The After

by Darby Hyde

In the dream I had last week, my last night in the mountains, Nabokov helped me get a foreign object out of my eye. It was more realistic than most of my dreams - the moon was the moon, suspended just above Mount Anthony, illuminating the scene as he dug in my cornea. During the procedure, which was clinical despite the dew forming on my bare feet, he quoted my favorite of his books, Pharisees in Silver: “I know less than what has been told to me and yet more than what I have told to myself.” After fetching the little enemy, dropping it before I could ask to inspect, he shut my eyelids with his fingers as sharp as insect pins. I woke up. 

           What do I know? I know about my computer, my keyboard, the splintered holes in my window and the spiderwebs now framing the moon, capturing the dusty moth-fish of light particles, pale fire stolen from the sun. I know nothing about Mount Anthony now, which could be orange leaves, or all purple shadows and dark snow, and I haven’t told anything to anyone in a long, long time. The mornings are spent watching TV, pouring all of my education back out of myself and into the computer screen, my pores growing by the minute, my own brain throwing up particles of fire and rust when I try to stand up. Every memory is in Technicolor. Memories, Nabokov said, are shades aching for wine and bread, the dead meekly attempting to revive themselves, and I think that’s good for him, but my dead are dripping in chocolate syrup. 

           Everything I write is empty because I am empty. Let’s liven this up. Let’s make it Technicolor. Present in the present. I have bread and wine, I am craning my head back with a stranger emptying a sack of wine into my mouth on a wet field under the greedy moon and Elon’s satellites and a DJ playing something that sounds like cement mixers. Vladimir empties the wine bag, squeezing the last drops onto my tongue and I laugh, accidentally coughing some up and shooting it into my nasal cavity. It burns and I laugh at the burn. 

         I am a monad of a monad. Everything is an “I” to me and every time I speak about an “I” I get further from myself. Everything about me is about other people. 

         Nabokov is writing a new book. The Book of Before and After, dictating it to me, using a lot of words I’m not sure how to spell and names I’m not sure exist. He wants me to write the After. Soon, I keep telling him, but his face is cracking and graying, and I’m not sure how much more of the Before he has. 

         In 2 weeks I will have to move again. Gather my books and the ratty blanket I’ve been sleeping on, fix the windows before my landlord Moses sees. I’m not sure if Nabokov understands, or will even be intact enough to come with me. All he does all day is decay and talk at length about God, incest, his childhood, the Book of the Before.