The Grey Matter of Time
It took her a while to get used to the darkness though the music was unexpected. Somber and distant, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head. The more she tried to remember where she’d heard it, the brighter her surroundings became. That didn’t mean there was much to be seen; she was standing in the middle of a road that stretched pretty much into infinity in one direction, and in the other –
“Hello.”
A man dressed as a mountain climber seemed to be waiting for her to notice him. He had a foot on one of several pieces of rock that were scattered at the bottom of what seemed to be –
“A really steep hill, yes. We’ve been here before, Stella, and I keep telling you not to look back.”
Her eyes flicked to the side and it was all she could do not to turn around. The man sighed.
“Even the stupid ones get it eventually, Stella. You’ve got to stop yourself.”
“Who are you?” She asked.
“If I tell you, will you make a better effort to stop turning around? I mean, you saw it; it’s a road. There’s nothing more to see; it’s a road, that goes nowhere.”
“So I’ve seen it before?”
“A thousand times. And every time you look back, darkness descends – you remember it was dark a moment ago, right?”
She nodded. True enough, it was bright and one could say, almost sunny now.
“And you forget all over again. And we never move on. Well, that is to say, we stop moving.”
“Where are we going?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know who I am, first?” The man smiled patiently, though it never reached his eyes she noticed. One of those fake smiles that make you feel sort of empty. She returned his dead smile. “Yes.”
“Stella.”
“Yes?”
“Listen to me very carefully; when I tell you this, please, please don’t panic and gape around you in all directions in that flappy way.”
“Because I’ll…forget?”
“Everything, yes.”
“I promise.” It was like not scratching an itch. “Are you sure there’s nothing…sort of…”
“Coming to get you? Sneaking up behind you on the road you clearly saw stretches into infinity?”
“It’s like you’re reading my mind.”
“Stella; look at me. Keep looking into my watery grey eyes – I’m not reading your mind, you told me that a hundred times already – “
“That your eyes are watery grey?”
“You’re dead.”
She felt every part of her begin to twitch.
“Stop; don’t turn around Stella. You can look forward, up this steep hill, but that overwhelms you every time. Look at me instead. I’ve taken the liberty of becoming more handsome every reboot.”
She couldn’t deny he was beautiful, or he would be if his eyes were a stronger shade of –“
“We’ve been through this. They’re not really eyes, Stella.”
“Oh. Then who –“
“I’m Death.”
She weighed this information up carefully. Behind her, a road that stretched endlessly – a beaten track that they’d already travelled, presumably. In front, the ground rose sharply to a steep incline, possibly a mountain. Surely he wasn’t intending for them to climb it? What about her bad knee?
“Are you seriously thinking about your knee again?”
Her hands went unconsciously to her kneecaps, where she checked the flexibility of the good against the bad one.
“Feels quite good actually.”
“I find it amusing that you always remember the knee before you recall anything else. You know you had osteoarthritis?”
“Suspected. I’ll know when I get my bone scan.”
He looked at his feet in that dejected way that men tend to do, his lips clamping shut into a long suffering line.
“No bone scan for me, so.” She gauged the climb ahead. “I guess I can manage this after all.”
“Stella, the whole journey has been this. You’ve been climbing all along. Don’t. Look. Back.”
“Woops! Nearly blew it. Sorry, I won’t look back. But –“
“What’s in the past is as unimportant to you as a road going nowhere.”
“I’ve got it. Honestly, I understand. What do you mean they’re not eyes?”
He handed her some rope and gestured that she tie it around her waist. “Let’s talk as we go or we’ll never get there. We’ll get stuck. I hate when that happens.”
She pulled herself up onto the base of the incline and immediately remembered her childhood; she hadn’t felt this light and limber for a long time. “A ha!” She said, “You’re suggesting there’s a concept of Time, but everyone knows there is no such thing in Heaven.”
“Oh, so you think you’re going to Heaven?”
“Well, the whole ascent-towards-the-sky thing kind of gives it away.”
He turned to her and put his hands on his hips. “Are you expecting a little kingdom in the clouds? With angels playing tiny harps?”
“Oh! Is that where the music was coming from?” She offered him her hand to take. “Are we nearly there already?”
He continued to climb ahead of her. “That painful little tune? Nah, I just put that in your head to annoy you.”
“So this is like a kind of purgatory? Like an in-between place?” She gasped with delight. “This road is my death! That’s why I shouldn’t look back.”
Although he didn’t look at her and kept climbing she could see him smile. A proper smile too, she noticed, real eyes or not. “I should probably concentrate on the journey and stop getting distracted by…stuff.”
“Ah, she’s using her brain! Which is ironic.” He chuckled.
