Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty

Author:Mark Doty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061871634
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-12-30T19:09:35+00:00

A few nights after I wrote those pages, this is what I dreamed: I had to parachute from an airplane in a strange way, sitting in the kind of plastic chair you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room. I was strapped into the chair, pushed out the door, and then fell and fell, it seemed almost endlessly, toward the earth. I can’t remember landing, exactly, but where I arrived was a hospital room, and the man in the bed was alternately Wally and Jim. He—either man—was in the last hours of his life. When he died I wept and wept; the dream was full of the enormity of the weeping. In a while I knew I had to tell Wally’s mother that one of her sons had died, though by then I wasn’t sure which.

I woke then, shaken, not crying now that I was awake but aware of the sobbing that had filled my sleep. I think my dream was about compassion for Jim, about seeing him and Wally in the same bed, the same boat. Just as I think the darker underside of his spirituality is judgment, so my dream points up to me how my own judgment of him has obscured my compassion. If I were him, if I were HIV-positive, what would I have done? It’s easy for me to say I’d never disappear from my brother’s life, but I don’t know that; can any of us know what we’d do under that disfiguring pressure? Judgment is easier than compassion, my dream reminds me; the dream instructs me, falling toward loss, the fall I can’t control, though I survive it, to see the ways in which Wally and Jim are of a piece.

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