Clawing Nick into her arms as he struggled to breathe, Casey stammered about the limited risk of men contracting HIV from women. She said over and over how sorry she was and began to cry, holding Nick as he wept.
"Why?! Why?!" cried Nick. "Why did I finally find you and now I'm going to lose you, why?! No! Noo, noooo!!"He had dialed the night crew manager's number at Food King, and called off his shift, lying but speaking with the real impact, the laceration of Casey's confession still new. Keeping the terrible secret hidden, he told his boss instead how he had just learned his girlfriend was pregnant.
As they spooned in the dark in her bed that night, he held Casey and smelled her hair. He cried with her, told her shhhh, baby, it will be all right, when he knew nothing would ever be "all right" again. How everything now was brutally, relentlessly ending.
Love at the time for Nick overshadowed Casey's crushing confession. Or so he believed, at least for a little while. In the more than six years after that night, when he was just three months shy of his twenty-third birthday, Nick lived a life with Casey of sweet affection and simple good company.
In the heat of summer, they would paddle a canoe across Lake Tekakwitha, sometimes lingering to have sex on a little island near her family's summer camp in the mountains west of State. In the cool of early fall, with her family back in New Jersey, they would drive to a tiny resort town near her family's camp, to eat at a good Mexican place.
When winter came, they had movie nights with more lovemaking on the couch and trips to the desert Southwest and New Jersey to visit Casey's sister and the rest of her family. And all year round, when he could not keep quiet any longer, they would argue bitterly over what Nick called Casey's denial.
For over six years Nick's struggles with the reality of Casey's illness, with his own dance with death as her lover, intensified. Because he refused to accept what he felt was her denial of the truth, their arguments became more brutal, sometimes near-violent—despite her diminutiveness, Casey would swing away at Nick. Yet because he believed so strongly in his and Casey's simple happiness, their desperation only made him want her more.
They lived together after he re-enrolled at State, worked part-time and finished his bachelor's degree. After graduation, they traveled to Europe together to visit Nick's extended family. As they of course continued to have "safe" sex, he trusted Casey with his life. Yet even though he lived Casey's lie with her, hid from the truth behind their love, Nick could always feel Casey's near-certain death; a laughing devil that waited in the deep darkness with infinite patience, waited to crush them and cast them into nowhere.
Late at night, after he climbed into bed next to Casey and she had fallen asleep, Nick would try to give a face to the thing he felt was chasing them; the laughing devil, an ethereal presence, or what he thought of simply as the maker of nothing. And if the thing was patiently waiting for them or chasing them, he wondered where it would come from, once it moved to strike. Puzzling in sleeplessness, speculating:
"Empty space," the relative material reality (or unreality?) of human language and mathematics; if this emptiness beyond all the galaxies is nothing more than a limitless void, then, what?
The "deep empty"—the infinite depths enveloping the earth, its solar system, its galaxy and the entire tangible universe, racing away from us as we race along with it through space-time. Semantics, another sentient, human contrivance, tells us this nothing must still be something—but because it's infinite, it somehow "doesn't count."
Even if the deep empty doesn't count, all the matter making up the "known universe," eventually, from one perspective, becomes a floating, minute point of light that disappears if we assume the capability of watching it blink out through the window on an infinite rocket ride. Everything we think we know, relative to infinite space-time, amounts to nothing, just blinks out if one gets far enough "away."
If this is true, then, what?
Further, what of "time," in terms of the space-time of relative human perception? With a playful imagination and elegant equations, Einstein had described undeniably how time bends, but only if human perception is assumed, and it is further assumed humans can travel near or beyond the speed of light.
Nick knew from obsessive reading, that, through the grace of absolute genius, Einstein showed us the "unreality," really, of super-distant stars and galaxies. Based on the work of Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, Einstein told us a new story about how the night sky is indeed full of suns and planets. But he showed us how our relationship with these heavenly bodies is quite different than the fathers of modern science could ever have imagined.
