The Traveler: A Moment of Grace

When I was a child I must have seen somewhere, maybe in a comic book or one of our many old illustrated books, maybe it was a William Blake engraving, souls rising from graves like mist in the evening. Souls rising like sleepers in white sheets, out of the old tumbledown graves of our local cemetery. And throughout my angry rationalist phase and my pretended atheism which I was just not rigorous enough to defend, when thoughts of death would trouble me that image would come back, that image of gentle souls rising in the moonlight, up through the trees, through the branches, up toward the moon and out of the sky. What a nice thing.
Sometimes in my room, waiting for a contact or an assignment, or just recovering from a demanding mission, and let me just say now, though maybe it sounds like we had an easy time of it, living in comfortable inns in Austria and Switzerland and the Alto Adige of Italy in the Dolomites, it was physically demanding beyond just the shooting and the occasional physical encounter. You don’t realize until you try it just how tiring it is to sit in the same position for six hours waiting for a shot. It’s quiet, that’s true, and nobody is shooting at you, but the possibility that someone might be shooting at you is always there, and the tense necessity of stillness, the muscles required to just maintain a position, well, just, you try it sometime.
Not to mention the fear of death. And that’s where the images of those souls came in handy.
Now that I’m out, I still think about it. For instance, as I was saying in a previous diary entry, I went out on a date recently. It was pleasant enough but I couldn’t relax. I wasn’t sure when to laugh. I realized I was used to a pretty grim kind of humor. It was a whole new world actually, this nice little upper middle class white university town in the northeast. It was great in a lot of ways, the little town square, the weekly newspaper, the statue of the town’s founder in the square, the little dogs people had, the quiet, the way the kids would just run around the town, run through your yard, come to your door selling cookies or magazine subscriptions, it felt so oddly perfect that at times I wondered if perhaps, without realizing it, or remembering it, I had actually been killed and this was my afterlife.
I distinctly remembered meeting with the commander and getting my papers together. I distinctly remembered my little goodbye party, interrupted by sudden orders to relocate to a new inn on account of plumbing problems, but not in a stressful way. I remembered every moment from my decision to retire to the present. And yet I was not completely sure that I was alive.
Not as sure as I had been when I was threatened with death.
But about the date. Her name was Grace, which was odd and kind of old-fashioned. But what did I know? I’d been out of American society since basically the age of six. And except for the arranged and somewhat stage-managed marriage the commander had put together for me, I did not really know what a man is supposed to do with a woman. I mean I knew some of the technical aspects but not the general hanging out part. How do you become friends if you don’t share a common set of fears and obsessions?
Well, I had been told that what you do is just listen and try to be nice, so I did that and it seemed to be going OK until she started pestering me about my life before the town. And I found that in spite of my training I felt a sudden urge to tell her everything. Where did that come from? A life of utterly disciplined dissembling falls apart in a little town with dogs, girl scouts and a weekly paper that lists cake recipes?
So I sort of did tell her. I told her I’d been in the mililtary. Which I hadn’t, but it was the closest thing to it. And I said I’d been in “intelligence,” and thus couldn’t say much.
She seemed to like that. I believe it sounded exotic or scary or something. So the date went OK. We had cheesecake and coffee at the local late-night diner afterwards and then I drove her home. It was like something in a movie from the 1950s.
Then driving home, I passed a graveyard and stopped the car. Mist was rising out of the ground, and it looked like souls.