Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus far experienced it, was a series of detachments. Characters crossed the stage, and some hung around longer than others, but all ultimately exited.

“The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

They could see each other, if barely, in the pewter gloaming cast by the tall buildings that fringed the neighborhood, but this near-dark was alien and carried with it the arrival of the postponable truth that all urban dwellers kept tucked on high shelves—we are unprepared for most forms of survival. At least those that don’t come with amenities.

We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.

“Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.”

But she knew if she listened to that voice she’d never do it at all. She’d spend the next year (or years) indoors, in fear, in mistrust and resentment until those very things became a balm, an ironic salve, the worry stone she caressed until that caress replaced every caress she’d ever give or receive again. And the worst of it was that by that point, she’d have convinced herself it was more than enough.

A Porsche swung wide on her left, engine revving, and shot out in front of her. She’d never been happier for a small penis driving a small penis car to act like a small penis because she again had cover between her and Brian.

“Lucky I’m a cop. They fucking pay us to notice shit like that.” “You say ‘fuck’ a lot.” “And why not?” he said. “It’s a great word. Verb, noun, adverb, adjective. ‘Fuck’ is fucking utile.”

She took her seat on the gunwale and looked up at the sky. The cloud bank from earlier had moved on and the stars arrayed themselves in clusters, as if seeking the protection of the herd, and she felt them not as celestial things, as gods or the servants of gods, but as castoffs, exiles, lost in the vast ink sky. What appeared as clusters down here were, up there, fields a million miles wide. The closest stars were light-years apart, no closer to one another than she was to a tribeswoman of the Saharan steppe in the fifteenth century. If we are this alone, she wanted to know, then what is the point?

She had no experience dealing with people like them, but they had plenty of experience dealing with rubes like her.

She realized now that in Haiti, even before the camp, as far back as Port-au-Prince and the corpses smoldering in the streets and stacked in the parking lot of the hospital, stacked like old cars in junkyards, beginning to swell and balloon in the heat, as far back as then, the truth of their deaths became the truth of her own: We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

From grade school through high school, college, grad school, and out into the working world, she had assembled herself into a character she played every day for most of her life. Once that character failed to connect with the audience any longer, she disassembled it and assembled a new one. And on and on. Until, after Haiti, after Widdy, she couldn’t reassemble. All that was left of her was the nub of her hollow, manufactured self and the whole of her sin.

She heard the lake before she saw it. It wasn’t gurgling or lapping against the land. It presented itself as a pocket, a lack of density that removed pressure from her left ear, pressure she hadn’t even known was there until it wasn’t.

“Because I hate you.” He took that into consideration. Shrugged. “That’s how we usually feel about the things that wake us up.”

“I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. But when I fell, I fell all the way.

“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.” He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is—where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe.

It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit.

She shot Rachel a vague smile as she approached and emitted the air of someone who was rarely present in a conversation but who’d learned her lines enough to imitate someone who was.

If it’s ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn’t), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.