by Amy Weiss
I am the oak?
An acorn must die. You don’t see it that way, of course. You consider it a symbol of new life. Yet life is ferocious, it rips apart and discards all the acorn has ever known—its body, its identity, its very existence. Life doesn’t arise from the seed; it kills the seed. But it grows the oak.
I am the oak . . .
Tragedies can make you sprout. Fire or gunfire, a self-inflicted death, a baby born without breath: the cause matters less than the consequence. Such things press against an acorn. They stretch it until the shell cannot contain it anymore. They break its home wide open. Do you allow them to turn you into the oak? Or do you swear off life altogether and decide to never become the tree?
I am the oak.
And I too am the oak. We are both becoming strong. We are both adding rings to our souls.
Are you really here?
Are you really here?
Are you really behind me?
Behind you, beside you, beyond you.
What is it like to die?
When I was a boy, my mother would wash my favorite blanket. She’d take it from the clothesline and hand it to me so I could bury my face in it. For a moment, my world was perfect softness, freshness, warmth. It’s like that, except now the moment does not end.
Death is not made of stone?
No, it’s made of love.
Where are you now?
Outside of where.
But you still exist?
When you lie in bed at night and you dream, do you still exist? Of course.
When you sleep, your spirit takes leave of the body. It flies. It joins me where I am. It speaks to God. It creates the world. You could say that it exists more than at any other time.
So death is like being asleep?
No. Life is like being asleep. Death is awakening.
What is it like to die?
To die is to learn the purpose of why you lived at all.
And why did you live?
I lived so that I could die, so that you could live.
How dreadful—you gave up your life for me?
It’s like asking me to give up a breath for you. I have given a million others for much less noble purposes: a sigh, a cry, a call from the lungs. What’s one more to spare, to breathe new life into you?
What is it like to die?
It’s like being in a rear-end collision in a car. It’s a push, a pop, a slight shock but nothing serious. It catches you off guard, or maybe you see it coming but can’t get out of the way. Instead of being pushed forward into the street, you’re pushed into a new dimension, one in which you can see the entire universe in all its clarity, in all its perfection.
How I wish I could see that.
You can. Open your eyes.
Does it hurt to die?
You’re asking me if it hurts to become an angel? No more than it hurts the baby to become a child, the bud a blossom.
What is it like to die?
Here is the strangest thing. It isn’t like anything. It’s just knowing more than you knew before. You’ve had that experience. Once you were a toddler who could barely speak, and then your vocabulary expands and you can describe all those things for which you never had the words. Or you’re a musician who’s finally figured out the fingering on a difficult piece, and it becomes simple to play the same passage with which you had struggled. When that happens, you change, but you don’t stop existing! What stops existing is the level of consciousness that you have now grown out of.
So it’s all a school, as the old man said? He showed me myself as a kindergartener, making my way up to conservatory. And, I assume, beyond that.
Yes. Clearly, a student does not die when she completes kindergarten. Her time as a kindergartener dies, I suppose you could say, but the student enters the first grade.
Why do we fear death so much, then? We don’t grieve graduations, we celebrate them.
For the same reason that the student may not wish to leave kindergarten. She gets to run around, to make art, to play with her friends. Why would she ever want to leave that? Well, she has to, because it has nothing left to teach her. So she moves on, she sees that her friends have done the same, and everything’s fine again. Besides, it’s kind of thrilling to be in a different class and have brand-new supplies, don’t you think?
Here I have been mourning the body you wore, while you are excited for a back-to-school outfit.
Sometimes we get so big and strong that the old clothes no longer fit.
Don’t you miss them, though? Don’t you feel sad that they are no longer? I would.
Do you miss the bodies you wore in other lifetimes?
No.
That is your answer.
You tell me the body is unimportant, yet I loved your body. The curves of your calves, your smile, your mind. The delicacy with which your hands held the guitar, the urgency with which they held me. The sound of you sleeping; the bottom of your foot searching the sheets for the top of mine. How you would reach for me in the night, your eyes and your voice naked with need, your soul laid bare. The look that would cross your face, it was one of pleasure but also disbelief—disbelief that there could be such pleasure. And that it could belong to us.
Don’t misunderstand me. The body is very important. Love is the what; the body is the how. Each one we’ve worn is a chapter in our story, its pages unfolding to the touch: a poem, a prayer book, a mystery, a love letter read so often that it becomes faded and creased. In the moonlight I would stroke the back of your neck and translate your skin into Braille. I’d stay up until morning savoring each word, lost in its tale of bruises and kisses, of battles that drew blood and scars.
What you say doesn’t comfort me, for all you speak of is long gone. What good is a book if there is no one to read it? Do you know the pain those pages must feel? And why must our bodies be made so fragile, always leaving this world and taking everything along with them?
You have heard the legend of the genie, yes? A genie somehow becomes stuck inside a lamp, and if enough pressure is applied he escapes from it.
Sure, I know it.
