The Rest Is Illusion

by Eric Arvin

  As he waved good-bye to his friend, Dashel felt the tug of mortality on his pant cuff. He stood up on the branch. An upswing breeze, the last gasp of a stronger zephyr, blew the papers out of his hand. The sheets shot through the air like a host of seagulls disturbed on a beach. They floated about, defying gravity’s attempts to ground them. Then came a red flash, a blur, as it had been in all his dreams. He didn’t need sound. No garish nor quiet noises. The barrier had been broken or spilled, then sopped up by the ground. Dash knew it was time. He knew his physical mind was quaking. He knew it because his dreams of the moment had told him so. His arms lifted to embrace the sun; to hitch a ride on a beam of light. Then, without hesitation, bereft of any desire to remain, he took flight. Feeling the great branch hoist him up, he said a final gracious and silent farewell to the Old Lady.

  He flew from the limb and never came down. Dashel Yarnsbrook never hit the ground.

  Chapter Ten

  THAT YEAR, the days at the end of the summer were blessed with friendly warmth and kissed by the gentlest of breezes. The sky was cloudless and stretched out in lazy blues. A postcard day. The kind the trustees and admission officers of Verona College hungered for. A perfect day for capturing the bends of the river as the ancient waterway shifted and danced with the earthen valley.

  Sarah Coheen and Ashley Owen Walterhouse III sat on the newly added guard rails that rounded the curve of the scenic road at the Point, put there to avoid future disasters and bury past tragedies. They had come to Verona for one final glance. One last acknowledgment of a benign soul lost. One last farewell to their friend.

  The old tree was gone now, having been damaged irreparably by the crash. All that remained was a stump cut so near the ground, it was mistaken by many for a flat, tannish stone. The marker explaining the incident would be forgotten in time. The view of the river was unbroken, yet it seemed lonely and abandoned without the old arboreal watch-post. Even those new to the view, who had never known the tree, could sense a certain loss and a definite void. The wind rising from the valley was no longer hindered by the massive arms of a tree past its prime.

  So, Sarah and Ashley stood and felt the end of summer’s slight, breathy buss. If they closed their eyes, the sound of the wind in the trees all around them transported them to the riverside and the ebb and pull of the water on the rocky beach.

  Ashley watched Sarah, took in her every movement eagerly. He was intoxicated by her presence, her every breath and quirk. She was a bacchanal, and he was an ecstatic practitioner wanting more, praying the days of worship would last just a little longer. Sarah had cut her hair short, cropped it one night not long after the accident. No reason given, but there she was at the funeral. It made her look more adult, less like a college queen, less likely to break into frenetic sobs. She liked it better this way, she told Ashley. It no longer flew into her face or collected leaves and small twigs on blustery days. Ashley also noticed that it pointed up her perfectly colored eyes. She rarely wore her glasses anymore. Her eyesight was never really that bad. Up close, she saw fine.

  Sarah sensed Ashley’s stare and returned the gaze. She grinned, and then she quickly looked to her toes. Ashley loved her combative humility when he admired her so openly. She would fold up like a flower in the night. He followed her gaze to her bare feet. Her unpainted toes twisted at tufts of grass.

  Sarah knew Ashley had always dreamed himself into a better, perhaps less lucid world. A world where all the other boys were just like him. He had told her one night of his fears of a loveless life, and then he had thanked her for coming into it—thanked her with large wet drops dripping from his lashes. She saw that look of everlasting gratitude sweeping over his face every time she caught him looking at her. But then she would run her fingers through his white hair and whisper, “Angel-boy… Angel-boy” until the idea of ever losing her would finally fade to the back of his mind. Sarah had taken to calling him that after his show in the dorm hall window. Silver wings were now his trademark. It warmed him when she said it. Like a burst of giggles blossoming deep within and radiating out.

  “So, Wilder has come out of the coma,” Sarah said.

  “How do you feel about that?” Ashley asked. He knew, of course, how she felt. He knew a shrieking voice inside her clamored for an answer. Why did Wilder live and Dash die?

