The Incredible Time

When you asked me on the drive I had known you long enough that I thought nothing of it. Hardly anything of it, anyway, hardly anything at all. Which was funny. When you think everything of someone, their personhood, the very fact of their existence, somehow comes to overshadow everything else. I loved you. I can say that now with confidence, though I couldn't then, or didn't in any case. Love, eventually, takes on a life of its own. Or it might be more correct to say that love eventually takes on the quality of life, one of its qualities, the primary and most striking one. The particulars cease to matter. One day you are born. One day you die. In between is only an impossibly wide gulf of time.

The coastal highway was dismal. And empty. Not to mention eerily quiet. A cloud sheet gray as slate loomed overhead like a slab of unbroken concrete, a low and featureless ceiling of endless nothing that had usurped the sky. Grass dead or dying bordered the black stripe of road as far as the eye could see. Our excursion — or journey, perhaps, to wherever you were taking me (I had not the faintest idea of where that could be at the time) — had offered not a single distinct landmark by which to orient oneself for some time now. If we saw any other cars, any other people, or anything moving or living out there on that road in that wasteland, that great beyond, I can't remember it. I remember thinking that there could be nothing — that there could not possibly be anything — beyond such a wasteland. That we were driving on and on, to the edge of the world, to the end of all light and sound. To the fringes of all existence. A place where, without preamble or the sort of self-concerned announcement characteristic of the world we were slowly leaving behind, everything would at a certain point simply cease to be.

I was as silent in the passenger seat as you were driving as the car itself was being driven, strangely. The sheer and uncanny silence engendered in me the absurd thought that something unnameable had swallowed all possibility of sound.

Further adding to the sense of abnormality, I understood it to be a coastal road by erudition only. There was no sea in sight. I knew from my familiarity with the geography of the region that the sea couldn't have been far off, though I could not for the life of me tell in which direction, and for some reason I could neither see nor smell nor otherwise sense it at all.

As for what you knew of our situation, compared to me? At the time, I might have presumed to guess, hardly even recognizing my own presumption. Now, I'm not sure I could ever hope to presume.

"I want to show you something." That was what you had told me. "And I do not want you to be alarmed. I believe I can do this with you. For you. That I can show this to you. You and you alone." Of course my heart swelled. Of course it did. It was as if your words had filled up my chest to brimming, had left no room for any remaining part of me to remain a part of me. So of course I agreed. Readily. Though I hardly understood the implications of doing so. Nor could I have. I didn't want to be alarmed. I mean, of course. What I mean is that what I wanted, more than not to be alarmed, was to show you that you could show me what you wanted to show me, anything, without inciting my alarm. That, I felt, was somehow important.

We met in school. In college, a time that was like a world of its own, a time so incredible that it could in hindsight be understood as a space. I believe that particular aspect of our relationship, the way it caused a sort of spatiotemporal confusion or fog, was a factor that contributed to its culmination in such a strange place. In other words: that the nature of the beginning of our relationship occasioned the out-of-the-ordinary circumstances of the end of it. We were young. I knew so much less then than I do now, and understood so much more.

You'll remember how resistant I was, at first, to the thought of you. To the mere possibility of you. You and your incredible talents, your incredible skills, the payoff of your dedication to your training so easily able to eclipse my capabilities. As if the indignation that fueled my rivalry with you was nothing. I've always loved the word "annihilate" — literally "to turn into nothing." There is a peculiar beauty to the thought. The perfect form of immaculate destruction. The possibility of a thing to leave no trace.

I believe now that that bias of mine toward the word "annihilate" was what led to the sick synergy between you and me, and my ultimate shame at recognizing my inadequacy across the many arts at which we competed. My shame was true, you know. It burned me, burned the person I was at that time, like a wick burns down a candle, slowly, almost imperceptibly, until all that remains is a puddle, a remnant of pride and vanity. I'm sorry. I can't really say more without feeling like I'm resurrecting something or some feeling that ought to remain buried. That ought to remain separated from us by the expanse of time.

