by Joyce Aimes
The rain drenched the dark San Francisco streets, covering the city with a quiet, indifferent shroud.
Gabriel Lopes stood by the window of her hotel room, the rhythmic tap of the drops against the glass matching the restless, spinning cadence of his own mind. Across the room, Gretta lay asleep. Her breath was shallow and even, her face still shadowed by the grief of a sudden confession. She was dreaming, perhaps, of a ghost—Michael Thomas, the delicate boy from Wisconsin who had sung in the rain and died for love of her, long before Gabriel had ever entered her life.
The epiphanies of the evening weighed heavily on Gabriel’s chest. Only hours ago, at his aunts’ annual party on Angel Island, he had felt himself a man of unquestioned consequence. He had delivered his thoughtful toast to the unparalleled hospitality of the host, and basked in his own curated intellect. When he had seen Gretta standing on the stairs, listening to the faint strains of the quartet, she had seemed a picture of romantic mystery. A fierce, youthful rush of desire had overtaken him. He had spent the ride to the hotel imagining a passionate rekindling of their early days together.
Now, that pride felt painfully trivial, a petty and foolish masquerade. Listening to Gretta weep for her lost boy, Gabriel realized with a sickening clarity how small a part he had actually played in her inner world. He had believed himself the master and center of her universe, yet he was merely a latecomer, a shadow walking through a life permanently haunted by a much more vibrant, passionate spirit. A boy of seventeen had loved with a fierce, reckless devotion that Gabriel, with all his books, refined manners, and social anxieties, had never truly known. He had never felt that kind of love for any woman; he doubted he was even capable of it.
A profound, melancholic warmth began to fill him as his own identity seemed to fade into the grey, freezing world outside. The burning irritation and jealousy he had felt just moments before began to evaporate, replaced by a strange, collective sorrow. He looked at his coat cast over the chair, his boots, the useless tokens of his modern, intellectual life. The boundaries between his own ego and the vast universe were dissolving. One by one, the people he loved, the aunts who had raised him, the guests who had laughed at his jokes, would become mere memories. He himself would soon fade into a shade and join the ranks of the forgotten.
He watched the sprinkles drift past the lamp outside the window. It was time for him to set out on his journey westward, to accept the fading of his illusions and face the true, unvarnished reality of his heart. His soul approached that vast region where the living and the dead meet in silent communion. The rain fell softly over all of The Bay, drifting faintly upon the lonely churchyard where Michael Thomas lay buried under a crooked cross, falling slantly upon the dark, churning waves of the Pacific, and softly, mutely, detaching itself over the entire universe, burying the living and the dead alike under a quiet, indifferent shroud.