Imaginary Keith still lives here. It’s a fact. And I’m as curious as everyone as to why he hasn’t been talking. Could it be his dreams? Can dreams have the power to silence?
This morning I sat on the edge of the bed, watching my friend as he dreamt about hitting someone on the head with what looked like a bowling pin. The sound of the pin connecting solidly with the stranger’s head made me wince. But whoever it was he was hitting just kept coming on strong, and it was then that I saw that Imaginary Keith was trying to protect someone. He was giving it his best, swinging away with that bowling pin, and as I looked closer, I could see Imaginary Keith cringe each time the pin made contact. My friend has never been much of a fighter.
Eventually Imaginary Keith just grabbed the hand of the mysterious someone (a woman at this point) and took off running, dropping the bowling pin so he can concentrate on both escaping and some serious mathematical computations that he has begun to perform in his head. Just what are the odds that they will escape, he thinks. And what are the odds that the woman would actually have been attacked? As they race through the streets, dodging people and jumping in and out of buildings, Imaginary Keith does the math. He arrives at an answer just as the two of them jump a second story balcony rail and fall into a grassy area.
.25%, he thinks. Not even a 1% chance that this will end badly. Why are they running? Why was he hitting someone on the head?
Imaginary Keith stops dreaming after that. My friend may dream randomly, but he usually wakes like clockwork. It’s 6:00 a.m.
“Keith? Was I dreaming?”
“Yes you were Imaginary Keith. You were on the run.”
“I can barely remember. Did I get away?”
“You didn’t have to. There was nothing to run from in the first place.”
“But I think I was scared. I can still feel it.”
“Yes. But it’ll pass.”
“Keith?”
“Yes?”
“I wish she wasn’t dead.”
When I picked up the phone the other night and reached back across twenty five years of silence, I had no idea what waited for me on the other end. Time moves so slowly we cannot see ourselves growing grey, yet passes so quickly that the transformation is almost sudden. It is one of the paradoxes that makes time such a mystery, and one of the reasons that life can feel like a dream. I sometimes think it is my own mind, an uncrossable bridge, that spans the gap of this paradox. That it is only in thinking that we lose sight of understanding. In a dream, time is meaningless, and it is only after we awake that things become confusing and we find ourselves trapped on one side of the paradox.
“Keith, do you think it was an accident?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“She was too smart. I think she knew what she was doing.”
“I know.”
I just wish I could have seen her. I had something I always wanted to tell her.”
“I know.”
A list was made of the people who I might have called that night. The night I began poking at things with sticks. It was a good list, made by a friend, that somehow added to the mystery and the fun. Life, let’s admit it, is a guessing game. Everything from mindless entertainment to higher education revolves around the concept of learning or relearning something hidden from us. Babies play peek-a-boo at the same moment that scientists try to unravel the universe, but take away time and they are surprisingly the same game, a way to lose ourselves in the excitement and complexity of discovery.
“Imaginary Keith, what would you have said to her? It’s been so long.”
“I know. But I always thought that the moment I saw her I would know exactly what to say and how to say it. That it would all come to me when we were face to face. I don’t know. I think I wanted to apologize to her for being the way I was back then.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t know what I would have said. How does one even begin to apologize for being a boy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think you have to.”
“You don’t have to. But maybe sometimes you should.”
If I ever decide to attend a high school reunion, it would be to visit with three people. In my mind, the others might only be a distraction. Everyone except the three seem to have had little meaning to my life, and it is hard to imagine how this could have changed in twenty five years. Maybe I am wrong. But of all the people in my class there were three who did have meaning. Three who had an enduring impact. Cindy S. and Scott W., both of whose names made it to the list, and another girl, Valerie, whose name did not.
Funny, almost, that it is Valerie’s name that was left off of the list. Valerie - the girl who returned to high school after leaving early and attending college for a time. The girl who seemed to pass quietly through life, would become valedictorian, and who I would date for a time my senior year. The same girl who once told me to stop the car in the middle of a desolate, backwoods road, so that she could push back against her rigid, moral Church of Christ upbringing. So in the dim moonlight, on a small bridge above an even smaller creek, the two of us drew close and slowly danced. An innocent but important act in my mind, a sin in hers.
“What was she thinking about as we danced that night? Do you think she remembered it, Keith?”
“I’m sure she did.”
“For so long I was always sure it meant more to her, that dance in the moonlight.”
“I know.”
“But now that she’s gone, I’m not so sure anymore. Now I’m the one left remembering. I’m the one left to wonder.”
As I listened to the news of Valerie, and heard the story told as Valerie’s own mother had told it, I heard a story of sadness and mistake. A woman who ended up, somehow, as a person who drank too much. A woman who somehow made the mistake of drinking so much that she accidentally falls asleep in her car, parked in the garage with the motor running, before she has a chance to open the garage door. But those are the mother’s words, repeated to me by yet another. Words that seem to only say that there is no way for a mother to be able to understand what has happened to her only daughter.
But as I listened, I could only wonder. How could she do it? What turns had her life taken that led to that garage, where she sat looking for the strength to end? As I listened, I couldn’t help but think that Valerie passed from life in exactly the same way I remembered her living it, dying so quietly that twenty five years would pass before I would hear the sound.