Song for Night

Light Is Jazz Hands and a Smile

Out of a nightmare sometimes a good dream is born. Twice since she died I have met Ijeoma in dreams. Perhaps the third time will be in the afterlife. Walking in this silence, the solitude of early morning that in a different time, a better time, would be full of the ritual of coffee, a time when even songbirds are still, I feel alone in the world. Yet it is not a sadness I feel. This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light.

I wipe my fingers across my eyes repeatedly, the equivalent of saying, I don’t believe it, if I could talk. The road before me suddenly sheers away, ending abruptly in a cliff. I come to a halt on the edge and stare into an impenetrable darkness. There is something sinister about this particular darkness, as though every childhood fear I have is woven into its very fiber. I sit on a log by the roadside. Behind me, in the distance, I can make out the disused station and the rusting vine-covered train. In front of me is the darkness. I do what I always do in moments of doubt, I light a cigarette. As I inhale, I think what a funny thing this habit has become. It is one I cannot do without and yet three years ago I didn’t smoke. My parents (even my hated step-father) would have gone berserk if they knew I was smoking. I remember a song I heard in boot camp, War! Huh! What is it good for … but instead of saying, Absolutely nothing, we’d add a phrase we like. I sing in my head. War! Huh! What is it good for? American cigarette companies! But it doesn’t distract me for long and my mind returns to the anomaly in front of me.

I don’t remember there being a cliff here. Not that I am sure I remember where I am, even though the sign at the train station was the same one I saw when I rode the train of death down from the north. Anyway, why would anyone build a road that leads to a dead end at a cliff edge? Apart from the obvious danger, it just doesn’t make sense. I know the road wasn’t bombed out because the darkness is too wide for any bomb we currently have. Only a nuclear bomb could do this much damage and I doubt either side has one, and even if we did and it had been used, the mushroom cloud would have been visible for miles, a tumor against the sky.

No, I decide, I am hallucinating. I must be. I scratch the cemetery on my arm and tell myself that if I put one foot into the darkness, it would disappear. I tell myself that this is only the shape of my guilt: guilt for all the lives I’ve lost or taken, guilt for letting my platoon down, guilt for losing my mother, for leaving her to die for me while I hid in the ceiling like a little coward.

I try to summon all the light that filled me moments ago. Light I need to cross the darkness. Still afraid and with no more light, I step over the edge of the cliff. The darkness vanishes and I am back on the road.

Ahead of me, a woman walks, a coffin balanced precariously on her head, her hips swaying with the effort, and yet poised, graceful even.

Mother?