From the R.M. Dolin novel, "What Is to Be Done"
Read companion poem
Chapter 17: Alternate Ending
Like every predawn morning for the past three months, Jake awakens somewhere between a memory and a dream; in that surreal purgatory, short of here and not really there. Saturday night’s tsunami and its after-effects reverberating through Sunday all the way to last night has left him needing to launch today with some sense of routine. This is why he waits, soon the French National Anthem, sung in Morocco, at a café called the Americain, will vault him into the systemic swirl of entropy that envelopes his life.
“I wish we could talk,” he tells his cherished photograph while delicately tracing tired fingers over barrier glass. “No doubt you noticed, I’m not getting much right lately.”
With regrettable regularity, the unscrupulous warden of the dark ushers Jake deep down the long corridor of agonizing regrets, stopping at the entrance of the night he tried, but just couldn’t find a way, to say good-bye.
He remembers someone helping him home for the first time in days. He’s never mustered the will to find out who, not knowing means maybe he never came home; then all of this really is the nightmare it seems. Knowing comes with consequences Jake would rather not own. Instead, he does just what he did then; stare blankly into the infinity of his nothing, devoid of thought, successfully avoiding having to come to terms with what it means to be a prisoner of utter emptiness.
The day of his last good-bye was the longest, saddest a life can contain. On rare occasions, when he’s able to force himself, he can vaguely recall some well-intended friend departing; of numbly plopping down on the living room couch too exhausted for cognition. One moment he’s being reassured things get better and the very next moment it’s five AM and the French National Anthem is rousting him to his new reality. In vivid detail he remembers rolling to his left as he’s done for years expecting to feel Emelia’s warmth, only that morning, he instead rolls off the living room couch colliding with the absoluteness of his abject hardwood floor.
Overcoming dazed confusion, Jake realizes the music’s from the box a nurse gave him on his way out of the hospital. La Marseillaise is only part way through when in an act of divine irony, the battery dies.
He remembers staring at the box feeling the numbing weight of his life draw down any sense of hope or happiness. Without thought or expectation, Jake rummages for her phone then trudges to their bedroom to charge it on Emelia’s nightstand. With overwhelming trepidation, he lies down uncertain if he’s allowed or even welcome in their bed.
In his pre-sleep state simultaneously shared by the conscious and subconscious, the impact of everything that’s happened cascades over him like a waterfall of marbles. He lays on his side of their bed mourning for the first time, a pain so infinitely profound tears continue to wash down his unshaved face long after exhaustion conquers sleeplessness. His last thought is the smell of Emelia on the pillow, a necessary reassurance he so desperately needs.
His very next thought is the rattled awareness that Laszlo’s once again taken up a heroic, albeit tragic, stand on stage in front of the orchestra as the band plays La Marseillaise.
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