The Inescapable

Morning streams in through the window veiled by a pale, translucent curtain across a square room with squarely-kept bed sheets and watches and notebooks and pens and maps sorted neatly atop dressers. In this new morning I am created. I am first short on the pillow when he raises his head, until he stands, and I stretch across the floor and up the wall. I cross the room with him all the way to the bathroom door. In the sheltered, windowless darkness of the bathroom I disappear.

The day passes much like any other. I follow him from meeting to meeting. He discusses Railowsky business, and my mouth moves in conjunction with his. He greets his guests, and I extend my flat claw towards theirs. The others and me, we touch. I feel nothing.

Eventually night comes. He might be in his well-groomed den, out in California commissioning new railways to be built, or at the River City Hotel seeking some company for at least just tonight. In these hours he pushes me to the corners—dulling lamps and closing curtains. He shuts doors, walks along walls. If he had left a bathroom light on from a hurried morning and I am cast starkly against a back wall, his breath will jump. He will curse at me, with the same mouth we used to gain three hundred more miles between here and Arkansas. I am silent.

After a few moments he steadies himself and I tumble after him quietly to bed. I tip this way and that, drunk from a long day of following and obeying, of fulfilling everything that had been cast before me with perfect precision, with no protest.

With his last move he extinguishes the last bedside lamp and rests easy, as I have gone. There is no light to create me, and no eye to see me. Perhaps for these reasons he can only sleep at night, when the darkness closes in around him, and all that’s left is just his own singular self in the room. He won’t say. But for eight hours I will wait in anticipation of my creation. In the morning the man will have forgotten that I am here. He will glance up from his pillow and wonder whether today will be the first day he can evade his shadow. And I will be there to reassure him that today will be just like yesterday, and we will continue our happy and comfortable life together.