The Shade of Eternity

Let’s talk about the shade of white.
Absolute color makes up the Light.
But even white’s made dark by night,
When the brightness shines no more…

Let’s talk about the endless dark,
The night which holds no single spark,
All voices merge, but never hark.
In the end all souls are poor…

Enlightened, damned, happy, sore,
It matters nevermore…

Oh, merciful and timeless Dark,
I surrender to your lure.

Let’s talk about the shade of eternity.

—Vero

- - -

They never found my daughter’s body. Just a crumpled piece of paper in a small clearing of the forest in which she was lost. The girl’s mysterious last words have rarely left my mind since the moment I set eyes on the poem. What were you trying to tell us, Veronica?

- - -

“Now close your eyes…and tell me what you see.”

The little girl closes her brilliant green eyes. “It’s dark,” she says. “It’s cold. Quiet. So quiet. The sound of your breath booms in your ears; the sound of your thoughts can be even louder…so that soon they are all that you can hear…” The high-pitched voice has begun to tremble.

I bite my tongue against the words: Now open your eyes, Babydoll, and come back to me.

- - -

John called Veronica Babydoll. But that was back in the old days, the good times when we were still a family—John and I in our late twenties and then early thirties; Veronica a normal, happy little girl, with her mother’s green eyes and her father’s pale, red-headed Irish features; Krystina a healthy baby who seemed already to carry those exact traits.

Granted, John was always a little odd, but that was part of why I loved him so. There were times when his blank stare and strange ponderings would chill me to the bone, but they were always overshadowed by the other times, when his love and warmth would light up the world of my children and I.

He was especially good to our daughter, Veronica, who often seemed closer to my husband than I ever was. They would have conversations like to the ones John used to attempt with me—about trances and “darkness”—and as they spoke, they would smile and nod and seem to understand each other. I avoided listening in on these conversations—they frightened me.

- - -

“Mommy…?” my daughter whimpers.

“I’m here, Krystie.” I put my hand on her shoulder. It doesn’t move a fraction of an inch. She feels like a statue.

“Mommy…” she says in a cold and familiar voice.

I feel my bottom lip tremble. “Find Veronica for me, Honey. I know you can do it.” Krystina doesn’t reply, but her own lip stops shaking and she seems to concentrate. Again, I feel that she’s leaving me, and I experience another strong urge to bring her back. But I fight it. I hold my breath and watch the little psychic scan the cosmos for her older sister.

- - -

She loved Veronica and connected with her like neither of them ever connected with me…and as I sometimes felt that I had never connected with my own husband. Perhaps Veronica took John’s place in the family when he…left. It certainly seemed that way. Veronica was happy and fairly normal before she lost John. But after that day, she became quiet, contemplative. She began to write strange poetry which reminded me invariably of my husband, particularly the side of him of which I was always afraid.

Yes, she took her father’s place in the world, but not completely—when John’s warmth left the earth, so did Veronica’s.

And yet she was there, as she swore that John was not.

I remember the day all too clearly, when John made the breakthrough he had waited his entire life to make—when he left our simple realm.

He had just finished talking to Veronica, who was only ten at that time. He touched her cheek with his thumb and sent her out to the school bus. “They’re good kids, Nadine,” he said to me. “They’re special, too. They know things—understand things—that normal children could never grasp…along with most adults, I’m sure.”

I laughed a little. “Of course. They’re your odd-ball daughters.”

He smirked. “Ours.” I almost laughed again and then stopped, staring into his light gray eyes, which were always blue when he was in his earthly mind. There was something there, a glimmer of a message that was far from humorous. A touch of premonition.

- - -

“I’m cold…” my daughter says, jerking me from my calm reverie and back into the equally heart-wrenching present time. Her voice no longer wavers; in fact, nothing but her lips seems to move at all.

“Is Veronica cold?”

“Veronica was always cold.”

I realize how hard I’m breathing, how quickly my heart is beating. People of thirty-seven do have the occasional heart attack, don’t they? Especially those who experience excess stress…I cough and wipe the frightened tears from my eyes. “Where’s Veronica, Baby?”

“She couldn’t stand the cold anymore.”

“He’s cold.”

“No, Veronica. Living people are warm. Your Daddy is alive.”

“No.”

“Veronica…”

“My father is not in there! If you can’t see that, you’re stupider than I thought!”

“He is, honey. He’s just sick right now. He’ll get better.”

“He’s gone.”

For the time being, I don’t ask Krystina anything else.

- - -

After Veronica left for school and Krystina—then only one—had been put down for a nap, I thought that I might speak to John personally. It had been too long since we’d really talked.

