The Room

The room contained an indeterminate number of lamps. When I clicked the chain of one of the lamps another, further inwards, would light seemingly at random, and like this I made my way in to the center. There was a fold-away felt table. My grandfather was teaching me to play seven card spit. I would have rather been watching TV, but it was already late, I remember, grandmother was asleep just upstairs. My parents would be by early in the morning to pick me up, my pockets swollen with nickels and pennies: but there was what sounded like an explosion, faint, from beyond the room, and my grandfather rose from the table. Several minutes passed. By now I had moved in close enough to see my face card: it was blank. Then he returned, looking as I had only seen him in photos, young, in his army camos, hunched under a rucksack and cradling a rifle. He was gesturing, wordlessly, like a character from a silent film: blood was running from a wound in his left leg, the one with the limp he’d had till his dying day. He was telling me to go, to save myself from the war he had fought so that I wouldn’t have to. But he’d also taught me a good soldier leaves no one behind. I was thinking this, but the me in the dream, loyal, fearless, not the me who had entered the room and whose only thought now was how to exit, unseen, turning off the lamps in the correct sequence so as to cover my going as though I had never come.