  “You know,” she shrugged. “I loved Dash. Always will. Wilder killed him.” She looked to Ashley. “Simple truths.”

  “I know you loved him,” Ashley said quietly.

  “Oh, I love you too, Angel-boy. I didn’t say that to upset you,” she said as she stroked his soft hair. He’d let it go white again, all the color gone. No longer needed to dye his hair vibrant shades. The colored contacts were gone as well.

  “You didn’t upset me. I never felt any jealousy or anger when it came to your feelings for Dash. I don’t know why. Maybe it was just my affection for him as well.” He turned, giving her his full attention. “And the truth is, Sarah, he brought you and me together. Even after he died, we relied on each other to pass through the mourning period, didn’t we? I can’t be angry with him. Certainly not with his memory.”

  “It’s strange that just a few months ago, he was with us. Here at this spot,” Sarah observed. She cuddled up to Ashley’s chest. “And now we’ll be living together at grad school, but Dash won’t be here. Nothing to even stand as a reminder that he died here.” Again, the incredulity crept into her tone. “Dash died here, but Wilder just woke up from his coma. It’s not right. It’s unfair for the world to have lost him. Maybe I should stop believing in God.” She said it as flippantly as she would any of a myriad daily decisions.

  “That will settle very well with your dad. He already thinks I’m some kind of demon sent here to lead you astray,” Ashley reminded her.

  “He knows nothing about you other than what he sees.” Sarah squeezed his torso. “The truth is deeper than that. He’s a surface man, unfortunately. He only trusts those things that are readily apparent. They’re all he can comprehend.”

  Ashley took Sarah by the hand and led her over to the flat stump of wood. He looked down at it, mulling over something.

  “That’s what it’s about, isn’t it?” he said. “Truth.” He knelt down and touched the smooth surface with his open palm. It was cool. Very cool. As if the wintry weather on the day of its demise had somehow encased itself in the remains of the old tree. “Feel this,” he said.

  Sarah sunk to her knees and placed her small hand on the stump face. She smiled with nostalgic bittersweetness. She bent and laid the side of her face on the coolness of the wood.

  “It’s lovely,” she whispered as she rose to an upright position. “I finally get it. I understand now why Dash didn’t fight his own death. It was the truth, and there was no fighting it. There was no way he could have survived that disease, and so he accepted what was handed him. He accepted it honestly. He lived and died as honestly as he knew how.” She looked at Ashley. Her eyes were wet oceans of tears. “How many of us can say that?” she pondered.

  “Not many,” Ashley replied, catching a tear as it fell from her right eye. “Not too many of us at all.” He paused and glanced thoughtfully out at the river, watching a small watercraft passing the third bend.

  “I was thinking,” he began. “Dash could never be forgotten as long as the evidence of this tree still remains. So then, this is his memorial. This should be it. What do you say we come back here every spring? When we get enough money, when we are that successful, we have a dedication. Then this spot will belong to the memory of Dash. Dash and his tree. He won’t be dismissed into Verona College urban legend. What do you think of that?”

  “I think it’s a beautiful gesture and a marvelous idea.” Sarah gently clasped his hand in hers. “But I also think—” She laughed. “—Dash would have really liked to have been an urban legend.”

  They sat for a while longer, hand in hand on the grass on the edge of summer. They watched a small flock of birds fly over
the river valley down below. Flying in the paths of the wind, they sailed effortlessly up the bluff and over Sarah and Ashley, uninterrupted only by the ghost of an old tree.

  Ashley watched as the birds changed course and headed down into the deeper areas of the college’s wooded property. Down into more guarded territories.

  “What do you say to a hike?” Ashley asked, still staring in the direction of the birds’ flight. “Let’s follow those birds. We can have a tiny little adventure. What do you say? The vale probably looks remarkable in the summer. I’ve never been this time of year.”

  Sarah rose to her feet and pulled him up with her. “A hike to the vale would be just right. The perfect thing to do, I think.”

  They began walking, still holding hands, in the direction of the birds. Sauntering through shadows, ghosts, and memories both new and old, across a small college campus high on a bluff.

