D U R I N G  D A Y L I G H T , I can dream I see what I see -- my house stands still between rows of rooted poplars. At night, if I open my eyes, I feel the earth move, and shortly, my house and I float between treetops. It's the moon -- slipping from cloud to cloud. And the stars. But it takes much longer to see stars.

I know he never saw them, although -- and I have forgiven him everything because of it -- he pretended. He never cared about what was real as I did -- only whether things were going as he wished. Lying came easily to him.

He's suffering now, there on that narrow hospital bed --perhaps most because there's no way to maneuver. When we come into life, one tube is all we need. When we die -- he looks like a bug caught in a web. This is not how I've known him, how any of us have. My younger sister pleads when she visits, scolds him as if he's in a mad, fatal sulk. As eldest daughter, childless, I watch around the clock. He doesn't know how my presence buffers him, how I give him permission to be mortal. I doubt he'd want that from me, but it hardly matters. For years now, we've had to slip each other what we have to give.

When I was seventeen, his silhouette loomed in my doorway. The brightness of the light behind him darkened his face, his body, and rested in his own sense of himself as a figure not quite divine, but certainly not simply human. As a consequence he trusted himself to me and allowed me my own head. I believe I loved him more than anyone ever had, and so, inevitably, we dashed one another's hearts.

I hated him for lying to me--and, then, it was another woman, too. Mother has been right about that--the only victory life ever gave her, I'm afraid. I first saw the antelope during my customary escape from their mutual dismemberments. I lay on the garage roof watching for falling stars, dreaming of a young woman of my own. Nights in the valley towns were rather quiet then. We had automobiles and planes, of course, but not so many of them that darkness ceased belonging to itself. And our house was on the edge of the mesa stretching miles toward the mountains. I had more sky than I could see.

The creature simply appeared although it was distant and dim I assumed it wasn't where I saw it. I'd always thought we made the constellations up, grouped the stars in familiar shapes so we could recognize them, like faces. And this creature was not quite an antelope, either. For one thing, it had five legs, two coming out of its left haunch. And it's tail had the sweep of a comet. The cry of my parents' rage broke through the house, swelled into the night. I thought perhaps they might murder each other, and I felt the oddest peace. The urge to throw myself between them or to beseige God with prayers simply was gone. I was willing for even death to happen -- I mean, even though it was they who were rendering each other, I took what they were doing on myself. I can't explain. Only, for once, I both cared and didn't care with all my heart. And then I was free. Death felt perfectly inevitable; the world, absolutely open.

Getting ready for my journey was innocent. I took some water and a jacket. There was no moon and no way to know where I was going except that flickering body of stars that apparently has descended to the desert.

I picked my way through the sagebrush and cactus talking with myself.

Why are you alive now?

I don't know.

Why here?

I don't know

With these people?

I don't know

As you are?

I don't know.

Joy seeped into me with the starlight, filling me like my own blood. I could have been anywhere or never, and Lena's face filled my dreams.

Why not?

Oh God--his chest is heaving. If only I could breathe for him. No, no that won't do--not even for a moment. His face is so empty now, except for pain. My lending him my breath would be a violence against all he has been.

He wouldn't forgive me Lena. I was the only child he never hit. My sister tells me he beat her the night he found out. I hadn't spoken to him, myself, in years. We didn't talk, really, until after I was forty and had betrayed Lena. I left her for a younger woman, much as he had Mother.
At first, I asked him whether he'd be pleased if I moved back to town.

"It's too late for that," he said. The next time I saw him, about four years later, we talked like old lovers who no longer needed anything of one another. Finally, he asked me about Lena. And I told him in pieces as we walked the mesa. It was twilight when I told him of the antelope, of walking across the mesa under the stars feeling the ecstasy of my mortality, drawing ever closer to the constellation that had somehow fallen to the earth. I walked all night, and indeed the stars grew larger, softer as I continued. The night was still an hour from dawn when I heard. I'd already seen it fully for some time.

It was taller than any building I had ever seen--tall enough to suck the earth it stood on toward the sky. Mostly, it was darkness. I could see it only by the stars that marked it randomly. Stars outlined its face, its long neck, much longer than any earthly antelope's. There was a star at the tip of one ear, and an arch of stars along a tail that shot from its three hind legs straight toward the heavens. Its hindquarters were lifted, and its body seemed to pour toward its shoulders, a vessel of night. The closer I came, the more it resembled my own soul during the moment before I move. It was drawn into a breath of poise and gazed down into the arroyos far below.

And then I heard it sing. My body folded, and I wept. Its song was eight more notes, and they rose like a scale, but the closest scale I had ever heard to the intervals of the antelope's song was a psalm a visiting Greek priest had once sung in our church. And yet this song was as far beyond his as the universe is beyond the sun. The antelope repeated it again and again, this rising call weaving the earth to heaven in strands of longing and love. I then not only knew that I would one moment die, but I knew the moment did not matter, that the meaning of a life is instantaneous, its completion impossible. And I knew, then, that I would choose for love.

He listened to me gravely, "I, too, had a young love, once," he said. She had been beautiful and in love with him, and he had been overwhelmed and grateful. He worshipped her. Parents, fate, time intervened. He did not see her again until they each had raised children. She was still beautiful, and still in love. "I told her I did not want to sleep with her," he said. "I told her what we had was still perfect and that nowhere else did I still have that."

I have learned that loving is an art to be studied and served, so I don't know if I understood him or not. Perhaps he had his own visions. Perhaps, in some way, he even understands mine.

Last night, I held his hand as he fell asleep. Before he drifted off, he told me he'd been dreaming of his father, of trying to swim the river by his childhood home. He smiled. "You're the one who remembers dreams," he said to me. I hold his hand again, and help him dream his death.