Our bodies are the lamps. When death arrives, it is sufficiently strong to release us from our containers. Does the genie cease existing when he leaves the lamp? Quite the opposite. He becomes huge, ever-powerful; he can summon any desire from the ether. He arises from the smoke to stand by your side, yet you keep looking to the lamp! Don’t mourn it, however beautiful and brilliant it may be. It contains the genie—one might even say it traps him—but when he breaks free from it, the magic begins.
Open your eyes now.
I can’t.
You must.
You make death sound wonderful, while life—life is such misery. A husband that is no longer, a child that never was. And that’s merely my sad little song. Everyone has his or her own tragedy. Multiply my pain by their pain, this lifetime by the last, by the next: there are thousands of permutations of sorrow. It’s incalculable, exponential, too much to bear.
Why sing this song of sadness, when you can sing a love song instead?
I’ve lost all my love songs. I’ve forgotten how to play them, and how they sound.
You see the suffering in the world and insist upon multiplying the pain by the pain. Multiply the joy by the joy. Then you will understand the true meaning of incalculable. Pain may result from the lesson, but it is not the lesson. Growth is. Love is. Don’t mistake a closet for a classroom.
I cannot find joy. Not anymore.
You can. It is what we are here to do. Do you know that in one lifetime, you came into this world simply to take pleasure in a summer night? Your sole purpose was to appreciate the artistry of July, to delight in her brushstrokes. What an advanced elective to take! And how beautifully you grasped the subject. The heat was hushed, the fireflies were floating lanterns, the garden you sat in glowed. The begonias were magic, and you were bewitched. Dusk fell and the evening stretched before you, softly sizzling with possibili
ties. Never mind the years and tears you shed before that night, or after; that life existed for that moment. Here is the thing: that could be every moment. It is your choice. This is the true meaning of reincarnation. We are not born over and over into a new body, but into a new moment. Open your eyes. In one day alone the world can explode with joy, and that is merely your sweet little song. Multiply that by every person, by every day, by every lifetime, and perhaps you are right: it is too much to bear.
If you chose not to stay here, why must I? Let me join you where you are.
You will. In the meantime, I join you where you are. The arms with which I hold you are made of breeze and rain, not flesh and bone; they are my arms nonetheless. I speak to you in coriander and clove, in cicada song. Every wildflower in your path is my footstep. When you come across a field of them, it means I have been dancing with you.
You say that you’re around me, yet I can’t see you.
You can if you open your eyes.
How I miss you.
Miss me? I have never left you, any more than I left you when we drifted into separate sleeps together in our bed.
And now we share the same sleep.
Sometimes I watch your dreams from afar, sometimes you invite me inside them. Either way I am with you every night, as I have always been, and I sing you to sleep, as I have always done.
Sing to me now.
No, now it is time for you to awaken, not to sleep.
The day is breaking. It is time to open your eyes.
I won’t, for if I do, you’ll disappear.
If you say so.
Don’t leave me. Not again.
Open your eyes. It’s time now. Open your eyes.
LESSON 7
Theme and Variation
“Open your eyes,” the old man is saying. “It’s time now. Open your eyes.”
The woman does and finds his old self standing above her, the morning sun perched on his shoulder. All she wants to do is close them again, to be with her husband in that place where he is solid, not shadow. When sleep is the sole pleasure, why wake? When today is pain, why tomorrow? There is a hole in her heart where the dream had been. She longs to return to it, to dissolve in it, to disappear into her pasts. They hold what she wants. The future offers only something gray and misshapen.
Or does it? If she continues walking a road of misery, her endpoint naturally will be more of the same; every footstep follows the one before it. To move to the side, to turn around, to renounce the course and walk somewhere else entirely: this will change the terrain of tomorrow. There is no predestination, no destination. There are simply paths and possibilities, extending in infinite directions, waiting to be explored. The old man tells her so.
“We can go into the future?” she asks, incredulous.
“We can go into a future,” he corrects her, his words leading her once more to the lake that holds all time.
The land is shell-shocked, pockmarked. The buildings are sleek and sanitized, the earth oozing and infectious. I live inside a hospital but I am safe, I am surgeon. The war is a mechanical, efficient scheduler, ensuring that no bed lies empty for long. It waits until we are asleep, then does its best work in the dark.
I place my hands on my patients to coax the toxins from within. The chemicals of warfare are difficult to remove from the bloodstream, the chemicals of fear even more so. But both can be fatal, and it is pointless to disarm one while allowing the other to gain ground.
Bodies are no longer sliced open, anesthetized, impregnated. We grow our babies on the outside now. I do not understand: If we can advance to the point of creating life, why can we not advance past the point of destroying it? We fight so hard to save lives, while others fight equally hard to end them. Humankind is scientifically progressive yet spiritually primitive, a dangerous mongrel.
Another doctor stands beside me. His hair is as red as the birthmark on his cheek. My hands rest on the patient’s body, his hands above mine. Our light combines to make her cells kindle and spark. I love him quietly, fraternally, the same way I love my patients, the same way I love even those who unleash their venom upon the earth, although they will not allow the love to enter them. They are terrified of the damage it might do.