According to Einstein's terms, even if we could journey near light speed to the stars, we would find our night-sky companions not there at all. We would see the consequences of the fact, that, to shape their "reality," humans deal only with light. Alone in the cold, we are infinitely bound by how we perceive everything, based on light's finite speed limit.
If light-speed travel was possible for us, we would understand the true nature of the surrounding universe. We would see how a star's burnout, death and absorption of its child planets emits light—the same essential light creating human perception of every single night sky star. We would see how, by the time the light creating our perception of such events finally reaches us in "our now," the distant dying stars' and planets' "now" is long past.
When he returned to the question of time, Nick finally decided that outside the infinitely-limited confines of what people feel or think, the expanse of time persists as limitlessly as the depths of space. Removing from the equation the tiny stuff of human perception, events or phenomena, time itself becomes an illusion in human terms; it cannot begin or end.
Relative to forever, there is no past, present or future. As he saw it, and as he believed we all must see it if we are being honest, everything, in the limitless run of time, like a tear drop in the ocean, effectively amounts to nothing. No past, no future, all present, here, now, and then again, never, nowhere, at no time.
In such a "place," carbon-based bipeds only strut and fret out their short organic lives. They amount to relative nothing and carry the lonely, ironic burden of a consciousness they cannot possibly "understand." In such a world, Nick thought, how could anyone even suggest the stuff of his ultimate fears, the presence and forms of his "demons," might be even slightly unbelievable?
Nick saw the truth of the place and where he and all people experience their lives—where they "exist." In such a nothing place, demons—like the hobgoblin of impending death chasing Casey and him—must be more than just typical inventions of perception, language and unstable sentient psychology.
In fact, Nick thought if we, as sentient organisms, insist we are just organized energy interacting with all the energy comprising the universe: an intricate, soft machine, perhaps imagining its individual, temporal, "psychic state(s)"—then the things of our imagination(s) must be just as real as we are.
We must be confident we have consciousness and existence in the first place—a consciousness couched in the absurd context of a space-time, which, in its infinity, renders all material existence irrelevant.
Despite the relative absurdity of our temporal, sentient, relative existence, we must accept our at-best illusory experience as "truth." It only follows—in the context of human logic—that the things haunting us must be "real." Monsters and spirit-beings, woven into our consciousness as part of our evolving language, myths, legend and religion—must be seen in a whole new light. In their many forms, our boogeymen must, live in the same "reality" we think we occupy.
As he ruminated in the dark while Casey slept next to him, Nick believed one overarching thing about the universe of apparent human reality and consciousness, of boogeymen. Whether it has four dimensions and expands infinitely into curved space, as Einstein defined simply and beautifully using his playful imagination and elegant equations, or if it has as many as eleven manifold dimensions and definable mass, as postulated by modern quantum physicists, the universe is for all intents and purposes only one thing: impossibly vast and effectively empty. And so no matter what human consciousness and perception might be in their own terms, they, too, ultimately amount to nothing.
Awake in the mundane light of day, Nick accepted that we and our "imaginary beings" all live, differently-defined, in the same energy space. An empty, dark, haunted universe is our home. In such a place, the lines delineating one form of energy from another—real things from those imaginary—must be barely defined, if at all.
For Nick, Casey's death—waiting to strike—became just another organized energy form, living with him in a nothing world. In his own shaken mind and spirit, in his broken heart, he came to know how we and all people use what we at least perceive as the bio-computers of our minds. We generate, contrive or envision our demons and angels—perhaps summoning them to cross the line separating us from where they live—in the deep empty. We effectively haunt ourselves with summoned avatars, or contrivances—"virtualities," of our darkest fears embodied.
Yet based on this, Nick wondered further why he and all humans do not summon or contrive only the beings that comfort us. What is the substance of our relationship with the deep empty, of our fear of the beings perhaps living in it? If there isn't really something in the deep empty to fear, after all—something endlessly pursuing us—why do we run in fear from whatever it might be? Perhaps most strangely, why are we also attracted to the thing pursuing us, somehow drawn to the agent of our destruction?
