Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

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.

There should be a word for the moment just before heartbreak, when the very air quivers with all that is about to come.

“It wasn’t scary. I mean, it was scary being in the dark and cold and everything, but when the lady, Mrs. Wilf, died, it was like everything had no beginning and no end. Like we were light-years away and here, all at the same time.”

Everything is connected. No beginning and no end.

Carl Jung had once described secrets as psychic poison.

it’s possible to have bonds with people, even complete strangers, that are soul-to-soul.

He tells his story in excruciating, necessary detail. It’s something beyond confession. It’s testimony. Telling the story won’t bring Joey back. Telling the story won’t take away his pain. But telling the story in these rooms filled with broken souls is what saves his life again and again.

“You’re only as sick as your secrets,” he says. This is one of the program’s maxims. She’s heard it a thousand times. It’s never meant anything to her—just a phrase that skids across her mind without leaving a trace: Searching and fearless moral inventory. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. She has somehow managed to believe that none of this applies to her. But now, she is deeply and incontrovertibly aware that all of it applies to her. If it’s true that she’s only as sick as her secrets, that means she must be very sick indeed.

There’s no comfortable place for him inside his own head.

Her words: It was me, Theo—I said it was me back then because it was me, I was your older sister, it was my fault, I never should have—and the sound of their breaths, the quiet thrown across them like a blanket. Do you think of her? Sarah asked him. All the time, he answered, and in saying it realized just how true it was. Because it was me, he told his sister. Not you, Sarah. Me. I was the one driving like a fucking fool. They went on like this, Theo in Brooklyn, Sarah in Santa Monica, middle-aged, haunted, silenced for decades by their own terror and shame.

We make plans and God laughs.

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.

Forty minutes north, a long-dead girl is sending out lassos of light. She has been doing this for many years, but conditions have to be just so. He has to be ready. Now, she crosses time and space. She is bones in a graveyard. She is cellular matter. She lives within the inner rings of an ancient tree. Every part of her that did not vanish on that summer night loops around him in an embrace he feels only as unexpected purpose and well-being.

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.

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.