Dying at Nighttime

It was March and winter wasn’t finished with us. It wouldn’t be warm at night for a solid three months and we knew it, but everyone was tired and excited and the sense of completion made us giddy enough to turn up the music, turn down the windows, and wrap our arms around each other for warmth in the back of Ryan’s dying Volvo. Hours earlier, the car wouldn’t start in the driveway, until some force of will that charges all indie film shoots smiled on the ignition. We were riding back into Boston with our fingers crossed.

We wrapped early on the set, and I took all the credit for the tight, efficient schedule. I knew it wouldn’t take three days to shoot a script that short, and I solved the mathematics of actors, lighting set ups, and an itchy director so it equaled four meals and a late night. Assistant directing requires the skill of surprise party timing, political handshakes, and a hidden ruthlessness. You have to choose when you’ll raise your voice to make silence, and what to utter to make it last.

For all the spoils of a well-crafted shoot day, I was content to know I’d sleep in my own bed that night. Film sets always seem so much longer than real time, displacing you that much further from sleep. At the most, I hoped for a fightless night with my recent re-boyfriend. At the least, I hoped for the heat in the house to be turned on. Both were just as basic as they were unlikely. With the music and the cold surging through our rickety time-machine, I forgot even my slim hopes and drew my arm tighter around my co-producer.

From under the river, in the mouth of the tunnel, the accident was instants old. I saw this arm, a normal arm, spilled hair, small glass, too much blood. The car was still rocking on its side. The exit of the rabbit hole, every fast emerging car coming up for air would risk what this car lost. We were a mile past it before my mind saw anything and I realized we had left the scene. The music played the whole ride home, the wind slid over our patches of numb exposed skin, turning with the wheels, all things automatic now without their magic. I didn’t know what happened, and we’d never know, and they would never know. It was over and if we hadn’t seen it then, it may as well have never had happened, like any fluttering action pinned down to a strip of film.

The house was cold, and stairs creaked their goodnights as we climbed to find our patiently waiting dreams. My co-producer changed back to my roommate and into her pajamas. The blankets returned my body heat back to me twofold, but underneath them I still felt exposed. In the hallway between our rooms, the drafts of cold air carried the ghosts we believed to occupy the old house. The light gusts from under doors and windowsills lingered the whispers of shouting arguments between the lovers that came and went. It trembled with our small fears of yet another break-in, after the one our ramshackle fortress had already sustained. This the same wind that bursts from the subways and tunnels, from under the Charles, dispersed the last snowflakes of the season around the city like shattered glass around twisted metal.

And when the draft went still for a moment, I realized I must still be awake. Not a ghost, not a victim, alive in my bed. In a deep breath I fill my lungs, and let it rush out into the night.