Nightwalker

by Ime Atakpa

  He skulks about, running the usual rounds about the breakfast table, always lingering between the far end of the table and the wall not three feet away. Today, though, something about that wall captivates him more than usual. He pauses on it and presses the weight of his body onto the thick plaster. That’s when I see it, for it’s only then that I deign to move closer.

  A protrusion rises a few millimeters from the surface of the wall. Several layers of paint run over it and blend almost seamlessly into the natural wall. Father fingers the curvature where the peak of the protrusion melts down into the wall. Then his hands move more purposely down to his waist where they search against the wall. They move with extreme precision, touching upon what, to me, seems a spot no different than the others. But when he pushes against it, the paint cracks. Beige flakes flutter to the floor. Some disappear beyond it, down into an uncharted abyss unbeknownst to me until this very moment. A folded-over napkin flutters off the breakfast table from the cool breeze that the secret passage emits.

  Father disappears down creaky steps into that darkness. Without voyaging any farther than where I stand, I can sense what awaits him beyond those steps.

  Hidden beyond this disused door, a congregation of spirits lurks, culling the soul of their captor in his momentary weakness. They release stinging odors into the atmosphere to coerce him further along his path toward self-destruction; and though Father spent years of his life safe from the grip of the baleful ones, today’s despair overwhelms beyond his capacity to endure.

  I follow him through that open door, down three creaking stairs into a humid compartment. I taste them immediately, those spirits, the dizziness brought about by their flavors. But the effect of this contact dissipates as spontaneously as it arrives. So I’m carried deeper into the chamber, trailing unsteady footsteps toward its farthest reaches.

  The footsteps halt several feet from the far wall. Deep, intentional breaths replace them. In and out, in and out, the breaths come steady as grandfather’s methodical ticking. Each inhale is a thought, each exhale a counter-thought. Their conflict is infinite.

  “You wouldn’t come back. You promised. You promised.” Even as the words slither from his lips, a hand reaches out to that far wall, its exact contents hidden by the chamber’s darkness.

  “Turn around. Come on, you can still turn around.” His hand recedes, but its recession is uncertain. The forces from which it draws strength conflict with one another. The head and the heart at war struggle valiantly for control over Father’s autonomy.

  “It doesn’t cost much,” the heart argues, soft and assertive.

  By contrast, the head speaks like a mewling child, laying bare its thought with quizzical undertones. “You promised. I promised. Me. I did it.”

  “Just enough to be at peace.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “Take what you deserve. Just take it.” Again, his hand reaches forward as an overgrown vine might, searching for a pillar to envelop, searching for anything at all to steady its boneless limbs. Father conducts himself leisurely forward, stumbling once over his own feet.

  “I don’t deserve it.” His breathing begins to steady. Sensations stir in him, a deep longing, and his tongue creeps from its own gluttonous cavern to lay moisture upon his starved lips. “I’ve earned it.” His voice shrinks to nothing. Where before it crept slow from his lips, it now falls quickly, heavy as fog.

  “You need it.”

  “I need it.”

  Too long withdrawn from the pleasure of indulgence, Father completes the final steps, reaches into the darkness, and pulls away his spirit of choice. He lifts it overhead and spins on his heels—as he rotates, his lips press and stretch in a half-contained smile—to place the bottle against the small trace of light shining in from the door. A golden brown liquid sparkles from within the shaken glass bottle.

  A memory jumps at me. I see myself as a child watching for the first time as Father overindulged on spirits and the way his body seemed to float through the air. He stumbled on every step and slurred whatever half-thought his alcohol-riddled mind could produce. I had just returned home from a walk in the forest, a small hike to clear my mind. No sooner had I opened the front door than he approached me in that stupor and lifted me off the ground. He attempted twirling me above the ground like any loving Father might seeing their child return home safely. But he could not bear my weight in his inebriated hands. His legs tripped over themselves and he stumbled backward in the same motion, and he flung my twelve-year-old self across the foyer and headlong into what was luckily the couch. Mother chastised the drunkenness out of him that night. No more than fifteen minutes elapsed for him to come fully to his senses. Again and again, he pleaded with me to forgive his idiocy. “I’m trying to deal with it,” he told me. “Everything is changing. You know I love you.” I remember the way his hand on my head and face had exuded such heat and left nasty traces of moisture when he finally released me, pulled free by his fuming wife. “Please forgive me,” he’d choked. On that day, I learned that men too were allowed tears. His were infrequent and large. He continually insisted, “I’m not myself,” as Mother dragged him upstairs to rest and repent. The last words of his I heard were echoes. “I can be better than myself,” rang down the staircase in fading increments until they disappeared altogether. What I hadn’t known was that he’d locked all this away for the sake of protecting me, or protecting himself, or perhaps both.

  I cannot imagine what new terrors might haunt him to know that I bear witness to his relapse. Understanding the depth of his sorrow at knowing he again allows himself to stoop into the pleasure of drinks, I do the favor of removing myself from the dining room before he begins to feed his demons.

