Monday, April 05, 2004

It’s a raft tonight

The smoke, at once sweet and acrid, curls around my head in the dim light leaking into the room from the door. The house is quiet; there's no sound at all, in fact, except the arrhythmic rattle of a tree branch blown in the wind against the window frame.

Derrick has stopped stirring beside me and sleeps quietly too, in that mysterious, almost deathly way he has. I could put my hand on his chest and feel the beat of his heart, so slow now as to be almost imperceptible. I'm amazed once more at how he can thrash so much before sleep just seems to crash down on top of him and still his body instantly.

I am trying to think how to answer his question, those final few words I could make out as he shivered and convulsed lightly before plummeting into dreams. Derrick talks in his sleep, but only in those few moments of frenzy, and rarely intelligibly. A few selected phrases, gathered in my memory over a period of weeks and months, seem to have some bearing on his waking life, but we never discuss them in the mornings that follow.

It's been over a month since we've shared a bed and tonight's question, delivered hoarsely but with a recognizable rise in pitch at the end, is the continuation of a conversation we had the last time, an uncharacteristic sharing of intimate secrets.

I turn the question over in my mind. "Is it an airplane or a boat tonight, do you think?"

For me, it is almost always a boat, a raft, actually. Tonight, it will be raft again.

It was only the fifth time we'd managed to get together, our work and travel schedules happily lining up to give us a night uninterrupted. The sex was fantastic, athletic even, as it had been from the first, and when we finally collapsed, breathless, into each other's arms, Derrick was giggling, giddy, his face flushed like a little boy who's been tickled until he can't catch his breath.

It did feel a little like a schoolboy sleepover, the way we'd rough-house and wrestle until finally everyone just fell back on their sleeping bags and told ghost stories in the dark. I said as much and Derrick laughed again.

We talked about our boyhood dreams and the things we thought we'd be when we were older, when we became the men we are now. We talked about the make-believe battles we fought in the backyard and the pup tents and Scout troops and I told Derrick about the raft.

"A lot of nights, before I turned out the lights and went to sleep, I'd sit in my bed with pillows propped around me, my legs stretched all the way out and I'd imagine that my bed was a raft on the river," I said. "I'd conjure up the Mississippi or the Missouri all around the edges of the bed and picture a clear, cool, starlit night. I'd listen as hard as I could, particularly in the summer when the windows were up and the breeze carried the sounds of crickets and cicadas and owls into the house.

"And then I'd switch off the lamp and roll onto my side and pull the sheets around me and close my eyes and float away. Just me and my raft and the river, floating away until I fell asleep."

Derrick smiled at this, I remember. "Like Tom and Huck," he said.

"One or the other," I said.

"All alone, out there on the river? It's a big place for a little boy, all by himself."

I still do it, I told him. Even when you -- or someone else -- is here with me, I still try to make the river real, to just float by myself until sleep takes me.

We were quiet for a minute. "That must seem pretty silly," I said. "A grown man fancying himself Huck Finn to go beddy-bye."

"It's not silly," Derrick said, and then he was silent for a minute more.

"I do it too."

I shifted to look at him, gently running my fingers along his forehead. "You do?"

"For me, it's an airplane. Or a spaceship. I'm the pilot -- I see it in my mind, flying -- and all my passengers and crew are below. We soar and I think about the places I want to go, the places a plane can take me or the stars we might explore someday."

That might explain your tossing about, I say. "The passengers must get a thrilling ride, with all those barrel-rolls you do in your sleep."

He laughs again and I can see Derrick, age 8, and Derrick, age 28, guiding his airplane of sheets and covers through the clouds. I wonder if I could fly at night, why I never have. I wonder if I might be able to look up from my raft and see him speeding across the sky as I drift lazily along, taken by the current. "Why don't you try to fly someday?" he asks.

"I just might," I say.

We've worn ourselves out and the day is closer than it should comfortably be. We keep hold of each other and for a while, I let myself be carried along by his restlessness until finally he sleeps and, I presume, is carried aloft in his dreams. And I push back from the shore and give myself up to the river.

And now, all these weeks later, as he takes flight he wants to know. Is it an airplane or a boat?

I don't think I've ever told anyone else about my river excursions; certainly I'd never admitted they're still almost nightly departures, 30 years after the first. And I needn't think very hard, nor do I wish to, about what it means that my nocturnal fantasies take me away to solitude, with a destination left to the whimsy of the water while this clever, coltish man's take him to the skies with dozens in his wake, on a course set by his own imagination.

It's a raft, of course, and the stars are just coming out.

I take one last drag on the joint, stub it out and settle beneath the sheets.

"It's a raft tonight," I whisper. "But I'll try to fly someday."