Sunrise Eyes-Peter B. Diseth
Sunrise Eyes
By Peter B. Diseth
He struggled to keep his eyes open.
It was hard work, and at this point, so late in the day it was almost day again, he could almost feel his body resigning to the fact that the feat of staying awake long enough to see the sun again was impossible. Almost. Despite the odds, though, despite the persistent nagging of some voice from another world demanding that he must quit it already, he stayed awake.
Thoughts careened into one another, mashed, meshed, bonded, and broke apart like sticky bumper cars. If it was difficult to keep his eyes open, it was utterly hopeless to make sense of any one of his memories. They passed before his mind’s eye so quick it was like they were never there in the first place, and the one or two of them that lingered long enough for him to catch a glimpse were too foreign for him to make anything of. It was a maddening exercise in futility. His mind was all but gone, and yet he tried so hard to find something concrete within.
One image that slowed down enough for him to see was some kind of pet collection squashed together to make one, enormously hideous creature he didn’t even want to recognize. Like a stack of photograph slides with a light running through, he saw a garble of two dozen legs, a handful of heads, a mass of tails that didn’t fit, and a horde of tongues lagging and swaying in a hundred unforeseeable directions. Somewhere deep down he knew they were his dogs, the ones he’d had by his side since he awoke in this life, but he couldn’t understand why none of them were recognizable. He thought about calling out names to see if any of the heads would turn his direction, but the words he would use never made it anywhere. They got lost in the frying synapses of his brain and wandered aimlessly around the broken images in there, discoloring and further confusing other memories and dreams.
Outside, the sky was still black. But he knew it was coming soon. He’d just have to keep his eyes open for a little while longer. He had nothing more to do in this world but stay awake long enough. He thought he could manage. He hoped he could manage.
He prayed a silent, mumbled prayer for help. Of course, he heard nothing in return.
Another image bubbled to the surface of his conscience, bobbing up and down slowly before retreating again to the murky depths. In this one a woman sat in a wheat field wearing an orange summer dress and laughing. Her head held back as far as it was allowed by her spine, her hair falling so far down her back it tickled her waist, her mouth upturned in a grin wide enough to lay in. This was the happiest woman he had ever seen in his life. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure if he actually had seen her in his life. He thought he probably had, that there’s no way she could have been in his mind if it hadn’t been placed there by experience, but it was pointless to try to be sure. He accepted that he knew who she was, and he pretended that he was in love with her. He pretended that they had been married, had a family, lived in the simple luxury of a country life somewhere green. He pretended that their years were spent in laughter, lovemaking, deep gazes, and poetic pillow talk. He pretended that their kids, now grown up with families of their own of course, were leading lives of meaning and substance. He pretended that any minute now one of them, a son perhaps, would walk through the door of his bedroom and sit with him as he waited to see the sun again. He pretended that the laughing woman in the field was in bed next to him, that one of her hands rested on his chest and the other one stroked his fine, white hair. He pretended that she was whispering the lyrics of his favorite songs into his ear. There was no harm in pretending, just in the inevitable realization that pretend is only pretend, and can never be anything else. And then she was gone and the memory of his created memories went with her.
The mattress of his bed sagged horribly in the middle so that he found himself trapped like a caterpillar in a cocoon. He couldn’t imagine ever getting himself off the bed again. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten into bed in the first place. Had he always been there? It was nearly too difficult for him to turn his head to face the window. How could he ever have lain down? Was there someone else here with him? Did he have a nurse, a maid, a friend, or a lover? He didn’t think anyone else was in the house, and yet he was certain he was not alone.
This certainty, though, seemed to come from a place deep down in the pit of his stomach, a bright and glowing place amidst the gloom and shadow of the rest of his body, a place inhabited by someone not yet born, not yet alive, not yet ready to emerge anew. It was an infant voice that insisted he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t prepared for that infant to climb out of its shell or womb or whatever enclosed it. Not yet. That time was not right. There were things to do first. He quieted the voice–or did it just quiet itself?–and focused all his energies into watching the scene beyond the window pane.
