The Rest Is Illusion Read online

  The campus was again silent in the night as Sarah made her way out the front doors.

  Sarah walked with her destination and reasons resolute in her mind, clutching at the cell phone in her right pocket. The little chapel appeared before her, lighted by a single lamppost that stood just off to the left of the building. She climbed the steps and reached for one of the handles of the double doors. She vacillated for a moment. What she was about to do was the most frightening thing she had ever thought of doing.

  Breathe, Sarah. Breathe.

  The chapel was empty inside, but it was always lit for any midnight faith-seeker. Sarah strolled up the aisle and sat in a middle pew. To her relief, the busted window had been repaired.

  She rested for a moment, and then she drew the phone from her coat, smirking at the irony of calling her father in a chapel. Divulging her sins. Without any more postponement, she hit a button. He wouldn’t answer right away. She would have to let it ring. And it did, until her father answered, the sound of an angry, waking bullfrog.

  “Yes,” he croaked. “Who is this?” He cleared his throat with an unapologetic hacking.

  “It’s… it’s me. Sarah,” she said timidly as her heart did pole vaults.

  “Sarah? Young lady, do you realize what time it is! You woke your mother and me.” Sarah heard her mother say something, but it was an incoherent mumble.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry….”

  “What is so important you’ve got to wake us up in the middle of the night? What have you done?” His accusations always made her wonder if she had done something worthy of his ire.

  “Nothing,” Sarah said defensively. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “You called because you want to talk. We talked today. Sarah Coheen, I am a very busy man.” Then, “Are you drunk?”

  “No!” Sarah said excitedly. “I just thought….”

  “There’s no thinking going on in that head of yours waking me up like this. Now get to bed. I’ll call and we’ll talk about this tomorrow. I think you….”

  “Daddy, shut up!” Sarah said loudly. The words bounced off the walls of the chapel like irate superballs.

  “What did you just say to me? Young lady, you do not talk to me that way. That is it! It was a mistake sending you to that school. You’re coming home tomorrow….”

  “No. I’m not,” Sarah said, stalwart. “You’re going to listen to me. I have something to say to you, and you are going to hear it.” There was a heavy sigh from her father. “Daddy.” She paused, attempting to transfer her own inner dialogue to her father’s ears. “That word is so weird for me. I never knew what to call you. Even as a little girl, I never felt comfortable calling you anything. Dad, Daddy, Father. Usually I just settle on ‘sir’ because it seems to make you happiest, and truthfully, it speaks for the closeness in our relationship.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m your father. Address me as such!” Still gruff. Still angry.

  “I can’t do that. It doesn’t feel right. Never has,” she said more to herself. “I feel like one of your least favorite parishioners. The ones that always sit in the back and fall asleep and bring broccoli casserole to church functions. I don’t feel like your daughter at all.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!”

  “I have never felt like your daughter!” she said loudly. “I feel like you don’t like me at all. That I disappoint you. You make me feel like that. You do, Dad! And I hate it!” She felt as if her heart was being emptied of vile, tainted blood, and she couldn’t stop the spill.

  “That’s it!” he yelled into the phone. “You’re coming home tomorrow. You are drunk and most likely on drugs, and I will not have a daughter of mine act like a fool. Your mother and I have given you—”

  “I am not coming home, and I am not drunk,” Sarah said, stomping her feet on the old wood floor. “I could not care less about your damn church, or what any of those hypocrites think of me!”

  “Sarah!”

  “Yes, I drink. But I’m not drunk now. Hell, I drink buckets. I also smoke and, yes, occasionally do some drugs. There! All your worst fears about me are true. How does it feel to know me so well?” She felt liberated. Justly exasperated with her father.

  “You know what else, Daddy? I’m in love with a gay man, and I’m dating an albino agnostic! And we’re going to fuck! All three of us! And when I have our children, they’re going to be albino agnostic homosexuals! Every single one of them.” She meant none of it. But at the moment, she only wanted to wound her father as he had done her.

