You Will Become

Eric Hill Approx. 2,373 words

353 Prescott Dr,

Prescott, AZ

86301

Eric.Hill.Honors@gmail.com

541-321-5411

YOU WILL BECOME

by

Eric Hill

From the train window he watches the clumsy flight of bats interrupt the slow burning Florentine dusk. A vague cloying scent of smoke from passing farms immediately conjures up memories he does not recognize as his own. He glances down at the abandoned book in his lap and tries returning to it once again, but the sweet vegetative smell wafting in through the open window pulls him away with remote images of places he has never been, people he doesn’t know. These strange memories cut through the landscape of his novel, swooping in and out of his concentration until he finally gives up and gently closes the book. Something gnaws at him like a name on the tip of his tongue, filling him with nostalgia and a little fear, taking him out the window and back to some foreign longing.

Gradually the night turns the windows into mirrors where he can keep an eye on his ghost and avoid the looks of other passengers. Enzo does not like to make eye contact with strangers; whenever they enter his car, he instantly fixes his gaze out on the moving horizon. But since the sun has set, the horizon has been obscured by reflections of the inside of the car. In the glare of his window, all the strangers take on an alien familiarity. He feels safe watching them this way, all of them riding on that other train, reversed, distinctly vague, and intimately removed.

The longer he looks the more it seems to him as though they are watching him. But whenever he locks in on the reflection of a particular face, the eyes seem to be staring not so much at him as through him. When he first boarded the train, it had been empty, and while this didn’t seem unusual at the time (he always came early to find a window seat), he wonders why he didn’t hear anyone get on. He can’t recall any commuter noises, shuffling of baggage, suitcases lifted into racks. Not even chatter. Maybe he doesn’t remember; he decides that he must have been deep in thought at the time. Now they are all there in the window. And yet he feels that he is alone; only his reflection is in the company of others.

He thinks about turning around to see the other passengers as they really are, to see if they look as familiar in the flesh as their reflections, but the more he considers this the more unnerved he becomes; what if he spins around quickly and none of them are in their proper positions? Or what if they’re not the same people? Or worse: what if the car is empty? His uneasiness blossoms into outright fear. He feeds it masochistically, playing the mind game with himself. And then, just as he can bear it no longer, he tries to push the fear away. He knows it is irrational, and yet this knowing makes it no less paralyzing. He finds that the more he tries to quell it and break his train of thought, the more obsessed he becomes with the idea. If he takes his eyes off the window even for an instant, if he looks away from his own reflection, he is convinced he will disappear, that they will all be there except for him. The idea sends a chill of delicious fear through him, like a child waiting for a jack-in-the-box.

And so, rather than turn around and face what he fears the most, he continues to watch them in the glass, and watch himself watching them in the glass, and watching them watch him watching them in the glass, his eyes heavy with sleep.

He sees the reflection of a young American with a backpack hold up a half-empty bottle of orange soda to his girlfriend. "You wanna kill it?" She shakes her head slightly. They speak in English. Enzo understands everything, and this confuses him. The American puts the bottle to his lips and drinks deeply, draining it.

This is the last thing he sees just before slipping off into a forgotten dream of his childhood, a recurring nightmare that made him wet the bed until he was nine. In the dream, he awakes in a burning house, crying, confused and unable to speak. Then the dream shifts, and he is trying to swim underground, pulling himself through moist earth and muddy water by grabbing onto roots. And, finally, he is high in the branches of a tree, recoiling from the horrible smell of orange blossoms and burning vegetation.

He is awakened by the odor of a cigarette. His mind is clear. The dream is forgotten; his feeling of déjà vu has been washed away by the amnesia of sleep. He is Enzo once again, on his way to a marble quarry in Carrara, where he works nights doing clerical work so that he can eventually pay for his secret trip. He tells Claudia it is because they need the extra money. Nine months ago, he promised her that he would look for a better future, and tonight he will keep his promise without knowing it. Although he has never been outside of Toscana, he keeps making plans and promises. “Colombino mio,” she would say, holding his face in her hands and smiling sadly, because somehow, she knew. He has always had a secret wish to go to America, secret because he has always wanted to go alone, without Claudia. And he has never understood why.

Before he married her, he had lied, telling her he was an artist, a poet or a musician. He can’t remember which. And now I work in marble, he thinks with a bitter smile.

The cigarette that wakes him is being shared by the American and his girlfriend.

He looks down at the book in his lap, which he had been trying to read when he fell asleep. It is a translation of a story about a little girl who crawls into a rabbit hole.

He tries to look out the window, but all he sees is his ghost staring back at him. He looks away. And then he looks again, but this time he concentrates on the reflection of the book. It looks nothing like his book. He strains to read the open page in the lap of his image. At first, he is unable to read it: the light is poor and there are many scratches in the dark glass. But he finds that if he looks at it only with his peripheral vision, he can make out some of the words. He reads carefully over the shoulder of his ghost. Everything on the page is written in English, and, although he has never learned to read English, he is able to understand the meanings of the words:

... that inner room, the sacred place where forgotten thoughts go to die like

elephants, later to be reborn as the dreams of others. In this manner the

soul of each of us lives on together, like the layers of an onion, the

collective memories of all who have ever been. When someone dreams,

it is the dead borrowing their thoughts so that they might remember.

