He opened his eyes to slits, careful to keep his head down.
A tiny, soft hand patted his brow. “Da-da,” his son’s voice said. “Da-da, love you.”
Tears sprang from Matthew’s eyes, but he did not move. Did not dare to. His nose, though broken and clogged with cartilage and dried blood, could still catch the faintest trace of his son’s smell. Baby powder and purity. Matthew wanted more than anything to bury his face in the child’s soft hair, hear him laugh one last time.
The tiny soft hand rubbed Matthew’s head absently while he wept and wished. When he could stand it no longer, he reached his fingers outward, hoping to touch his baby boy one last time.
There was nothing, nothing but the emptiness.
Matthew breathed in harshly, sucking large gulps of air, trying to right his mind. The digging. The light. He raised his chin, the effort causing his head to tremor, his neck to stiffen. He looked where the light had burst through the dark.
He heard more digging. Urgent, rhythmic. Desperate. Someone, or something, was pushing through the debris a few yards away. “Hello!” he yelled, his voice slurred wet gravel. He waved a hand in the dark. “Hello! I’m here! I’m here!”
There was no sound of rescue, no movement. Desperate for reassurance, he turned his strained neck to look toward the area where Dee lay. He reached out his hand, and after a few brief moments of scrambling panic, he found her own, still warm. “Dee! I think, maybe, we’ve been found.” He waited, but was met by silence. “Dee?”
Then, “Yes, Matthew. I hear you, I’m sorry, I hear you.”
Matthew was so relieved he nearly sobbed again, but kept himself together, kept himself hoping. “Did you see the light? Did you hear?”
There was a pause, and then Dee spoke. “I heard it.”
Matthew was very still, clutched furiously to Dee’s fingers. Something was tugging insistently on his exposed foot, but he felt no pain, so he ignored it.
His shirt was soggy with blood. He rolled his body, tried to slowly release his injured hand. He could feel it squelching beneath his stomach, as if he were lying face-down in a puddle in the middle of a muddy, beaten road. “Dee? Do you think they’ve come for us?”
“How is that possible, Matthew?” she said, her voice toneless. “You’re not thinking clearly.” He heard a rustling. “Here, boy. Don’t let go of my hand now. It’s coming to get you.”
Matthew gripped her hand greedily. “Dee, we’ll be saved soon. C’mon, I believe now. You should be thrilled. I believe.” He waited for a chuckle, or a chiding. He received neither. He swallowed. “They must be digging toward us. Yes, yes. They’re coming.”
The movement seemed to come from all around. Something was tunneling through the spilled guts of the building, straight toward them. Matthew laid his ear to the vibrating concrete. In the pitch black of his world, Matthew heard something break through the rubble just in front of him, palm-slapping sounds smacked the ground, glass broke and iron twisted with a high-pitched groan. There was a shifting sound as the thing filled the space directly before him.
Matthew pulled his hand away from Dee and reached for what had come. His hand plunged deep into a writhing, jelly-like substance, which immediately shot up his arm and sprayed itself onto his face. He gasped and felt something wiggle down his throat.
He gagged, clawed at his lips, but felt nothing. He threw up, the stinging tang of vomit somehow bracing him.
There was an upward swell, and although he felt no pain it seemed as if his eyes were melting down his face, cold and slick. He felt his body lift then spin in a barrel-roll to one side, although he knew, somewhere in his subconscious mind, he had not physically moved. It was dizzying and he clawed at the chunks of destruction around him for purchase. But the pieces of the structure were gone, the whole of the physical world had fallen away. A blast of warm stale air gusted upward.
Was he falling? No, that familiar, constant pain was still in his back, a part of him now. Would I miss it, my murdering lover? he thought. But it wasn’t gone. It was there. Solid and heavy. He was still trapped, but there was a gulf beneath him now, a space wider than a canyon blown open where there should be bricks and glass and dirt. A giant’s dark heart beat somewhere in the abyss and he found himself staring down into it, searching. There was a flare of color, and another, erupting from the sides of his vision. The world came into focus.
There were trees, sweating slime-covered smooth black monsters that rose a thousand feet into the air, reaching for him, their sappy perspiration running freely down their sides, tracing through faint veins of stone-hard bark, splashing into a snake’s nest of gray roots. They plunged upward from an impossible distance, their bases surrounded by a fetid swamp that went as far as he could see, a black horizon. The sky was pale and dead, but he knew that it was eternal, like space. An eternal emptiness. Home.
“IT’S A LETTER,” his grandfather said, dropping the thick envelope on his bed.
He left and Matthew swiveled away from his desk, watched the door close. He walked to his neatly made bed, studied the envelope; it was dingy brown, soiled, old-looking. The handwriting on it was scrawled in an imprecise manner, jagged and spearing, peaks and valleys of black ink thin as an old man’s hair. There were stamps, bearing language and currency symbols he did not recognize, slapped across its surface.
He picked it up, studied the front. It bore no return address, no name of sender. Turning it over he saw the envelope had been previously used. It was frayed and torn, spotted with something dark. Dreary tape held the flap closed, as dingy and browned as if its contents had been sealed for hundreds of years.
He ripped it open, pulled out two hand-written pages of scribble. Many of the words were hard to make out, but once he got a feel for the author’s form, the words cleared, came into focus:
I WRITE THIS in the hopes of finding you well.
This night is a terrible night, one that will be remembered only for its misery. Nothing of consequence has taken place and nothing of note has been accomplished. The price I ask for living is a harmonious sequence of knowledge that turns the wheels of the clock to tomorrow, diversion that makes daytime turn to night and allows me once more to close my eyes on the world which has deceived me until such time as I am forced to open them.
War is rampant and civilization is holding firm on sandy beaches of past moralities as wave upon wave of hatred, corruption and bloodshed splash against the shore. I fear I don’t know of anything but what is before my very eyes. The people I think I love are deceivers, those who follow me whisper corruption behind my back and friends are true only as it suits them. I’ve lost the willpower to pick myself up time after time, exhausted from being knocked down by indifference, selfishness and lack of honor. We chase gods and act like children. It’s pathetic.
Old friends are shadowy memories, ghosts that talk to me in the night and conjure distorted images of the way things once were. The way things could have, should have, been. They exist as passersby, breathing shallow confidence of the boy’s life, of the boy’s happiness. I tell them to fuck away, to leave the past buried. But it returns in my sleep. It haunts me.
I believe that love is a bauble held only by poets. It exists only in words, on paper, in songs and through acting of all kinds including the most devious. It doesn’t exist any more than hope, trust, conviction, honesty or faith. Lost ideals of a racist generation, mistaken concepts taken to heart by the weak and overly sensitive, tossed aside by the strong, the survivors, the leaders. Strength lies in appearance. Appearance of person, of religion, of stature, of wealth. Gone are souls intertwining, coupling energy. Gone is romantic ambush.
We are ravaged. We are followed. We are dying.
I write you because there is no one else to write and I’m alone with these thoughts. It is haunting.
I write you though I know you won’t understand it any more than the rest, any more than I. I know you don’t want it. I put my heart into words because I have not the strength to put it back into the world. I’m weak. I’m a coward. I’m ashamed of myself and everything around me.
Do with my thoughts what you will, what you want. Send my prayers back to the Christian God.
No one is left to wonder what will become of us when we’re gone. Not you I, nor I you. I wonder if it would help if I told you I missed you.
Okay then, I miss you.
