Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

The kid is a curious combination of expressive and restrained, as if his very spirit were doing battle with everything he’s been told he’s supposed to be.

He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

Benjamin Wilf kneeled beside her once, long ago. Give it all you’ve got, Alice. Waldo kept Mimi Wilf warm and made her feel safe at the end of her life. Maybe all of them are simply a chorus of souls, light touching light.

It’s possible to grow up in the wrong house, on the wrong street, in the wrong town, in the wrong part of the country. It’s possible to go to the wrong school. To have the wrong dad. To be pushed to do the wrong things. But it is also possible to survive all these psychic indignities if you have one, maybe two people who recognize you for who you are. His mom saw him. By seeing him, she saved him. And on one winter night half his life ago, an old doctor slung his arm around him and swayed back and forth as if he and Waldo were both hearing the same barely audible music.

Grief comes in waves. Like the swells crashing against the rocks, it gathers force and breaks when you least expect it.

The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars. Perhaps each one is what remains of every soul who has ever lived; perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling. The young man standing beside him is the infant he placed on his mother’s belly; the husband and father whose salvation comes in opening his own heart; the elderly astrophysicist who devotes his life to the hunt for habitable exoplanets beyond our solar system. The whole crowd is here, invisible, surrounding them. The air shimmers with everyone he has ever loved. He is near the end of his life, and in another sphere, he is also just beginning. He would like to believe this. And why not? He will find out soon enough.