Last night, I dreamed that I died. Or maybe I dreamed it this morning. The lucid scene felt close to my waking, the sensations still clinging to me as I stared at the ceiling.
In the dream, I was at church with my mother. My father and sister were absent. It was the church I had attended in my youth and everything was just as I remember it. We were seated at our usual pew, waiting for the service to start, when an unfamiliar man entered. I could paint his face, it’s so vivid in my mind: Tightly curling brown hair, watery blue eyes, and reddish-brown stains on his cheekbones and forehead.
We exchanged a long, intense stare.
The man passed in front of my mother and sat beside her. He draped his arm across her lap and gripped her knee. She stiffened and looked at me.
“Caleb,” she whispered fearfully.
I pushed the man’s hand off my mother’s lap and leaned toward him. “Find another place to sit,” I said, my voice low with menace.
The man rose and moved to the pew behind us. It made me uneasy, being unable to see him, and I sensed that some violence was coming.
I heard a metallic clack, like the sound of a revolver’s hammer dropping, and my mother slumped beside me. With a cold, visceral shock, I realized that she had been shot.
I hope I’m not next, I thought, and the cold feeling spread outward from the nape of my neck. Then I understood that I had already been shot. I reached back and my fingertips touched ruined, wet flesh, blasted open. This is it, I told myself. I felt a momentary panic, and then I was glad.
There was no pain, as if all my nerves had been blown out of the crater in my neck. My vision dimmed and I seemed to be drifting downward softly, peacefully, my consciousness draining fast. I was accepting and relieved.
I woke with a broad numb patch at the back of my neck.
I lay in bed for a long time, processing the experience, and then I listened to the message on my phone. It was from my agent.
“Cal,” she said, “hi. Just a small thing. The journalist coming today isn’t the one I told you to expect. She had a death in the family. So expect someone else. I couldn’t get a name for you, but the editor said she would be calling her best writer, okay? They’re really excited. Let me know how it goes.”
I sat up in bed and cleared my throat before returning the call.
“Cal?” My agent sounded apprehensive. She knew what was coming.
“Hi, Beth. Look, I’m not feeling the interview, what with the change.”
“Cal, talk to me. What’s the problem?”
I hated when Beth tried to handle me. Worse, I hated when she handled me. A month earlier, she had convinced me to agree to the profile in the face of my direct refusal. And I had only agreed after researching the journalist who would be writing the profile, after reading her stuff and determining that she was too glib to even scratch the surface of my situation.
That journalist would have phoned in a feeble version of the profile that half a dozen others had written: Author Caleb Bright retires after writing three contemporary classics, moves to the mountains of Colorado, takes up painting; friends and family comment on his artistic nature and deep religiosity; everyone cites stress as his reason for ending his literary career.
But I wouldn’t be dealing with that journalist anymore, and I don’t like unknowns.
“Cancel it,” I said, “or maybe we can postpone until—”
“She’s taking two months off. You know the piece is for December.”
“You’re springing this on me. Why am I only hearing about this now?” I threw back the sheets and began to pace. After nine years working with Beth, I had learned to recognize her tactics, though I never got better at evading them.
“Of course not. They only told me yesterday. Really, Cal, it doesn’t matter. The New Yorker is big for us. This is exciting. And the fact that they’re looking to include you in their ‘2016 in Letters’ issue ...” She trailed off.
“You can say it.” I stopped in front of the window. The morning was peerless: Sunlight breaking through mist, enflaming the yellow aspen leaves. I rarely woke early enough to catch the sunrise. The dream had woken me. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Say it,” I repeated. “It means I’m somehow still relevant.”
“I’m just thrilled that the re-release did so well. People loved your forward.”
“Is the new journalist a woman? Do you know?”
“You are such a playboy.” Beth laughed. She knew that she had won. She knew that she could play the relevancy card to scare me into anything. Sometimes, I even thought she knew that I had never really wanted to stop publishing—that I was desperately afraid of being forgotten. My robust literary career hung on the success of three novels. Would I still be on the shelves in ten years? In thirty? “I honestly don’t know,” she continued, “but I told them you prefer women.”
“Good.” I was sure the editor had gotten a kick out of that, but I didn’t care.
“We’ll talk after you two meet,” Beth said.
“I’ll e-mail.”
“Great. Keep me posted.”
We hung up and I gazed dejectedly out the window. The memory of the dream kept pulsing against me, a strange resonance, and I felt sick to my stomach.
I skipped my morning run, showered, and made the bed. I was barely able to go through the motions. Maybe the dream played a small part in my mood, but unhappiness was a mainstay for me. I thought about my books. I thought about the state of my life and I bucked against it. I’ll publish, I told myself. I’ll do it—to hell with the consequences. Then I shuddered and fury rose up my throat like bile.
I dressed in dark jeans and a black sweater to suit my mood. Some mornings, when I got my coffee and dove into writing, I almost felt good. The act of writing produced a forgetfulness that carried me along, out of my life, into a current of imagination. That day, though, I had to wait for the journalist, I had to think about my dream, and Beth’s call and comments trapped me in misery. I couldn’t help but consider my career, and a terrible sense of futility surged through me, rage scraping at its edges.
I took my coffee to the deck, and my Bible. I let the well-worn book fall open to a Psalm. My eyes wandered the page, seeking comfort. I always found something—a little something to hold on to—if only the fact that after this life came a life without pain, fear, hatred, or guilt.
I pictured Heaven as a field where I would wake one day, warm in the tall grass, and see a man seated at a distance. He would have his back to me and he would be looking out at the landscape. I would come awake slowly, into perfect happiness, and, when I was ready, I would stand up and go to him.
I would spend the rest of forever in that summer country.
The sun crawled higher into the sky until it pierced my eyes. I took my reading inside then, and I heard tires on the drive at noon.