  From upstairs, the direct imagery of his stupor cannot reach me. However, the sounds of manhandled furniture, footfalls indicative of stumbling, and increasingly incoherent outbursts supplement my imagination enough for it to produce in full clarity the movements associated with them. By merit of this vision, I witness his fall into disrepair, dredging up samples of those spirits, letting them spill between his lips.

  Present and past coexist wherever memories reveal themselves. Two separate moments in time can be no closer than when bridged by memory. Incidents of childhood arise here and there to remind me of gentler times. I’ll never be certain to what end they reveal themselves, not now or ever.

  Cruel September compounds our discontent. Spring will begin life new next year. It tears life away to begin it anew next year. But for now, color drains hue by hue from each leaf. So the leaves die, and so they fall lifeless to the ground below. Where the earth will take them, as it takes all things.

  The sun shines still, bright in the clear sky. It touches the chandelier overhead, producing an irritating glare. I sit at the end of the table, next to Father, only ever moving to disrupt that glare.

  Otherwise, the spread of family photos laid upon the table receives my full attention. Father stares across the table, seated as far as possible from Mother, but he does not stare at the photographs. He stares, if I interpret the vacancy in his eyes correctly, beyond the pictures into the very memories they capture.

  “I remember this,” Mother announces, lifting between two fingers a moment trapped in time, flashing it before Father as a peace offering, an ironic method of forgetting. “His first word.” Nimble fingers turn the photo around and soft eyes glare longingly at her past-self holding the past-me close in embrace. “This was that day.”

  She then falls under a spell of sadness. It’s drawn into her eyes and the lines around her mouth. The whole of her countenance shifts gravely, bearing in it hints of what thoughts now plague her. In his own corner, Father marks this alteration and smiles accordingly. His eyes, though, betray the feigned sincerity of the gesture and Mother, wanting nothing of his pity, turns away. The photograph slips between her fingers, lands face down on the table amidst its order.

  A sigh from the far corner steals Mother’s attention. “Sorr
y,” he tells her. She repeats his apology.

  Her hands thereafter return to their work, sifting through the photos, bringing the most memorable to Father’s attention, and placing them into a separate pile before seeking out another. She goes about this for several hours. Father sits deathly still for the duration.

  Eventually, Mother finds her way through all the photos, the best of these tucked away to the side. Polaroid prints form various trips out in the forest. Pictures of me dressed up for first days of school. Me smiling gap-toothed, holding out a bloody molar. Our family, immediate and extended alike, crowded around me as I struggle to blow out the candles on a birthday cake (I count seven candles). Feeble, small and naked me cradled in my mother’s arms, a bundle of tears that only recently drew its first breath. Mother collects them in a neat pile, caresses them gently as though it might better connect her to them. “We should frame these.”

  This whole time, Father’s gaze has remained on her. What he hopes to discover, I cannot fathom, but without doubt, he does seek something to be found there. He searches her eyes, her lips, the twitch of her nose. For answers. To what question, I cannot attest.

  “We still have those frames we never used.”

  Father’s expression turns grim. “There’s a reason for that.”

  “But—”

  “But we agreed, and that’s all.” It is the most authority I’ve heard in his voice as of late. The atmosphere thickens to have heard it. A low tide rises.

  “That was before.” She draws a hand over the scattered stack of memorable pictures, fingertips gravitating toward my face in them.

  “Nothing has changed about that.”

  “Everything has changed.” She slumps over the table, visibly peeved by the brief rush of cold as the heat stabilizes between her arms and the marble surface. That despite, she holds fast.

  “I know that, but this.” He gestures ambiguously with both hands. “This is still the same.” Father almost gets up—I catch all the signs that indicate his desire to—but stops himself for one reason or another. He contents himself with leaning over the table. “Don’t you think we need something to stay the same, at least? Look, we’ve waited. We’ve—” He chokes, sighs. “How long has it been? I don’t know what happens from here. But I know what we have.” Now he stands, makes his way around the table. Though his eyes never leave Mother, his hands feel the table for the smooth prints. “We have these.” Then he finds her hands and holds them in his own. “And we have this.” Now his tender smile catches her. She straightens herself to smile back. Then he sighs in relief that he’s captured her attention. At that, she turns away once again.

  “You’ve been drinking again.”

  History knows that Mother lacks immunity to the bottle’s temptation. Years ago, she embellished a tale or two of our exploits in the woods to Father, slurring words together in a garbled mess of a story that Father little regarded. It had been soon after the night walks began for me, when both of them collapsed under the pressure of maintaining a semblance of control over my condition. The trip itself hadn’t been exemplary to my knowledge. We set up camp at routine locations, she revealed some of the family’s history, and we shared in the company of the natural world.

  During that trip, she brought a silver-coated thermos small enough to be comfortably attached to her waist. She forbade me from touching it, speaking of it, and even looking at it. Being of young age and bounding with inquisitiveness—especially given the circumstances of our trek through the forest—I was not wont to comply with her demands. But when she perfectly struck away my hand in the darkness I thought had concealed my endeavor to whisk it away, the glare accompanying her reproach conveyed all the gravity of her demands. As such, I set the issue to rest, only ever considering the thermos when she unclipped it for a frequent drink. And even then, my attentions faltered for fear of reprimand. I couldn’t detect the subtle changes in her composure, namely her increasing affection toward me. I suppose I believed those affections to have been induced solely by her maternal instincts.

