All right, here’s the thing, and I’m only telling you because it’s four in the morning and I’ve given up on sleeping. I keep waking up with a word stuck in my mouth, and the word is the name of a planet. I’m not going to tell you which one yet, because you’ll figure I’m some kind of lunatic. Maybe I am. Just not the way you’d think.
Before the word there’s this light. A whole world of it, gold and slowed way down, where nothing’s at war with anything, and I swear I have never been there. That’s the part that kills me. Never been there in my life and I miss it so much I can hardly breathe — like missing a house you grew up in, except I grew up here, in this city, forty-one goddam years, and I’ve never once felt like I actually live here. Not once. If you want to know the truth, that’s the thing I’ve never told anybody.
Not the dream. The other thing. This feeling, ever since I was a kid, that somebody dropped me off at the wrong address. Like everybody else got handed the instructions and I didn’t, and I’ve just been faking it the whole time, doing this big impression of a guy with a life. And I’ve got a life, I’m not saying I don’t. Job, apartment, people who’d tell you we’re friends and wouldn’t even be lying. It all looks terrific. Underneath it, though, there’s this hum, real quiet, like a refrigerator in the next room, and all it ever says is: visitor. You’re a visitor here, pal.
For years I called it being depressed and took the pills for it, and they helped about as much as an umbrella helps in a flood. Which is to say I stayed exactly as wet. Just had something to hold.
But lately the dream’s been pulling a new one on me, and this is the part that really gets me. The gold’s still there. Only now, off at the edges, there’s two other worlds, and they’re burning — one cracking open from the inside like a dropped egg, the other one just drying up, slow and awful — and some voice that sounds an awful lot like mine goes: you were there. Both times. You were there when they ended.
And then, every single night, right before I wake up, the same lousy thought, clear as a bell somebody rang in the next room:
This one’s the chance to make it right.
I don’t even know what this one means yet. That’s the honest-to-God truth. I’m just starting to get the feeling that I do, and it scares the hell out of me.