Chapter 4. This Is Not a Dream

The shaking began after it was over.

While the creature lunged at me, while the fight lasted, my hands had been steady as stone. Now it lay dead beside the trunk, and there was nothing left to draw that foreign strength from. The strength ebbed away like a receding tide, and I began to tremble.

Not from fear. Fear had belonged to the fight and vanished with it. This was something else, something that had lain buried beneath the adrenaline, pinned down and patiently waiting for its moment.

The moment had come.

The wound on my forearm, ignored during the struggle, now burned with a steady heat. I sank down where I stood, onto the trampled moss beside the dead beast. Cradling the injured arm against my chest as if it were a child, I sat there and shook, unable to stop.

The light in the sky did not change. It moved toward neither sunset nor dawn. The same even, diffuse, pearlescent glow hung overhead, as though time did not exist here and the world knew only one endless, sickly noon. I sat beneath it, small and wounded in the middle of a foreign forest, and slowly understood that I was alone.

Truly alone.

More alone than I had ever been in thirty-five years.

I was a man accustomed to solving things.

That was not pride. It was simply the way my life had arranged itself. When something broke—at work, for my parents, for a friend—they called me. I took the problem apart, found the weakest link, decided what had to happen first and what came next. The moment a disaster became a task, it stopped being a disaster.

And I was good at tasks.

I remembered the six months, five years earlier, when everything had collapsed at once. A project into which I had poured three years of my life was shut down in a day. They escorted me out with a box of papers as though I had stolen something, although the only thing I had lost was my own time. A month later, my father fell ill. I raced between hospitals, found doctors, paid bills, made arrangements, and carried both him and my mother—all while unemployed, nearly out of money, and unable to see what came next.

Back then, too, I had believed there was no way out.

But there had been. There always was. You sat down, separated the problem into pieces, and found the first move.

I always found it.

Sitting in the foreign moss, I obeyed that same ingrained habit and tried to solve this. Take it apart. Find the weak point. Decide where to begin.

For the first time in my life, I could not find a single move.

Because the problem was simple. Simple and final, without a loophole.

I had died.

There, eight minutes from home, beneath the white light without sound, I had truly died. No one had pulled me free. Mira was not sitting beside my hospital bed because there was no bed, and there was no hand of mine for her to hold. I was no longer there.

And perhaps I was not truly here either. There was only someone with my face and my wedding ring, sitting in a forest that should not exist.

They were still there.

That was what finally broke through me. Not my death. Strangely, I had almost accepted that—it had already happened, and grief could not undo it. What overwhelmed me was their life. The life that would continue without me.

I saw it all at once, with the same merciless clarity with which Analysis had shown me the beast's vulnerable throat.

I saw someone come to our home and ring the bell beside the same door I had closed that morning with my own hand, after tossing me too over my shoulder. I saw Mira open it, perhaps still wearing my old, stretched-out shirt, perhaps still holding a warm cup, knowing nothing yet.

Then I saw her face change.

I knew every version of that face. In eight years, I had seen it drowsy, laughing, furious, and wet with tears of laughter. I had never seen it like this. I was almost grateful that I never would, because merely imagining it made something inside me cry out.

I saw strangers take her somewhere. I saw her asked to confirm what had happened. I saw her nod, sign papers, and ride home in someone else's car, passing the bakery where I had meant to buy rye bread.

I saw Saturday. Her parents had been coming to dinner. My father-in-law was supposed to bring his homemade cordial, and I was supposed to lie that it was the best I had ever tasted because I wanted to survive until Sunday. Now they would still come, but not for dinner. There would be no cordial, and I would never again get to tell that harmless lie. Only now did I understand what a privilege it had been to have such things to lie about.

Then I saw Leo, and whatever remained of my composure gave way.

Leo, who had hung from my neck that morning and asked, “When will you be back?”

“Soon,” I had told him. “I'll be home soon.”

I had made that promise for the final time, in a hurry and without giving the words any weight. Now soon was the last thing he had heard from me, and it would remain that way forever.

