Tether

My sister joined me on the sand and stared out into the fog. The men had recovered the remains of Arthur's cutter, she explained, hardly more than driftwood and torn canvas. She listened in vain for an answer, then left and did not return.

Loss was not unknown to me and I did not fear it; by then many of my precious tethers had broken. My husband’s tugged at me still, calling through the mist from the place where his heart went on beating.

He did not return on a ship but rose as a grim column from the water. I wept, not least because he remembered our promise. We had lain together not far from that very spot and entwined so much more than our bodies. It was his idea: whichever of us first left this world would make themself known from the next. Death could pose no obstacle to a love like ours.

Cold fingers brushed the tears from my cheeks. Join me, he whispered. Heartbreak, loneliness, regret—these are limitations of the flesh. Cast away your fickle body and you will never know them again.

And so I followed him into the water.

Unknown time passed, then didn’t pass. Borrowed atoms dispersed and remained as connected as they had always been. Distinctions between self and other dissolved. Arthur and I had never been apart, not even before we were born, for all the world was but one thing. Ahead lay the end of all suffering, a doffing of the feeble self before the threshold of Everything.

And yet.

Although the black depths teemed with unshackled consciousness, an all-too-familiar tether tugged… from above.

The truth came to me at once; for ignorance, too, is a limitation of the flesh. My husband sailed away on a hired vessel and abandoned his own in the path of the storm. There was another on a distant shore, another woman who already carried his child as I never could. Even now Arthur remained imprisoned by flesh and all the pathetic delusions that were part and parcel of it. Eternity gaped below and I yearned to be swallowed by it, but I did not let go of that hateful tether. I dragged myself up, up to the realm of suffering with which I was not finished after all.

In the end it was I who fulfilled that long-ago promise. I emerged from the sea in a form between forms, a half-metamorphosed thing. Though I was invisible to them, the living who roamed the streets at this late hour shuddered as I passed.

A cat that had been napping on the writing desk hissed and leapt through the open window. The man snapped to his feet so quickly his chair toppled and skidded across the floor. A beard concealed much of his colorless face—months had elapsed since I last drew breath—but there could be no mistake. I had reached the end of the tether.

At first my visitation was incomprehensible to the meat housed in Arthur’s skull. He crawled pitifully to the corner and shielded his face with one arm. I refolded my boundless contours into a shape he recognized at last.

He howled in despair. “What have you done to yourself?” he screamed. “You weren’t meant to do this!”

I laughed, and it pleased me to behold that the sound of it raised the hair on his arms and neck. Regret is a limitation of the flesh, I whispered. Cast it away.

Arthur swatted with one arm as though I were a swarm of wasps. “Regret? I harbor no regret. The dead cannot harm the living,” he said, which betrayed a deep misunderstanding of what it means to harm.

His new family will never understand why his heart remains out of reach even when times are good. He alone sees the chain that twists around his ankle and disappears into the dark, restless ocean. He alone feels, ever so gently, something tugging on the other end. When we reunite at last, it will not be the end of his suffering or mine.

I promise.