  WILDER CAME out of his coma on an ordinary Sunday night. The sun had left the sky, and the night nurse had closed the drapes. It was an inauspicious time to wake, but that is when it happened. His mind and body clicked together as one once again, and he slid into earthbound existence. He had no thoughts of time, nor exactly how much of it had passed as he slept. He was disoriented, and it took time for him to recognize that light was light, that air was being passed through his lungs, and that other voices were in the room.

  As the wet, dewy feel of his slumber wore off, he noticed the voices belonged to people he had never met. They might as well have been the first human beings he had ever caught a glimpse of.

  Who are they? he wondered. Why do they look so pleased? He had the strange sense of being the subject of grotesque enchantment, the alien in the autopsy.

  A snippet of past memory spiked through his mind in those first semicoherent moments. Dashel. That was the name he fitted with the face that suddenly appeared in his thoughts. It was only a brief image in his head, quick and indirect. Like a bad edit in a film. The picture was fuzzy and blurred, but it stabbed him with a strange pang. A feeling he should remember something he had to be terribly sorry for.

  “Welcome back,” one of the strangers in blue said as she leaned down over him. He heard her but only faintly. Wilder heard things now as if he had cotton in his ears. Everything seemed to be in hushed whispers followed by strange silences. Silences and spaces like the missing words of echoes across a crevasse. It gave Wilder the sensation of being there but not being there. He was a spectator from inside his own life.

  The strange woman in blue smiled at him sweetly. The corners of her eyes crinkled with laugh lines and soul songs. Her hair was cut short and blonde, and her voice was light and feather-soft. Wilder thought for a moment in his new-sprung state, he would like her to sing. To fill the room with lullabies. Her smile caused something to tremble inside him.

  Is my heart breaking or mending?

  She caressed his head, pushing back invisible hair from his brow. He locked his eyes on her.

  Mom?

  He questioned his memory and searched for this woman’s face, but he could not find it. Her face was not there. Still, Don’t leave. Please don’t ever leave, his inner voice called. His inner voice seemed harsh. Too sharp. Too angry. Yet there was a quality of newfound change to it.

  “My name is Diana, but you can call me Dee,” the nurse said. Her eyes were roadways to better things. Pleasant afternoons on porch swings. “If you need anything, just ask. I’m here for you. You’re my special one. I’ve been looking after you for a while.” She had a smile like standing beneath a waterfall on a hot day.

  Memories of people and events came back to Wilder like crumbs of seconds and milliseconds falling through hours. He had slept more than he had wanted, and now he was stubborn—set to stay up the rest of his life.

  At first he did not think too much about what had happened to him. He wasn’t even sure, really. A freak accident, Dee had said later. All he knew was he felt depleted of strength and verve, both mentally and physically. Dee had gently told him he needed therapy. He would need to retrain his body to use its muscles. The accident had caused severe damage, but he wasn’t paralyzed. The impairment was not irreparable.

  Dee assured him that he might be as good as new one day with the right physical therapy program. Might be, he heard. But Dee didn’t overstress those words. She said everything with the excitement of a thrill seeker on a rollercoaster, and still her voice retained its lissomness, its undisturbed serenity and grace. Wilder tried to respond to her but found his vocal abilities inadequate. He could not say a word, trapped behind a wall of silence.

  “It happens,” Dee said, standing at his bedside and taking his hand. “It will come back in time. But you have to give it just that—time. You’ll have a voice again. It might sound a little different, but if you keep at it, you’ll hear yourself singing in the shower one day. You’ll have the ladies swooning again.”

  So, there he was for the time being. Awake, silent, and still. What used to be important to him held little meaning now. Lists and calendars meant nothing. In fact, Wilder wanted to click his tongue at the structured frivolity of the young man he saw on the previous side of the life divider.

