Light Still Arriving

After the last child reached for the golden ring and descended from painted wooden horses, after the music stopped playing and the world stopped spinning, the shops closed their doors and the crowds returned home, and Damien Fry waited alone.

A hundred lights swayed in branches overhead where glistening rain slipped past to beat his shoulders and drip from his fedora. One finger from his broad hand traced the stitches of his briefcase. He watched the street where water raced the gutters past large windows decorated for the season.

When the final bus rounded the corner Damien Fry stepped to the curb. It veered toward the gutter and doors flew open spilling fluorescent shadows across his face. He climbed the stairs and quietly dipped a token in the font beside the driver who nodded with a habitual smile.

Damien Fry stood at the aisle where aluminum pews repeated in rows front to rear, occupied by a dozen passengers with heads bowed in solemn silence. He removed his hat and took a seat near the front, stale diesel incense burning his nostrils. The driver pumped the pedals and the engine swelled, and the wheels chanted in unison.

A thousand lights passed splattered windows like a procession of colored stars, staining the passengers with blue, red, yellow, and green. They swayed in unison at each turn and bowed at each stop until the driver pumped again, the great engine swelled, and the liturgy continued.

She boarded at one bright intersection just outside town in a flurry of leaves, wind, and rain making her seem part of the storm. Wind ran the aisle, stirring the passengers like a tent revival meeting. They rustled when she wrestled a soaking load of bags. They worked into a frenzy when she fumbled for a token. They were ready to run the aisle by the time she deposited herself near the front. The young woman stopped to survey the passengers, their faces in spasms and their bodies nearly in fits.

Her yellow raincoat and hat seemed like a fisherman except for long red curls falling like a hurricane around her face. Her legs were long, bare, with her broad mouth painted the same dark red as her hair. She tucked a stray curl behind an ear and smiled, cautiously, then took her seat across from Damien Fry.

The night had grown dark and the bus was a strange aquarium of fluorescent green shadows. The passengers swayed like seaweed as the bus lurched and retreated like the tide.

The young woman sat quietly, but something about her seemed unusual, almost mythical. He knew they had never met; she appeared from nowhere like Venus on the half shell, and yet he knew this woman, somehow.

She seemed to watch for some cue, but he could not guess what. Damien Fry watched, curious, until she caught his glance. He smiled politely and pretended to look outside.

“Can you believe this weather?” she said. “It almost feels cold enough to snow.”

“It’s been quite a storm.”

She waited for more, then sighed dramatically and fished through her purse. But when Damien tried not to notice, the search became more frantic.

Damien faced her again, and she stopped.

“Gum,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to quit smoking but I’m starting to wonder if this gum chewing thing isn’t just as bad of a habit.”

She held up a ransacked purse.

“Or worse,” she said.

Damien smiled and returned to the window.

She tossed a piece of gum into her mouth, chewing it into submission, then sank back in her seat and sighed heavily.

She checked to see if Damien was watching, “Don’t you just love gum?”

Damien could no longer mask his curiosity. She clearly wanted his attention, but he couldn’t guess why.

“Do I know you?” he said.

She stopped chewing and turned to face the window. After a few moments she seemed to find a new energy and leaned closer to the glass.

“Oh, look!” she said. “It’s stopped raining and the wind has blown the clouds away. You can see the stars.”

She cleared her throat and proceeded slowly.

“It’s a funny thing about stars, don’t you think? How the light we’re seeing right now when we look at them is actually millions of years old. It took millions of years for that light to arrive here where we can see it. For all we know, the star where it came from might not even exist anymore.”

Damien listened intently.

He said, “Where did you hear that?”

Her voice started to shake. She seemed to be reciting.

“The light we see right now started before the dinosaurs ever existed. It might have started before the earth was created. It was traveling here before man walked on earth. The three wise men followed a star that could have stopped existing millions of years before Christ was born.”

“Where did you hear that?” Damien said, and his face turned pale.

She didn’t answer.

“My mother once told me . . .” he stopped. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s just something I remembered.”

She added quietly, “The thing about those stars is that it really doesn’t matter if they still exist at all. The light from them is still arriving. As long as we can still see them when we look at the sky, that’s all that matters. For us they’ll always be alive. They’ll always be young and beautiful.”

The world could be watching and Damien Fry wouldn’t care. But the bus stopped again and he recognized his stop. He blinked quickly.

The young woman watched silently as Damien picked up the briefcase, grabbed his hat, and stepped off the bus.

The air had grown crisp and clear. Damien paused on the sidewalk, staring at the millions of stars overhead until the bus continued down the street.

His heels clicked loudly down the sidewalk, percussive as the thoughts in his mind. The sidewalk ended at his driveway. Only the stars continued further.

His key slid easily into the lock, worn from years of use, and the door opened quietly as always. The silence inside seemed ancient.

