Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

If when we die, we don’t just vanish, then there’s nothing to be afraid of, right? He sees…he doesn’t know what to call them…not spirits, exactly, not beings, but a barely visible web, like those intricate spiderwebs that glisten when the sun hits them. Those glistening strands form patterns just like constellations.

He royally fucked up one of the only things in life that you can’t find a way to fix later.

He has a theory that there’s a set number of shitty things that can happen in one lifetime, and he’s already reached his limit.

One lesson among many during the pandemic is that plans are mere fantasies. Plans are fungible. We make plans and God laughs.

Thousands upon thousands are dying lonely, terrible deaths. He’s heard that refrigerator trucks are being used as morgues. A madman is in the White House. The atmosphere is weighted with grief as if grief were a tangible thing, a presence rather than an absence.

Maybe it’s all right to allow his whole being to yearn for the company of one actual person, and not only to be searching for black holes in the universe. Maybe it’s all right to risk loving someone.

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.

“If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.”

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

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 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.

A book is written in solitude, and yet it contains within its pages the fingerprints, dedication, and love of others.