Abandon

They’d nearly killed the bottle of wine. Abigail was feeling pleasantly buzzed now, working up a good sheen of sweat just sitting in the city heat, no relief but when the buses roared by, and she thought about that snowy night in the boardinghouse with Lawrence and the vision he’d shared of spending a Colorado summer with her, with grandchildren he would never have. There was still anger. God, plenty of that. She didn’t know how she’d ever be fully rid of it, but maybe there was space now for other things. Things that didn’t keep you up nights, that didn’t push good people away.

And she wondered where in that vast cave system her father had finally eased down to die, hoped he hadn’t been scared, and that when he’d finally broken free of all that freezing dark, he’d found his way to that Colorado summer and the man he might have been.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

—T. S. ELIOT, “BURNT NORTON”

Through the grottoes and tunnels of this cold and silent underworld, he returns, impossibly, to Abandon’s crypt.

The beam of his dying headlamp sweeps across the battered iron door—still closed, still locked.

She hasn’t come.

The disappointment cuts deeper than he imagined it would, despite having warned himself she wouldn’t anticipate his actually making it back to the cavern. He hadn’t figured on it, assuming instead he’d run out of light and die of thirst, lost in the granitic entrails of the mountain.

He turns away from the barred exit and walks back into the cavern among the bones, fearing his light will expire at any second, wanting at least to see and choose his final resting place.

Lawrence doesn’t procrastinate with the decision. He picks a spot along the wall beside a blond-haired skeleton wrapped in a deteriorated woolen jacket and slumped over on the rocky floor, the browned skull resting on the humerus of her left arm, Gloria watching the last flame of the last lantern sputtering in the middle of the cavern.

She wonders, Am I the only one alive? No one else has made a sound in hours.

The coal oil is nearly used up, the batteries almost dead, and they wait for the light to go away, each passing moment charged with the possibility they are seeing the last they will ever see of this world.

The flame recedes into the wick and the headlamp dims.

Lawrence pulls off his lamp, looks into the bulb, the light fading before his eyes.

Soon there is only the molten glow of the tungsten filaments, the lantern’s wick, then nothing.

He breathes in slowly, out slowly, trying to soothe himself with the proposition that this is where he belongs, a certain justice inherent with being locked in the mountain to die alongside the objects of his obsession, but finding little comfort in anything but the knowledge that his daughter is safe, thinking it must be a sad testament that saying those hard truths to Abby before she climbed out of the cave was the single decent moment of his life.

Time limps by in the black.

They tremble with helpless terror, thinking it’s death they crave, but they long only to be spared sitting alone with their fracturing minds, listening to death creep toward them.

Lawrence slides his arms out of the shoulder straps and unzips his daughter’s pack, lifting out the water bottles he filled at the subterranean lake and standing them up.

He takes one, unscrews the cap, and turns the bottle upside down. When he’s emptied them both, he throws the bottles out into the cavern, the plastic banging invisibly against the rock.

And Gloria and Lawrence gaze into the dark, thinking of a son, a daughter they will not see again, the images swarming and vivid, inlaid at once with such beauty and unbearable regret.

Chasing her little boy through an alpine meadow, sunlight caught up in his rusty hair, his high, small laughter resounding off the mountains as she tickles his ribs.

His little girl in his lap, turning the pages of some long-forgotten book whose words would crush him if he could remember.

Both, in their own way, thinking, This is hell—the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished.

In true dark, there is no gauging of time.

It moseys along and dawdles and hints at the horror of eternity.

At length, Lawrence folds the backpack into a pillow and settles down beside the bones of Gloria, whose shattered heart quits beating.