The Dark

The doors closed and that was the last of the light.

I was still happy. For a while. I do not know how long, because there was no way to know how long.

His shoulder was against my shoulder. That was it. That was the entire content of my head for however long it lasted, and I have never had anything like it before or since, and I do not apologise for it.

The truck started moving.

Here is what a sealed metal box is. It is not a room. A room has an outside that air comes from. This was a container with fourteen people in it and whatever air had been in there when they shut the door, and the arithmetic on that is simple and everybody in there did it within the first hour.

Nobody said it out loud. You could feel the moment each person worked it out. It went round that box like something passing hand to hand.

It got hot.

Metal in the sun goes all at once. There was a stretch where it was uncomfortable and then a much shorter stretch where it was something else, and I could not tell you the hour because there was no hour, there was only before and during.

I had nothing to keep it out with.

This is the thing I have to explain and I am not sure I can. For months I had been walled up. Chemically, badly, but walled. Then they stopped giving it to me, because you do not waste it on stock that is leaving, and I came into that truck with everything wide open and no practice at holding anything shut.

Fourteen people. In a container. In the heat. All of it arriving in me at once, undiminished, with no way to sort out whose was whose.

I had one of them with a rosary. I could feel her working it and I could feel what it was doing and what it was not.

I had one who had decided, early, and gone quiet in herself, and that is a very particular thing to sit next to.

I had two who were angry, which does not last.

I had my brother, and I kept going back to him the way your tongue goes back to a tooth.

At some point I made a joke.

I do not remember what it was. I have tried. It was only the shape of a joke and I put it into the dark because the dark was full of people and I have never known another way to hand somebody anything.

Nobody laughed.

By then there was not enough air in that box for laughing and everybody knew it, and they were right, and I knew it too when I did it.

I have thought about that more than is reasonable. It is a small thing. It is the smallest thing in this entire account. And it is the one I come back to, because it was the first time I did the thing I have done ever since, and it did not work, and I did it again about four hours later anyway.

That is the whole of my method. Somebody should know.

The hours after that I cannot give you in order. I know we stopped once and did not open. I know somebody banged on the wall for a long time and then stopped banging, and that the stopping was worse. I know I stopped being able to tell how much of what was in me was mine, which had happened before, but never for that long and never with that much of it.

I know I was thirsty in a way I had not been before and have not been since.

And I know that somewhere in there the thing I had been carrying since the doors closed, the small warm ridiculous thing about his shoulder being against my shoulder, stopped being the thing I was thinking about.

Because he had gone quiet.

Not asleep. I would have known asleep. I know exactly what asleep feels like from the inside of somebody else and it is not that.

Quiet, in the way the girl who had decided was quiet.

And I put my hand on him and said his name, and he answered me, and he was fine.

He answered me.

He was not fine.

I knew that before he finished answering, and I had about a day left with him, and I spent the first part of it telling myself I had read it wrong.

I have never read anything wrong in my life.