Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

Standing by the pool, he could see into neighboring yards. He could also glimpse part of the street. Nevertheless, not a single person or vehicle was in sight. He looked at the blue-black mountain range washed out by the bright haze of winter. The arching sunlight reflected off the snow blanketing the desert and cast an intense, blinding glow which enshrouded the horizon, diminishing the view of the mountain even more. He hadn't thought of it previously, but just then he found himself wondering about the unseen forests and wilderness thriving on the other side of the mountain and felt an inexplicable desire to journey there by foot. The wind came and went, varying in intensity, sometimes seeming to roll across the desert with a rumbling like distant thunder. Suddenly he realized that the ground beneath him was shuddering, vibrating with a low intensity — a steady, perpetual energy quietly shaking the land and unnoticed by him until that moment. While subtle and unfluctuating, the vibration possessed a frightening and catastrophic power which, he imagined, originated from the planet's dying core.

All around him, the world was slowly coming unstuck. Cinder blocks and bricks were separating, plaster was cracking, carpet was being tugged toward living-room ceilings. Appliances, televisions, vehicles, animals, children, and entire families were about to be sent upward, gently at first and, then, with the violent speed of a rocket — smashing against overhead light fixtures, or ceiling fans, or skylights, or, in most cases, wafting recklessly like balloons set loose into the sky. If he looked at the garden, he would see cactus uprooting itself, soil and rocks and pebbles ascending as if by magic. The spade he had dropped was already hovering above the porch, encircled by satellites of mud. Soon the signposts of mankind would be jettisoned to the universe, the symbols of presence ejected from a tired, worn-down planet — the cities, the freeways, the airports, the schools, the burned-out and rusting cars, the unkempt pastures of bluebonnets, the high, brittle grass, the gutted houses abandoned on weedy plots, those vast number of commodities fashioned by human design. The great purging was beginning, he told himself. It had begun this morning.

But when turning to gaze at the garden and the house, Hollis saw that nothing had changed, nothing had been raised to the sky. The spade lay exactly where it had fallen. The roots of cacti and succulents were buried under sodden dirt. His feet remained firmly on the ground, the earth had not undone itself or stopped on its axis. The house was stable on the foundation, as always. The rooms were the same rooms, no different than yesterday. No, nothing much had changed — with the exception of one maddening thing: she wasn't there anymore, but yet she was there nonetheless. Something had irrevocably changed for her, and, too, the life he considered to be his own was then altered past recognition. No amount of mental preparation could have truly prepared him for this eventuality. He was, at that second, aware of a widening black space within himself — a profound loneliness he had never experienced, a complete and utter sense of being left alone without another recognizable soul at hand; he had, in the passing of a single morning, entered uncharted territory and, it was understood, the way back home was lost even as their home stood directly in front of him. So, he told himself, better to go elsewhere for a while and put off what the house entailed — his grief, his fears, the phone calls he will have to make. Better going where she rarely ever went, to where he could hide in the shade and wasn't supposed to think about anything.

Inside the tiki hut, Hollis hugs his knees to his chest and stays like that for what feels like an eternity. Later on, he lifts his head and stares again at the water dripping outside from the ends of the thatched roof, thinking: If the water stops dripping right now, she'll return to me. If the water will only stop dripping — all of it, every single drop — then Deb will walk out of the house, calling my name. He tells himself this, with eyes fixed on the droplets which keep forming and plunging, forming and plunging, while knowing in his heart it won't happen. The water continues dripping, and she never calls for him. And he wonders why it has to be, why was she just here earlier as she had always been — the movement of her limbs, the resonance of her singular voice, the warmth of her skin — and yet now she is gone from the world. How could she go?

Still, the love is here; the love they shared is here — it is more tangible than ever. He has that. Yes, I have that. Then, maybe, it is he who has gone away for good — not her — and he has vanished from the world without yet realizing it, somehow existing beyond the fade to black, as if in another reality, as if in an illusion. But where are you this very second? he asks himself, rocking back and forth. Where does someone go when finally gone? And what — he asks aloud — is the meaning in death? However, no answers materialize from his wondering, and yet that void of understanding, in its own vacant manner, provides the ultimate, all-inclusive answer to his questions. So decent people die each and every second of the day without reason, the living are required to forge ahead nonetheless, and that is simply that; the role of living is acted out on a daily basis, an individual's act of dying is a one-time affair — but everyone gets a shot at playing both parts, none are exempted, none are unique, everyone goes on and everyone goes.

Sighing miserably, Hollis presses his palms flat on either side of himself. The dream is over, he concludes. I'm awake. A heavy internal weight has consumed his limbs, mooring him to the floor and making it difficult to stand, but somehow he manages to pull himself up anyway. He staggers in the shadows, bracing himself against the hut's doorframe, the thatched roof jutting beyond him and sprinkling the ground with droplets. Sunlight illuminates the backyard, raining upon the garden beds and the swimming pool and the house. Except, to his confusion, the house appears miles away, although it summons him closer. Their bedroom also beckons — as beloved places do which cannot be experienced as they once had been enjoyed — be-cause she is there, at least for a while. She is waiting.

“All right,” he says, after taking a deep breath, and then steps from the shadows of the hut and into the light of the backyard, heading along a flagstone pathway toward the house. With the brightness stunning his vision, he stumbles on a flagstone slab, his body wobbling off the path, his boots crunching across gravel. Today the sun shines. The desert thaws, the cactus needles glisten with beads of water which mirror the heavens and seem to hold the sky. Tomorrow the temperature will soar at Nine Springs, burning through the day and onto the skin of golfers. There will be warmth, but not for him, not for Debra. “It's okay,” he assures himself, finding his balance, returning to the pathway — squinting now against the sun and reaching his hands outward to grasp at air, weaving blindly ahead for no other reason than he must, pacified by the sudden understanding that all things born are fated to move toward their end.

The two figurative paintings which, respectively, preface each section of The Post-War Dream were created by Peter I. Chang: I. Dwellers (gesso, charcoal, and acrylic on wood panel, 2000); II. Safe Places to Die (acrylic on developed photographic paper, 2000).

Both ovary illustrations — Fig. 29 and Fig. 30 — were originally printed without the artist's name cited in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex , by Dr. A. Willy, Dr. L. Vander, Dr. O. Fisher, and other authorities (New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., Inc., 1950).