His hat and coat found the rack with little help, but he measured every step, every movement, to place his briefcase on the table near the door. His hands were numb and trembled slightly as he maneuvered the latches, opened the briefcase and lifted a manila folder of yellow newsclippings and typed papers.

“You see those stars?” his mother had once told him. “The light from them is millions of years old. We’re seeing it now but it took millions of years for that light to reach us here on earth.”

He had looked at the stars. They seemed so big to a six year old, and so close. How could the light have taken so long to get here when he could almost reach out and touch those stars?

“They seem like they’re close, but they’re not,” his mother said. “They’re very far away and they might not even exist anymore. Their light takes so long to come to earth. The only reason we know they were ever there at all is because of the light they’ve left behind.”

“How can they still be shining if they’re gone?” Damien said.

His mother smiled and drew him closer.

“That light is like a memory of them,” she said. “They’ll always exist to us, as long as we can still see the light.”

“Will they go away if we forget about them?”

“Probably. So we just have to make sure we don’t forget.”

“I’ll never forget them,” he said.

Damien Fry ran a finger along the edge of the manila folder which contained everything he could remember about his mother. He could remember her coming home from shopping one day with armloads of presents for Christmas, then leaving again, saying the most important present was missing. He also remembered his father waking him the next morning to tell him she was gone and could never return. But most of what he could remember about his mother depended on this folder of yellow newspaper clippings.

All the other pages in his folder, those he had typed and labored over, were only ideas of how it might have been.

She might have only bent down a moment. Damien always believed it was when she found the missing present, the knife he had asked for all year.

Clouds could have parted to let moonlight fall across the frozen lake, illuminating the ice and her pale face. The snarled remains of her car might have sat quietly on the shore. Disoriented by the collision, she could have pulled herself out of the car and onto the smooth ice.

For a moment she could have realized what was happening, before her mind started to drift away.

Snow gently tumbled across her cheek, falling in tiny lace shadows like a shroud, winding through her hair and making crystal webs around her eyes. She could barely feel her body, but the numbness offered a welcome refuge from the pain.

Her long wool coat may have dipped tentatively at first through a fault in the ice and slowly drew in water from the lake. It could have become more saturated and slid further in.

Without doubt, the cold night became more intense when her legs finally slipped into the water; her mind had already drunk of the lake’s dark water when it first invaded her wounds.

With the ice no longer able to support her, she might have heaved one final gasp of cold night air and disappeared slowly into the lake, soon feeling the ground again beneath her body, where there was no sky, no snow, and no pain; only this icy lover who kissed her open lips, filling her pale breast with his cold breath.

Damien closed the folder and returned it to his briefcase, next to the small pocket knife he had kept so many years.

In the morning’s blue hour Damien Fry had awoke and dressed, and now he waited quietly. Morning had arrived in a snowy blanket and a thousand tiny colored lights glowed dimly beneath it.

Again he fumbled with the stitches of his briefcase and watched up the road. Trees overhead slept heavily beneath the icy mantle.

The morning star had reached its full height across the sky. Eosphorus, Venus, the apparition sometimes called Lucifer. It wasn’t a star at all, just a planet. Closer than any star, and still there. Damien regarded it silently.

The stars had all gone away, promising to return as though such mysteries could ever be predicted. The sky was barely turning blue, but Damien closed his eyes and could imagine it dark. In his mind he could still see the stars, the light from millions of years ago. He could remember them, and as long as he remembered he knew they would continue to exist.

Down the road the bus again approached, rustling the blanket beneath its wheels. It moved slower than before, yet still determined, its headlights slicing the quiet morning air. It approached the curb, but Damien did not stand. Instead, he waved it past with one broad gesture.

He stared into the tracks left. The tracks would have been easy to follow. The bus would stop and wait if he asked it to, and he could climb to his place at the helm. But another possibility had occurred to him, and Damien Fry rose slowly and walked home.

His leather Oxfords didn’t seem suitable for the snow anymore, so he left them on the sidewalk. His socks had grown wet, so he left them in the driveway. The fedora he wore wasn’t made for days like this so he left it on the porch.

He left his briefcase on the table inside the door. Inside the house he left his coat, his suit, and shirt. Naked, he stood before the tall glass doors at the back of the house and stared across the back yard at a freshly iced lake.

Damien turned the handle and the door swayed open. He walked across the deck and stepped into the soft white snow past the stairs. He let the cold shoot through his body, throwing his hands overhead to let the cold pass out his fingertips like rays of light. He stood a moment, stretching for the bright morning sky, then dropped his arms to his sides.

He ran toward the lake. He ran like he had as a boy on warm summer days, and like a young man in cool summer evenings. He ran to the lake and the far end of the dock. And he jumped.

The ice parted easily from the impact and after a few strokes he came up beneath it. He strained against every instinct to break the ice again, to breathe free. He opened his eyes and waited.

He waited to know, to understand. He waited to remember.

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