Hands of fog crept around them, strangling the stars, drowning the night, dragging threads of darkness on kites of smoke.
They didn't speak. No music played on the radio. Her car danced and drifted with the road, the trees on either side held still.
She didn't tell him where they were going and he didn't ask. His hands were in his lap, his fingers circling each other. He turned and glanced at her: a street-lamp broke through the fog ahead, flashed through the window and into her hair; her green eyes glowed golden in gold light. The car became riddled with shadows, each springing from the lamp, sweeping and waxing the contours of the cabin, stretching and fading her unraveled hands. Then it was dark again and he looked away. His mind wandered. He thought about how happy he was, where he was. Of his ever-famished contentment. His cycled, spiraled peace: pieces.
To her, her thoughts were cragged cliffs; she was always looking down them, down on the road ahead, down on the relentless pursuit of time, down on her life, down. She glanced at him, slumped in his seat, his feet kicked back on the dash. He was scratching the back of his neck with one hand, biting his lip just so. Two drops of sorrow flung ripples through her quivering heart. A smile unsheathed in her lips, across her stare, her skin, like the first crack down an aging window. If he'd looked at her, their eyes would have met; and she would have wept. If he'd looked at her, he would have seen the happiest girl - the most beautifully sad woman.
But they drove on, looking ahead.
They came to a steep left turn and she signaled before taking it. Up the hill the fog kept its distance, breaking in the headlights like startled flights of smoky gulls. The pavement wore into dirt and they held their silence, swaying up the ragged road. As the slope leveled out he could see they had come to the high shoulder of a great hill. She stopped the car. To his right the slope dropped down into a sea of haze where scarcely he could discern the twisted shapes of trees. Before them he could see a sprawling black structure of iron and wood laced through the pale mist about, looming up beyond scope of the window.
And they held the silence. There was an awkward passing stillness: the slight rustle of their clothes on their backs as they breathed. And then, from somewhere far beyond the walls of fog, death reached to tap their shoulders in a siren spinning out of the night. The spell was broken.
She turned to him: “Do you want to get out?”
And to him, it was as though she meant more with that question than meets the ear. He looked in her eyes, then to the cold dark beyond. He pulled his corduroy jacket over his shoulders and said, “Sure.”
Part of him didn’t mean it.
She sensed some pulse of regret in his words, but with disregard she closed her door and walked to his. He took her arm and looked now up the twisting network of planks and stilts to what he realized was the base of a great water tower. A light from the hidden roof breathed a pale glow on their vacant stage. The world was still.
So still. He looked at her hands and she looked in his eyes. He looked at the seashells hidden in her ears, and she touched his lips with a single finger.
His arms reached around her spine, holding her, cradling her. So close, so close. The silence was a splinter in her. She wanted to speak; she wanted to comfort him, to comfort herself. She would have said, “I never want this moment to end.” But it was futile, and the moment had passed, and she had said nothing.
In the dreams she had forgotten, she was stripped of the land and her body and her eyes. She was a skeleton, blind, in a world of echoes. In those dreams, it was her sense of touch that guided her: a torch of feeling as she clambered the nothingness. Time in those dreams spread beyond years. And it was only the explicit impression of his hand locked in hers that gave light to the instant, pulling her, like a drowning body from the whirlwind of her heart’s fire, from the pain of belief, from sleep.
In the dreams he had forgotten, he was a lark in her cage. And he sung for her. And he watched her in her long nights of dreaming, and he watched her laugh and love. He watched her as she was free, free as one can be in this or any life; and he never took mind to his cage. And he remembered, years later, what it was to fly, and that night in his dreams he was free on the wind and without her. And so over the seasons and years of that night, he returned to her, taking rest just beyond her bedroom window. And he stayed and he sang and he watched for a sign, but he did not see her face again before he woke.
They turned. Turned their backs from the witness of the wilderness and the lustful stares of the birches - so unbearably bound to the earth; from the light of the water tower, from the promise of light in stars they could not see. He took her, she held him, and their eyes danced inside their eyes, but they were still.
“This isn’t the end . . .”
Voices hushed and buried in a glass pain.
“But it is. Tomorrow, you’re gone.”
“It can’t be the end.”
“I want to believe you.”
“ . . . so do I.”
She buried her face in his jacket; he laid his head in her neck's cradle.
He wanted to tell her so many things. He would have told her she changed him in a glance. He would have told her she was proof, proof that everything was beyond words. That the trite scraps with which he tried to piece her couldn't conjure an eyelash. That his life was a sky and now it's a sea. That he could live because of her. He would have told her she made him believe.
But no one, not even lovers, says what they truly mean to say.
She clenched his shoulders and let her hands follow his back into the eve of its arch. A tear burned behind her eyes, and she begged for it not to blur the moment.
He smelled her hair and felt her body move against his in one long, shuttering sigh.
A breath of wind dived down the sky and all around them the fog began to stir. The water tower bled its shadow, the clouds shone stark and low, pouring down the hill. To the south, Bangor could be seen climbing in lights from between the trees. In the north, Veazie flickered like a broken bulb.
They took their hands and followed a path around the tower. On the far end they sat down side by side on the wet turf. They shared their starving eyes and fed their longing stares. Every sense was honed. Their lips were divided, their bodies were separate; their hearts born as one in a dream they could not remember, their lives uncertain and torn. They shared their brokenness. They shared their silence. They were still.
Deep, rigid cold came over her. His hands still in hers, she stood up and led him back to the car. They shivered and huddled and climbed inside. She started the engine and he touched her hair.
Soon they were down the hill again, and she was crossing back over the same old streets, lined with the trees she’d always known and the stores she’d always shopped. She could feel her lips tremble as they held their silence.
He watched the New England night with open eyes and wonder. But nothing was beautiful, nothing but her. He could almost taste his pain. In the morning he would be counting the miles by the moments and the distance would swell into despair. In the morning, all of this was gone.
“Pull over,” he said.
“What?”
“Pull over, right now.”
So she turned into an empty parking lot on the side of that avenue. He opened his door and circled the car, took her by the hand and pulled her into the night one last time.
The fog took everything. The traffic, the drunks and the bums, the punks and the kids, the horns of trains, the reckless dogs barking wildly at the very flicker of a flies wings - everything was swallowed into quiet, isolated to its own domain.
Curtains of night, kites of smoke. Their stage crumbled into dark and they held their stillness.
Three streets down, an old man with too many dreams watched the fading image of two people holding, kissing. Vanishing.
She looked down on her hopelessness, despite her hope.
He knew that the truth could be saved, if he only had the courage. If he would take that chance and give up his ghosts. If he surrendered, he’d be free, if he surrendered he could stay there, with her.
She could keep him, if she'd only fight.
Curtains of night, kites of smoke. They held their silence, their silence held them.
The world faded to black under a black bird riding the black wind in the black night, far above the fog and the trees and the city lights and the silence.
It glided deep and low at the sight of a haze. A frail glow. It circled back.
There, in the darkness, this lone black bird saw something it’d never seen before: two people, illuminated. It did not understand, but watched still, drawn by something it did not - it could not know.
They kissed, and it must have been the last night on earth.
The bird flew on, and everything was left so incomplete. But for sake of mystery, for sake of loneliness, the black bird turned back one last time. It saw their stillness,
like two candles left burning
in the heart of a tempest.