Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving

30. Atlantis

206 Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving 30 Atlantis  Mark Doty 1. FAITH “I’ve been having these awful dreams, each a little different, though the core’s the same— we’re walking in a field, Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass with a highway running beside it, or a path in the woods that opens onto a road. Everything’s fine, then the dog sprints ahead of us, excited; we’re calling but he’s racing down a scent and doesn’t hear us, and that’s when he goes onto the highway. I don’t want to describe it. Sometimes it’s brutal and over, and others he’s struck and takes off so we don’t know where he is or how bad.This wakes me every night now, and I stay awake; Mark Doty, “Atlantis,” from Atlantis: Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Relatives, Lovers, and Friends 207 I’m afraid if I sleep I’ll go back into the dream. It’s been six months, almost exactly, since the doctor wrote not even a real word but an acronym, a vacant four-letter cipher that draws meanings into itself, reconstitutes the world. We tried to say it was just a word; we tried to admit it had power and thus to nullify it by means of our acknowledgement. I know the current wisdom: bright hope, the power of wishing you’re well. He’s just so tired, though nothing shows in any tests, Nothing, the doctor says, detectable; the doctor doesn’t hear what I do, that trickling, steadily rising nothing that makes him sleep all day, vanish into fever’s tranced afternoons, and I swear sometimes when I put my head to his chest I can hear the virus humming like a refrigerator. Which is what makes me think you can take your positive attitude and go straight to hell. We don’t have a future, we have a dog. Who is he? 208 Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving Soul without speech, sheer, tireless faith, he is that-which-goes-forward, black muzzle, black paws scouting what’s ahead; he is where we’ll be hit first, he’s the part of us that’s going to get it. I’m hardly awake on our morning walk —always just me and Arden now— and sometimes I am still in the thrall of the dream, which is why, when he took a step onto Commercial before I’d looked both ways, I screamed his name and grabbed his collar. And there I was on my knees, both arms around his neck and nothing coming, and when I looked into that bewildered face I realized I didn’t know what it was I was shouting at, I didn’t know who I was trying to protect.” 2. REPRIEVE I woke in the night and thought, It was a dream, nothing has torn the future apart, we have not lived years in dread, it never happened, I dreamed it all. And then Relatives, Lovers, and Friends 209 there was this sensation of terrific pressure lifting, as if I were rising in one of those old diving bells, lightening, unburdening. I didn’t know how heavy my life had become—so much fear, so little knowledge. It was like being young again, but I understood how light I was, how without encumbrance,— and so I felt both young and awake, which I never felt when I was young.The curtains moved —it was still summer, all the windows open— and I thought, I can move that easily. I thought my dream had lasted for years, a decade, a dream can seem like that, I thought, There’s so much more time . . . And then of course the truth came floating back to me. You know how children love to end stories they tell by saying, It was all a dream? Years ago, when I taught kids to write, I used to tell them this ending spoiled things, explaining and dismissing what had come before. Now I know how wise they were, to prefer that gesture of closure, their stories rounded not with a sleep 210 Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving but a waking. What other gift comes close to a reprieve? This was the...