The Light

by Francis CoCo

  Angela turned and nodded, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s the same thing. It’s so odd though, with all the things he’s had happen, you would think that he would be studying his Bible intensely...”

  “I think he just has a hard time with religion, maybe,” I said.

  “His other brother is a lawyer,” Angela said, “isn’t that crazy? Chip and David are so serious and Max is so laid back, they’re all so different. It kind of seems like all of this stuff would be better suited for someone like David, more so than Max.”

  “I’m so sorry about his mother,” I said.

  “His mother, my father, of course, for him it’s worse...”

  “That’s not true! Your father dying is just as bad, maybe even worse, because you didn’t have the chance to know him...”

  Angela looked appalled, that I would compare the two. But she didn’t say anything. She just shook her head and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here- go for a drive- get a coffee- something...”

  “Let me grab my purse,” I said.

  _____

  “Six times six is thirty-six, my old man is thirty-six.”

  I rolled over and smiled. It was a chilly morning. Officially it was Spring, but there were still cold days. That’s how it went in Minnesota, just because it was Spring didn’t mean that it wouldn’t still sometimes be cold or that the snow was over. The sun was beating through my white eyelet curtains in my bedroom. Another one of those weird movie reels was running through my mind. That was how my dad taught me my times tables, and, at the time, he had been thirty-six. Now he was in his mid fifties.

  I lay in bed for a minute, remembering him driving me home from school, in the afternoons when I was in the second grade- the long, winding road that ran through the woods towards our house, and reciting this. I lay there and stared up at the ceiling. That road to our house seemed almost magical now. It was a long, twisty-turny road that went through the woods and came out onto a brow overlooking the river. We would ride along the brow for a few miles, the sun shining bright- the water rippling down below, reflecting the sun and us, up high, on the sliver of road, looking down at the river and the trees and the houses and then the road would take us back into the woods, both sides of the street shaded and made dark by the tall trees. It was always me and my dad in the car. For years after school, he picked me up in the afternoons on his way home from work. My sister was always involved in every curricular activity you could imagine; girl scouts, cheerleading, track, choir, - but I was never involved in anything. I didn’t want to be. I was happy to go home and watch Little House on the Prairie and eat cereal on the floor, in front of the t.v. while I did my homework. So, after school, my dad would pick me up and we would ride home together. Looking back, that was the only time we ever spent alone together. It was when my dad was authentically himself- on those rides. The only time he didn’t put on the work face or husband face or the face for the neighbors. On those rides he talked about being a boy and about his dad and things he never otherwise spoke of, all while the radio played songs from his era, the 60’s and the 70’s. My, how time flies. As I lay there I thought about how my dad used to tell me that. He said, when you’re young, time goes by so fast, but as you get older, it speeds up and flies by. He was right. Time was really speeding up. It hit me then, something that I’d never really thought about before- that life was like a moving train- it never slowed down, it never stopped – it just kept going and going- until it came to the inevitable- the end. It kept barreling towards the end, whether you were ready for it or not.

  I kicked the covers off and got out of bed. It was a Saturday. I made a mental note to call my father, later, maybe that afternoon. I never called home as much as I should, I was so bad about picking up the phone.

  Why was my life suddenly playing out in my mind? I mean, it was fine, I didn’t mind it, it just had never done that before and now it seemed that it constantly played out like snippets of a movie. When I was awake the movie played in my mind. When I was asleep I dreamed about people who had passed. My grandmother, a girl from school who had drowned in the lake one 4th of July weekend. She knew how to swim, but somehow, she’d drowned. We had been friends, she’d died in the sixth grade, and yet, she was talking to me in my dreams. I could never remember, when I woke up, what she said, I just remembered her talking to me, her hands waving about, a pained look on her face, and she and I sitting on a log outside on the playground, where we used to have recess. The creepiest part about talking to her, though, was that she was wearing an orange bathing suit, and she was wet.

  I did remember what my grandmother said- she was always talking to me in her kitchen, while she went about cutting up vegetables, telling me that she missed my father. She said he never came to see her anymore and that she didn’t understand why he’d stopped coming to visit. I recall her saying that, a few months before she passed, I remember her complaining about that, saying that he had always been so good to check on her and she couldn’t understand why he then would lets weeks go by without so much as a phone call, She’d said that but I hadn’t thought of it in years. Why remember it now?

  That’s what she said when she was talking to me. Sometimes I dreamed that she was alive- that I just found out that she didn’t actually die like we thought- and in those dreams I would rush to her house and bang on the door. For some reason, it was always night time when that happened and she was always in the back of the house, making her way to answer the door -walking through the dark house- walking slow- on her way, but moving so slow- I would stand banging and banging and in the dream I could see her as she made her way through the house, but it seemed that her house went on forever, - like it was the longest house in the world- as she was always walking, walking, making her way to the door, but never getting there. She never made it to the front door. She never opened it.

