Solstice Sunsets
by Dan Belanger
part 1
“Does time stop when it runs out, or can it be recycled?” I asked as I stood upon our doorstep at that magic hour of twilight when the last rays of sunshine covered everything in a luminous blanket of gold. “Can we polish up the seconds, revamp the minutes, overhaul the hours? Can experiences, thoughts and deeds be changed, improved, perhaps, with what we learn from each go-round? Are our best days ever truly behind us or do we always get a chance to make them better?”
It had happened many times before, this moment of temporary transcendence in which the clouds of confusion cleared long enough to see some of life’s key questions, if not long enough to view many, if any, of the answers.
It occurred only when one of us was crossing the threshold, about to enter our modest dwelling, as the light hit in that certain sweet way at that certain sweet hour.
Sometimes it was me on the doorstep, sometimes it was you, and sometimes it was Fitzgerald.
Do you remember, Bea, how as the sun set and the light changed, each incarnation of the moment of heightened awareness closed in on itself like a flower in reverse bloom?
How mesmerizing it was to watch the warp of the world behind the one of us, the room before us, and the door through which we passed as the whole scene sizzled and fizzled, fusing down finally into a tiny bud-like bead of time. These time beads hovered before us, glittering, in the last light of day, with tiny dewdrop reflections of you, me or Fitzgerald standing on the threshold of understanding. Somehow, standing in the subsequent moment, we could look back, and see ourselves in the shrunken version of the one that had just passed.
You just stood there, motionless, watching me, like you thought I was some kind of idiot, as I rushed around trying to catch the moment each time, instead of just letting it float like a bubble until it popped out of existence as they sometimes did.
When I was successful, I’d drop the moment of lucid inquiry into a large mason jar that I kept on the sill of the kitchen window that looked out over those beautiful Outer Cape Cod dunes rolling down to the blue Atlantic.
I’m guessing that you probably don’t remember any of this, though, as shortly after the moment passed, we forgot all about it, a kind of post-hypnotic amnesia glazing over our minds. We’d forget how we felt each time after stepping through the door, like we were walking into a whole new world of possibilities.
* * *
Our little fish shack, hidden in a secret cove in the Provincetown sand dunes just beyond Race Point, wasn’t in and of itself a portal into an array of seemingly endless possible futures. It was just one of many such humble abodes built by Admiral Alverez, a retired Portuguese Naval officer. Admiral Alverez, called “the admittable admiral” by the fishermen who worked the fleet of boats that he owned, built the modest dwellings to provide them with a place to rest between ocean-mining excursions.
It was Fitzgerald who, after studying the history of the place, told us all about the admiral, who had built this particular fish shack on this particular spot so that each year, on the Summer Solstice, the sun would shine directly through the transom window above the front door. The beautifully crafted stained glass window held the image of a red sun shining yellow rays down on a purple whale splashing up from a bright swirl of sea-green waves.
On the solstice, the sun, angling through the window, cast a series of reflections, on the kitchen wall, of the lavender leviathan appearing to bound up out of the emerald sea.
The exact positioning of the structure that allowed for the sun to shine through the window in this way on the solstice each year was an architectural feat that the admirable admiral had learned about in his extensive travels.
In Ireland, after cruising up the Boyne River, he visited an ancient burial mound in Newgrange, just an hour outside of Dublin. On the winter solstice, he watched as the sun, at Newgrange, shone through the grassy mound’s entrance, down a long stone passageway to a sacred chamber deep within.
In Egypt, he sailed up the Nile to visit the pyramids at Giza, which some said were perfectly aligned with the stars on Orion’s Belt as they would have appeared in the year 10,450 BC.
In Mexico, he dropped anchor in the Caribbean off the Yucatan Peninsula to visit the ruins at Chechen Itza. There, on the Autumn Equinox, he saw, as the sun passed over the El Castillo Pyramid, a series of shadows that looked like a feathered serpent climbing its ancient stone steps.
The admiral believed that the ancients, as he called them, had a greater understanding of our place in the cosmos than we could ever hope to muster. He constructed this fish shack on this dune by the ocean to see if he could mimic the astronomical precision of the ancient, star-gazing architects. He had no idea about what the consequences of doing so might be, for he did not understand the magical properties that such places might portend.
* * *
We never fully understood why we experienced the heightened level of awareness when the sun shone through the transom window and we saw the image of the whale on the wall bounding out of the sea as we stepped through the doorway during the solstice sunsets. Why our minds soared with the lavender leviathan when we saw it rise out of the sea remained a mystery of the place that the admittable admiral had built over a hundred years ago.
It was Fitzgerald who was responsible for the miniaturization of the multitudinous moment captured in the tiny time beads.
When Fitzy told us about what his small, startup tech company in Boston had created, we wanted very much to support him. So we let him replace the transom window with the prototype of the computerized window that, he said, was built with artificial intelligence as well as 3-D printing capabilities.
