Daphne rolls over to press her face into the cool part of the pillow, not yet awake but aware of an unusual presence in the room. Her blood runs cold as her attention snaps to the murky figure by the window staring out into the moonless night. Without breaking her gaze, Daphne quietly stretches out a foot in the direction of her husband Steven, who has occupied his side of the bed for more than thirty years. A quick poke, a determined push, but Steven does not move. The man could sleep through anything.
The window figure has not budged. Maybe it is just a shadow or a piece of furniture? A curtain, perhaps. These possibilities embolden her to move her hand. She slowly reaches out toward Steven under the coverlet, ready to shake him awake if necessary. With her flat hand pressing down and gliding forward, the coverlet never moves a whisper, not a breath.
Her finger tips make contact with bare skin just beneath his shirt, and the skin is cold – deathly cold – in sharp contrast with the warmth of their summer bed. She gasps, and the figure at the window turns abruptly toward the sound. “Are you awake?” the man croaks softly. The scratchy voice is familiar, and as she slowly processes the impossible, her terror grows.
“Steven?” she replies weakly, a question that is not a question. The grip of panic closes in on her chest, and she falls into a darkness so deep she cannot tell which way is down. If Steven is at the window… then who is this in her bed?
In a heartbeat Steven is at her side, holding out his hand. After a pause she sits up and takes it, reveling in his warmth. There is no reason to expect his hand to be cold, but she cannot shake the memory of what she felt just moments before. Steven’s touch slowly brings her back to the present, pushing the darkness and the chill to the back of her mind, far behind any vestige of tragedy or loss. Steven switches on the lamp and holds Daphne close. His familiar scent is a comfort, and she buries her face in his shoulder to breathe it in. Sandalwood from his soap, bergamot from his shampoo, the musk of his cologne. Daphne clings tight and weeps.
* *
Later that night Steven and Daphne talk in the kitchen in front of untouched cups of tea. They have sat at this table countless times before as spouses, partners, confidantes – but tonight somehow feels like the first time. “It’s just not possible,” says Daphne, clutching her robe with one hand while rotating the tepid teacup with the other.
Steven explains that he had a dream in which he had the ability to shed his body for a new version, the way a snake might shed its skin or a bird its feathers. His next memory was of being by the window, looking out at the starry night, feeling as optimistic as he had in a long while. Because of the dream, he was unsurprised at the sight of an inert, Steven-shaped blob lying on his side of the bed, though he was somewhat surprised to see it was not just skin but rather his full, three-dimensional body, now a distorted lump of lifeless mass. He realized then that the physical body must be like the snake’s skin but our whole person is much more. We must possess extra dimensions for our thoughts, our feelings, and our memories; perhaps even a dimension for the feelings and memories we evoke in others. “Daphne,” Stephen says quietly, touching her face with his palm, “I think I understand what a soul is.”
Daphne looks long into Steven’s face – his smile brims with emotion and the familiar eyes of his youth shine with the tears of a believer. He has not looked better in decades. His stomach is flatter, his hair is fuller, and his skin is clear of the subtle sun damage and telltale wrinkles of a sixty-something year old man. He also has not put on his glasses since they came downstairs. He apparently no longer needs them.
As they slowly accept this miracle, an awkward inevitability elbows its way into their conversation. “The elephant in the room, as it were,” Steven quips. What will they do with the molted Ex-Steven nestled upstairs in their bed? How do you dispose of a dead body that’s not anyone’s dead body? The practical issue is so pressing that the philosophical issue does not rise to discussion. And in this familiar place where they’d talked so often, under the stained-glass light shade relocated from their first house and the dumb cat clock with the pendulum tail, where they had shared so much joy for so many years, Daphne and Stephen construct a scheme to dispose of two hundred pounds of soulless flesh without anyone calling the police.
* * *
The first challenge is moving the body. Now fully conscious and in better light, Daphne can see that the Ex-Steven does not look that much like the real one. The blob has no hair, for one thing, and its skin has an ashen gray quality that makes it otherworldly. She is also no longer 100% sure what she means by “the real Steven” at this point.
