DR. ROBIN CRAIG

I wake up, my head scolding me for such impertinence. The sun streams into my apartment through the open window, as if extending a hand of warm friendship.

Damn sun!

I peer reluctantly around my room, wondering what I did last night. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to paint a sorry picture from the half-chewed pizza slice slumping on the table and the empty bottle of bourbon lying open on the floor.

Once I was a painter, the artist kind not the tradesman kind. Not successful, not yet, but on my way up. Or at least I thought so. I believed that life should be grasped, that nothing was more important than the work we choose to carve our own identity into an otherwise indifferent reality. Almost nothing. My life was one of struggle, yet one filled with the joys of potential and growth. If my work was my passion, the friends I collected along the road were my love. Not the food of life, but the spice. Not just spice, but a rare and wonderful one.

What a fool.

When my wife died, I died. Our love was an expression of us both, of our totality, our work and our life and our dreams. The work could not survive her loss. The hope and fire became ashes with her.

At some level, I know I should get over this. Never fully over it but placing it gently in its own sacred room, where I could treasure and revisit it without being ruled and ruined by it. While my life and work go on. I know it is what I should do. I know it is what she would have wished. But I cannot. It is if a dim film lies over the world I once loved, and it can no longer reach me. I still meet my friends, occasionally. But they can no longer touch me either.

I do not need to work, not for a long time. My wife, ever more prudent than I, was careful to maintain a healthy insurance policy in case something happened to her, never believing it would. For whom does? And yet it did. A mistake. I still need to eat and drink, as the pizza and liquor attest so eloquently. Perhaps if I still had to work, I would work and work myself back into myself. There can be a fine line between prudence and folly, though I know it is I who corrupted one into the other.

I know this is self-pity. But the knowledge brings no power to overcome it.

I feel a sudden rebellion against the mess and scraps and smells, attempt to make myself slightly presentable in some feeble echo of past pride, and head down to the street.

I smile amiably at the doorman as I pass, but he ignores me, staring stonily ahead as if I am not here. I wonder what I did to him to offend him so but lack sufficient desire to find out. As I turn, I gently bump a passerby. But instead of the expected gruff “watch it!” he just shakes himself and moves on, as if my existence is beneath his notice in his busy private world.

There is something strange about the people I pass. I am used to the way pedestrians on a busy street ignore each other, but it is both more and less than that. It is like they do not even see me. Even if I smile at them, I get neither smiles nor scowls in return, just blank indifference. Yet if I am in their way, they pass around me, without acknowledging my presence.

Weird.

What was that thing I read about once? Blindsight? An affliction in which a person reacts to what they see, yet are not conscious of seeing it? It is as if the world has become blind sighted. Do they see each other? Yes, I see people greet each other, talk to each other, farewell each other, even argue. It is only me they do not see.

I smile grimly to myself, remembering my thoughts about the dim film I have cast over a world I no longer truly see or care for. Perhaps the world is now returning the favour.

I shiver. Get a grip!

Then I laugh at my own delusions. Somebody must.

I pick a breakfast spot at random, so unfairly offended at the world that I’d rather meet new strangers than risk old acquaintances. I sit down and try to attract the attention of the waitress, but she ignores me, the amount of her tip dropping by the minute. As she passes, I touch her arm, but instead of turning to me, she shakes her arm and moves on: not annoyed, not even puzzled, just reacting to a half-felt touch that didn’t reach her awareness. Like a cat twitching its tail at an unwanted contact from something beneath its dignity to notice.

Though there are empty tables, a man sits down opposite me, ignoring me like everybody else. I start getting annoyed but then decide to just run with this strange day and test its limits. I stare at him, but he doesn’t flinch. I pick up a piece of his bacon and chew it, glaring at him challengingly, but he doesn’t react to the insult. I even take his coffee out of his hand and drink some, but while he looks a little puzzled to then find it sitting on the table, he just picks it up again and resumes drinking. I am tempted to spit in the damn thing.

I poke him in the chest, but he reacts no more than the waitress when I touched her arm. I wonder how he would react if I stabbed him with a knife, but I decide I’m not ready for such drastic action. He’d probably just think he’d somehow stabbed himself!

Suddenly panic constricts my chest and I run. I leave a trail of disturbed people in my wake, but the most reaction I get is when two of them think they bumped each other and start quarrelling.

I lean with my back to a wall, panting heavily, seeing the crowd who cannot see or even feel me, only the wake of my passage: as if an invisible ship cleaved their ocean but all they see are impersonal waves fleetingly rocking their existence.

Then it dawns on me. The strangeness and contradictions finally worm their way into my own consciousness, and I realise this is a dream. Have you not had the same experience? A dream drifting into the shallows of your mind until you realise its nature, and once named, vanishes?

But the wall resolutely remains a wall, the crowd continues going about its business. If this is a dream, then it will not let me go.