Obsession with such thoughts, especially given his life with Casey, might be expected from an undergraduate whose professors and friends spoke of him as "bright and a little wild." Nick particularly liked exploring and experimenting with the ideas of Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Sartre, Nietzsche and others who had tried but failed to understand in their time, just how the lines of reality blur: cave wall shadows; attempted reconciliation of science and faith; thinking therefore being; being in nothingness; everything as nothing.
In this undefined, baseless world where all human life plays out, Nick still loved Casey. After more than six years of simple happiness and agonizing battles over denying the reality of approaching death, there came a rainy September afternoon. On that afternoon—two months after she developed a summer cold she couldn't shake—when she kept losing weight she couldn't gain back, Casey finally asked Nick to take her to her doctor. The kind man Nick would always remember for his shockingly blue eyes had immediately admitted Casey to a local hospital.
Only a few weeks later, following her transfer to a university medical center in New Jersey, Casey could no longer leave her bed. She hadn't much to say on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons Nick would spend by her bedside. With hollow eyes set in a skeletal face, her head withered atop shoulders like tinder sticks, she would look at Nick and tell him she was sorry, so sorry. He would hold her cold, dry hands and tell her she had no need to be sorry, how he felt so lucky to love her so much, now and always.
Then, it happened. Casey's younger brother Tom called Nick in the middle of one lovely Indian summer afternoon, the sixteenth of October. Nick got the call just as he was leaving to go back to the hospital.
As the phone rang, he looked out the window of his Days Inn room at the landscaping edging the parking lot, young sugar maples and sod grass. Shear curtains obscured his view. Rain had fallen earlier on the oddly warm day; the sun broke through suddenly—on branches with scarce, curled, red and golden leaves, fat raindrops exploded with light—diamonds in the trees.
At first, he felt only complete numbness. Then he cried quietly, as Tom told him Casey had slipped into a coma after Nick left her side in the early morning, to eat, shower and put on clean clothes. He had spent the previous night wide awake in a chair by her bed, listening to her shallow breathing. Tom told Nick how, an hour after he had left, Casey had become very still. Her mouth had opened a little; she had taken a quick, whispering breath, and then had not breathed out.
As everyone who lives through the death of a loved one learns to do, Nick went on without Casey. At least part of him believed he grew stronger as he went on; the part that felt the pain of Casey's death becoming less like a remembered experience and more like a case study with which he was intimately acquainted.
Trouble was, though he thought he went on with his life, Nick's dreams of Casey—lost somewhere in time, perhaps out of time or timeless in her death—still pursued him. As his dreams persisted, Nick started to believe the darkness on the other side of reality—the darkness that is all, compared with the pinpoint composing all material reality—that this darkness was the source of his dreams. And he believed the darkness must inevitably come to overwhelm not only him, but the world of sentient life.
In his dreams Nick could smell Casey's perfume and taste the dull copper of her nipples and feel the presence of her flat-shoes-and-denim-dress charm. Maybe these dreams were just another form of energy; psychic energy to be specific. And maybe the dreams had indeed come from the deep empty, teeth bared, invading Nick's mind, his sentience, penetrating his collective energy like the organized energy forms, or perhaps demons, they were in themselves.
Maybe the demons had come to take him away, to eat him from the inside out. Nick didn't know. Not really. After Casey died, Nick knew in his heart only what his dreams told him, night after night; dreams upon dreams in the dark.
* * *
Two years after Casey's death, Nick developed shingles and a persistent cough. Casey's doctor before she was moved to New Jersey agreed to see Nick; he immediately sent him to the same local hospital where he initially admitted Casey.
Declining even faster than Casey had, Nick was transferred to a major medical center in downstate New York. His HIV infection progressed rapidly to a case of full-blown AIDS, manifesting with all the horror of the syndrome. Doctors did their best to slow and combat the devastating physical and psychiatric impact of the AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma ravaging Nick's body and mind. They had little, if any, success.