  She drove us home well enough, as far as I could tell. Only when we returned did the signs recognizably manifest. She fell that night into Father’s arms, red-faced and teary-eyed. Secrets told only to me found their way to Father’s ears, as did her lamentations of the inevitability of what was to come. I never understood her apprehensions, for she had survived every misfortune of our blood curse from seven to twenty-five. She lived long enough to be married, to bear child, to love that child. No affliction of mine could negate the strength with which she overcame life’s obstacles. Yet there she was, a victim of the chemical feelings.

  Just before I fell asleep that night, I head Father tell her: “drinking won’t make this go away, and it won’t make it easier. You’ve been through this. He needs you to be his rock.” Sure enough, he had much more than that to say, but only some of that dialogue has kept with me all these years. I spent a good while mulling over the hypocrisy of it on the day I first saw Father drunk. Of course he needed Mother to be my rock. By no other arrangement could he walk down that road himself, experiment with the benefits of drunkenness. And the lasting irony arose that Mother became both our rocks.

  With Father now returned to his old ways, I can only imagine how long remains before the rock, too, succumbs. Strong as it may be, no stone is immune to the weathering of time. Strong winds and heavy rains whittle that coarse stone into something lean and smooth, something easily trampled and carried away by creatures passing by, or by the same winds and rains that for long years only dreamed of the day they’d shatter the stone to dust.

  She blinks. A tear splashes against the table. Father has already departed and her present solitude enables the tears to flow. The pictures remain strewn across the table, dampened by her sorrow.

  I observe with unyielding determination. Observation as a method of understanding improves always upon itself. Each new discovery informs the next.

  She blinks once more. In the brief moment her eyelids blind her, the eyes beneath shift near unnoticeably to the side.

  Knowledge builds itself in waves of increasing magnitude. Following much quiet deliberation, it achieves its penultimate form: the cusp of revelation.

  Twice in succession, she blinks. Father’s secret chamber sits just outside her peripheral. Twice again she blinks and her eyes face forward, away from that place.

  Progress eliminates the necessity of further observation. It’s clear to me. She yearns as Father yearns to feel the hot sting burn the taste from her mouth and the feeling from her throat.

  Two blinks and a yawn accompany a natural turning of her head. At least as natural as it is meant to appear to an inattentive audience. Nothing withholds her from embarking down those three steps into the chamber of spirits.

  -XI-

  Whitewall

  I’ve not given my best effort over the last few weeks. The results of my incompetence show in the increased agitation between my parents. Confrontational as ever, they clash at moments that least mandate conflict. The moment with the photographs was the worst of it but certainly not the only one. In the week since then, I struggle to recall explicitly what similar events transpired between the two, yet I know for certain they clashed. It all flutters from recollection.

  These lapses of memory, though, should not come as a surprise to me. Feeling has all but fled me; and with the dissolution of that failure, I hoped normalcy might return to our lives. If we all collectively buried the agony, locked it away in our hearts, the tragedy which has shattered us might too hide itself away from thought. Since the only power available to me is augmenting my perception of time—a priceless yet useless ability—what choice do I have but to spectate the remainder of their miserable lives? Sure enough I’ve been ill at ease, intentionally neglectful.

  Looking back at my hasty response to experiencing firsthand the resplendence of Mother’s light, I hardly recognize myself. That version of myself knew in his heart that a solution waited beyon
d the burden of only a few minor struggles; that version of myself was misguided. Ah, when I heard from Mother’s own tongue that she knew me to be alive, how my spirits had leapt! In that same memory, Father’s rejection of Mother’s hopes hardly bothered me. What could he possibly know? Did he inherit the familial curse? Had ever he been subject to the afflictions of the night walks or their corresponding symptoms? What treacherous roads ever stretched before him that he should know best the state of affairs?

  Every day since then, his skepticism felt all the more real. Today, I pray that it soon becomes so.

  There’s no sunlight to inspire me on this cold afternoon. Perhaps it’s the whipping winds that suck ambition from my scheming or the high cracks of thunder that splinter any wayward, foolhardy dreams. Had I been anything more than a fool, I’d have seen it as Father saw.

  A flash in the sky gives momentary light to my room. Everything remains in place, just as it’s been since my disappearance. When next lightning strikes, my personal effects shall appear no differently than they do now. After all, I’m nothing to the world they live in.

  “How could I mistake my son’s voice?”

  Lightning flashes again. She heard my voice. The winds seem to quiet, their howling grows less bothersome. A somber silence creeps into the storm until only the sound of unenthusiastic rain remains. If Mother truly heard my voice, if I may assume she truly heard, then surely I’m capable of doing more than causing minor disturbances. If I steel myself and train myself, surely I might learn to lift and move objects. The force dividing me from my parents weakens when least I expect it. But perhaps I should expect that the barrier shatters in the moments it does. When this tragedy drives me to the edge of my sanity, only then does the barrier diminish.