by Harvey Lillywhite
I wish I didn’t have to live my life in chronological order.
I want to go back to the small bedroom I had in high school on the corner of the small house my step-father built out of bricks with his own two hands. When he married my Mom and added the new piece to his house, he asked me what I wanted in a bedroom. Small, I told him, like a monk’s cell. I would craft all the furniture—a small bed of smooth stones I’d gathered from a nearby river and a Plexiglas table lit brightly from below. I told him I’d seen a Jaguar XKE that was bright yellow; I wanted the two inside walls to be that color.
We drove around town, bonding. I asked him how he made his abstract expressionist paintings. He stretched his own giant canvasses. Primed them with gesso. Drank a couple of glasses of cheap wine and got busy. Then we saw it, the yellow car. Like that.
The two outside walls, I said, should be stained glass since they had southern exposure and caught a lot of sun. He did my idea one better. I came home from school one day, and it was finished. He’d installed two hidden projectors to shine on the two outside glass walls of my room; they projected light through kaleidoscopes that turned slowly creating the effect of always-changing stained glass.
I want to go back and lie on the bed of small stones that fit my body so perfectly, to wake up at dawn as the sun illuminated my glass walls and the shards of color formed intricate and beautiful geometric patterns, and the two inside walls shown yellow, as bright as the sun. It would do my old body good to step back in time, to have a little vacation in my dazzling youth.
It was around that time that I learned how to fly. It was an accidental discovery, as most of the good ones are. There was no leaping from roofs or high branches. There was no violent flapping of my arms. I realized that if I leaned forward at just the right angle at just the right moment as I was running and made a subtle little jump, I would start gliding up off the ground wherever I wanted to go.
One summer I flew to California and landed on the beach. My closest friends in high school were there already. A party of some kind was going on. It was just after dark. The moon was full. My friends were running with some girls, a little younger than we were, along the shore. The sand was phosphorescent. As we all ran along, our footsteps trailed behind us, glowing in the moonlight. I want to take my old body back to that night and see the look in my eyes as the world came alive for me in a way it never had before, as if for the first time.
I would also go back to visit the days when nothing much happened, only to realize actually how precious each second of life is. There’s my Mom, sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her oversized reading glasses, the ones that made her eyes seem twice their size when she turned her head from the pages she was reading and looked up at me, and we both laughed. Each of the many wooden cupboards in the kitchen was painted a different solid color. I’d take out a box of cereal, sit at the table reading the sports page. My Mom read the existentialists, the poets, the I Ching, all the important stuff. There was an entire world inside her head where she was most comfortable. But she was the most generous person I’ve ever known. She moved so easily between her world and that other one. And all the people she ever met, of course, had an entire world inside their head, where they lived most comfortably. How suspicious and grouchy most of us are as we step out of that comfortable world, where we are the North Star, into this fragmented and disappointing place where we must interact, the world we call reality, the world we try to hold together with whatever sticking power love can muster.
I, too, loved to read. Although once in a small reading circle when I was six, the words on the page suddenly fell from the paper, as though they were tiny creatures held together on the page by some magnetic force that was abruptly shut off. They clattered off the page onto the cold, shiny floor where I read, making a faint but brittle kind of noise. Nobody else in the reading circle seemed to notice. But the letters scurried away—some on two skinny legs, some hopping away on one, others rolling along, others moving like goofy, asymmetrical caterpillars. I tried to catch them and reapply them to the paper. But the meaning was changed. My teachers were alarmed at me as this continued to happen throughout my formal schooling. One time, because the words felt sorry for me, they came back together willingly in the book I was holding and formed my deepest, most well-guarded secret: they told me that I would always be a small child fractured by the sad divorce of his mother and father, heartbroken for all time by the anger and selfishness of those two, when they were relatively young and wanted so much what was impossible. When I saw those words, I tried to rub them out with the small eraser on the heavy wooden pencil I’d been given by Mrs. LaBelle, my teacher in first grade. But the words wouldn’t disappear.
I’d go back there and reassure myself. It would be okay. Life has its ups and downs. Of course we might learn to fly. But there would be times when flight was out of the question, when you were chased by truly evil people, times when you couldn’t escape, when unspeakable things might happen. It would be the day after such an unthinkable thing had happened that I’d return to myself to prove that life moves on, like the walls of my bedroom, the kaleidoscopic rubble that changes slowly, each transient pattern more beautiful, in its way, than the last, all falling apart and regrouping over and over and over again.
