At our wedding, in a part of the vows I didn’t know was coming, my wife-to-be gave me an oval loaf of ciabatta. This is not a symbol. It’s not a metaphor. It’s just a loaf of bread. I made it. I baked it. It’s food. We can eat it together tonight. From each according to her abilities, eh? Just stay with me, spring through winter. Stay with me when there’s nothing left. I’ll stay with you. There’ll always be food enough.
I lost it, idiot that I am. I don’t even like bread. But I wasn’t alone. After an equally unrehearsed pause, Aly sighed and said, Okay. Maybe it is a metaphor. And all the crying people laughed, even my mother. After, we had a great party.
She warned me, at the start, that she had nightmares. I deal with some grim stuff, Theo. A lot of days. It gets into my dreams. You sure you want to sign on for sleeping next to someone with the screaming meemies?
I told her if she ever needed company in the middle of the night to wake me up.
Oh, I’ll wake you up, all right. That’s the problem.
The first time, I thought she was screaming at someone coming into the room. I shot up, my heart seceding from my chest. My lunge woke her. Still in limbo, she broke out crying.
“Honey,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
It’s not okay!
Her rebuff was so violent I almost got up and went to sleep in the other room. Three in the morning, the woman I loved was weeping in the dark, and I wanted to tell her how badly she’d just hurt me. That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it’s different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.
“What was it, Aly? Tell me, and it’ll go away.” We like to say, Tell me everything. Everything. But always with the tacit proviso that there’s nothing truly horrible to tell.
I can’t tell you. And it won’t go away.
Her sobbing subsided as she came awake. I tried again. “What can I do?”
She showed me: Shut up and hold her. It seemed too small a thing, something anyone at all might do. She fell asleep in my arms.
She woke early. By breakfast, it was as if nothing had happened in the night. Doing her mail, she basked in a pool of sun like some strong, green thing. I thought she might tell me now, describe the horror that had awakened her screaming. But she didn’t volunteer.
“You were on the ropes last night. Bad dream?”
She shuddered. Oh, sweetie. Don’t ask.
Her look begged me to let the whole thing drop. She didn’t trust me; I wasn’t a true believer. I hid that thought, but she read me like a primer.
My worst nightmare. She looked around the room for a way to placate me without getting into details.
“In my worst nightmare, you’re lost in a foreign city when the sirens start going off. And I can’t find you.”
She took my hand, but her smile faltered. I was wasting my energy worrying about such a small thing when we were living in the middle of a vaster catastrophe.
They think we’re neurotic, Theo. That we’re a bunch of nutjobs.
I was not included in that disparaged we. She meant her kind, the ones who could feel their way across the species line.
Why is it so hard for people to see what’s happening?
Her night screams grew so familiar they stopped waking me fully. Over time, she let me in on them. In her dreams, other kinds of life could talk, and she understood them. And they told her what was really happening on this planet, the systems of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. Human appetite’s final solution.
In sunlight, she worked flat-out. I’d drive her to the Capitol on days when she lobbied, and I’d pick her up at night, at the bottom of the southern stairs. The day’s results mostly satisfied her. But in the evenings, after two glasses of red wine and a poetry session with her rescued mutt, she could turn panicky again.
What happens when they’re gone? When it’s just us? How is this going to end?
I had no answer. We’d fall asleep spooned against each other, making what comfort we could. And every few nights, she’d wake up screaming again.
But until the end, there would be battle. She was built for it. One afternoon, I watched her in front of the bathroom mirror, suiting up for war: blush, mascara, hair gel, lip gloss. She’d helped draft a call for nonhuman rights that she planned to promote throughout the Upper Midwest. That meant playing on the animal emotions of lawmakers of both sexes, in ten different states.
Take no prisoners. Right, man?
The barnstorm campaign was to start that evening, on home turf, in the southern wing of the Wisconsin Capitol. She hummed a song as she dolled up. The cuckoo’s a fine bird, she sings as she does fly. And when she cries cuckoo, then summer is nigh. The bill she backed was decades ahead of its time. It had no chance in hell of passing, and she knew it. But Aly played the long game—a game as long as there was time left to play.