You’re moving through the lasts. When you lived for a time with farmers in the northern country. You and your wife and daughter had a little room above a cottage beside one of the barns that had begun to buckle like a foal. A wooden bucket in the barn opened like a flower, oiled tool stamens, thick rats scaling wall shadows; pigs rooted, floating behind split elm boards. Cold sunrise, fertilized haze of afternoon, call of penned animals in the indigo night. You’re moving through the lasts. Your wife kept the farmer’s books. You were drinking a lot then, or had been, though maybe this is important only as a marker of forgetfulness—the loss of large sectors of meaning once grafted to time. Of thin sleep and proximities of death and sharpened, slurred, oiled words grafted like skin. Skin of recent jobs. Grafted last entries into the grieving stage of promises, alcoholic statements, remedies, problems solved, passing synapses lost, how many lasts.
But your daughter loved the pigs, so many dozens of them, a hundred of them, sea of pigs on this farm where your wife did the books and you were trying out decency. But the farmer slaughtered the pigs one day. You’d gone with your wife and daughter to a cabin with a lake for a weekend. To escape that terrible music. And when you returned, you didn’t know what to tell your daughter when she asked why they were suddenly gone. Oh, they’ve moved, you said. Where? she said. The next farm, you said, too quickly, conveniently—a better farm, you said, as if it helped. Why this was your answer, you couldn’t say. You were a bad improviser. She asked nothing else but watched you, the way a child can, with a distracted gaze of deep attention. A last. Her eyes regarding your first betrayal shone a silent glassine light around you. And you thought this would be the one betrayal. This would be the great doubt. And when you saw the farmer next, he appeared to you as a jovial murderer. He had seemed to like the pigs. He’d named many of them, given them endearments. He’d once said to your daughter, They’re not much different from us.
You and your wife and your daughter lived at this farm for just a few months. There have been several lasts since, lives and places and you grew older and now it is now.
Your daughter’s gone off to college. Another last you’re moving through. Tonight, your sleeping wife stirs. Since your daughter left, your wife’s sleep cycle has changed. For instance, her voice wakes you, her opened eyes blinking rapidly. You say her name in the dark. She continues not with words but articulated shapes of breath. Brutalist dream words woven, expressed, worsted in meaning. She stops, and her eyelids close.
How she looks in the room’s darkness there like a memory of an angel on the edge of death or sleep, a purple-powder-blue vein pulsing in your wife’s cheek, each pulse a star, a constellated city map, the names whited out, years passing down the hall cloaked in a gown woven from thousands of eyelashes, this is your wife at this moment. Death, or sleep, or maybe just memory, a composite; you’re moving through the lasts. These nights since you last saw your daughter, your wife’s sleeping arm sometimes extends, reaching out like a cobra, then descends and slaps the bed. As if her arm alone were somnambulant. Sometimes, the arm comes down across your face, your body. And so, increasingly, you’ve been a light sleeper.
Tonight’s last, just now, you were crowning from a dream in which your children, hundreds of them, were waiting in line for the important test only you could tell them they’d passed. This test had lifelong implications in failure, but you’d never been told what those were. Reason was gestural, the implications implied. You wanted the children to love you, all of them, to grow up and call you more than occasionally on the telephone after they’d left. You wanted them to please stop forgetting you. Tonight, when your wife’s arm came down and slapped your face, the dream woke to a dark room. A despairing dark. That you couldn’t save them, though you were about to. But they were left there before the test finished.
Your wife, still sleeping, is moving through a listing dream. You hear the farm conspire in the dark of her sleeping breath, naming things. You’re back upstairs in the small incandescent flicker of that cottage room. You hear a memory of the pigs outside in the barn, moving about, rooting, sleeping, being together, a family. A last imprint. You hear them now, gone. You close your eyes. Out the cottage window, you see the farmer and his wife in their kitchen. The farmer rises from the table, moves beyond the window. He appears at the back porch and crosses the dirt lot to the larger barn. The last barn. It’s dark enough, moonless; his body moves inside shadows cast by the structures, his indigo shape etching through the deeper, stilled black. He opens the barn door, you can see through the open vent there the vastness of emptied pens, of former lives, of traces of family now evacuated, atomized. Had the pigs ever wondered about the lasts? Has the farmer ever wondered what he’s done, and to how many, and for what?
And what of you? The bed shifts. You open your eyes. Your wife’s arm has risen again, charmed and strange. You reach up and gently guide her hand down to your chest and hold her over you, and a tension releases in this silence between death, dream, and memory, you feel her lasting pulse on your chest, and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes as you descend into sleep.