He reclined his seat, hoping to rest his body while staying alert.
Dylan spoke as he chewed. “Keep pressure on that wound.”
Sleep crept into the car unobserved.
He sat with Mr. Reynard in his hospice room.
Jess hadn’t wanted him to go. She called his visits to the old manmorbid. He went anyway.
His past was unraveling at the edges.
Green’s little card table by Mr. Reynard’s bed held a clockwork picture of a moth with a perfectly spherical head shining like a mirror, a work in progress.
His elderly neighbor looked at him through a haze of pain and medication.
“Do you think you’ll ever get back together with that fiancée of yours? Jess?”
It was a strange question. They were still together.
“No, I don’t think so.”
He was answering with the future’s voice. The speed of his answer startled him.
Mr. Reynard coughed and took five slow breaths to recover.
“Why not?”
Green thought about it.
“You know, I don’t think she actually liked me very much. She would talk about me like I was work, like a second job.”
He waited out another rasping cough and recovery.
“Honestly, I once caught myself daydreaming about her just…disappearing. Moving out while I was at the office. Even having a car accident. Just, I don’t know, going away without me having to make any hard choices or be the bad guy. Not my proudest moment.”
Mr. Reynard watched him from the bed with wet eyes the color of old paper. His white stubble was becoming a snowy thicket in the hollows of his sunken cheeks. Green wasn’t sure if he was actually listening. He went on speaking with a future self’s voice.
“Kinda pathetic. I know. I was just so tired of selling her on the idea of me.”
Mr. Reynard looked at the ceiling and Green thought his mind had left the conversation and drifted elsewhere. That was fine. He just wanted to be near his friend.
“You’re right,” Mr. Reynard said. “Good for you. Marriage is hard, but it was never hard to love my Andi. Even when I was furious with her. A good partner makes you feel strong. Better to be alone than with someone who treats you like a chore.”
He shut his eyes. Green watched his pulse flutter beneath the thin skin at his temple.
“You deserve better,” he said in a whisper.
When he looked back at his art project, the moth was gone. The new picture had long copper minute-hand teeth.
Green woke shivering and started up the engine to run the heater, aware it wasn’t the first time he’d woken to do so.
2:55a.m.
He looked at himself in the rearview. In the dashboard glow, he felt conspicuous and vulnerable. Folded in the absolute dark of those woods, he was a solitary light, a beckoning glimmer in the permanent midnight of the ocean floor, bleeding out a shining summons into the dark, calling to unseen fish of unknowable size and appetites.
This time, he would keep watch until dawn. He could sleep when the sun was up. He could set up his tent and start camping the way it was meant to be.
Sleep returned.
