Archive > Vol. 21 no. 1

D. Nurkse

The Unlit Room

When you die, she says, you become your actions. Scratching a flea bite, rubbing your sore eyelid, pulling the scratchy sheet to your chin, wriggling out of it, probing a wobbly tooth with your tongue — these are the weft of the cosmos. Action is indestructible. Even swatting at a fly and missing it. No force can undo that.

We are half-naked in a bed itchy with brioche crumbs in the bitter heat. Her voice fascinates me. I hope she will speak until dawn. Very occasionally a random car whooshes down a distant street.

Speaking these words, she explains, the meaning vanishes. The act of speech lasts forever. In the breeze. The chain of consequence. The charge and spin of electrons.

Towards the East River, a cat begins yowling, mad with loneliness.

When you die, she clarifies, you continue in the lives of other people: me, the mailman, the nun who sells cupcakes on Kent Avenue. You fan out in ripples. Eventually you escape into the dreams of the cranky retired accountant whose snores you heard clear through the paper-thin wall, the absent mind of the child down the corridor who plays Twinkle, Twinkle absurdly out of tune.

Now it is so late the darkness and silence and emptiness and vastness of the city seem like a single idea, an idea that might occur to a bedpost, a stopped clock, the dull sheen that must be the mirror.                         

It is her voice I love. How close it is to silence. The cat cried itself to sleep long ago. The cars stopped passing. All that can happen now is dawn. If I could make out her eyes, surely I would see it kindled there. Glinting for no one.