He told me this over the course of dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad, in answer to my asking, “So, Dan, how are you?” I didn’t interrupt him, confining myself to making sympathetic grunts. This was the most he’d spoken to me at one time, and the most about the subject of his loss, and once he’d started I knew better than to derail him. He took most of dinner to unburden himself, during which time he ate little — some garlic bread was all — but managed four full glasses from the bottle of red wine I’d set on the table. This was sufficient to start him swaying ever-so-slightly, and to pull his eyelids lower. Once I thought he was finished talking, I said, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”
His voice slurring, Dan said, “No offense taken, Abe — Abraham. You want to know what helps? I’ll tell you. At about four in the morning, when I’m lying on my bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, which is kind of like a movie screen hanging there above me, because it’s white, and because I can see everything that happened played out there on it, again and again — when it gets to be four in the morning, and I think, I’m going to get up in an hour and a half anyway, why not now? I haul myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, doesn’t matter what, make myself a cup of coffee to go — can’t miss my morning cup of coffee — and I go, take the car and drive out to the corner of Morris Road and 299. Morris has a wide shoulder there, so it’s no problem for me to pull off onto it and sit drinking my morning cup of coffee. There’s a traffic light there now, did you know that? Did you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I did.”
“Of course you did: who doesn’t? It marks the spot where the Drescher family — where we — where the happy family of one Daniel Anthony Drescher was forever reduced. I sit at that spot — that historic spot, coffee in hand, and I look at that traffic light. I study it. I contemplate it. I watch its three glass eyes trade off commands. If it’s warm enough, or if it isn’t, I open my window and listen to it. Let’s say the light starts off green. There’s a buzzing, almost like an alarm clock, which is followed by a clunk, and the light is yellow. Another buzzing, another clunk, and it’s red. It’s like gates being opened and shut, like prison gates. The light stays red the longest, did you know that? I’ve timed it. This is looking at it from Morris. From 299, it stays green the longest. After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, too. Looking at the light doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t think, Well, at least some good has come out of this terrible tragedy. The intersection’s just another place to be. I can’t escape it. I can’t escape any of it. Myself am hell, right? So I might as well be at the spot where I took the plunge, so to speak, the place where I was cast out. I do feel calmer there. Strange, huh? I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things — when I look at people — I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland, but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it,” his hand slammed the table, rattling the dishes, “what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more? Would I find those things the minister talked about at the funerals? You weren’t there, were you? I guess we didn’t know each other so well then. Beauty, the minister said, the three of them were in a place of beauty, beauty beyond our ability to know. Joy, too, it’s a place of unending joy. If I could punch a hole through the mask, would I see beauty and joy? You would think, either it’s got to be heaven, because that’s what we’re talking about, right? Or it’s what it is, the mask is everything. But I’ll tell you, when I’m sitting at that intersection, watching the light go through its cycles, I think of other — other possibilities. Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us. You ever feel that way?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“That’s all right,” Dan said and, leaning back in his chair, promptly fell asleep.
Recalling Dan’s words now, it’s hard for me not to shudder, to wonder, How did he know? They say extreme states of mind can push you to — a visionary state, I guess you’d call it. Could be that’s what happened to him. Then again, I have to remind myself that what transpired that day at Dutchman’s Creek: what we heard; what we saw; God help me, what we touched; that all of that doesn’t necessarily bear out Dan’s words. It feels a lot like special pleading to say that, though. Actually, it feels more like flat-out, Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky denial. But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?
Since he wasn’t in any shape to drive home, I gave Dan my bed and I took the couch. It was no fun trying to get him out of that chair, maneuver him through the living room and down the hall, and guide him into the bedroom. He kept wanting to stop and lie down, and it’s no small task convincing a big man drunk on wine and exhaustion not to decamp in the middle of the hallway. Despite everything Dan had said, I had no trouble sleeping. Later that night — technically speaking, it must have been the next morning — I had a nightmare, the first since Marie died. As a rule, my dreams had been of the mundane, this-is-what-I-did-today variety. Seldom, if ever, did my mind conjure any strange, exotic dreams, any dream-like dreams. I’ve always been this way. Truth to tell, I used to sort of envy those folks who dreamed they were on great adventures, or having passionate love affairs, or dining with famous people. To me, those dreams seemed like starring in your own private movie. This dream was no happy Hollywood extravaganza. It was the kind of film you want to turn off but can’t, because switching it off would mean standing up from the couch and crossing the living room, and you’re literally too scared to do that. It seems like a tremendous risk. But that’s not all, no. You’re fascinated, too. So you sit there, unable to stop watching, knowing full well you’ll regret your failure to change the channel later, when you’ve pulled the bedclothes up over your head and are praying that the creak you heard outside the bedroom door was the house settling, not a footstep.