Red Rain

When I was a child I loved the rain. I would go outside without even a jacket and just stand, looking up into the sky. I could spend hours that way. As my clothing soaked through and my skin wrinkled, I would lose myself in the downpour. All the childish worries about school and friends and family were washed away. I forgot temporarily the entropic world in which I lived, in favor of places where things existed instead of merely happening.

I was never bored. My imagination ran wild, feral even, with nothing outside it to project another person’s images into my theatre of the mind. I was free to paint crazy landscapes of illusion, fantastic vistas that might have been found growing under the clouds of Venus during the golden age of science fiction.

In my waking dreams I saw trees, miles high, each supporting myriad mosses, creepers, ivies, vines and all the attendant insects and other animals, vertebrate or in-, on their massive trunks. I saw fungi contorted into strange and beautiful shapes, glowing with unearthly colors. I saw the rain, magnified into oceans waterfalling from heaven, feeding the trees and the life surrounding them. As though one of the trees myself, I felt my pores drinking in the water in parallel to the silent, vibrant profusion in my mind’s eye. I half-expected to wake up with my hair long and gathered around my feet in growth as luxuriant as those plants. That was just one of the visions that occupied my rainy days when I was young; there were many others.

Have you ever stared straight into the rain? It’s simultaneously confining and liberating. The droplets, moving faster than the eye bothers to keep up with, form a solid gray wall all around you. It feels as though you are standing at the bottom of some ethereal rocket-tube, prevented from launch by the pressure of the water striking your face. Yet, without that feeling of being held tightly in, its counterpart would be lost as well. Because the impression was also there that if the pressure should ever cease, I would immediately be released. If only the drops would stop striking my face for a single instant, I could shoot upward and outward. I could become one with the entire sky, air and rain and all, at last.

But as a child, I lacked the words to express this paradoxical joyous imprisonment. Nothing I could say would make my mother understand how alive I felt, standing in the rain. She insisted that I make no foray out of doors unless on a trip to some other indoors. She walled and roofed me; bound me up in dryness: umbrella, poncho, galoshes, even rubberized over-pants. But to be dry in the rain was worse than death. It meant being deprived of the sense of wonder that was so close at hand. I was entombed and shut away by a thin layer of plastic. We warred over my outdoor gear with as much sound and fury as the meteorite strike in the Antarctic.

My mother won, of course. Although until I was in my teens I would occasionally slip out of the house and indulge my flights of fancy under the gray dripping trees in our back yard, I eventually lost the need and ability to stand freely in the rain. Other matters, more pressing and more adult, demanded my attention. I no longer had the time. My pockets were soon filled with things that did not like water. I took a course in painting and half-unknowing tried to recreate my visions, any and all of them, but failed. Mind was betrayed by hand and eye, and my command of words was insufficient to divide text by one thousand and come out with the appropriate imagery.

Perhaps I could make her understand now, if she were still alive. But two months after the Impact, my entire neighborhood died. I was one of three survivors. We had ignored the rain and the governmental order to stay at home and keep calm. We wanted to escape the fear, the confusion, the enclosure of houses for a time. We watched from the nearby mountainside as even the rooftops of our homes vanished in the flood.

-

I don’t know why, suddenly, I am remembering those lost days of my youth. It has been more than fifteen years since the world’s innocence was lost in that explosion, since I had to give up my carefree lifestyle and struggle to retain life. Living and growing are much easier now than in the early years, of course. I have my architecture work, rebuilding a drowned world. But there is still so much to do and so little time, it seems, to do it in. Mankind has always built such prisons for itself. The only leisure I have now is at times like this: lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come.

My wife is already asleep. I run my fingers over her skin and feel a slight chill there. The human body temperature drops in the small hours of the night; it must be around two o’clock for her to be so cold. I feel slightly cold as well despite the sheets. If it were much cooler, I would expect to see as well as hear her soft breath.

She lies on her side with her back to me. It’s strange, that we should be separated by such a barrier as that between wakefulness and sleep. It is times like this that reveal the empty spaces in even the most intimate of human relationships.

I have a sudden, irrational desire to wake her, but refrain. She needs her sleep. It’s just that ever since that day, when the Impact’s death count became immediate and real, the rain has always held a connotation of isolation for me. I want some company other than that insubstantial curtain of water and mist hanging outside the bedroom window.

Finally, I can feel the first stages of sleep approaching. I lie still, breathing ever more slowly, letting my senses diffuse and my mind wander. The rain outside makes a lonely sound. It seems strange that rain would be lonely—it is surrounded by, enveloped in, a vast array of itself. It only appears in crowds of many millions of individuals.

Although I am inside in bed I feel a strange empathy, kinship even, with the rain. After all, are we both not paradoxically surrounded by ones like ourselves, yet alone? I feel myself to be a single raindrop. The bed is gone, my wife forgotten as I contemplate a geometrically shaped self, suspended in seemingly infinite space. All about me is the gray void, and in it, the others.

I am a raindrop… falling, falling. My birth was in the clouds, but I have no memory of them. All around me are myriad other raindrops: others like myself. We fall in silent and separate companionship and conflict, from a misty past, through dark empty space, toward an unknown future. Brief, seemingly insubstantial gusts of wind pull us this way and that. But ultimately, only the journey from sky to ground matters.

Together we fall. There is something at the end of this inevitable one-way motion. Whether it is a rooftop, a flooded desert of concrete, or the roots of some growing plant, we do not know. Gravity and time are inexorable, though, and all we need do is wait. It is now possible to see the future approaching, too too quickly--

IMPACT

At that moment I can feel my self, my being, dissolve. There seems to be a sudden light and a great noise. My accustomed physical boundaries fall away and I find myself joined to the others around me. As our beings mix, we become something more, something powerful and close that we have never experienced before.

At first, it is just those few of us who were in the immediate vicinity. We form a puddle, but such a shape is fluid and we abandon it, following the irresistible pull of gravity. There, just below, is a stream rushing with our brothers and sisters; we pour over the bank and into the current. But even this is not the end, as the forces around us pull ever-larger groups of us together. We enter a huge space, a river, rushing at incredible speeds toward a common unification. All manner of tributaries: other streams and smaller rivers alike, pour into the great conglomeration. For the first time both in living and in racial memory, we are truly united. There is no distance between me and the one next to me; not even a skin of surface tension separates us. After many hours which pass in a single heartbeat, the great mass flows smoothly out into the ocean. All are together here; all the water that has ever fallen upon the earth; all the rain and hail and snow of past and present together at last.

I can feel my self being submerged and diffused as never before into the common being as we combine into something more, something that an individual droplet could never hope to be. No longer incomplete, but filling and filled by those around me. Final completion: each of us complementing and supplementing the others. But even as my last vestiges of individuality begin to fade, I can hear a voice.

-

I must surely be asleep and dreaming by this time, because it is as though someone is asking me the most important question of my life. My mother finally understands my garbled, insufficient means of expression. She understands why I wanted to be part of the rain. She asks me, “is this the way you want things to be?”

The answer comes to my mind with all the force of those many years since I first stood outdoors and truly looked into the sky. Yes, I say. And with that, the last layer between dream and reality melts away. I join the shining ring, and am finally free.

Illustration by Ryan Armand