What the Night Will Do to a Man

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It’s funny what the night will do to a man.

In daylight, he could carry almost anything. Bills on the kitchen counter. The doctor’s phone call. The empty chair across from him. The words he should have said twenty years ago and the ones he wished he could take back. Daylight gave everything edges. There was coffee to make, grass to cut, groceries to buy. A man could stay busy enough to believe he had made peace with his life.

But night was different.

At two in the morning, the house became enormous. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen like some machine keeping watch. Pipes clicked behind the walls. A car passed somewhere beyond the bedroom window, its headlights moving briefly across the ceiling before disappearing. Then everything was still again. That was when the dead came home.

Not as ghosts. Nothing so dramatic. They returned as voices. His father laughing on a summer afternoon. His mother calling him in for supper. A dog scratching at the back door that had been gone fifteen years. The woman he once loved standing barefoot in the kitchen, asking whether he wanted another cup of coffee. He would close his eyes and there they were. Young again. And so was he. Night had that particular cruelty. It remembered people before time got hold of them.

He got out of bed and walked to the window. The neighborhood slept beneath the trees. Porch lights glowed here and there. Somewhere a television flickered blue against somebody’s curtains. He wondered how many other people were awake behind those dark windows, bargaining with their own memories.

Maybe everyone had a two-in-the-morning version of themselves. The frightened one. The lonely one. The one who finally admitted what the daylight version refused to say. He stood there a long while. Then, almost imperceptibly, the darkness began thinning beyond the rooftops. Black became charcoal. Charcoal became gray. A bird tried one uncertain note from a tree, and another answered.

Morning was coming.

Nothing had been solved. The people he missed were still gone. The mistakes remained mistakes. The questions had not suddenly found answers. But the room was smaller now. The chair was only a chair. Shadows retreated into ordinary corners. He went to the kitchen and started the coffee. Outside, the first sunlight touched the tops of the trees, and the world began putting itself back together. He smiled at that.

It’s funny what the night will do to a man. And sometimes, what the morning will undo.


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