  One morning, I woke and for no reason at all, remembered my grandmother’s telephone number, 894-9598- I hadn’t called the number in fifteen years, had completely forgotten it- and, for some reason, I woke up and clearly remembered her phone number.

  I’d called it. A little boy answered and I mumbled something about having the wrong number and hung up. I don’t know why I called. I guess I just wanted to make sure.

  _____

  Max wouldn’t talk about his mother. It was obvious he was devastated but he refused to discuss the accident. Angela and I had gone to the funeral. It had been a closed casket. Angela knew most everyone there but I hardly knew a soul. It had been an awful day. It was late April but it had snowed. I knew that it could snow in April in the Midwest- I knew that, but it was so late in the month and the snow was so heavy that it felt really strange. And, as usual, the snow was beautiful; covering the graveyard in a clean white blanket, falling softly from the sky and resting on everyone’s head and shoulders like fairy dust. It gave the day a surreal, dreamlike quality. If I were making a movie, it would be just the scene I would dream up for the day of a funeral.

  I met Max’s brothers, Chip and David. They both lived in Deerhedge. I was surprised to find out they lived so close. I don’t know where I’d expected them to live, but I hadn’t expected it to be so close to Fallcrest, especially considering that Max never mentioned them or talked about going to see them. Chip was the lawyer and David was in the Seminary, like Angela had said. Angela said that the brother’s were sort of snooty- or, at least, that’s how Max perceived them and that was why he never talked about them. I guess they didn’t get along. You could tell that both brothers were very smart and, they seemed nice enough, but they didn’t seem nearly as cool, or as fun, as Max was. But, then again, I’d met them on the day of their mother’s funeral so, I might have been wrong.

  The Saturday after Max’s mother’s funeral, there was a knock on my door early that morning. I had been up, dressed in my terry clothe bathrobe, drinking coffee and looking up gossip sites on my laptop. It had been one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep and had woken up many times through
out the night and stared up at the ceiling and thought about all of these things that had been happening to us. I was relieved when the sun came up and I’d gotten out of bed and started a pot of coffee.

  “Hi,” Max said, when I opened the door, “are you up?”

  I stepped back and allowed him room to come inside.

  Shutting the door behind him, I said, “Yes, I’ve been up for a while. Want some coffee?”

  He walked into the kitchen to make himself a cup and I went over to the couch where my laptop sat open and shut it down and closed it and then followed him into the kitchen.

  Max was leaning against the kitchen counter, a coffee mug in his hand. This was the first time I’d seen him since the funeral. I went over and hugged him.

  “What’s that for?”

  “God, I’m just, so sorry,” I said, pulling away.

  “I’m okay,” he said solemnly, bringing the cup of coffee to his lips and taking a slow sip.

  “You can’t be okay. It’s your mother.”

  He kind of moved his head from side to side- a move that seemed to say, Yeah, well, and I knew he was not in a mood to talk about it.

  I went to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair and sat down. Max followed me and sat down across from me. I wondered why he’d come by. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about his mother, but it seemed he wanted to talk about something.

  The kitchen window was behind me and Max sat staring out of it and drinking his coffee and then, he said, “So, I guess Angela told you about July 23rd.”

  “July 23rd? What do you mean?”

  “She said she told you about the dream. About me having to go to Hualapai Mountain on July 23rd.”

  “Oh, is that the date? She told me you had to go but I didn’t know when- She might have told me, I can’t remember...”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s the date.”

  We sat quiet for a minute and then I said, “Are you going?”

  “I think so,” he said, “What do you think? What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. I think I might be afraid to go. Actually, what am I talking about? I would be petrified...”

  Max nodded. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of his button down and lit a cigarette.

  “Why do you have to go somewhere?” I said, “I mean, if he, the Light, the voice, whatever it is, if he comes to you in dreams and tells you things, or shows you things like he did with the flat earth dream, or like when he told you about Ekron and all of that, why do you have to go somewhere? Why can’t he just tell you?”

  Max took a drag off his cigarette, looked up, “I don’t know. Maybe he wants to show me something?”

  “Like what?”

  Max shrugged, “I have no idea. But it has to be something. Maybe it’s something important?”

  I took a deep breath. I couldn’t believe the conversations we had. This time last year I thought the earth was round, spiraling through space, I believed that man had landed on the moon and now I felt like such a fool, now that I knew about the Van Allan belt’s and the firmament- now that I understood that man going to the moon was impossible. Ever since Max’s dream about the flat Earth, I’d begun to research it- reading everything I could on the internet and watching videos on Youtube, and I was completely on board with him. I now felt that he had had some kind of vision, now it made absolute sense that the Earth was flat. This time, only a year ago, I thought the world was what I thought it was and now, now, I was sitting at my kitchen table talking to my friend about traveling to some mountain in Kingman, Arizona to meet a Light, a being, a something, that I still could not even fathom. I’d seen it but I still had no clue as to what it was.

  “You might go missing.”

  “What?” Max said, taking one last drag and then stubbing his cigarette out in the saucer in front of him.