Their first naive attempt proves to be a quick lesson in the term “dead weight.” The plan involves a transfer from the bed to a wheelie office chair, but Ex-Steven constantly shifts shapes, conspiring with gravity to evade their grip and escape to the floor. In concession to Newton’s laws of motion, they finally allow the floor to have him, albeit with a bit rougher landing than they intend. A bit out of breath, Daphne plunks herself down on Ex-Steven’s back, and smiles up at New Steven, bemused. New Steven sits down next to her on the body, and an unfortunate noise emanates from Ex-Steven like the long, final note of a bagpiper’s lament. Steven and Daphne suppress their laughter. Even though the body is not exactly human, it seems wrong to treat it inhumanely. But then Steven says, “I guess that was just a bit of soul music,” and they both completely lose it.
Sobered by the significant effort to get Ex-Steven just from the bed to a chair in the corner of the room, Daphne and Steven return to the kitchen table to form a plan. That is to say, Daphne explains the plan she has been forming all along. The renovation of the town’s library, which had burned down the year before, is nearing completion just a few blocks away, and Daphne knows for a fact they are pouring concrete the next day. Steven was the director of the library for years, and Daphne has been very involved in fundraising for the reconstruction. Assuming all is on schedule, the cement truck will be filling around the foundation at daybreak. This is the heart of the disposal plan: bedroom to garage to car to library site, just in time for the cement pouring.
Steven, the art major turned librarian, helpfully gathers several books on medieval engineering as well as a pad of drawing paper. “I think I can save us the intermediate steps,” he says in the familiar tone of his endless bad jokes. As his cheeky sketch of an authentic counterweight trebuchet emerges on the paper, Daphne looks on as if he is magic. She cannot fathom how the quick strokes of his pencil can uncover the image so precisely and so effortlessly. When he adds the very realistic likeness of the blobby Ex-Steven in the trebuchet sling, she laughs out loud.
As the one with her head in the real world, Daphne asks, “What will you use for a counterweight?” and is met with an empty silence familiar to every classroom teacher. Daphne smiles and starts working out the engineering principles – this is her forte. As her paper fills with calculations – simple physical principles extrapolated and applied to the dimensions in the drawing – Steven looks on as if she is magic. He is amazed with the speed in which the equations and numbers fill the page, accurately predicting exactly how such a device might function. Their friends have always admired the yin and yang of their relationship. Some say they are not so much “of the same mind” as they are complementary parts of a single, remarkable person.
Daphne puts the pencil down and feigns a gloomy prognosis. “I’m afraid we would need about 20,000 pounds of counterweight to get Ex-Steven all the way to the library from here.”
“We could use the car,” Stephen suggests, having no practical idea how heavy a car is. Daphne smiles and sketches out an alternative plan. This one uses their wheelie office chair, some area rugs, and one of their kayak paddles. It is just as hilarious as Steven’s idea, though without the realistic illustrations. The difference is that Daphne’s plan will actually work. As she finalizes the math, she notices Steven is not looking at the paper but is instead smiling at her. He clearly has been waiting all evening to ask her this question: “Do you know what today is?”
She looks at his boyish smile and knows something is up. She knows it will be dumb, and she knows it will be sweet. The last time he asked this question, a few years back, it was their 10,000th day of marriage, which Steven decided warranted a special evening out. He has always loved counting life events in days, weeks and months, because that provides so many interesting anniversaries to celebrate. He has an acute sense of the passage of time that belies his general apathy about other real world quantities like the weights of cars. Daphne (along with most other rational people) does not keep track of time the way Steven does, but she knows how much he enjoys it, attributing the behavior to his spending too many days in an environment where everyone speaks in whispers.
“Is it our 12,000th day of marriage?” Daphne guesses, after some quick mental calculations handicapped by not quite remembering how long ago the 10,000-day anniversary had been.
“No, tonight is the night we will have been married for one billion seconds,” Steven beams. “The exact moment will happen just before dawn, in fact.” The mention of dawn triggers a check of the time, and they see they can manage a few hours sleep before this milestone and still have plenty of time to get rid of the body once and for all.
* * * *
Still laughing at the ridiculous evening, they head upstairs to collapse in the same bed where their whole adventure began. Barely able to keep her eyes open, Daphne lies on her side and Steven nestles behind with an arm around her waist and his face pressed against her back as he has done countless times before. In this shifting shadow between dream and reality, she feels him squeeze close and hold tight until their hearts beat as one. And now, in a time outside of time, the couple’s pulse counts down the seconds from one billion, finally reaching zero and Daphne drifts away.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
