What I Tell You In the Dark by John Samuel Page B

as a ham. I let myself dry naturally, the dripping from my body fast at first then slowing to a delicate, hesitant pace, like those raindrops at my window, each one drawing so painfully close to letting go. It is intoxicating, the slowness of it. Nature’s speed. One element banished by another, just as I was – the creeping change towards a new state.
    As I dress myself in Will’s pyjamas the light outside continues to change, smudged by the dusk. On a whim, I decide that I want to go out there. I feel strong enough after the food and the bath, and I want to do it now, before it gets dark. There is something at the moment, about the dark, that I do not like.
    I pull on a coat and shoes and go clumping down the stairs. The sound brings Alice Sherwin to her doorway but, on seeingme, she doesn’t say whatever it was she was planning to say. She just shakes her head and goes back inside.
    The daylight is almost gone. As I come to the edge of the park only the top windows of the high-rises at the far end of the playing field catch the fire of the setting sun. Yet again, I have to stop. It’s not weariness this time that makes me keep pausing, as if to catch my breath, nor is it that same exhilaration that I felt during those first few hours after jumping in, that marvel at the firing of my senses. This is the reward of beauty – I don’t know how else to describe it. For longer than it should be possible, I have watched, only watched. I have seen the way people struggle with the task of fitting their lives to the perfect, impossible circus of beauty that whirls around them. Some manage it, many – most – do not. But for all my watching, I have acquired nothing more than a kind of clinical wisdom, the ability of a psychiatrist observing a patient, to predict what will and what will not work, who will or will not succeed. What good, though, is this truth when it is not grounded in experience? That is what I have lacked all this time. Real knowledge. Knowledge born from life – not from a brief intervention in your lives or from endless observation, but from joining with you. And here is my reward – this great beauty that lay hidden from me for so long. From knowing in my gut, the way you know it, that all this huffing and puffing will lead us to the same vanishing point, I am able to see the world afresh. I turn with it now. I too am fixed to its workings.
    These leaves that lie scattered beneath the trees, the map of their veins is drawn from the same skein that puts the blood-shadowed lines in my own flesh. Their creases, too, are the same. I pick one up and hold it next to the skin of my palm – time folded into all matter, marking it. I am matched to this now – a part of life, no longer apart from it. Each moment flurrying like a snowflake, distinct from the last but impossible to grasp, dissolving on impact. I relax into it. This is right.
    Along the path from where I’ve decided to sit a small band of derelicts and drunks are performing their evening routine. They move as a single entity, orbiting the bottles and cans arrayed on the wall of a nearby flowerbed. The choreography is repetitive and precise, binding them together in a series of small shuffling engagements. Starless planets locked in alignment.
    Needless to say, now that I am thrown in with mankind, grounded so to speak, not one of them notices me. I have become just like any other. I am all but invisible.
    Some distance beyond them, a game of football is proceeding against the failing light. The players are too distant to be anything more than shapes, line drawings of form and movement. Occasionally their shouts rise up off the flat ground and reach me, mixing in with the isolated bark of a dog or a snatch of music. At one stage, two young men lope past, hoods up, both on their phones. The one nearest to me shakes his head at whatever he is hearing and makes a kind of hiss-spit noise. It’s a