Chapter one from the R.M. Dolin novel, “What Is to Be Done.“
It’s late in the season of so much has happened with so much still undone. A season that began with the potential for paradise only to fall with the fragility of magic and memories dying to be left alone. It’s why Jake stoically sits on the edge of his predawn darkness. A silhouette on black. A contrast in relativity. A contradiction to the late spring Santa Anas churning the Upper Rio Grande valley in a cold vortex of sinister foreboding that stirs the still dead quiet of night. How can anyone sleep? How is it possible to pretend the placid security of dreams are enough to keep the desperation of life and the unforgiving absoluteness of solitude at bay?
Yielding to suffocating stillness, Jake’s gaunt unshaven face collapses into his hard-calloused hands. Stiff fingers press against bones that each day grow more pronounced, each graying whisker a thorny reminder of realities he can’t escape. Jake needs his first thoughts to be of Emelia. Yes, he’s awake and ready for his ride, yet he waits. Only after her alarm’s reassurance can he leave. Only that provides the context he so desperately seeks for everything sure to follow.
Years ago, Emelia downloaded a song from the movie Casablanca as her alarm tone. Not ‘As Time Goes By,’ as everyone assumes, but the French National Anthem from the night in Rick’s Café when Laszlo rallies his fellow expatriates to openly defy their German oppressors. Laszlo is Emelia’s most noble literary hero; often reminding Jake that true heroes fight for causes regardless of consequence. Of all the charming things to admire, Jake’s most impressed by the way Emelia draws inspiration from a movie and uses that as her foundational philosophy.
Each night Emelia sets her phone on the nightstand and stubbornly sleeps through the alarm forcing Jake to crawl over her to turn it off. “Oh, mon amour,” she would tease in a sultry voice rich with French overtones. “It is this side of heaven to awaken with your naked body pressing against mine.”
“How does a rational man respond to that?” Jake asks the darkness while reaching despondently for the alarm’s off button. With recursive regularity he reviews the starkness of his world one last time before willing himself up from his bittersweet bed. Stiffly he strides toward the unlit hallway, his bike cleats tapping a lonely cadence on the hardwood floor. Uncertain if his next breath is determined, instinctual, or even worth the effort, Jake pushes past kitchen shadows certain of life’s singular certainty; there are no redoes.
