THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE DOOR (Patreon)

Kingsport was old. Almost as old as you could get really. At least by American standards. The ruins of the church were laid sometime in the 1640s or 50s. Today it's nothing but old stones, fallen ceilings, ruined arches. But it was always like that to me. Ruins overgrown with moss, a spray of gravestones with names like GILMAN and CARTER, tilted at crazy angles by roots and the slow moving earth. The dead surrounding the ruins of the church to the king of the dead.  

My earliest memories were of singing and climbing and living my little kid world in the old graveyard with a balsa wood plane, while grandpop watched. They were the last normal memories I have before things got bad...for a time, and then...got strange.

My dad — who was composed entirely of transactions — died sometime between those memories and the door, and I came to live with grandpop full time in the house on Newburyport Street across the way from those dead generations. Then my mom died in the hospital she had been in for more than a decade, a little bit later. But that one we all knew was coming. 

Then the lawyers and the fight over the trust. That just went on and on. Grandpop just wanted me to live and he did his best to keep me from all that. At 18, it might all be mine...all the money and the companies and holdings and such, if our lawyers were paid more than their lawyers I guess. When I got too down about it, grandpop would always smile and take my hands and laugh in his old man way and say, "Danny, you have to understand something...this..our life...you. You're my dream." 

But I didn't understand. Not then.

Grandpop tried to show me the door in the old church when I was 16 when he first got sick.  

On the last day before he was set for the surgery, he took me to the door.

"There's a door there, Danny, but you can't see it," he said to me, and his face was already yellowed and sagging from the disease which hadn't even been a thing last month. Already it was gobbling him up. I laughed because there wasn't any door there, and then I didn't know what to say.

"I went in that door when I was 15, and everything was good for a long time. Everything was great. Your dad came and was happy and everything...made sense. It just worked out. But then I just..."

He turned and looked at the dead end wall without a door.

"Pop?"

"It's okay Danny. It's okay. It's not working for me anymore. It's your turn. I should have sent your dad through, but I got greedy, I guess. I thought I could hold on to it forever."

And then he did something strange. He tottered into the alcove, ducked his head beneath nothing, and stepped to the wall as if carefully entering a narrow, invisible doorway that was not there.

Sometimes you're put in situations you don't know how to deal with, and I was just 16. Grandpop was my world, and he had never said or done anything so strange. I chalked it up to the drugs and the disease. As I helped him up the stairs to the house, I asked him:

"You feel better pop?"

"Yes, Danny. I do. I'm better. You remember what I showed you."

I thought about that a lot. When pop didn't wake from the surgery, and the days tracked on, and the judgment in my case was coming up. I thought about the door. But then, of course, everything started to fall apart. The President and his bullshit. The war in Kashmir. The bombings in Taiwan and the Belorussian thing.

Then, of course, the east coast power grid collapse, the fuel shortage, and the disease.

Still, grandpop hung on, somehow through all this. Even when people hunkered down in their darkened houses and waited for things to fix themselves somehow, grandpop hung on. My mind kept playing that day over and over. The day this all began. The starting gun. The world had unraveled in just short of two years from the day grandpop went through a door in his mind.

Then, I find myself standing in the alcove of the ruined church across the street. And though I can't see it, I'm nearly certain there's a door there. A door that if I go through I can fix all of this. A door to a world that somehow side-stepped ruin. Where grandpop wakes up. Where I get the settlement. Where we all live happily ever after. A dream world.  

All dreams need a dreamer.