While he tries to digest all of this, he hears his ghost whisper something to him; he dares not look into its eyes.

"It's all lies, of course,” says his image without a smile. “You're reading a reflection, and all reflections are inversions of the truth. Besides, Enzo, you shouldn't believe everything you read."

"But how is it I am able to understand it? I don't know English."

"Then how do you know it's in English? Enzo, listen to me, all words are gibberish; all languages are as well.”

Enzo glances down at his own book, which he suddenly realizes has been closed the whole time. He opens it, looks at it and reads a random passage:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Now,” says his ghost, “read the reflection of all that gibberish.”When Enzo looks at the place on the reflected page where the poem should be, he reads this:

I lie awake in the chaos of a dream

I lie, a wake in the dream of chaos

I dream in the awake lie of chaos

I wake in a lie of chaos, the dream

In the wake of chaos, I dream the lie....

The train goes into a long mountain tunnel. It is suddenly blacker than night and the tracks roar like a rhythmic hurricane. The wind comes violently in through the top of the window, bringing the smell of damp rock into the car.

He remembers a voice he heard in a dream he had about falling asleep in a cave: The voyage is always back and forth over the same waters to the same shores and by the same mistakes he finds the unexpected and the new. I follow the dark, sunken eyes of an Chumash cadaver, pulled from a shallow river, into a low-ceilinged cave in the high mountains above some railroad tracks. I can’t tell if it is male or female (disfigured in a wreck, severely burned and in the water so long it is badly decomposed). The eyes themselves are cloudy with death, and yet they see well enough to guide me through the dark cave. The air is heavy and warm, moist and dank like elephant’s breath. I feel my way along the craggy walls with one hand, putting the other out before me, expecting a low hanging stalactite to knock me unconscious or a bat to fly into my face; we are traveling quickly through the dark cave -- I must hurry so as not to lose my dead guide. Although it is too black now to see the spoiled skin and muscle clinging awkwardly to dry bone, I can still remember the horrible image by memory -- surely memories are the only resurrection.

Enzo looks up to see his double grinning at him from the window. It unnerves him so much he immediately begins asking questions. “Do all these memories belong to you? Are you me looking at myself from another life?”

His reflection scowls at him. “Don’t be stupid. I’m just a reflection, not a foreshadow.” The scowl breaks into a grin once again just as Enzo’s face goes blank.

As quickly as the train has entered the tunnel it exits; the roar and the blackness are softened. He thinks of Claudia and watches as she flies up and out the window like a carelessly placed photograph. His new memories have begun to anchor themselves like guano to stone, until they begin to obscure all he has ever known. Even his family becomes a receding image polluted by the superimposition of unfamiliar faces. His father is now a body lying face down in an irrigation ditch, drowned in six inches of muddy water. His skin is the color of copper. He is shorter, stockier than before. He lies motionless in the brown stream. His mother has become a charred corpse, indistinguishable from the remnants of smoldering wood and ash that cover her bones.

A grandfather he has never known speaks to him of memories he barely recognizes, and yet he feels as though he has been forced to hear them far too often. His real grandfather is the only member of his family who is dead; now, here he is, more alive than the rest. But even he has changed and speaks to Enzo in something that is neither English nor Italian.

“You were born in a burning house. It was truly a baptism through fire. She went into a forced labor and burned to death. But you were saved.” He speaks slowly and in a calculated manner, as if his tongue belonged to someone else. He also has copper skin. His hair is silver and long. He wears a red and black plaid shirt with wide brown suspenders. As he speaks, he wrings his ancient hands, pulling taut the loose, brown skin. “The fire was set by the same squatters who killed your father nine years later, a man and woman. They killed him for the land, because of his orange trees. The woman saw you run away; she knew you had seen them kill your father, and they both came after you. You climbed a tree in the middle of the orchard, and when they found you and told you to come down, you would not. You threw oranges at them until they could not look up. You ran away and hid in the caverns. Do you remember the Chumash paintings on the walls?”

The old man’s voice takes on the urgency of a nightmare in progress; his eyes seemed glazed with either concern or madness, or both. “Do you remember the dreams you had while you slept there that night and how they told you what to do when you awoke? I’m telling you all these things so that you’ll know what to do when the time comes, so that you will remember them tomorrow.”

But when Enzo was nine years old, he did not go into a cavern and look at rock paintings. He went to Santa Maria Novella, where he saw Masaccio’s Trinity. Below that painting another had been recently discovered, hidden beneath a marble slab. It was of a tomb, and inside the tomb was a skeleton.At the base, painted to look like inscribed marble, was a phrase in Medieval Italian: “Io fui gia quel che voi sietes quell ch’ io sono voi ancord s’arrete” ["What you are I once was, what I am you will become”].

I must wake up, he thinks. But he is unable to rouse himself from his stony dreams. I’ll sleep past my stop and then I won’t be able to take my trip.

But the train never arrives in Carrara. While he is sleeping soundly, there is an accident and when he awakes there is only fire, the sound of a woman screaming and the seeds of vague memories that he is too young to understand.

The End