Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [178]
Now she was in my dream, sitting on the stairs behind white balusters. Blocking my way were those giant men in suits, and there was someone new in the middle of them, a black man closer to my size and better dressed than them all. He was in his middle age, just the beginnings of curled gray at his temples. In his right hand he held a Bible to his chest, and I was still struggling to get free and he was saying something to me that I was ignoring and I swung around and shot a look at Fontaine through the balusters in the stairs. Her face was still and accepting of my fate; there was nothing she could do, and I dropped back onto my right foot and scanned these towering Christians for the one I’d have to hit, my last chance. Then the preacher’s voice rose above the masculine noise of the house, his words amplified somehow. I could look nowhere but at his brown face, the dark light of urgency in his eyes as he shook his head and yelled, “You’re gonna die.”
I opened my eyes to blackness. The preacher’s last words hung in the air like an echo. I peered into the dark for him, for surely he must be here in this room where even coming out of sleep I had heard him.
You’re gonna die.
Seconds before, when I was still in the dream, I’d begun to hear these words as a warning that I must change, but no more: this was a predictor of my immediate future; I would die here in England where I lay next to my wife in a soft bed on the second floor of this stone cottage in the country outside Oxford.
I sat up against the headboard. We were staying in her cousin’s house, and out the second-floor window there was no moon, no streetlights, no stars. I opened my eyes wider but could only begin to see the pale plaster of the wall. With a sick dread opening up in my abdomen and chest, I knew I would probably die today or maybe the next and it would have to be violent, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that what the black preacher’s eyes were telling me? That violence begets violence, no matter who you claim you’re defending or protecting?
But I didn’t want to die. I was thirty-one years old. I was in love with my wife. We wanted to make a family. We wanted all those things people want before they, too, are cut down.
If I’d thought I’d felt terror before this I was wrong. The man I’d lived long enough to become fell away and I was a boy again, one who was not going to make it. Beside me, Fontaine slept curled on her side. We’d made love before falling asleep, and now I wanted to wake her, I wanted to tell her my dream, I wanted her to tell me that’s all it was.
The month we got married, troops in Bejing marched on the peacefully protesting students of Tiananmen Square. They bludgeoned and ran over and shot to death hundreds. In the heart of the crowd was one of the leaders and his girlfriend. She was young and lovely and smart, and she could see now that most of the advancing soldiers were their age, young people from outside the city, the sons of farmers and truck drivers. One of them raised his weapon and shot her boyfriend in the head. She screamed, “Why?! Why?! Why?!,” and the next round tore through her face and out the back of her skull and she collapsed dead across her boyfriend’s body next to the bodies of the others who had tried to change their world.
This moment was witnessed by a journalist, and long after reading it I kept hearing the young woman scream Why? Why? Why? This was true innocence, wasn’t it? Innocence is asking why to brutality. But when innocence is gone, you don’t ask why anymore; one merely expects it and either fights it or runs from it or does something in between.
There was no reason to wake Fontaine. Sometimes fate is cruel and clearly mine was to die on this two-week trip to Europe.