Shadow

34

A little strip of moonlight seeped in between the drawn curtains in Axel’s room. They had laid him on his back, and he could follow its path across the ceiling with his eyes.

What will your eye want to look at, when you know that it’s the last thing you will see? The question was posed in his first novel, written at a safe distance from the moment that now awaited him.

With the door closed it had silently slipped into the room. Gratefully he had sensed the presence of what he had so long yearned for. The one who had finally come to free him from his prison. All afternoon he had sat like this, elatedly looked forward to what he thought would now happen.

Then the day had turned into evening and darkness slowly fell. But his anxiety grew stronger, keeping pace with the darkness descending over the room. As he waited, dread crept in and gave life to an intense premonition. A tremendous fear struck him. The grace he had imagined he would be allowed to enjoy had been transformed into a threat of dissolution. A warning of chaos and putrefaction.

When the nurses came in and lifted him over onto the bed, he wanted to scream for them to stay and not leave him alone with the thing lurking in the corners, the one thing he couldn’t see. Unsuspecting, they laid him under the covers and forced him to listen to their heedless conversation. He watched them go, leaving him in lonely desperation.

He didn’t want to die. He was no longer ready. For five years he had called on death, and when it finally sought him out he realised that he was not prepared. Eye to eye with the inevitable it was not death he saw, but himself.

It became harder and harder to breathe, his chest was being pressed down by an enormous weight. His body struggled furiously to maintain the life it did not want to relinquish. Far off he could see the red alarm button. The inaccessible connection to those who could come to his rescue.

His chest felt heavier and heavier, and there was a foul smell in the room. All he could see were shapes, but he no longer knew what it was he was seeing.

He wanted to call for Alice, ask her to come and save him. But she just sat over there at the desk with her back turned, not paying him any attention. He heard the sound of her typewriter; he wanted to go over and put his nose on the back of her neck and inhale her scent.

He was falling, faster and faster, but his useless arms refused to protect him. He needed the consolation of meaning, a real purpose to the life he had lived and the death he was about to face. He wanted to be able to leave his life with accomplishment, and not as an escape. Pushed from his hiding place he was falling helplessly through whispering voices. All the events he had silently ignored came rushing past.

He was freezing and begged for someone to warm him.

Only now did he understand that death was unavoidable. That all roads led away from what his senses had known. His mind raced through his life, grasping for memories that might alleviate his terror.

His name was known all over the world. He had shaken hands with kings and presidents. He had assumed his place in history.

To what benefit? All that awaited was annihilation.

He was admired by millions of strangers, but not a single one could offer any solace.

What was it that he had always searched for?

And when his chest sank and his heart stopped, one last question echoed.

To what purpose did I need all those honours?

Through the canopy of branches overhead a sunbeam found its way and blinded him. He was lying on the little patch of grass underneath the apple tree. He heard the sound of steady blows from his father’s hammer and his mother pottering about in the garden.

He was back at Bliss.

The happiest moments of his life.