I did eventually sleep, but woke early into the weird no-light that precedes morning. My first thought was: I escaped the continuation of the brother-dream. Then I lay very still to grab onto another dream that was fading away—not a nightmare, not even what you’d call a bad dream, because there were some parts of it I wanted to keep. I salvaged as much as I could, and then quickly made my bed, dressed, snatched some stand-up breakfast, and headed north on my bike. The sky had not yet separated itself from the flat gray of the ocean. I had never been out this early. The empty beach contained not a single living creature.
“It’s like a video game,” Wheezer had explained to me in the dream I’d tried to hold on to. “But what you need to remember, Marcus, is we’re inside the screen. Someone else is at the controls.” What we had to do, he said, was avoid the “powder-colors.” When the game was switched on, whoever was playing on the outside would try to shoot colored powders at us through little holes. Already we could see those powder-colors amassing and waiting to be sent forth from their chamber: thick crusty reds and blues and yellows, like those primitive colors in the un-paintings by the German artist my aunt had showed me on her laptop. If we wanted to stay alive, Wheezer said, we had to keep alert. When the powders hit us, we needed to wipe them off fast. “What happens if some powder gets stuck on us?” I asked. “If too much gets stuck on you,” he warned in his hoarse little asthma voice, “the colors will paste you over and you’ll be trapped inside the screen forever.” Even though the dream had its scary aspects, it had been nice to be with Wheezer again.
The wind hissed past my ears as I sped north without my helmet, which I kept fastened to the back of my seat. The old people never bothered with helmets on their early morning bike rides. I was anxious to stay within this eerie zone, no longer night but not yet day, until I reached the cottage. It was like the beach was under a spell. The tenuous light through which I rode seemed to wrap itself around me and push me forward to meet whatever I had to meet.
Looking back on that morning, as I have so many times, I calculate that the ten or twelve minutes it would have taken me, pedaling at top speed, to reach Grief Cottage would have given an ordinary summer dawn more than enough time to break through. But as I felt it then, the penumbra stuck to me all the way to the cottage like a faithful cloud cover. It lasted through my dismounting and hiding my bike between two dunes, and it hung above me as I crawled through the sand beneath the wire fence with its warning signs. It was as if time and light and sound had conspired to hold themselves back so that I could receive the full impact of what I saw.
He stood there in the doorway on his own terms, not mine. I reeled with the vividness of him. He was stronger and sharper in substance, and, unlike our last encounter, he didn’t slouch or seem to wait passively to see what I might do next. The tense way he braced himself against the door frame, pushing himself outward with both hands (I saw the prominent knuckle ridges between the spread fingers), was that of a figure ready to spring after having been kept trapped for too long.
I saw the long narrow face with indented cheeks, the small raisin-dark eyes lodged deep in their sockets, the pale stalk-like neck, an off-kilter nose that looked as though it had been broken and not properly reset; I saw the wide mouth and the thin lips, and the gangly, slightly bowed legs in jeans, and the black ankle boots. The faded red shirt I had seen before, but this time buttons were left open, exposing the articulated chest of a man.
It felt like turning a corner in a corridor at school and suddenly coming face-to-face with an older boy. He’s just there, this totally other being; you’re right smack in the center of his attention, and you have no idea where this is going.
Whether daylight had by this time edged out the gloom I don’t know, but I remember being thankful for a couple of observations that presented themselves like solid posts of realism for me to clutch onto, as he looked ready to burst out of his door frame. The first thought came in the form of a calculation: If you measured by an unbroken stretch of time, he had been in this place longer than all the previous dwellers put together since 1804. The second observation, seeing those knuckly hands braced against the door frame, was a practical question, the kind Charlie Coggins might ask: Why had nobody bothered to replace the door or at least board over the space to slow down the decay? Maybe it was these infusions of practicality that kept me standing there for as long as I did. Was it long enough for me to gauge that I had reached the toleration point of what I could sanely handle? Or had my primal brain propelled me into flight without giving me the luxury of thought?
On this occasion I hadn’t even gotten as far as climbing the rotting stairs to the porch. All I knew was that one moment I stood below him in the sand, transfixed by our mutual gaze, and the next thing I knew I was standing far from the cottage, my face turned toward the ocean. The first sound to come back to me was the thud of my heart racing inside my chest. Then the sound of surf and birds followed, and daytime was definitely in control. I knew that if I turned around now all I would see would be a falling-down cottage and a gaping doorway.
At some point I realized I wasn’t by myself at the ocean’s edge. Not far away there was a woman holding a golden retriever on a short leash. Both of them stood still as statues facing the breaking waves, as though they were competing to see which could outlast the other in utter stillness. The dog wore a dark green vest with a number and an insignia. The woman was about my mom’s age and had her small upright build and coloring. Only this woman had the means to take care of herself. Mom would often comment on the ways you could spot this when she saw a certain kind of woman in a store. “That’s a very expensive look,” she would remark about the woman’s hair. “It looks like casual sun streaks, but it’s actually a three-color process.”
Suddenly the retriever lunged at an incoming wave and the woman tightened the leash and murmured something. The dog sat down and was perfectly still again. This happened several times. It seemed cruel to bring a dog to the edge of the ocean and then not let him play in the surf. The longer I watched this tug of wills between them, the more indignant I became.
Both woman and dog watched me approach. The woman’s look was questioning but not unfriendly. It was as though she already knew what I was going to ask.
“Why can’t he go in?”
“It wouldn’t be a good idea. He’s in training to be a service dog. Normally, Barrett is the calmest dog you can imagine, but when we brought him here, he got excited as soon as he heard the sound of the ocean, and when he saw the surf he went wild.” She had a Lachicotte-type accent, though not as pronounced.
“Is he for a blind person?”
“No, he’ll go to a disabled vet. It’s a new program. Prisoners at the Navy brig in Charleston train the dogs. My husband and I are volunteers. We take one dog at a time during weekends and holidays and get him accustomed to new experiences. Distractions and unexpected sounds. This afternoon, my husband is taking Barrett to a firing range, and after that to a children’s playground.”
“Who named him Barrett?”