From his place on the bed, he couldn’t see his neighbor’s yard. And that was fine, that was just perfect. He didn’t care to see anything man-made then, just the sky. He wasn’t sure if the twinkling pinpricks of light in the sky were the stars are just the bright cracks of his corroding eyesight, but he chose to see them as distant suns and was delighted that there were so many in the sky.
The sky was less black now. Dawn was approaching.
Another image flitted across his inner field of vision like a hummingbird stopping briefly to suck pollen through his straw of a beak. This one was of a little boy sitting under water. It must have been in a pool of some kind because the water was so blue, so clear. He didn’t think he’d ever been to a tropical beach, so a pool it must have been. The boy was twelve years old and had his legs folded together Indian style. One of his hands pinched his nose shut while the other floated around on its own, at mercy to the will of the water. Little bubbles streamed out of the corner of the boy’s mouth. His eyes were shut tight. Streams of an even lighter blue color pierced the depths of the water, glinting off the boy’s arms and face, like spotlight on the stage. After an eternity of pure blue silence, the boy jumped up, eyes wide, and swam as hard as he could for the surface. His feet kicked out of view and the image was gone.
He realized that his eyes were closed. How long had they been shut? He opened them as wide as silver dollars. If he could have lifted his arms, he would have pried his eyelids open with his fingers. But his arms were too heavy. They lay limp and useless at his sides. He took as deep a breath as he could manage.
The sky was turning gray outside. The pinpoints of light stayed where they were. If they had been stars, they would hardly be seen now. He knew now that they were just more signs of his body’s rebellion against his soul; of his body’s relentless shutting down. He smiled and thought of them as stars anyway. He thought how wonderful it would be to see the sunrise and the stars at the same time. How lucky he was, how privileged.
There was a noise then from another room in the house. He couldn’t tell which room it came from, or even what other rooms there were. It came again, a loud thwump like an old washing machine that was spiraling unevenly. Nobody was doing laundry were they? Not in his house. He decided to ignore the noise and focus on the task at hand…
His eyes were closed again. He silently cursed himself, using every blue-stained adjective he could come up with, words that would make his mother do more than just blush. But they just made him laugh. They were ludicrous coming from his own voice–even if it was only in his head. They didn’t fit in his mouth, the vowels too short, the consonants too violent, and he was beside himself with the strange way they had found a passage through the muck to the forefront of his mind. Some things will never be forgotten, he supposed. Least of all the naughty things.
He felt his breath getting slower and slower, shallower and shallower. He knew the end was near. Hell, he’d known it for some time now, but there was immediacy to it now. All he had to do was close his eyes and exhale and he knew he would drift away forever.
Another image dangled before his mind like a stringed carrot before a racehorse, forever one step ahead before it was pulled out of sight. Here two black men sat across from each other at a fast food restaurant booth. One ate French fries, the other sucked on a milkshake. Neither of them left the other’s gaze. No words passed between them, not in the physical sense, but volumes were being spoken. They conversed about life and love and God and damnation and politics and sports and someone named Jeremiah. They argued, they agreed, they fought back and forth, and they reminisced. Neither of them moved except to eat and drink, but they were dancing arm in arm, hand in hand, forehead to forehead. Sometimes the dance was dangerous, yes, and sometimes it was downright bloody, but it was dancing all the same. They were intertwined in each other’s lives, each other’s souls, each other’s daydreams, and they held on to one another for dear, dear life. The one finished his last French fry as the other sipped the last glob of liquid ice cream, and they both stood up as one into the bright yellow shine of the sun’s light coming through the restaurant’s window. And as they did, that little carrot of a memory/dream/riddle was pulled away, leaving the racehorse of his mind to its own reckless devices.
He pulled himself out of his head. It was too dark in there, too murky, images and voices were emerging that had no right to be there. He felt like he had become a channel, allowing other people’s thoughts to flow effortlessly through his brain. It started as a small stream, trickling over bare rocks and untouched earth, desperately trying to make a path for itself, and was now like a raging bull of a river, knocking down trees, digging ravines, and crashing over the sides.