He would wait. Children knew how to wait. Their lives were made of waiting for the next good thing that was surely about to happen. He would stand by the door. He would ask Mira when Dad was coming home, ten times a day, the way he had asked about the sea. She would have to answer him somehow, and there were no words in the world that could explain to a three-year-old why the door through which his father had left would never open for him again.

Eventually, Leo would stop asking.

Then—and this was worse than my death, worse than the beast, worse than anything—he would forget me.

He was three. Almost nothing survived from that age, only fragments and warm patches of memory without names. I would fade from him like a dream at dawn. He would grow tall and strong and kind—I knew, for no reason I could explain, that he would be kind—and he would simply have no father. He would not even properly remember what he had lost.

Only an emptiness shaped like a man he could no longer recall.

The sea.

He would never see it with me. His yellow bucket would remain beneath the bed until one day, a year or perhaps three from now, Mira found it while sorting through his things and froze in the middle of the room with it in her hands.

I had promised him. Promise-promise.

I had even planned to surprise them by booking the trip for the long weekend in May. I had thought about it while driving. I had smiled like an idiot moments before my heart stopped. I would never make that reservation. Perhaps Leo would visit the sea one day when he was older, without me, and never remember that someone had once promised to take him there to shake hands with the fish.

Another memory came, one I did not have the strength to face, yet could not stop.

Five years earlier, when I had no job and my father was in the hospital, I had once sat alone in the dark kitchen, convinced that I had failed everyone and unable to see any way forward. I did not cry. I simply sat there, emptied out and unable to move.

Mira came in. She did not turn on the light. She did not tell me everything would be fine; she knew those words could make a dark moment feel worse. She simply sat in the chair beside mine, took the hand that wore the ring, and held it.

For a long time, she said nothing.

Then she said only one thing.

“I'm not going anywhere. Whatever happens, I'm here.”

That was enough. Not to fix everything—the fixing came later, in its own time, as it always did. It was enough for me to stand up from that chair.

Whenever I fell into the darkest place in my life, she was there to hold my hand until I found something solid beneath my feet.

Now I was in the darkest place imaginable. A foreign world. A dead beast beside me. A sky without a sun. A place she could never have conceived.

She was not here.

She never would be.

There was no one to take my hand. No one to say, I'm here.

I folded over in the wet moss and stopped trying to hold myself together.

I do not know what to call what followed. They were not tears in the ordinary sense, the kind shed over a film or a broken cup. The grief seemed to come not from my eyes, but from deep inside me, from the place beneath my breastbone where Mira had rested her forehead for eight years. There was no way to set it aside, no way to rise above it.

I called for them.

I called their names aloud into the pearlescent, sunless sky.

Mira.

Leo.

I called as I had never called anyone before, knowing they could not answer and still unable to remain silent. The sky did not answer. The forest did not answer. Somewhere in the distance, alien voices called to one another with steady indifference. They cared nothing for me.

That indifference contained the whole truth. My grief had no weight here. A man was coming apart in the middle of the forest, and the forest did not notice. To it, I mattered no more than I had mattered to the beast that saw me only as prey.

I do not know how long it lasted. Time seemed to stand still while the grief moved in circles, returning again and again without weakening. Each wave left me certain I had no strength for another.

But grief did not destroy me.

Eventually, it burned itself out.

It did not pass. It burned down to ash, the way anything burns when there is no fuel left to feed it. In its place it left a hollow stillness more frightening than the pain itself. I lay on my side in the foreign moss beside the creature, my injured arm resting before me, and there was nothing left inside.

No thoughts.

No plans.

No tears.

I had been scraped empty to the bottom.

I stared at the black roots tangled before my face and thought of nothing.

In that emptiness, at the very bottom where neither grief nor fear remained because there was nothing left to draw them from, something stirred almost too quietly to feel.

Silent.

Cold.

Heavy.

It offered no comfort and no warmth. It simply sank to the bottom and settled there, smooth and solid as a stone. From it, a different cold began to spread through the hollow place inside me—not the cold of the earth that had greeted me when I woke.

This cold came from within.

I did not yet know its name. I did not even have the strength to ask.

I lay there and felt it cool and harden inside me as, for the first time since my awakening, the light above the forest slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to change.