Fiction: The Tent

Inside the tent he was certain there was something waiting for him. Not something that he wanted to find, necessarily, but something that he was bound to find. He could see the slow flicker of kerosene lamplight as it made shadow puppet stories across the walls. Anthropologists would've marveled at the likeness to the first cave drawings, in fact. He knew that this was trying to tell him something. But he sat there, motionless, the hotness on his face from dying embers of the campfire. He was sure it was the fire that had flushed his face to sunburn. Though when he rubbed his hands below his eyes, he was certain that he felt a dampness. He put his hands to his tongue to make sure, but he didn't need to test it.

He was amazed at the way sound traveled in the night this far away from anywhere. It was, as she had convinced him earlier in the day, the middle of nowhere. Like a black hole, but with trees. If he were to clap his hands together loudly, the sound would almost instantly be sucked off into some other dimension. No reverberations, and a crisp silence would rush in and cover him up. This silence, layered with crackling twigs, scuttling branches, the ticks of katydids and songs of night owls was all around them, thick as cottony pajamas. He was certain she was already asleep inside the tent, even with the lamplight betraying that activity. Dousing the fire with a squirt from a water bottle was enough to prepare him for the inevitable.

Cottony pajamas. Of course, he had forgotten his, so he stripped to underwear and slid inside the sleeping bag. There was a reason he wanted those on right now. The tickle of ice that crept along his back and sent bumps to his skin. It wasn't cold out, actually, but it was cold in. There was the gulf between he and she. They were hair's breadth apart, in some ways. They were oceans apart, others. She tussled, unconscious it seemed, stretching out her arms like a newborn, fingers twisting, grasping but getting nothing but air. And then relaxing, curling upon herself into a cocoon. He rolled over and closed his eyes, yearning for black inky voids to overtake his vision.

This is the thing. It's a long hallway, very high ceilings. Everything is canted. Like a funhouse mirror universe, you can't walk through the hallway the way you might want to. The floor twists with every step, the walls shake and reverberate. At the end of the hall, that's his apartment. He knows it is, but when he is inside it feels foreign, unwelcoming. An interrogation room in his mind. All white starched walls, suffocating air, so much air and nothing, absolutely nothing furnishing it. There is a chair in the middle that sits like an island buffeted by the twisting floorboards that he walks on. They are as concrete as gelatin and he grasps the chair for what he can. He climbs into it, feeling at last to have found some solace, a life preserver in the room of his own making. He is small in the chair, dwarfed by the walls, the ceiling, the legs of the chair. He wants to turn on the stereo, to play music so very loudly, but he is afraid that he will wake her up. He is in his dream, but still he is afraid of waking her up.

"You're snoring."
He rolls over, blinks away the dream, barely. He still feels wobbly, on top of something that maybe he climbed too quickly to get to. A head rush, so he sees little tiny stars in his view. "I am?" he offers weakly as a retort.
"Yes. I couldn't sleep."
"I was dreaming about my apartment. I think I was dreaming about you, too."
She cocks her head to one side, leaning on her arm, the sound of the night flooding the tent through the open fly. Their voices sound staticky, like the words might stick to their clothes if they aren't careful to avoid getting too close. Too close with words, he thinks. That is the problem with staticky voices.
"Do tell."
"I wanted to play music really loudly. I had left my door open so that you could hear it, but I didn't want to wake you up, either."
She rolls back on her back. The top of the tent, like looking into a cathedral ceiling, the way the poles converge at the zenith. She could hear a mosquito trespassing. She didn't really want to hear him right now. She really felt much more adept at just guessing him. "It's a metaphor, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"The dream. You dream in metaphors."
"I do?"
"Yes, you do." She could feel her ire rise, her voice jumped up a bit, her throat constricting. She didn't want to do that, though, so she paused, feeling her blood course around again. Pump, pump, pump. The heartbeat she could feel in her forehead was hers alone. He was not in her blood, thankfully.

There is this pause. Like silence, like the flood of the night that comes over the tent, that seems to wash it away, pitch it fully out into the ocean of other possible silences that lap and wave out in the nighttime of the world. The tent, moored only by three stakes in the ground, moored only by two people clasped tight as padlocks on the floor of it all. The night silence sluices across the top, across the bottom, through the fly. It fills up the space in between, a dark brackish silence. And then, you're drowning in it. You can't breathe for the silence, it isn't deafening, it isn't quieting, it isn't suffocating. It just overtakes you until you become just another part of it. And it's all around the tent, it's leaking inside the tent. That is the pause. That is the pause that they hear between each other. She breaks the pause, the brackish watery feeling on her skin is too much to bear.

"This isn't necessarily a place I wanted to be."

He turns over, uncertain, dreams playing like unspooled film sliding through his fingers. Single images, glimpsed for seconds at a time. He could almost put it together into a story. Almost.