That was the beginning of our relationship. Of course you know all of this. No, there's no possibility of you having forgotten, no chance you would have. No chance you could have. I describe what you must remember simply because I want you to understand what I felt. What I felt was the force of you at all times. I felt it as one feels a wild wind. At times you pushed against me. At others you pushed at my back, guiding me down the path that would become my life, a path that I was often unsure I walked of my own will. But because you walked it with me, side by side — because you were there — I walked it with pride. With my previous long-burning shame having been washed away by the incredible tide of time.

Oh, to remember! To let my mind wander and my imagination feast on the bounty of incredible time — our time. The memory of the sound of the ancient ocean, preserved eternal in the spiral of a seashell and shared with a secret smile. Of the exact circumference of your earlobe pressing into my shoulder, and mine into yours. Of watching a flamboyance of flamingos take flight at the precise mathematical moment of sunrise, like a blood-red funeral wake for the night burning away all across a newborn citrus sky.

What is certain is that I had the utmost respect for you. And for that reason alone, I don't hold it against you, have never held it against you, for being the one to reveal to me how fragile and artificial a construct the notion of respect, along with most other notions or gestures toward the imperceptible or the ideal, really are. I only want to tell you this so that you might understand my feelings.

What I want you to understand most of all is that I nurtured the bud of our love, my love. How I nurtured it. So intent was I that I often failed to grasp that you and I were never truly as one. That you were always walking one step ahead of me. Always just that much farther along on the path than I was. And on the occasion that I did grasp this fact, I was always quick to forget, curiously fastidious in my selective amnesia.

In any case, we didn't speak much over the course of the drive there, all the way out there. When we did, we discussed trifles. The destiny to which we were being propelled seemed a distant thing, a vague idea, and I was of course unapprised of its impending arrival. Either way, there was hardly need for words between us by that point. Between those like us.

On and on the road stretched. Endlessly, it felt like, and no one else was on it but us. Both your hands were on the wheel. There they remained throughout the entire drive, grasping it tightly, never letting go once. You always drove like that, both hands on the wheel, never letting go until you arrived at your destination. In many ways, I knew you better than I knew myself in those days.

When we arrived at the shoreline it was as if our presence there was itself a form of profanity, a pure manifestation of the profane. As if we had transcended ourselves to become nothing less than the ideal of what our being there represented. The tiled walkway, and beyond it the gray belt of beach, and beyond it the still and lifeless sea that seemed to fade into a fading sky — it was as if this place had been this way for centuries, millennia, for all of time, and our trespass threatened to transform its stillness, its oneness with eternity, into motion. Awful, perpetual motion. Once something starts it's hard to stop it again. I know that now more than ever.

Standing where the footpath bordered the cold gray sand was a figure, gray suited, slim and tall, facing away from us so that I could not see their face, hands in their pockets so that I could not see those either.

"Go on," you urged me.

"Is that a person?"

"Go on."

"What are they doing here?"

You didn't answer, you'll remember. Just gave my back a little nudge, as if you knew that, just that, was all I needed.

Without you, I approached the figure, which I could tell well in advance of its turning to face me was not human, was merely something, some thing, some indescribable thing. It was a thing that had adopted aspects of the human form, its diabolical reason for having done so unknowable to me at the time and incommunicable for me now. It was a being whose revelation I knew — somehow even then I knew — was the harbinger of a coming age, a great illumination.

The being turned to face me in a way that I could never communicate except at risk of annihilating the ego. Purely instantiating the process of turning conviction into nothing.

"Hello," the facsimile said — its inhuman voice contouring around the word, around the letters, the sounds, in a manner that seemed to undermine my understanding of sound and matter, of everything, of life itself — in a language that I had not heard since my early childhood. A language that no one could have possibly known that I once spoke.

A language that even I thought I had forgotten.