  “Sarah!” her father gasped. “Why do you say such things? You are such a disappointment sometimes.”

  “No, sir,” Sarah retorted, her voice cracking into a thousand different melodies. “You are. You are a terrible father. You might be a great preacher, but you failed miserably at being my father. And Mom didn’t do that much better. Now—” She paused. “I’m going back to sleep, but I want you to stay up and think. Think about what I said and focus on the memory of my voice. Neither of us will be here forever. We should start trying to like one another, I think. Who knows if there is a Heaven? Who knows for sure? Daddy, I love you. I have to, but you need to treat me better.”

  “Sarah.” His voice was softer. It was almost a whisper.

  “You need to treat me better, Daddy. I’m a grown-up. My own woman. I’m no longer yours for show. All day today, when I was with you, I felt like a horrible person. I hate being around you. And I hate myself for feeling like that. I want to like being with you,” she said, “but you need to treat me better, Daddy.”

  There was silence. She could hear his heavy breathing on the other end. “I’m going to bed now,” Sarah said. “Call me tomorrow if you think we can do something about this, but I will never be coming home again, Daddy. Ever.”

  “Sarah,” he whispered again. It was almost enough to make her want to recant. To take it all back. She had struck out at him. Something he had never expected her to do. His voice sounded low and saturnine, full of sorrow.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said finally, more like a cricket than a bullfrog now.

  “Good,” Sarah said, lowering her voice. “Good night, Daddy. I love you.”

  “Good night….” And then, like soft snowflakes on the cheeks, “I love you… Sarah.”

  His voice melted into her, the words filling a vacant chamber left empty for too long. She turned off the phone and sat down again, absorbing a newfound spirit and will that had less to do with religion than it did with inner faith.

  WILDER WASN’T aware of much. Everything around him was tinted in sepia and rang of cold reverberations. He knew he was no longer outside. He was now in a room. A bedroom. And he was sitting on a bed, stripped of his shirt. Wilder did not try to ascertain more from his situation. None of it mattered, really.

  His intent at the start of the evening was to redominate his scene, his surroundings. But then he was struck down twice—once by Maggie, and then by the tree. He had slashed at the tree in defense of his own convictions, but in the end, the tree had won. Wilder knew he had wounded the old thing, possibly its death-knell. Yet as he cut at it, the tree threw the image of his own father back at him. The shard of mirror in his hand had become a blade for slitting his father’s throat. And what was worse, what was even more horrific, was that he felt satisfaction. He felt a sense of justice. The harrowing vision was no more than what his father deserved.

  But it is all a lie! A moment of insane weakness, Wilder thought.

  “What did you do? There’s blood everywhere!” Was it his mother’s stoic voice he heard? Just for a moment, he saw her standing in front of him. She dabbed at his face with a wet rag, wearing the perfect gown with her hair done just right. But then his vision mended, and he saw it was only Gabriel. Of course, it wouldn’t have been his mother. How foolish of me! His mother would have sent him off to be tended by other hands. Lesser hands.

  “There’s so much blood, Wilder. Is this all yours?” Hi
s voice was all echoes and vibrations. Gabriel might as well have been shouting through a drainage tunnel or from the other side of the river valley. “Your hand’s all cut up, man.” Wilder felt a tight swaddling sensation around his hand. “That should do.”

  Gabriel’s handsome face was directly in front of Wilder. A reddened mark on his jaw was about to bruise. His lips were moving. He was saying something, but it all was an irritant to Wilder. He wanted to slap Gabe away, and he was lucid enough to do so in that last moment. After which a profound heaviness set upon him, and he fell into a disturbing sleep. A rest that wasn’t quite restful. A sleep filled with nightmares of blood and bark.

  COMING BACK was a delicate transition instead of an eye-opening jolt. It was a serene falling down, a sweet, soft ease settling over Dashel. With it came the knowledge of another world that he had forgotten about for a few hours, the world he had known as real.