But when I said his name, he simply put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my lips in an unaffectionate way. I almost recoiled at the feeling it gave me—it was as if I did not know him at all. “I have work to do.” He walked into his office, his movements almost robotic.

For hours, I awaited his return, but since we were in the same building already—and since he felt at least a trillion miles distant at the moment—I resigned myself to waiting for a while.

At a random moment in my wait, I began to miss him terribly, unexplainably, as if he had indeed left on some fateful and potentially eternal journey, as if I may actually never be able to see him again. I suddenly felt frantic.

I didn’t usually go into his office while he was working. He was kind, but I knew that he would never forgive me if I distracted him during what might be a very successful day of writing. I barged in now.

He sat catatonic in his computer chair, already turned away from the desk and staring straight into my eyes, as if he had somehow known that I would enter the room. His eyes were more than gray; they were…white, clear…No, they were gray, but they were different…

His eyes seemed to turn blue one last time, though they did not change physically at all. “I love you, Nadine.” He grunted and kicked the front of his computer tower in, destroying it. He began to cry, and then to laugh. I was terrified. I called nine-one-one. He was rushed to the emergency room and classified a schizophrenic within that week.

I remember the look on Veronica’s face when she came home. There was no way she could have known; the school had not been called. “Let me see him,” she said in a voice that was almost inhuman in its coldness. I told her that Daddy was sick and that he needed to be alone for a while.

She said that she would hate me if I did not comply, but I felt that the words did not begin to express her seriousness.

I took her right away.

After less than a minute of speaking to her father through a thick pane of glass, she turned to me, tears in her eyes and a look on her face so blank and resigned that I felt my throat tighten.

“Honey…” I said.

“He’s cold.”

Her voice shocked me in that way that John’s voice had always shocked me. “No, Veronica, living people are warm. Your daddy is alive.”

“No,” she said, pushing past me and walking quickly toward the door.

“Veronica…” I followed her, putting my hands on her shoulders.

She violently jerked away, turning to face me, her voice now alive with rage. “My father is not in there! If you can’t see that, you’re stupider than I thought!”

I coughed, failing to control my tears. It was all falling apart; my family was dying. “He is, Honey,” I said, swallowing. “He’s just sick right now. He’ll get better.”

“He’s gone,” she said, her voice cold once again.

We did not speak of it anymore that day, and rarely so much as mentioned John from that point on. John never spoke again. He appeared to possess brain activity, and was capable of being led by foot from one location to another, but was otherwise unresponsive and utterly catatonic.

His heart stopped mysteriously a month later, and Veronica never so much as flinched at the news. While I cried, she said coolly, “Don’t waste your time. Father’s gone; he’s been gone.”

- - -

Minutes pass. Finally, I speak to Krystina again. “Is Veronica dead, Honey?

“Veronica is gone.”

“Where is she?”

“Nowhere.”

“…Is she dead then?”

“She’s in The Darkness. With Father.”

- - -

I think of that day a year ago, the day that I came home to find Krystina sitting Indian-style on the sofa, the room dark, the TV off, with the quiet, resigned look of Veronica. Veronica was fifteen then, and Krystina was six.

“Vero went for a walk in the woods,” she said to me.

“Did she tell you that?”

“No. I saw her.”

“When?”

“An hour ago.”

“You were in the woods?”

“No.”

“…It’s getting late. I should go find her.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “She’s left.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s gone.”

I remember how quickly I ran to the phone to call the police, to scream that my daughter was missing and that I wanted to see every cop in the state searching the nearby forest until she was found. What I remember most clearly is how calm my youngest daughter seemed throughout the whole ordeal, as if, for her, hope was already lost, and, somehow…it didn’t even matter.

- - -

“But what is the ‘darkness!’” I yell at Krystina.

“The truth.”

I sob uncontrollably. “What does that mean!” I try to shake her, but her body is like stone.

“Nothing. The Darkness is The Nothing. It is The Everything.”

“But Veronica is in this place?”

“Yes.”

“And Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Then it must be something!”

“Yes. No.”

“Then tell me what it’s like! Tell me what they see!”

“Nothing. Quiet. Darkness. Madness. Everything is here, but it means nothing.”

“Tell me what they see! What they feel!”

“Spinning. Everything’s spinning! I spin with Everything! We spin with Everything!” She has begun to yell, to tremble. Her hands grasp at the air before her, as if trying to catch hold of something substantial. I reach out to her. Her grip is tremendous. I feel a crippling pain erupt in my fingers and hear at least three snapping sounds.

“Spinning, falling! Falling forever and never hitting the ground!” She releases me and begins digging at her own arms with her fingernails. Drawing blood.

“Krystie!” I screech, lifting her off of the sofa and holding her in my arms, my mutilated hand throbbing.

