Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

No One But Night-May 1921

TW: Canonical suicide attempt and mental health issues abound. This is a very sad chapter.

He'd become so accustomed to the light that when the darkness fell again he'd forgotten how to live in it. At first, it seeped in through the edges, until finally the darkness infected the brightest parts of his life. The darkness was always there, of course. Sometimes it was pitch blackness and all-encompassing. It had been that way after the war. The darkness lay so heavy over his father's farm in Plover that he thought it would suffocate him. He hadn't known until he got home, until Emma stopped giving him so much morphine that he wasn't even able to think, how much of the light in Plover emanated from his mother. The house was sad and quiet and colder without her presence. His family was quieter and colder. Even Sampson seemed sadder.

It was better that his mother died before she had to see him like he was. Or at least that's what he told himself. It's what he told Clara. How much better was it that she died thinking of him as her handsome son, the boy whom she loved for his impractical dreaminess, which was so much like her own? How much better was it that she never knew that his face became that of a monster and that his soul followed suit? The truth was, though, he lay in his childhood bed and wanted his mother. Instead, it was just Sampson who laid on the foot of the bed, or it was until Emma would run him out, saying dogs didn't belong in the bedroom. He missed Sampson's wet, heavy breathing noises when he was gone.

Emma took good care of him. She was kind and efficient and didn't treat him any differently than she would have before the war. He appreciated it. Richard knew that his mother wouldn't have been able to be so practical. She would have cried. She would have broken down. Sometimes he thinks she would have kept going until she broke through his walls and made him feel something. Instead, the darkness devoured him, and he was comforted by the lack of feeling it offered. He didn't have to look at his sister and see her confusion as to why he wasn't the brother she grew up with.

The darkness was easier to bear in Chicago. Maybe, he'd later think, because he didn't expect any light there. He was prepared to live in the darkness. He grew accustomed to people not looking at him, and to living a life where no one ever touched him. Even the doctors and nurses at the veterans' hospital seemed to go out of their way not to touch him, or to do so as little as possible. How could he blame them?

When choices were offered that would consign him to deeper levels of the dark, he took them. He later would pray they were the right choices, but in the end, his ticket to hell was already stamped with the blood of German farm boys he picked off from atop a tree, so what did it really matter?

And then Jimmy, and then Odette, and then Clara. Jimmy shook his hand, patted him on the back, acted like he was another man friend. Then Jimmy paid Odette. Richard no longer had to fear being asked about his sexual history. It was now verifiable. He could say her name, name a place, say exactly what occurred. And Odette seemed like a miracle. She touched him. She touched him in all the ways that felt like they came out of a half-remembered dream, and in ways he never even dreamed possible. Maybe even better, she let him touch her. Not only was he starved for the feel of people touching him, but he was starved for the feeling of touching other people. He was still dreaming of Odette when Clara stumbled into Jimmy's bordello bedroom.

Clara. Clara was sunshine, although he knew she would laugh if he told her so and tell him only he thought she was nice. Clara, like his mother, made everything warmer. It felt like she aimed light at him until he started to notice the darkness receding slightly.

Still, the darkness found a way.

"Mmm. In your book. Ruth. Seemed a lot like you," Richard said as they went for a drive.