  His eyes opened, the long lashes fluttering away the mists. The muted ceiling was just as it had been when he had fallen in the rasping clench of pain. No longer a blue sky, its vividness was hushed and muffled.

  The room was dark, but predawn was seeping in through the window. Just a hint of light to foreshadow the nearing sunrise. Dash felt the papers around him. He still had a wad of them crushed in his balled fists. The computer screen saver, a downloaded lightning storm, flashed glints of forged light throughout the room.

  Dash felt two rather curious sensations upon waking. The first was the whirling view of his surroundings. The room swirled and circled about him like a tilt-a-whirl. But it was the other sensation that had him most preoccupied. He was content, for the dream had revealed itself. He had finally seen the end and had been cleansed by its resolution. The new dream had washed out his insides, and all that remained was his soul and his outer shell. He had never felt more aware of himself. He knew what the day held and why it had to be.

  Completely devoid of discomfort and pain, Dashel staggered to his feet. He walked to the mirror on the door, stepping over scattered papers and notes, the battlefield of a last fall.

  “Not half bad,” he said almost voiceless, as he grinned at his reflection. His hair, though still curly, looked unwashed, and one side of his mouth was smeared with the dried remnants of a stream of blood. His eyes, however, looked alive once again. Astute. Quick. Ready.

  Dash looked back on the pallet he had fallen to the night before. Papers lay strewn on a small area of the floor, sprinkled and globbed with blood. It had accumulated and soaked into a large darkened patch of carpet.

  “That’ll be taken out of my dues,” he joked as he bent and rubbed at the stain.

  After a shower, he dressed in the appropriate attire for the day. A suit. The one his father had worn at his own graduation. The one his mother always loved him in. Dark blue, double-breasted, pin-striped with a black silk tie and shiny black shoes. He ran his hand through his blond hair, full of kink and curl, and imagined he looked almost acceptable except for the emaciated appearance of his face.

  Collecting the fallen papers from the carpet, he stacked them once more, then slid them into his backpack along with the others that had not been bloodied. Ashley had teased him that he would never finish the Independent Study, and he would be working on it until the day he died. Dash zipped the bag up and sat it on his father’s desk chair.

  The bloody floor received his attention next. He scrubbed at the carpet with cleaning solvent, but the blood was too deeply set. In the end, he stood defeated and looked down at the stain. It would have to remain. Part of him becoming part of the room, part of the house.

  Dashel turned off the computer. The screen light faded, leaving a glare as a reminder it was once there, a ghost or phantom image.

  One last time he looked into the mirror. Nearly acceptable. He gave himself a polite nod of acknowledgment.

  Behind him, he noticed Ashley’s brightly covered bed.

  “So long, Ash,” he said with a delicate kindness in his eyes and a hint of melancholy in his voice. Best that Ashley wasn’t there. It made leaving easier.

  Dash was ready to go. As he stood there at the door, the room grew silent. Frozen in saddened anticipation. It was a great stillness like the shadow of a mountain descending over a sunlit plain. Everything was waiting. The room—the world—was down on its knees in love and waiting.

  For me.

  As he walked away from Sigma Gamma, he saw things as if he was the star spectacle of some grand procession. The air parted, the cracks in the walkways mended, and the tree branches lifted for him to pass. At first, he thought it only his imagination fed by a night’s fantastical dreaming, but then he knew. The air is indeed parting. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, the fabric of existence was torn ever so slightly for a brief instant. Spread just enough to let Dashel Yarnsbrook walk right through. And if anybody had been watching, they would have sworn they had seen him bowing every so often from right to left. Bowing at no particular thing. Just a tree, or a bird, or a young stag that stood out in the middle of the quad.

  He reached the Old Lady, having walked the way on easy air. The great tree peered out over the valley and welcomed his advance. She had been wounded with the shard of mirror glass lying at her base. Dash put his hand on the raw area where the bark had been stripped off. Then he looked up at the branch he had once perched on, and he proceeded to climb up to it.

