Someone said, What do you dream about? I said, Tug Lake. I kept an old photograph of Tug Lake close by. Sometimes it was in an old Hawthorne novel on my nightstand, sometime it was in my front pocket. The photo was a black-and-white job with ruffled edges and a crisp white boarder. It was the size of a swollen postage stamp. The photo was of my grandfather bobbing in the waters of Tug Lake. Gray liquid swallowed him up to  his chest. All was silent and still in the photo, however, beneath the surface you could sense his legs were moving. Was I really that different from anybody else? I said to my wife. I collected pictures of the dead. I sought connection to my past. But for those living I did not have time.

The dreams, they were all the same. The photograph turned into a moving picture - a silent film. I watched the man, bare-chested, as he treaded water. Above us, the sky was white and the trees were gray. The sunburn on his face was a contour of smudges and shadows. Whoever held the camera was also moving with the undulating waves. Nothing was said in the dream, no vibrations exchanged - there was only the constant sound of water lapping up against something. In the distance, it felt like children were jumping off a wooden raft.

One night I woke up to the black and gray and yellow from the streetlight invading my room. I said to my wife, This could be any point in time. This could be nineteen-hundred and twenty-two and nothing would be different. This could be eighteen-forty-three. Time means nothing at this moment. A hundred years ago the night would still be black and the shadows would still be gray and the two of us would be sleeping in a wooden bed. My wife put her hand on the side of my face and then fell back asleep.

I took the picture to the living room. Somewhere, far beyond my reach, Tug Lake existed. It was living, evolving. I held the picture under a lamp. Everything else in that picture was gone. Deconstructed by time. The children had grown and died and were now forgotten. The wooden raft had rotted and pine needles had grown and fallen and grown again on trees. But that fixed point, in the middle of the lake - that place he occupied could still be captured. Do you even remember Tug Lake? Did that moment mean anything to you? Was it that long ago?

I read, Time is the brush of a beetle's wing; time is a flutter of the heart. If that was true, then Tug Lake had just happened. If that was true, then he had just left the water and was headed home for dinner. His wet clothes would still be wrapped in a ball and that ball would be wrapped in a towel. If that was true, his presence could still be felt.

I thought of dark waters. I thought of that still lake - cold now and still in the dead of the night. I felt alone in a room called living. It is only me and you and you are gone. A hundred- million people alone like me, looking out into the dark wondering what kind of world was out there beyond their understanding. I was one of many. Out the window the streetlight flickered. What would it feel like to occupy that place in Tug Lake? Would time mean anything if I swam out to that spot? Stand back with me for a moment; let us look down at time from the heavens. Is the space between you and me really that great? Or is it merely a few lapping waves on the shore of Tug Lake?

I woke my wife. I whispered at her sleepy face, Water is constant. Did you know that? Did you know it takes centuries for water to fully evaporate and regenerate from even a medium-sized lake? And even then, the lake contains water or particles of water going back thousands of years." My wife nodded. She fluttered the lids that covered her eyes. She said, I am going back to sleep.

Why do I seek you? Is it because I never knew you? What am I even looking for? What would I find at Tug Lake? Each Autumn I drove to Oxford to walk through the home of William Faulkner. I would run my fingers over the words he wrote on his walls. It was a needed moment each year. It connected me to this complicated string called time. I needed to touch the things he touched for anything to be real. I ran my fingers over the uneven edges of the photograph and things all made sense. In the photograph my grandfather was smiling. Something had been said to him from behind the camera, that single moment before light became durable on film. Did you know that the words we speak, every sound uttered in human history was still with us? Verbs and consonants were floating above us, ghosts from our past that are never forgotten. Would time matter if words came back to haunt us? Suppose time did mean nothing - suspend reason and walk with me for a spell - imagine that your final breath was followed by my first. Let's say it was true. Suppose I had the power to reach up into the heavens and pull down your words like apples from a tree. Would any of that help me to understand you any better? Or does time perpetuate mystery? 

I asked my mother once, Tell me about him again. She closed her eyes and spoke of barren landscapes and houses with wood burning stoves. Rural tales I would never understand. She told me of the night he died. She remembered the sound of the wooden stairs as they carried him down through the dark. She remembered seeing her breath and nothing more as she stepped out into the night. There were two headlights that disappeared in the dark. That I could understand. 

I went outside and looked at the stars. I laid on my back and set my head on the frozen ground. Time means nothing to the heavens; the moon and stars outlive us all. My mother was only a child, she must have been very afraid. What can you teach me about death? Speak to me - not as someone that came from you - speak to me as flesh speaks to blood. What did you learn after Tug Lake? Will we understand time any better when it's gone, or does brevity give us greater understanding?

I felt the cold in my bones. I wanted to wake up my wife. I wanted to rouse her once more just to show her the clarity of what I perceived to be stars. I wanted her to imagine with me the endless wave of souls who had looked up at these very same stars, who had considered their arrangement and what it all meant - those who had laid with their backs on the hard earth and considered their own humanity. I closed my eyes and listened for the train. You heard the rails before the horn. I heard them only at night. I lingered there in the cold for minutes and seconds. There was still time left to swim the waters of Tug Lake.

————————————————————

Jonathan Lindberg writes short stories and novels from his studio in Memphis. He loves reading, traveling and writing.

Photo provided by the author.