  “Well, there are people every year who go missing, they just disappear, What if you don’t come back?”

  “I thought about that.”

  “And?”

  “I think I have to go.”

  I rubbed my eyes. What a long strange trip it’s been, the line from a Grateful Dead song ran through my mind. I didn’t even do drugs- had never done drugs a day in my life, but this felt like a very bizarre acid trip.

  “Max...”

  He looked at me.

  “I have to ask,” I said, “this all seems so… biblical… how is it that you don’t believe in the Devil or the Bible? How can you not believe in it when the name Beelzebub is in the Bible, when Ekron, a place you’ve never even heard of was told to you in a dream and it’s right there, in the Bible?”

  Max shrugged, “I know. You’re right. Maybe I should read it… it just has always seemed so…I don’t know, but like, that story of the guy swallowed by the whale, I mean, come on...”

  “You might want to pull it out,” I said, “read it. Especially now.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Do you still see those shadows? Shadow people or whatever they are?”

  “No. I haven’t in a while. They were everywhere and now I don’t see them at all. In fact, I think they’ve gone away.”

  “I guess they went back to Ekron.”

  Max smiled, “I guess so.”

  “We’ve had a lot to happen in the last year.”

  “I want you to go with me,” Max said, “you and Angela.”

  “When you go to meet the Light?”

  “Yes. Actually, no – what I mean to say is, I want you guys to go with me to Arizona, but, we’ll check into a hotel. You guys will stay at the hotel when I go to that mountain, Hualapai- whatever it’s called, but I want you to come to Arizona with me.”

  “Of course,” I said, and then I said, “Fuck me. This is some crazy shit.”

  Max smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile since the death of his mother.

  “Fuck me is right,” he said, standing up and pushing his chair to the table. He took one last sip of coffee and set the coffee mug down on the table.

  “Where are you going?” I said, looking up at him.

  “I have to go to work.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Again, he did that thing with his head- sort of a shrug- sort of a movement. I took it to mean, not exactly.

  _____

  A few days later, my sister called. It was a Thursday after work. I was cleaning the house and I could tell, immediately that something was wrong.

  “It’s dad,” she said, “he isn’t doing very well.”

  I sat down on the edge of the sofa, “What?” I said, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s just not doing well, Paige, he has a hard time breathing, he’s fainted a few times, the doctors are doing tests- they think it’s his heart- but, they don’t know.”

  “Should I come home?”

  “Yes. I think you should.”

  “Where are you? Are you with him?”

  “Yes, but, he’s sleeping, if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to call back.”

  “I don’t understand, his heart? I talked to him not long ago, a few weeks ago, he sounded great, he’s always been as healthy as a horse.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, I mean, it happened so suddenly, like the last week, maybe a little longer, but he passed out twice this week, he’s felt faint, he can’t breathe...” Teresa said, “he’s just, he’s not good.”

  “This is so weird,” I said. And it was weird. My dad had always been healthy. So healthy, that whenever he got a physical, the doctor would be shocked at his numbers, which were always on point- near perfection. He’d never in his life had surgery for anything- no appendicitis, no gall bladder removed, he’d never even had his tonsils taken out- none of the normal things people usually had happen by the time they were in their late fifties.

  I told her I would call back and talk to him later that night and we hung up.

  I sat in my living room in silence. His heart? How could that
be? I’d just spoken to him and he’d been in great spirits, said he felt terrific. He’d talked about all the exciting things that were happening for him,(Recently, the New Yorker had published one of his cartoons) that had been a life long dream of his- to be published by the New Yorker. He would have rather them publish one of his short stories, I’m sure, but the cartoon had been just as good and, it was the New Yorker.

  I would have to go home to Nashville. I would have to use my vacation days and go home. Did I have enough money for a plane ticket? I did, but just barely enough. The money didn’t matter, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that my dad was getting older. My mom was getting older. And I was living in Fallcrest, Minnesota. And, I guess the real question was, Why? What was keeping me here? I had no family in Fallcrest. My family was twelve hundred miles away, in Tennessee. I should go back. I should move back.

  Truthfully, and selfishly, I didn’t want to. I wanted to go with Max and Angela to Arizona in July. I wanted to see if there would be any great conclusion to this enormous mystery that had come upon us. I wanted to see why Max had been summoned to this mountain in Arizona. And I wanted to be there, when whatever was going to happen, happened.

  But, if something was wrong with my father’s heart- if his health was bad. I would have to go home.

  I called my father later that evening. He was up. He and my mother had just come back from taking a drive.

  “Hey,” I said, when he came to the phone, “what’s going on? Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and gave a little laugh, “Teresa told me she called you but she shouldn’t have, I’m absolutely fine.”

  “But, she said you passed out?”

  “No. She exaggerated. I didn’t pass out- not really, only for a split second...”

  “Well, I’ll be coming home in the next few days-”

  He cut me off, “No, don’t you do that – there’s no reason to come home. I’m fine.”