Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

For if the earth is a camp and the sea an ossuary of souls, light your signal fires wherever you find yourselves. Come the morning, launch your boats.

But these are only a few possible arcs to a life, a handful of shooting stars in the night sky. Change one thing and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped. His

foot on the gas. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but that won’t stop him. He’s all jacked up just like a fifteen-year-old boy. He has something to prove. To himself. To Misty. To his sister. It’s as if he’s following a script written in Braille, his fingers running across code he doesn’t understand.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

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.

“Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”

He sounds almost as if he were reciting something from a textbook by memory. Like he’s trying to say something bigger, deeper: private thoughts for which he doesn’t have language. Everything is connected.

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.

Everything is connected. No beginning and no end.

The most sense he can make of it is that they’d shared a terror that if they spoke of what happened that night, their words would form a complete narrative more terrible than the shattered part each of them carried alone.

But silence may have been a mistake. No. Silence had definitely been a mistake.

He once heard it said it’s possible to have bonds with people, even complete strangers, that are soul-to-soul. The idea has stayed with him. What does it mean that he helped deliver the boy? What does it mean that Waldo was with Mimi when she passed?

Is it coincidence, pure and simple? Is there even such a thing? Ben thinks, sometimes, about the time he spent sitting with Waldo, nestled among the gnarly roots of the oak.

He will recognize a current running through him, a force that connects him to the world he apprehended as an almost-eleven-year-old boy. He won’t know who is reaching him through time and space, but he will know he is not alone.