  The climb was made all the more difficult by his dress shoes and the backpack full of paper. Breathless, he straddled the branch in his suit and took the backpack off. Now he would wait, his back leaning against Her solid trunk.

  Dashel rested on the branch, feeling the breath rush in and out of his lungs, breath that could stop at any moment. So easily undone. Everything could be so easily unmade.

  Only in this world, a voice said, coming into his head like a slight whisper.

  “You’re right, Lady,” Dash responded. “Only in this world.” He patted the timeworn branch between his legs.

  The sun peeked timidly over the hills to the east. A blast of light grazed over the river, sending up sparkles and shines like shouts into the air. Dash could see the beach below was flooded with run-off from the snow. The old barge was probably being inundated as well, feeling once again the sensation of the river on all sides.

  The entire valley began to take notice of the new dawn. Rustles and sighs escaped from the deeps of the forested hillsides. There was life in the valley.

  WILDER’S JOURNEY through his dreams led him to corridors and darkened hollows hitherto unknown to him. Memories and fantasies converged and melded into one another in disturbing variants. Things he once thought pleasant and harmless took on terrible forms and hobbled or slithered after him, chasing him through forests and deep thickets.

  And there were trees. Trees he never knew the names for until he saw them in his nightmare. Tall, menacing oaks and sycamores and ash. Large weeping willows that reached out and strangled him, leaving welts and cuts with their thin, whiplike appendages. Incubi wresting him in a world of sleep.

  Wilder freed himself from their hold and ran again but was unable to scream, unwilling to call for help as he tripped through the darkened wood.

  Ahead he saw a light, and as it grew and he was able to see the landscape around him, he realized he wasn’t anywhere foreign or fantastic at all. He had not been struggling through some fairy-story forest. No, he was at the Point. He was on campus. There was the tree and beyond it, the valley and the river.

  The sky was overcast in a mutation of night and day. Great clusters of swollen gray clouds crawled through the atmosphere. A clap of thunder shook the globe, and Wilder looked upward. A splash of rain fell on his lips. As he looked down again, the tree was gone, and he now seemed nearer to the edge of the bluff overlooking the valley.

  The muddy water of the river whirled as each drop of rain fell into it. It was rising quickly, overtaking the banks with frightening speed. Soon it would rise to the bluff, then submerge the campus. Wilder tri
ed to turn and run, but he could not move. He was fixed and rigid, unable even to wiggle his fingers and toes. Then, in a horrifying moment of nail-scratching terror, he realized, the tree has not vanished at all. Oh no, it was very much still there… and it is me! I am it!

  The river water circled around his feet—his roots—soaking into the good earth. He could do nothing as the water inched up his form, only listen to the rain as it hit his branches and limbs with sharp thuds. Even if he could cry out, it would do no good now. It was too late! He was alone now, forever….

  Splash splash thud splash thud….

  But then slowly the rainfall took on a more mechanical sound, alternating rhythms. He heard a familiar clicking and ticking. As the water rose to suffocate him, to envelop his highest branch, Wilder awoke. The drowning sound of raindrops was replaced by the sound of fingers on a keyboard.

  Wilder sat up, coughing as if he were submerged and could not breathe. Color came back into his eyes.

  “Finally awake, huh?” came a voice. “You’ve been tossing and mumbling all night.” Wilder saw Gabriel sitting at his computer. He was in Gabe’s room in Sigma Gamma. Posters of sports heroes and swimsuit models hung on the walls. A stolen stop sign stood leaning against one corner.

  “Gabe,” Wilder scratched out. He was still struggling to shake off nightmare phantoms. “Why am I in your room?”

  Gabriel looked distressed, wringing his hands at the desk. A dark bruise colored his face. There was no answer. Wilder could tell Gabe wanted to say something but was afraid to.

  “What happened last night?” Wilder pursued.

  “I found you out at the Point,” Gabriel said. “You were muttering and bloody and….”

  “Why am I not in my own room?” Wilder could smell the scent of something gone amiss.