She resisted the urge to ask him what he meant by that. If they stopped to discuss every little thing, they’d just delay…although wait: what if she wasn’t on her way to eternal bliss? What if the whacks were right all along and there was a hell?
“We’ve never gotten this far before, Stella. You’re doing very well.”
“So we are heading towards somewhere nice?”
“Somewhere ‘nice’?”
“Well, somewhere lovely, then.”
“Stella, your granny’s house for afternoon tea is ‘lovely’. Is that how you’d like to spend the rest of your existence? Although, your granny is planning afternoon tea for you, in fact.”
“Which granny? Because one of them could easily have ended up in the bad place.”
“Do you think you’ll end up in a bad place, Stella?”
“I mean, I wasn’t a ‘bad’ person. I just didn’t expect to go so suddenly. Oh.”
“You remember.”
An inexplicable sense of foreboding.
She’s not nervous; she’s had this procedure three times already this week. It’s not pleasant by any means, but she knows the drill and although the after effects are horrible they’ll give her that shot. Morphine she supposes. Yes, must be. Makes her sleep and stay conscious at the same time. But for some reason, she thinks she’s going to die; she needs to get out of this, but how? All these doctors and nurses and radiographers and equipment; all this fuss for her, all this effort to try to eliminate the lesion on her brain – how can she tell them she has a feeling that she’s going to die so could they please wheel her trolley back to the step-down ward? No embolization today thanks all the same. How much money must this treatment cost? A nurse pops her head out the door of the theatre.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Stella. We’ll be ready in just a second.”
“I um…I feel a bit…weird.”
“In what way?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
It’s not the usual radiographer. She wonders why it’s necessary for her to be awake for this. Last time she asked if they’d give her something to make her dozy but they said she’d be fine. Told her she’d “be grand.” The radiographer even said you could get an angiogram and go back to work after it. Embolization: well, there’s just a little bit more to it, but still a very simple procedure. It’s just a catheter inserted into the catheter that’s inserted into your artery. In through the groin and up through her body to her brain. The new radiographer hurts her. She knows immediately he’s not used to doing this. She cries and apologizes. He tells her that’s okay. She sees the shapes inside her brain on the screens above them. He points out the lesion to her. Has she seen it before? Yes. She tries to think of something else. She studies her own brain. The pattern it makes.
“It’s like a beautiful tree.” She says. He looks puzzled for a second and says,
“What? Like a Bonsai?”
Someone bursts in from the computer room, where the other radiographers are and shouts for him to stop.
“I’m going to be sick.” She says and vomits into a kidney shaped bowl, and apologizes.
There’s a flurry of new activity in the theatre and she knows that at that very moment, her sister has stopped folding laundry and cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong.
Stella’s final wish is that her radiographers will someday go through an angiogram embolization for themselves.
Watery grey eyes.
“Well done, Stella. You remembered without once looking back.”
“I have two little girls.” She looks at him. “I married the love of my life.” She finds it strange that she should look into eyes that are empty and be so completely filled with love. “I have a son, too.”
She signed the adoption papers in the slowest of motions. There was never a doubt that she would sign them, but when she got to the end of her name, that would finally be that, and she did not want to be rid of this last vestige of her son. The pen was weighty, and wrote smoothly. It was designed for a quick signature; the pen of a solicitor. She drew the curves of her name mindfully, holding the pen aloft, over the space where the full stop should be. This moment: give me this moment forever. Some part of her knew though, there was love and happiness in her future, a good man and two daughters with blonde curls and a glint in their eyes; their easy laughter filling her to the brim with the meaning of life. If she did not believe that there were better times ahead, she never would have brought that pen down in a final full stop. Goodbye my son.
And the joy came, but so did the barricade. Deep, deep down in the furthermost part of her, so secret that even she forgot about it. When once she whispered, “I’ll always keep a place in my heart; a tiny home for the pain.” Her wise self heard her and understood that this was to be the way, for now. And then, that most human of things: Time, passed. She began to tell the story of how once, she had a son; she did not try to hide it. But she would not reach for the love of him, because she was afraid it would break her. Time passed and the cells of her heart grew briar and brambles. And she lived, and she laughed and she cried. But while she wept, they were never again the tears of a childless mother, turning herself inside out with grief. And she shared her love like dealing cards: happily giving away all of what was left, believing, wrongly, that there was not a full heart to dip into.
“I’m going to let go.”
“I know you are.”
The watery grey was all around her now and she floated easily upward, breaking the surface and opening her eyes. To think this was what she had been afraid of. It could not break her because she could not be broken. With her hand on her heart, she laughed: a pure sound of complete love, full and free and gladly given.
It had only ever been a matter of time.