  Wilder began to see more clearly in the early Monday morning light. A younger nurse had come in and opened the drapes wide, letting in the relaxed rays of a late summer sun rising. The light touched every visible surface in the room. It gleamed and shined on metal and shot a spotlight on a bouquet of roses on the table at the foot of his bed. He hadn’t recalled seeing them until just then, but surely they had been there all the while.

  “Let’s clean you up a bit,” the young nurse said. She drew a basin and shaving equipment from a noisy cart she had brought into the room. It felt like a first shave to Wilder. His flesh was sensitive and new. The nurse took her time, going over his skin slowly and carefully.

  “Very handsome,” she said upon finishing. He knew she was trying to make him feel better, but he couldn’t help but think she sounded a little condescending when she said it. She wasn’t as pleasant as Dee. This woman—girl really—had a halting way of speaking that seemed almost asthmatic, and she smelled of bubble gum and too much perfume. She had told him her name, but he had forgotten it.

  The young nurse reached down to the desk beside the bed and pulled out a mirror from the drawer so he could look over his fresh shave. As he set light upon the image in the mirror, his face twisted into discomfort, and his eyes widened in a painful plea. His breath grew heavy and fast.

  She dropped the mirror to the bedside.

  “Oh my God!” she gasped. “I thought you knew. I thought they told you.”

  She placed a hand on his shoulder in a clumsy attempt at comfort. Wilder made an irritated gesture and did his best at shrugging her away. She backed slowly out of the room, ill prepared for the psychological nuances of a shaving job.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered as she left.

  A scar. A crooked, lightning-like, zigzagging scar ran a course from the top of his head to the corner of his mouth. His reflection, which was once the perfect boy smiling, was now grotesque and abraded in his mind. All his shiny black hair had been shorn off, and the scar ran like a fleshy river from where the hair had once forested so prominently, into his bottom lip. He thought he would die from fright and humiliation, with the memory of the mirror image forever seared into his brain.

  He was through with his reflection, he thought. Never again would he look at himself. Resting back on his pillow, he screamed on the inside until he had tired of the shouting and the live fury and fell asleep.

  Wilder didn’t wake until Dee once again stood at his side that evening. The drapes were opened, and the moon hung like a giant onion bulb in the sky. He woke with the horror of what the mirror had shown him still fresh in his mind. It lay over him like a heavy wool blanket on a blistering day.

  Dee sat near him and gave him a wink. Somehow it made things seem not as dire, if only for a moment. She was there as promised, wh
enever he needed her.

  “Your mother called today,” she said, running her thumb over his knuckles as she held his hand. “She wanted to be here but something came up.”

  Wilder could tell by the almost undetectable pause in her sentence she felt badly by having to say it.

  “He’s your son,” she had said passionately. “And he’s awake! He needs you here!” Her bottom lip quivered with disbelief and anger. But in the end, no one came. Only nurses and doctors for the most part.

  Remembering more and more about his parents, Wilder didn’t expect to see them. Nor did he really want to. It was a relief not to have to see his mannequin of a mother, and his father would only incite rage. No, he had apparently been without them for many months as he slept alone in a hospital in his coma. He could be without them for good… maybe.

  Wilder’s attention again was drawn to the bright red roses at the foot of his bed. The light from the mounted television flickered violent plays of passion on their petals.

  “They came yesterday,” Dee said. “Beautiful, aren’t they? Lucky boy! You get a new batch of them every Sunday. Every Sunday! Someone thinks you’re pretty special,” she teased. “Well, someone other than me.” She gave another wink and squeezed his hand harder. He wasn’t sure, but Wilder thought he felt a smile creep across his face.

  Days passed without Wilder noticing that the sun was coming and going. His internal clock was trying to catch up with its external counterpart. With each passing hour, he became more and more comforted by Dee. Comforted by her against his will, but it was comfort nonetheless.

  Despite Wilder’s initial contempt at convalescence, Dee had eventually succeeded in convincing him to give it a go. By Friday, he agreed to begin the long hard road come the next morning. Dee was pleased. Wilder was pleased that she was pleased. He couldn’t ever remember having that feeling before, and that struck him as odd. Being the reason someone else smiled was a wonderful feeling.