I wander around until it is dark, stealing food when I am hungry and drinks when I am thirsty. What else can I do, when nobody can see me to accept payment? I wonder if I can enjoy myself. There is a snooty nightclub. In my rising career, I might have gained entry. Now, no way, yet I just waltz in without challenge. I taste a few expensive drinks, dance before a few attractive girls, mesmerised by their rhythm and what it does to their bodies. I see a couple smile at each other, take each other’s hands, and leave. I could follow them, and they would be none the wiser, but I cringe from such invasion of privacy. A flame of lust hits me, and I realise I could follow any of these women home, and I wonder what they would do, how they would react and explain it, if I were to have my unseen way with them?

Some have said that we are moral only out of fear of being caught, and who can punish the unseen man? But they are wrong. Perhaps it is their own selves they are describing. While I feel I have lost myself, I find that I have not. I would never have violated someone’s rights so terribly before. If I did it now, my wife’s ghost would despise me. My own soul would despise me. Then I would truly be lost.

***

It is early morning. I am walking along the beach, feeling the cool breeze off the ocean, relating to the mournful cry of lonely gulls, attempting to feel the beauty of the growing dawn, yet feeling that too is beyond me.

I like the emptiness and peace. I hate the crowds who cannot see me. If I am to be alone for the rest of my days, I prefer to be truly alone, just me wandering an empty world.

So, I feel a twinge of annoyance when I see a man sleeping on my beach, wrapped in some ratty cloak, as if he had dropped there in despair yet still held a hope of the dawn to come. He seems to sum up my own existence: a lonely body, alone on an empty beach, no future or past, just a life washed up on an infinite and uncaring shore. I approach him and look down upon him.

I feel a savage desire to kick him just to watch him react, but I recoil from my own incipient cruelty. Such thoughts are strange to me, and I wonder if I am losing my soul. What then will be left of me? Perhaps when I betray the last of me, my body will dissolve into mist, and I will at last be free of this curse where I exist without leaving a mark or a ripple in others’ minds. But I cannot betray the last of me. Not yet. Something still holds me to this Earth. So, I gaze upon this stranger’s face, wondering what story his life holds and what led him here, knowing I can never know.

He opens his eyes.

***

I awaken on the beach, to find a woman staring down at me. She is young, raven-haired, attractive in a purposeful if somewhat lost way, her eyes a living blue peering between long black lashes.

Eyes that are alive, boring into mine, not filmed and unseeing. I am too startled to be cautious, and cry out, “You can see me?”

Her eyes widen and she replies, “You can see me?”

If not for her strange echo—and if I were dreaming, how am I on the beach I lay down on in that dream?—I might have thought I had finally awakened. Yet I remain cautious, not wanting to graduate from dreaming to being locked up for my own good.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You know what I mean!” she snaps. She is either more courageous than I, or more desperate.

We stare at each other for long moments, until she asks forlornly, “Do you think we’re dead?”

“I don’t think we’re dead. No body, no obituary. And who heard of ghosts having to eat?”

She sits down next to me with a sigh. “What has happened to us?” she asks in a small voice. I can only shake my head. For now, we feel no need to introduce ourselves, no need to relate our life stories. For now, it is enough to be together and watch the sun rise flaming above the waves.

***

Weeks have passed, weeks as vague as a dream, yet filled with a sharp sweetness.

Perhaps I am in love. This man I found on a beach, so shattered, yet retaining some indomitable strength that while beaten down remains waiting to reassert itself, has reached my soul in a way no other has. He too seems to be healing. He now looks at the beauty of trees, sunsets, streets and people as if not passively accepting their glory, but itching to take it, express it, improve it and make it his own. He said he was once an artist. Now when he is lost in contemplation, I see his fingers twitching, as if holding an invisible brush.

And I see in his eyes a reflection of the feeling in mine.

Finally, one night he reaches for me, and we make love where we are, on the beach, in sight of the whole world if only it could see us, without guilt or regret. As I gaze on his sleeping face, I wonder if one day we shall have a child, but tremble at the thought. Would they inherit our curse? Or worse, never be able to see us or feel our touch? Never know we were. I shudder, then I too am asleep.

***

I wake with a start in my own room, no longer on the sand. No longer with her. I look around and see that even the fungus has given up on my old pizza.

Something ineffable has changed. The world feels real, pungently tangible again.

I see my dried-out paintbrushes, and for the first time in so long, feel the need to again express the inexpressible. I think of my wife and find her where she would want to be: in my soul, in that room where I can visit her, but in my past, not coating my present with impossible regret. I think of what I have won.

Then I remember a dark-haired dream lover, and think of what I have lost.

I head downstairs, and the doorman greets me. The world, so long shrouded in mist, seems bright and alive with promise. I smile at people in the street, and some of them smile back. I laugh in simple abandon, and some people grin at me, others pull back nervously. That just makes me laugh the more.

I order my breakfast, sip my coffee and lean back, closing my eyes in melancholy contentment. I feel someone sit down opposite me and open my eyes at the intrusion.

Her bright blue eyes look at me through her long lashes, and I smile.

 

Robin Craig    ©    2025