The End
It took her a while to get used to the darkness though the music was unexpected. Somber and distant, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head. The more she tried to remember where she’d heard it, the brighter her surroundings became. That didn’t mean there was much to be seen; she was standing in the middle of a road that stretched pretty much into infinity in one direction, and in the other –
“Hello.”
A man dressed as a mountain climber seemed to be waiting for her to notice him. He had a foot on one of several pieces of rock that were scattered at the bottom of what seemed to be –
“A really steep hill, yes. We’ve been here before, Stella, and I keep telling you not to look back.”
Her eyes flicked to the side and it was all she could do not to turn around. The man sighed.
“Even the stupid ones get it eventually, Stella. You’ve got to stop yourself.”
“Who are you?” She asked.
“If I tell you, will you make a better effort to stop turning around? I mean, you saw it; it’s a road. There’s nothing more to see; it’s a road, that goes nowhere.”
“So I’ve seen it before?”
“A thousand times. And every time you look back, darkness descends – you remember it was dark a moment ago, right?”
She nodded. True enough, it was bright and one could say, almost sunny now.
“And you forget all over again. And we never move on. Well, that is to say, we stop moving.”
“Where are we going?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know who I am, first?” The man smiled patiently, though it never reached his eyes she noticed. One of those fake smiles that make you feel sort of empty. She returned his dead smile. “Yes.”
“Stella.”
“Yes?”
“Listen to me very carefully; when I tell you this, please, please don’t panic and gape around you in all directions in that flappy way.”
“Because I’ll…forget?”
“Everything, yes.”
“I promise.” It was like not scratching an itch. “Are you sure there’s nothing…sort of…”
“Coming to get you? Sneaking up behind you on the road you clearly saw stretches into infinity?”
“It’s like you’re reading my mind.”
“Stella; look at me. Keep looking into my watery grey eyes – I’m not reading your mind, you told me that a hundred times already – “
“That your eyes are watery grey?”
“You’re dead.”
She felt every part of her begin to twitch.
“Stop; don’t turn around Stella. You can look forward, up this steep hill, but that overwhelms you every time. Look at me instead. I’ve taken the liberty of becoming more handsome every reboot.”
She couldn’t deny he was beautiful, or he would be if his eyes were a stronger shade of –“
“We’ve been through this. They’re not really eyes, Stella.”
“Oh. Then who –“
“I’m Death.”
She weighed this information up carefully. Behind her, a road that stretched endlessly – a beaten track that they’d already travelled, presumably. In front, the ground rose sharply to a steep incline, possibly a mountain. Surely he wasn’t intending for them to climb it? What about her bad knee?
“Are you seriously thinking about your knee again?”
Her hands went unconsciously to her kneecaps, where she checked the flexibility of the good against the bad one.
“Feels quite good actually.”
“I find it amusing that you always remember the knee before you recall anything else. You know you had osteoarthritis?”
“Suspected. I’ll know when I get my bone scan.”
He looked at his feet in that dejected way that men tend to do, his lips clamping shut into a long suffering line.
“No bone scan for me, so.” She gauged the climb ahead. “I guess I can manage this after all.”
“Stella, the whole journey has been this. You’ve been climbing all along. Don’t. Look. Back.”
“Woops! Nearly blew it. Sorry, I won’t look back. But –“
“What’s in the past is as unimportant to you as a road going nowhere.”
“I’ve got it. Honestly, I understand. What do you mean they’re not eyes?”
He handed her some rope and gestured that she tie it around her waist. “Let’s talk as we go or we’ll never get there. We’ll get stuck. I hate when that happens.”
She pulled herself up onto the base of the incline and immediately remembered her childhood; she hadn’t felt this light and limber for a long time. “A ha!” She said, “You’re suggesting there’s a concept of Time, but everyone knows there is no such thing in Heaven.”
“Oh, so you think you’re going to Heaven?”
“Well, the whole ascent-towards-the-sky thing kind of gives it away.”
He turned to her and put his hands on his hips. “Are you expecting a little kingdom in the clouds? With angels playing tiny harps?”
“Oh! Is that where the music was coming from?” She offered him her hand to take. “Are we nearly there already?”
He continued to climb ahead of her. “That painful little tune? Nah, I just put that in your head to annoy you.”
“So this is like a kind of purgatory? Like an in-between place?” She gasped with delight. “This road is my death! That’s why I shouldn’t look back.”
Although he didn’t look at her and kept climbing she could see him smile. A proper smile too, she noticed, real eyes or not. “I should probably concentrate on the journey and stop getting distracted by…stuff.”
“Ah, she’s using her brain! Which is ironic.” He chuckled.
