Eric

In the sunset without a sun, the sky looked like a large, flat piece of white, opaque paper.

He looked at this canvas, so even, homogeneous, seemingly without edges. It extended beyond the small, continuous hills, which were black.

There were some houses on the hills, but they had fused into one with the mountain, disappeared under the shadow, into the blackness.

The water was the reflection of the sky, in the same dull whitish gray; there were a few small black fish swimming in it, making little ripples around him. He stood still, with his thighs half-submerged.

Because of the recent, unusual rain, the lake rose. A few feet from the gray sand banks, the water used to come up to his heels. Now even the metal railing was almost all underneath. Everything was either sinking, or resurfacing. The city of Atlantis.

Soon it became completely dark, and he got out.

He didn’t know how he got out of the hospital that day.

He just remembered making turn after turn—it was a labyrinth, every double door was the same, clean white, as every other double door, he pushed through one, and couldn’t tell if he had just come from the other side, the same hallway down either direction. The gates were still flapping by each other.

It wasn’t easy.

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What was truly strange was he couldn’t recall anything after that, as if he had very selective amnesia, how he got home, or anything that happened later that day, vague impressions.

Lately, he had found himself zoning out more and more often, forget what he was doing. At work, in stores buying things, crossing the street. He thought he was losing it.

He would have walked right in front of and gotten run over by a speeding moped once, had he not just heard a little dog barking behind him, making him stop and turn around. It was a stray dog, brown, slender. The dog sat on the sidewalk and looked at him, next to a bunch of luggage and suitcases, he didn’t know whom they belonged to. Its eyes flickered and glowed. Just this he remembered very clearly.

He never saw the dog again, there, or anywhere. There were too many stray dogs in the city.

The doctor told him. How long would he have, he asked him. Four weeks. A month. At most. Then he walked out of the hospital. That was it.

He didn’t tell anyone. The doctors gave him a lot of phone numbers, pamphlets, cards, and told him a lot of things he should, or needed to, do, to ’prepare.’ He didn’t want to do anything.

Lately he had gone swimming often in the community pool in the park. The pool water was oddly blue, yet clear, one could see straight through to the floor bottom. He liked to swim to the deep end, then prop himself up on the protruding edge, with the back of his elbows; his legs couldn’t kick to the ground. The water was so blue it looked almost poisonous.

The large pool was full of people. Kids laughing and yelling, and quieter, were adults talking, forming a loose net of murmurs, one pierced occasionally by a kid’s high shriek.

A mermaid slipped by under his feet. A black shadow. 3:05 pm, he looked at his watch. ’It’s raining,’ he heard someone near him say. Not to him. He looked up. Nothing. ’It’s raining.’ It’s raining, he heard more and more echoes.

He looked up again, squinting.

The sun was really bright. People were getting out of the water in droves. He felt it was a little funny.

He turned his palms up, trying to feel any rain. He began to see in front of him, very small ripples, appearing, one, another, more and more, until all the ripples had expanded into each other.

It suddenly began pouring. The rain kept rolling down his face, people screaming, laughing. Suddenly he found it a little hard to breathe.

Instinctively he pushed himself forward, away from the edge, sinking into the water.

That was where he met Aki.

The city at night glowed. The streets were empty, though, the climate suddenly cooling.

He was warm sitting in the subway train, slowly, coming to a stop. All the different colored signs down every street were lit, stacked on top of one another in any which way and orientation, like in that video game. But he couldn’t see anybody. What people had built, gloriously, went on with or without them. He pressed his hand on the train window; there was another, outer layer of glass, but his hand still felt cold.

The train reached the stop.

He walked along the edge of the platform. There were still not that many people. The weather really changed at a moment’s notice. Eric remembered that afternoon he met Aki, in a humid high-seventies.

She asked him, aren’t you getting out of the pool?

Oh, he said. He lifted himself out of the water, and sat on the edge.

Aki! I got the towels! A little boy yelled from the other end of the pool. He remembered her name.

Eric looked at her, and noticed her eyes weren’t on him. He was embarrassed right away. The girl named Aki was talking to someone else.

He got out of the water completely, stood up, and was about to leave; but he couldn’t help looking in her direction once again. Her body turned a little bit toward him, with her hands

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extended out, palms facing upward. She wasn’t looking at him, but through him. He saw her eyes were wide open, the black and the white clearly distinct, almost pure crystalline, glinting. Water rolled past her cheeks, like tears, but her face was completely expressionless, as if she had been crying, after a long while, having released already every feeling and emotion she possibly could, with there being nothing left now, but complete calmness, serene. But the tears hadn’t been wiped away.

He thought of the stray dog.

He forgot how long he stood there watching her. But he recalled the rain seemed to have sometime stopped.

It began drizzling. He walked faster.

There was a shop in view in front of him. A big golden neon sign La Villa, with diffuse incandescent light, emanating from inside the large single-pane glass storefront, in warm and vivid contrast to the subway train station next to it.

A man and a woman sat across from each other by the window. Couldn’t tell what the man was saying, his facial expression was deadpan; the woman kept laughing, and laughing, hardly being able to contain herself. Tears were brimming from her eyes, making them sparkle; she was wiping them away with her fingers.

He was outside, so he couldn’t hear them.

The coffee shop was almost full, there was someone at every table, students and their laptops, single women, middle-aged men in suits, families, couples. The entire city was found in there, again.

He and Aki were the couple by the window. He couldn’t forget how her eyes looked that afternoon.

He stood, at the lake, watching the invisible sun fall behind over the hills.

When the skies completely darkened, this would be his first memory.

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