The Gift From God

The Gift From God

The first morning after eight years of it, I woke up in the yellow light coming through the curtains. My breathing was even, my back was dry, and the taste at the root of my tongue was gone. I sat up and waited, out of habit, for the part where I couldn't get a full breath. It didn't come. There was only the quiet. A thin quiet, the kind a room has right after somebody has walked out of it.

I got up and did what I did every morning. Water in the dented saucepan on the hot plate, two spoons of instant coffee in the white mug with the chip in the handle, the window pushed up the four inches it would go before the sash caught. The radiator under it had been cold since October. I drank the coffee standing at the window, and it took nine minutes.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall and at that hour I had it to myself. On the way back I saw that the hall light was off. The landlady left it burning all night and had every night since I moved in. I shaved, put on the blue shirt, and made the 8:00 class with 10 minutes to spare.

The dream was gone. Eight years of it, six pieces in the same order cutting off at the same second, and then one morning there was nothing there at all.

No yellow light from the hallway. No scrape… scrape… of something heavy crossing a wood floor. No white hand of my mother's past the edge of the doorframe, the fingers curled. The quiet that came down over those winter nights in the rented room was deep enough that I thought my damaged head had finally healed, that God had taken pity and handed me back an ordinary life.

Nothing had healed. A trade had been made.

God hadn't taken the dark out of my head; he had only changed the reel.

The quiet ended when the other thing started. It came in slowly, a piece at a time, beginning with a few loose images on a fall night the year I turned 23.

That night I watched a man I had never seen, somewhere in his fifties, thin, in a yellowed undershirt with sweat rings under the arms, standing in a wrecked kitchen. He ran water from a rusted faucet into a cloudy blue plastic cup, drank half of it, poured the rest into the steel sink, then stood with both hands on the edge of the sink, looking out at a dark yard through a window furred with dust.

The dream ran under 50 seconds and then it cut.

I woke up in the rented room in Albany with nothing in my chest and an itch in my throat I couldn't name, the particular irritation of a man watching something unremarkable when somebody pulls the plug out of the wall.

The next night, the dream was still there.

It picked up where it had stopped. The man walked out of the kitchen and down a set of wood steps that went creak… creak… under him. On the third night he walked an old motorcycle out through the gate. On the fourth night he pulled in at a convenience store on the highway and bought a pack of cheap cigarettes.

It ran like a television series with a fixed time slot. One installment a night, in strict order. It never skipped ahead. It never repeated.

I started writing the times on the back of an envelope I kept under the lamp. It let go at 5:00 a.m. every morning, give or take a minute, whatever hour I got into bed. For 23 mornings straight the envelope said 5:00 or 5:01. On the 24th I wrote 5:00 again and underlined it.

If tonight ended with his finger putting a rusted key into a lock, then tomorrow night, the second my eyes closed, the film started again on the click of the bolt coming back. Laid end to end the pieces fit so exactly that there was no gap anywhere between them, not the width of a hair.

No dream gets put together that way.

And I was the audience, the only one, held in a seat in that dark theater while my body lay on a narrow single bed in Albany, with no pause button and no way to get up and leave.

The series was the easy part.

I wasn't standing in the corner of the room watching him.

I was inside him.

My head was locked in under the skull of a man I had never met. I felt his right knee go bad when the weather turned, and I got the smell of the mildewed vinyl seat in a truck he hadn't cleaned out in three years. I got every turn his thoughts took, the bitter film at the back of his throat, and by the 10th night I knew the name his wife had stopped saying in a soft voice 10 years earlier.

Dreaming isn't the word for it. I was made to live that life a piece at a time, slow and patient, the way a man serves a sentence.

For the first month and change, the mechanic's life was dull enough to wear a person down: up at 5:00 a.m., a day of hammer on anvil, a silent dinner across from a silent wife. I thought God was playing a harmless joke on me.

I learned that shop by heart. Fourteen wrenches on the pegboard with their outlines painted behind them, and one outline with nothing in it. The radio stayed on a station that ran the same 20 songs and he never touched the dial. He washed his hands left over right, every time, and dried them on the same rag.

Then came the 45th night.

Two o'clock in the morning. He got out of bed without turning on a light, picked up a metal flashlight as long as his forearm, and went down into the basement hidden under the shop.

The yellow beam went over a stack of form lumber and stopped in the corner, where a woman was tied to a steel chair. Her mouth was taped over with black tape, and her eyes were swollen and rolled back.

Whatever I thought I understood about the world ended there.

There was nothing impulsive about him. He killed for a ritual, and the ritual was about taste. He believed that when a person is driven all the way to the edge, the fear does something to the blood and gives it a particular metallic flavor, a taste he had gotten on his own tongue once, by chance, in a wreck at 51. Hate had nothing to do with it, and neither did any thrill; he was working, patiently, to bring the blood to the exact grade of fear he wanted.

He walked around behind the chair, put a plastic-coated steel cable over the woman's neck, and pulled.

Snap.

The cable went taut. Stuck inside his head, I felt every muscle in his forearms working, and I heard something give under his rubber gloves, crack… crack…. What happened to her after that I'm not going to put down here. He counted, evenly, until there was nothing left to count.

The whole thing took two minutes and 12 seconds. His heart rate never went up by a single beat.

When everything had stopped, he took off the gloves, touched two fingers to her chin, and put them in his mouth. He worked the taste around, made a small disappointed sound, and thought, in a voice with nothing in it: "Not this one either. I guess I'll have to find the next one."

Khhhh…

I came awake at 5:00 a.m., got to the bathroom, and threw up over the toilet until there was nothing coming up but bile.

I rinsed my mouth twice and sat through a lecture I can't remember. At noon I ate a sandwich at the counter in the student union and my hands were level on the table. Nobody asked me anything.

A 23-year-old college student's nerves are not built for that. I couldn't tell anybody. If I told anybody, I'd be in a psychiatric ward by the end of the week. So I bought a black notebook and kept it by the bed with a ballpoint beside it, cap already off.

Every time I came up out of the dream I grabbed the pen and put down everything I had just been through, fast, the way you'd wash something off, to get him out of my head.

I wrote by hand and fast, and the letters came out slanting hard to the right. Nine or 10 pages was a normal night. The ceiling fan rattled on the downstroke and by the second week I had stopped hearing it. When I was done I made coffee on the hot plate and drank it at the window.

The black notebook ran out in November. Under my bed was a cardboard box my aunt Marion had packed the week I moved out of her apartment, and in it, under my old school reports, was a marbled composition book from the house in Milton with 40 blank pages left in the back. I used those.