It was not that it reminded him of Valerie. He never forgot Valerie. She came to mind on countless occasions daily—in the build and step of a woman who walked ahead of him, in a kitchen or bakery at the smell of fresh bread that she loved so much. The most routine thing could do it. On a bright, cloudless spring day he would think of their affectionate running argument: he said such days were “sunny,” while Val insisted they were better thought of as “blue-sky” days. But the more piquant, stabbing memories came with peculiar stimulants, on unpredictable occasions.
Once, for instance, he was drinking in a bar and a crusty guy in a fedora climbed on a small platform with an acoustic guitar. The bottleneck slide did it. The rattle and keening of the strings conjured the full scene. The very first time she heard the country blues, in a bar nearly identical to the one he was in, Valerie had stopped talking and was entranced by the musician. A tear welled up in one eye. Albert was captivated by the music, but at that moment even more by this beautiful woman. He saw the tear swell, then, like a salmon leaping a dam, clear her lower eyelid. It streaked down her cheek and she did not wipe away its track until the song was done.
So thoughts of her—reincarnated feelings of her—were nothing different, even if they were not entirely pleasant. Neither was it new or especially disturbing to meet Valerie in a dream. She had appeared in many dreams, as had his deceased father and grandfather. Yet she (like they) had never spoken. In the dreams and in the waking memories she had seemed a kind of ineffectual or—yes, a dead presence—something you coped with and worked around, but never really had to respond to or actively engage, exactly because it had no life or volition of its own.
Albert decided it was like someone who had a bum hand, bereft of movement and any sensation except frequent stabs of pain. You learned how to get along with one hand, you developed tricks and ploys to endure and sometimes avoid the pain. In the company of others possessing two healthy hands, when performing menial chores or making love, you were constantly reminded that you had only one hand, but the reminders were no longer piercing. They had dulled with time and familiarity. They had become, simply, a part of you. But then say that somehow the bad hand appeared to regain its vitality. Suddenly you could feel it as a whole, a palm and five functioning fingers. Now it seemed alien and alarming, something that had to be allowed and taken into account on its own. You sensed glimmers of joy and excitement at reopened possibilities, but at exactly that point you could not trust what was happening. Was the hand really returned, really alive? Or was this fitful self-delusion? As soon as you grasped the hand—or let it grasp you, let it stroke your face or rub your shoulder—would it go numb and limp and void? Would it prove again its real absence, the freshly crushing definitiveness of its loss?
That was what so disturbed Al about the dream. In it Valerie had appeared utterly, entirely alive. She looked and acted real apart from Al and Al’s memories or fantasies. As he reviewed it dozens of times, he realized that in the dream Val had even aged slightly in the five years since he had last seen her. Or seen her like this, alive. Or, that is, apparently alive. That was the weirdness and craziness of the dream and its aftermath. He knew she was gone. How could there be any doubt about her death? And yet he now found himself thinking of her differently, in a way that not only reawakened old feelings, well-rehearsed memories, but also intimated the potential of new feelings, of making new memories with Valerie. That was impossible, absurd. Any such feelings or hopes, however tentative and evanescent, could only disappoint, and disappoint bitterly. Like the one-handed man who thought he sensed a tingling of life, Al shook it off. For safety and sanity’s sake, he denied it. He distracted himself from awareness of it and forgot it.
At least, he tried to.
≤
Albert did much of his attempting to forget the dream on morning and evening commutes to and from Old Chicago. Walking to or away from the sub train station, he often fell into conversation with other pedestrians. But once they were aboard, the train’s rhythmic motion and sounds seemed to silence and lull passengers into a trance, if not slumber. On this particular morning, Al’s car included a mix of strange and familiar faces. Beside him sat an old man with an egregious comb-over. As the disheveled fellow nodded in and out of sleep, the lone lock of hair somehow stayed in a solid piece and swung like a scythe across his smooth pate. A man on the upper deck munched on a biscuit grasped in a crumpled paper bag. Two lovers at the front of the car faced Al, the man slouched with his legs flung wide, his arm casually laced around the woman. He monopolized the seat and probably, Al thought, the woman’s entire existence. She was curled up compactly, with a tired and resigned look. Burbles of conversation flowed about the coach in three different languages. Some children chattered loudly.
Albert looked ahead to another day of the most lucrative—if not actually lavishly paying—job he’d ever held. He tutored teenaged heirs of the constituency, as the inner-city wealthy class was known. In the days of plentiful, affordable petroleum, now receding into the obscurity of the past, there had been a steady drift away from books and widespread basic mastery of the sciences. Reading and learning, after all, required patience and arduous discipline. Why seek information or entertainment by these time-consuming, often monotonous, means when they were otherwise instantly and easily accessible? Education and enjoyment via imagistic, computerized media appeared vastly superior in their efficiency.
During the ongoing decades of the Descent (so-called because it plunged society into the more spartan, demanding period after the “peak” availability of oil), the constituency hoarded not only economic power but the dwindling reserves of petroleum, alongside the consequent ready supply of electricity. Of course, without affordable energy, the panoply of electronic devices that functioned on it was useless. Laptop computers, cell phones, televisions, video game players, and portable music devices by the millions gathered dust in attics or rotted in landfills. Not all were laid aside, however. In Old Chicago and other major cities around the country, the constituency still enjoyed the generous (if decreased) availability of energy and electricity. Constituents continued to depend on electronic technology. As they shunned the burdens of reading and the sciences over generations, their skills in these areas atrophied and faded. But in recent years there were second thoughts. Was it really prudent, constituents asked themselves as political conflicts flared, to entrust all their technical support to the subs who so grossly outnumbered them? Also, the mass entertainment and arts industry had long ago become unaffordable and infeasible. Movies hadn’t been made for decades; recorded and digitized music was a relic. Onerous as they had been, obsolete as they had become, traditional books reassumed value. Much of the constituency now wanted its young trained—for necessity and for pleasure—in literature and history, in math and the practical sciences.
That was why Albert rode the train six days a week: to ground constituent adolescents in what once had been known as the humanities, and teach them some basic algebra. Like Al, most tutors came from devout Christian or Jewish families. Poke McNearland, the longtime priest at St. Brendan’s, offered the most succinct explanation for this reality that Al had ever heard. Father McNearland pointed out that, as their adherents understood them, Judaism and Christianity were not philosophies or abstract systems of thought. Neither were they folk religions based on the perennial, timeless cycle of the seasons and life and death. Instead, Jews and Christians rooted their faiths in particular stories from the past. God had revealed himself and his aims uniquely in the characters of Moses and Jesus, in the events of the exodus from Egypt and the crucifixion. In turn, these stories, and other texts radiating around them, were contained in Scripture. Thus Jews and Christians (along with Muslims) really were “people of the book.” At least some of them must be able to read and continually refresh their communities of faith.
“Take it another step deeper, really deeper,” McNearland said. “God as we know God acts through time and space. But God can’t be contained in the world. You can’t put God in a box, even the biggest box. God can’t be captured on the surface of things, so we could say God is all depth. That’s why the bush that draws Moses to itself doesn’t only burn, but it speaks. It not only shows on the surface and by its appearances, it manifests from its depths.”
Often
