From the time she had married him, she always remembered him waking up at night with phantom pains. He would take his crutches and a packet of cigarettes and go out to sit alone on a stoop in the garden. For the first few weeks after their honeymoon, she tried to make him more comfortable. She would offer massages and hot towels and alcohol and sex to no avail. When she tried to follow him outside, he would simply hold up his arm like a locked gate.
She would stand at the window and watch him smoking fitfully under the dogwood, betraying his torment to the air in little gray puffs. She wondered if what she felt watching him was what it meant to be married. Soon, she was able to sleep through the night, oblivious to his comings and goings.
After their home was gone, they moved to the capital to live with his brother's family. It was her, now, who was waking up every night, pulled out of sleep with the feeling that someone was clawing the flesh off her back. Crammed into the guest room with a number of other refugee relatives, they were denied the privacy needed to conceal pain.
They made a tacit agreement to share their misery with each other.
At midnight, they would soundlessly slip out of bed and tiptoe over the sleeping bodies strewn about on mats on the floor. Arm in arm, they set out among the burned-black city, sometimes not returning until dawn. They never spoke a word.
Many years following the divorce, she began to associate him with a foreign musical she watched once by herself in a cinema on a rainy afternoon. It was the scene where the star-crossed lovers frolicked in a field of Swiss tulips. The scene right before the male lover kills himself.
They had tried to make that space. For a brief moment, between the angry, dish-breaking marriage and the quiet drifting apart, there was a flash of light. She drew the trolley to a halt and flew out the window like a stage actor on a string until she reached the roof of the post office where he was waiting for her. They danced for thirty seconds and then died in the blast before they were brought back with the power of radiation, like mutants, into their present sleepwalking lives.