She screams. The volume is impossible, the pitch that of a siren. She squirms free and falls to the floor, the sound ceasing. Her eyes open and stare at the ceiling.

I know now that I have made a horrible mistake. I approach her, crying. “Krystie?”

“Don’t bother,” she says. “There’s nothing left.”

I call the police, but for the first time, I truly believe what my daughters said—they’re gone. I sent Krystina into the “darkness” myself, and I still don’t know what it is.

“The ‘darkness’…” I mumble as I hang up the phone with my good hand. “It took everything from me. What is it? What does it all mean! What is the point? Why am I here? Why is any of it…”

Suddenly, I feel an odd sort of calm come over me. “Why is this wall?” I say, my vision becoming hazy. “Why is this phone?” I run my fingers gingerly across the cool plastic of the receiver. “Why is it that when I touch this thing—this thing called ‘phone’—why is it that it’s solid? Why does it not simply break apart, become what it is—nothing…Darkness…?”

It is at that moment that I feel The Darkness approaching. I hear it like a tidal wave fit to wash away the entire world—horrible, peaceful…

True.

It is at that moment that I know that if I touch the wall before me, it will crumble into nothingness, and I will do the same.

I know this for certain.

Because what I know is what is.

That is how it’s always been.

And once you believe and understand The Darkness…

It is all that you can ever know.

My physical fingers, which no longer pain me, reach out and touch the wall. As if composed of a brittle glass, it breaks away, the shards falling into the gaping dimension of pure nothingness which exists beyond all Existence. As the most intimate secrets of the massive Creation begin to flash across my limited human mind, I feel myself shriek, as Krystina shrieked and John shrieked; I feel the last of my humanity and individuality cry out for recognition, for the sake of its own existence, as it is pulled farther and farther from my true being and until it finally dies. And then I become silent, and I allow myself to fall into the blackness, leaving the world behind. I am faintly aware that my physical body falls to the floor. Suddenly, I know everything there ever was to know—of the past, of the future, of the endless branches of possibility which surround every moment of every timeline encoded in the very core of every realm. There is no present moment. The laws of Physics are the laws of Man, and Man’s existence is nothing more than the faint residue of some long-forgotten dream. And I can see all of Time now because I can no longer interfere. The Nothing can never interfere, except to call back its parts as it did to Nadine Robinson early one earthly night, and only the individual soul—which is always still The Nothing—can call itself back, which is not interference as it happens within the bounds of earthly time. The dimension of Earth is only one of many, of infinite worlds and realms with no more meaning than the former. And I see it all now, in the one eternal Moment of The Darkness, which I have now entered and become.

I see Veronica Robinson, one year before Nadine Robinson and Krystina Robinson fall into The Darkness forevermore. I see her walking into the forest with a notebook and pen in hand. She feels close to The Darkness now. She just nearly understands it, and wants it to take her in. She begins to write.

She feels the wave approach. She sees The Darkness before it takes her, and she is afraid. She scribbles some words—which are just beginning to lose their meaning—as she screams like all the rest. Yes, even Veronica who was half a part of The Darkness for years, who so long plead with it to take her, to usher her out of her loneliness for her beloved father, screams as she realizes that even her love for said man would be overpowered and diminished by the great truth that exists beyond all levels of philosophical speculation—the truth which has more and less meaning than any absurdist could have guessed. At the very end, the wave hits her and she feels the calm ocean of Forever pool around her face. She wills her earthly body to write just a few more words, which now mean close to nothing at all, and signs the name she was given at birth. She tears out the page and drops it to the ground.

I see her, a timeless, pristine young beauty of the ultimately insignificant human race. Her curly, red hair is nearly to her waist, her pale skin glistening against her black sleeveless dress. Her green eyes have, at the last moment, turned very gray. Set behind her is the picturesque backdrop of the sunset at it’s most beautiful—blue and orange and pink and red. As she walks, she fades, out of the world and into The Darkness, taking with her the physical body, along with her book and her pen. They are nothing. It is all nothing. So she surrenders to The Nothing. And she becomes one with me, with what was once my husband, and what was once my younger daughter, and it has always been so. The Nothing which is The Everything is only one being. Every soul has been here, and every soul will eventually return.

Every soul is here.

I see Nadine Robinson’s physical body turn to dust, along with that of her family and everyone she has ever known. The carbon atoms will separate and recombine countless times to form human and diamond alike, and after less than a trillion more years, they will be surrendered to The Nothing as well.

Gods and goddesses and heavens and hells and traveling ghosts will all come and go, but The Darkness is eternal. And nothing exists beyond The Darkness.

From the Author: Let me know what you think.