Certainly I’d revisit the times when I’d done something wrong, when I’d gotten angry, when I’d treated someone poorly. Maybe I could explain. Luckily, being older now, I’d realize how things suddenly transform, how one day you go to work as a wolverine, and, by lunchtime, you find you’ve become a hummingbird. Life is strange that way. But it’s a fact, though always startling, that we tend to forget.
I would be careful not to change anything at all. Not the fender benders. Not the worst angry fits. Not the party I had when my parents were away for a week when all the clothes in our entire house were stolen (but nothing else). Not the rose I gave Sally, the true love I never met. But I would go back to that dream where I first saw her, leaning against a brick wall in some city, waiting for me, looking like she’d known me forever, telling me something in all but words: you think sadness stretches to the end of your days, but you’ll never know, until you get there, what you might find.
There’s no doubt I’d go forward, maybe 10 years, maybe all the way. I’d leave hints for myself that time doesn’t exist. I’d hide my watch and cut the electricity so the clocks blinked 12:00 all day long. I’d ask a stranger to knock randomly at my front door; when I opened up, the stranger would reprimand me straightaway demanding that the only legitimate prayer is THANK YOU.
I’d love to see my dog again, all my dogs. I’d play guitar for them. I’d sing to them a song only they seemed to understand. I’d thank them for teaching me what a wagging tail means. And now that I’m older and more skilled, I’d teach them to fly as well.
What age, exactly, am I? Today I’m 58. But as I moved at will through time, would I finally come to understand that I’m without age at all? But this body that’s melting all around me, this candle . . . it is me . . . and here I am when the candle goes out . . . and here I am when the candle is just lit. Moving back and forth through time would convince me that I did, in fact, understand why we’re here, what the true purpose and meaning of life are, just as I’d suspected.
What’s the hurry? Just now it’s raining hard. The deep gray of the nimbus clouds is worth noting. Where does all the water come from—the ocean of clouds that passes along? And the lightning? The thunder? Coming out of the woods once the rain stops, an extended family of deer who mistrust me but allow themselves to come nearer and nearer, the seductive safety of the suburbs. And I’m back here where time is now struggling with any number of problems. Are they broken things that I can mend? Are they growing things that haven’t yet become what they will be? Are they dying things for which it’s best to give up all hope? I am a problem solver says the thunder. Here is deep insight says the lightning. Here is the rain. Thank you, I call out in prayer. Thanks a lot.
My children are just starting their adult lives, by themselves. I’ll see you in five years, I tell them, and fly ahead to see what they have become. The future is marvelous. It is different from anything we have ever known. I’m whispering secrets to their children as they sleep. I am Grandpa Nightmare. I am Grandpa Sweet Dreams. Trust yourself, I tell them. Trust every single thing you feel. It’s true: you can fly. But try as I might, I whisper to them, I can’t see out beyond myself to the edge of creation to figure out that one answer that would make everything okay. Nevertheless, I promise, there’s beauty every second, in your big toe, in your finger pointing at the huge bird soaring over the tree in your backyard. At night before they fall asleep, after a good tickling, I show them the stars, which spin and spin and never change. Over there, I tell them, the Twins, Sadness and Joy, inseparable—the whole world, I inform them, made of the tiniest bursts of energy, half positive and half negative—everything made of that smash-up. Each of you, I say before I leave, is a Big Bang . . . if you listen closely and long enough you can hear the zillions of little explosions as the world and everything in it remakes itself every single moment.
And then I’m gone. There’s no looking back. I see it all from start to finish. Nothing more than a painting, a few words whispered into the wind, words that mean everything there is. Here.
Yes, it’s so nice to slip out of Time’s bridle. When I go back, I stand on the back porch; I’m seven years old, looking out at my Grandmother’s ancient cherry trees. I whistle for my horse: a buckskin mare named Sugar. From the side of the porch I can climb on her back. I grab her mane. She walks out of the backyard and into the field just planted with wheat. Then she runs as fast as she can, an unbelievably smooth gallop. But I have to cling to her with my legs, struggling to stay upright on her back, thrilled with the ride. And then she slows down, trots back into the yard. Each step bouncing me uncomfortably up and down on her spine. Whoa, girl, I tell her. Back at the porch next to the garage, I jump down and walk her back to the other horses at Adams’ stable just down the narrow road.
Look, my Mom says when I get back. She’s holding a clothespin in her outstretched hand. Squished in its jaws is a big black spider. Black Widow she tells me, SpiderWoman. I see the red hourglass on the underbelly.