She resisted the urge to ask him what he meant by that. If they stopped to discuss every little thing, they’d just delay…although wait: what if she wasn’t on her way to eternal bliss? What if the whacks were right all along and there was a hell?
“We’ve never gotten this far before, Stella. You’re doing very well.”
“So we are heading towards somewhere nice?”
“Somewhere ‘nice’?”
“Well, somewhere lovely, then.”
“Stella, your granny’s house for afternoon tea is ‘lovely’. Is that how you’d like to spend the rest of your existence? Although, your granny is planning afternoon tea for you, in fact.”
“Which granny? Because one of them could easily have ended up in the bad place.”
“Do you think you’ll end up in a bad place, Stella?”
“I mean, I wasn’t a ‘bad’ person. I just didn’t expect to go so suddenly. Oh.”
“You remember.”
An inexplicable sense of foreboding.
She’s not nervous; she’s had this procedure three times already this week. It’s not pleasant by any means, but she knows the drill and although the after effects are horrible they’ll give her that shot. Morphine she supposes. Yes, must be. Makes her sleep and stay conscious at the same time. But for some reason, she thinks she’s going to die; she needs to get out of this, but how? All these doctors and nurses and radiographers and equipment; all this fuss for her, all this effort to try to eliminate the lesion on her brain – how can she tell them she has a feeling that she’s going to die so could they please wheel her trolley back to the step-down ward? No embolization today thanks all the same. How much money must this treatment cost? A nurse pops her head out the door of the theatre.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Stella. We’ll be ready in just a second.”
“I um…I feel a bit…weird.”
“In what way?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
It’s not the usual radiographer. She wonders why it’s necessary for her to be awake for this. Last time she asked if they’d give her something to make her dozy but they said she’d be fine. Told her she’d “be grand.” The radiographer even said you could get an angiogram and go back to work after it. Embolization: well, there’s just a little bit more to it, but still a very simple procedure. It’s just a catheter inserted into the catheter that’s inserted into your artery. In through the groin and up through her body to her brain. The new radiographer hurts her. She knows immediately he’s not used to doing this. She cries and apologizes. He tells her that’s okay. She sees the shapes inside her brain on the screens above them. He points out the lesion to her. Has she seen it before? Yes. She tries to think of something else. She studies her own brain. The pattern it makes.
“It’s like a beautiful tree.” She says. He looks puzzled for a second and says,
“What? Like a Bonsai?”
Someone bursts in from the computer room, where the other radiographers are and shouts for him to stop.
“I’m going to be sick.” She says and vomits into a kidney shaped bowl, and apologizes.
There’s a flurry of new activity in the theatre and she knows that at that very moment, her sister has stopped folding laundry and cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong.
Stella’s final wish is that her radiographers will someday go through an angiogram embolization for themselves.
Watery grey eyes.
“Well done, Stella. You remembered without once looking back.”
“I have two little girls.” She looks at him. “I married the love of my life.” She finds it strange that she should look into eyes that are empty and be so completely filled with love. “I have a son, too.”
She signed the adoption papers in the slowest of motions. There was never a doubt that she would sign them, but when she got to the end of her name, that would finally be that, and she did not want to be rid of this last vestige of her son. The pen was weighty, and wrote smoothly. It was designed for a quick signature; the pen of a solicitor. She drew the curves of her name mindfully, holding the pen aloft, over the space where the full stop should be. This moment: give me this moment forever. Some part of her knew though, there was love and happiness in her future, a good man and two daughters with blonde curls and a glint in their eyes; their easy laughter filling her to the brim with the meaning of life. If she did not believe that there were better times ahead, she never would have brought that pen down in a final full stop. Goodbye my son.
And the joy came, but so did the barricade. Deep, deep down in the furthermost part of her, so secret that even she forgot about it. When once she whispered, “I’ll always keep a place in my heart; a tiny home for the pain.” Her wise self heard her and understood that this was to be the way, for now. And then, that most human of things: Time, passed. She began to tell the story of how once, she had a son; she did not try to hide it. But she would not reach for the love of him, because she was afraid it would break her. Time passed and the cells of her heart grew briar and brambles. And she lived, and she laughed and she cried. But while she wept, they were never again the tears of a childless mother, turning herself inside out with grief. And she shared her love like dealing cards: happily giving away all of what was left, believing, wrongly, that there was not a full heart to dip into.
“I’m going to let go.”
“I know you are.”
The watery grey was all around her now and she floated easily upward, breaking the surface and opening her eyes. To think this was what she had been afraid of. It could not break her because she could not be broken. With her hand on her heart, she laughed: a pure sound of complete love, full and free and gladly given.
It had only ever been a matter of time.
The End