Outside, the sky was now a powdery blue. The sun was just moments away.
And then another sound from another room. Not a washing machine now, but an instrument. A brass instrument. It sounded too high to be a trombone or tuba and too low to be a trumpet. A French horn, maybe? No, it was too guttural. It sounded like power. No, it sounded like Power. Where was it coming from? Who was playing? The notes came through the wall like giant bubbles through water; slowly, grandly, and with purpose. They fell upon his weak ears with such thunder and gravity that he was forced to close his eyes despite his will to keep them open. But though the sheer power of the blasts of the horn was enough to rattle his bones, there was something about their unnatural length and adagio vibrato that lulled him in a way. It wasn’t putting him to sleep, nothing so cradling as that, but it was wildly hypnotic. He could sense, if not exactly feel, his organs pulse and sway with the rhythm of the music.
The uneven washing machine sound joined the thunderous horn and provided a kind of lop-sided percussion to the march. Was it a march? Was it anything so common as that? He thought it wasn’t. He thought the kind of music they were playing, if even it could be called music, had no name, no style, not category it would into.
The voice buried deep in the pit of his being, the infant voice, spoke up then and sang with the horn and drum. There were words, many words whose sounds were colorful and lively and epic in scope and meaning, but he couldn’t make them out. The sounds of the unseen instruments and the voice of the unseen being inside mixed together in an overwhelmingly other-worldly blend of soul and fire.
He felt the pull of the song, tugging at him like a leash, and resisted. He had business to conduct before he could allow himself to join the chorus of that ethereal symphony.
With all the strength he could muster, he opened his eyes and looked out the window. The powdery blue had been replaced by what he knew used to be a golden hue, but had since become a bronze rose. The sun would break the plane of his windowsill any moment now. He could already see the glare its shiny forehead cast on the ceiling of his bedroom. He watched with a nearly steady, almost straight stare at the space outside the lower pane of glass beside him.
The music, though he had tried his best to ignore it, or at least put it aside for the time being, was still present and louder than ever. If it was external, which he knew now it wasn’t, it would have burst his eardrums and made his eyeballs swell. But it was deep inside him, so it just filled him up, like a balloon-full of helium, and threatened to float him away on its grand orchestral wings.
Only the vision outside his bedroom anchored him to the earth.
His eyes, having been open for nearly a full minute now were excruciatingly dry, and at last he finally allowed that he would blink once, very quickly to wetten them, before opening them again. But he couldn’t. Try as he might, he couldn’t budge his lids. He could have laughed then, if he could have, at the irony this situation lended: here he’d been struggling like mad to keep his eyes open for hours and now, try as he might, he couldn’t force himself to close them. It seemed they were going to be open till the end.
And that was just fine by him.
The music, which was no longer music so much as a calling, grew louder, more sophisticated. Other voices joined the infant’s, other unimaginable instruments joined the horn and washing machine drum. And just as he feared, he felt himself being pulled up and out of bed, lifted from the world that he called home for who could remember how many years. And as he floated higher and higher yet, he found he was able to move his body with ease. He craned his neck and looked down at his bedroom. There he lay. Or rather, there lay the dry husk of what he had inhabited. It was a shrunken and shriveled body bent at a horrible angle in the concave cubby of the mattress so that its eyes could peer out the window. It was nothing now. Nothing at all.
He thought what a pity it was that he didn’t get to see the sunrise one last time.
And then he ascended further; through the ceiling, past the insulation, into the dusty open space of the attic, and finally beyond the poorly shingled roof. When he was surrounded by nothing more than the cool morning air, he stopped moving. He looked to the east, and there he saw the face of God.
Never had the sun been so big, so bright.
Never had music run so deep, so spirited.
Never had voices sounded so full, so inviting.
Never had he wanted anything more than this.
Copyright C. 2008 Peter B. Diseth