May 23rd, 2024
It was in a dream. It was night, maybe just before dawn. I was somewhere in New York State close to West Point, my alma mater. I was with a number of my classmates from the military academy, although we weren’t actually classmates yet. We were waiting for a bus to take us to our first day of training. The strange thing was that we all simultaneously young and old, innocent and experienced. Each of us was both puer and senex. In the dream, our bodies were those of teenagers, but our minds were those of old men. We were just beginning our adult lives, but we already knew where we would be and who we would be forty-eight years later. Dreams have their own peculiar internal logic. Somehow, we could be two things at once without any paradox.
The bus arrived.
I recognized a once and future roommate in the group. I asked him,
“Knowing what you know now, are you going to get on, or are you going to go back home to Baltimore, or are you going tell everyone to fuck off and do something completely different?’
Maybe, he asked me the same sort of question. I don’t know, because I woke up.
Asher was in bed with me. When he sleeps with me, I am hyper-alert even after I doze off. I felt him stirring, and then he rolled toward me. Asher is only three years old, and he is a restless sleeper, often troubled with uneasy dreams. He lay next to me, and he placed his left hand on my right arm. He silently ran his little hand up the arm from the wrist to the shoulder, and then back down again.
He commanded, “Grandpa, get up.”
“Why?”
He said softly, “I want to go in the kitchen.”
“Why?”
“I want to drink a bottle.”
I got up. Asher reached up and wrapped his arms around me. I carried him to the kitchen.
I was on the bus.
Frank is Emptiness 