The experimental device, modified to replicate our stained glass transom, was meant to catch and reprint three-dimensional copies of sunsets so that you could relive them, and re-experience their beauty in what Fitzy called six sense-around.
“Why six sense-around, Fitzy?” I asked him while he was installing the device.
“Because, Ozzy,” he replied, “when you experience it with all five senses in the moment, you become a part of the endless tranquility of each sunset. You connect, using the awakened sixth sense of intuition, with everyone who ever saw a sunset, and who felt the deep calm and heightened awareness that they bring.
“All possibilities exist within their simultaneously contemporary and ancient essence. And yet each sunset is as unique as a diamond, a snowflake, or a fingerprint. My Magic Window can catch these beauties, and store them for later multi-dimensional viewing.”
Well, that all sounded great, but the Magic Window didn’t work quite as Fitzy had hoped it would when it worked at all, which was only on, and for a few weeks before and after the astronomical start of the summer season. Instead of storing the sunsets for revisiting, it blew them out straight away through the blowhole of the stained glass whale. The lavender leviathan spewed each shrunken version of the tranquil moment into the room where it floated for several seconds. This gave me time to catch most of them and to put them into my memory jar.
So the mystery of the recurring moment of lucidity existed at the intersection of two forms of AI: artificial intelligence and ancient ingenuity.
* * *
As I was saying, though, each time, after dropping them into the jar, I forgot all about these bright spots in our otherwise shadowy existence. It was only after knocking the jar over, and seeing the many instances of the moment strewn across the kitchen floor, that I became aware of them.
As I attempted to gather them up, I chanced to glance into one of the crystalline versions of the moment where I saw you, bathed in honey-gold light, and heard the questions that you asked as you stepped through the enchanted doorway into the fish shack.
“How many days, how many hours, how many minutes do we have left?” you asked. “How many chances to make things right?”
It was a good question.
Although we lived together for years in a small array of dismal, dimly-lit rooms, passing from morning to night to morning through a shamble of upended days, after a time, we were no longer able to see each other. Looking at the same person in the same place for so long, our eyes stopped actively seeing, and just assumed that they saw what they saw.
Without making the effort needed to truly see, our own faces sank deep into the anonymity of dark mirrors. We lived for years unseen and unseeing until, as if a beam of light suddenly flooded into the place when Fitzgerald entered our lives, we were exposed.
The withers of age that had crept over our faces like ivy over a garden wall were made evident then. The devastating awareness of time’s inevitable toll told us that our existence, which we had taken for granted for so long, would soon come to an unceremonious end.
At least that was how we felt at the time. The memory jar that sat on our kitchen window sill was covered in dust so we could not see the luminous time beads inside. If we could have seen them, their glow, no doubt, would have enlightened us with the understanding of the many possibilities of time. It is likely, then, that we’d have realized that the aging process dominating this version of time, might not even exist in others. That understanding came long after Fitzgerald entered our world, which was virtually timeless, in our minds, before he arrived, and the clock started ticking.
* * *
Who was Fitzgerald? It’s not going to be easy, but I will try to explain.
When we received the long, rambling letter from him, in which he professed to be our son, we were completely bewildered. That’s because we had no son. We had no son because we had not been able to have children.
When some couples receive such news, they adopt, others separate. We simply went on with our lives. It was a disappointment, but we were able to move past it, to put it out of our minds and focus on what we had in each other; that is, until we received that letter.
After that, we never stopped thinking about the son that we never had. He entered our dreams and dominated our days. He sat there on the old leather couch next to us, watching TV.
We conjured the details of his existence a little differently each night. While his features changed, he remained a staple of our lives as we wove his imaginary presence into our nightly conversations:
“Fitzgerald looks tired,” you’d say. “I think we should all go to bed.”
Sometimes we even spoke to him: “What do you want to watch tonight, Fitzgerald?” I’d ask. “What! Wrestling? No, I don’t think so!”
But we were just messing with each other, doing our best to make light of the letter that was actually quite unsettling.
I tried to think of who the imposter who’d written the letter could have been, of how he knew us. I rummaged through the immense piles of junk that we had collected over the years, looking for clues. I didn’t find any until I knocked over my memory jar.
It was only as I watched the beaded versions of the solstice moment scatter across the light blue tiles of the kitchen floor that I began to find evidence. I could see, then, that the answer to this mystery could be found in the questions that we asked as we crossed the threshold on each summer’s first sunset.
“Am I happiest when following my desires or when following my passions?” I saw myself asking in one of the time beads. “What’s more satisfying, pleasure or truth? Could it be that I’m happiest in the moment of heightened awareness, or is it later that I’m at my happiest when looking into the mysteries of the moment? Am I happiest when pondering time and its passage or when wandering through it, wondering if it ever really passes at all?”
That’s when it occurred to me that the key questions that came in the moment had the potential to provide order to the chaos and confusion of the days passing from solstice to solstice.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Dan Belanger