One of my patients is a mere infant, too small to compete with poison. War has taken over her tiny life, and now it’s come to claim her death. As a physician, I’ve been trained to accept that the human body will occasionally do battle with itself. But when the human mind goes awry—when it considers a newborn baby worthy of attack—well, what training could prepare someone for this?
There is also a boy, not yet five years old, whose trauma is written all over his face. I use my hands to erase its words, to replace it with a new story, one in which the only soldiers are made of plastic and make-believe. Whenever possible, I sneak into his room and sit with him so that he can relax into sleep. I can see his heart without having to look. It is pastel and pure. I never saw the eyes of the unborn daughter I lost to the fire, but they are the same, they are his. I know this, too, without having to look.
It is a struggle to ascend from the water; the hopelessness of the future weighs the woman down like a rock. For a brief moment she considers letting it drown her. Her husband has assured her that death is not bleak, but no one can promise the same of life.
“War evolves into something quite sophisticated. Then again, so does healing.” The old man points at her harp. “It was wise to bring your talents with you.”
“I was a doctor, not a musician.”
“What’s the difference? Only the instrument of healing. The bodies you play are made of tissues and nerves, instead of silk and willow. You tune cells rather than strings. You make both vibrate with harmony. You already know how to create white light with music. Soon you will do it without.”
The woman spreads her arms across the lake, smoothing its surface, feeling in its depths for the frightened boy for whom she had tried to create a fairy tale. She reaches, she searches, yet her fingers cannot hold on to the slippery spirit. With each lifetime it seems to elude her more, to swim farther away, not even her child any longer. Her patient, but somebody else’s child.
“You were the mother,” the old man says, “just in a different way.”
“And the little infant? She was so familiar, though I could not place her. If it wasn’t the same soul as the child I lost in this life, then who was it?”
The mare lifts its head at the question, looks into the woman’s eyes, waits for the recognition to dawn.
The woman says, “I don’t care much for the future.”
“Then change it,” says the old man.
“How?”
“What do you mean, how? It isn’t a riddle. Compose a new one.”
The war lumbers on. The infant girl dies, as does the young boy. I cannot save them. I have nothing to offer; my light is brittle and cold. The windows of the hospital are sealed and the toxins cannot reach us, though I feel that they must have. What else could explain this strange pain inside me, slowly shutting me down? My colleagues volunteer their help. I don’t accept it. Why should I live, just to watch children die? They do not let me place my hands on the sick. My touch is too leaden. It would leave them susceptible to shock, to an infection of sorrow.
The old man shakes his head. “Wrong direction.”
The war lumbers on. The patients respond to my medicine. One night, the red-haired doctor places his hands on mine instead of above them. Outside our windows people are killing. Inside our walls people are dying. But I—I have just been brought to life. To think that he has been by my side the entire time; I never knew to look for the love buried underneath war. The infant remains alive, although not for much longer. The little boy calls me Mother.
“What does happiness sound like to you? Why insist on a war at all? Are you so scared to be at peace?”
I place my hands above the little boy. His blood is strong and clean, like the air that pours past the unsealed windows
. I try to look outside the windows yet it seems that I cannot, for flowers obscure my view. Oh, to find flowers again! The red-haired doctor is beside me, and I kiss the birthmark on the cheek where the fire once touched. I love him in spite of it. I love him because of it. He asks if I am ready. Ready for what? To go outside, of course. The world is lush and green and fertile, and the only beds I tend to belong to the roses. The boy sprawls across my lap. I uproot a buttercup and place it under his chin, and he glows because he has never known a day of terror in his life. The infant girl has grown into health, into childhood. She runs through the fields, running, running, spinning and dancing and throwing her arms up with delight. Her legs are small and bowed with youth, little wishbones. She falls over and laughs, she stands up, she is off again and running toward the sun, never catching it, always trying—
The woman is buoyant. She could not stay underwater if she tried. She has not lost her unborn daughter; she has found her, in a little boy who shines with buttercups and wonder. Her mare is there, as is her husband. Always he is there. The glassy waters of the lake are a prism that refracts him everywhere she looks. How senseless it is to grieve one body when he will be given to her in countless more. Death is not loss; it is simply the opportunity to love one another in a thousand different forms.
She had been right. There is no future without him. But those words mean something else now.
This had been her fear: that, despite having returned to her again and again in the past, perhaps he would finally decide not to. That he would touch the burns on his cheek and find them too painful—that he would find her too painful.
This had been her shame: the wounds did not begin with the fire. More than once she’d harbored snakes inside her—harsh words, thoughtless words, various meannesses in all their slimy forms—that had slipped past her lips to bite him. How can the same mouth be used to kiss and to harm? She had lit the candle out of love so that her husband could make his way through the night. She had lit the candle and she had slammed the door, and what resulted, though tragic, was accidental. The real injuries are already forgiven. They have been forgiven over and over.