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At Night, He Walks

When I wake, sometime long past midnight, he is crying again.

It is always like this. The tears come not when we first go to bed but later, while I am asleep, he lies awake and cries, and sometimes I awaken perceptive again of his same indefinable anguish, the which one can sense in a room as though it were a living thing, between us.

And so it is now. Next to me he lies on his back, muzzle pointed towards the ceiling, and when I lean my head just barely to the side, eyes swung to the left, the moonlight cast through a bedroom window shows that the fur of his face is damp with tears. Though his body is wracked with arching, shivering little sobs, he makes not a sound. He never has. He never will.

When first these episodes began, I wondered - ought I reach out and touch him? But something held me back, then and now. Long ago in the south pacific it was believed that when eyes are closed a spirit can flee its body and wander, and that he who disturbs a sleeping man or woman does so at risk of severing a soul forever from its physical form. Now here I watch him suffer somewhere far away, as I myself am torn with a mixture of fear and concern and resignment, and I dare not speak or move for fear that if I do, this already fragile being will shatter fully, and be made irreparable entirely.

After a few moments he sits up, and swings his legs off the bed. He is going walking again.

Without turning my head I watch the slender white form slide off the bed. He is small for a wolf, smaller than me, and the shirt he pulls over his head is a woman's; in oversized America, even men's size small shirts invariably hang off him like a tent. He sits on the edge of the bed, back to me, pulling on jeans, and then stands, taking his coat from a hook, and buttons it. The motions are mechanical, like a sleepwalker's, but I know that he is wide awake, driven by something deep within him that I cannot understand, or do not want to understand.

Does he know I'm watching him? Hard to say. A few times I have caught his glance, in the day, and he knows that I know, but something in that sad, haunted expression of his eyes begs me not to ask, as though the mere speaking of words itself, the mere asking or answering of the question, is more painful or destructive than he can bear.

And so I wait, eyes closed. The soft pad of feet over a wooden floor, growing ever distant - the clang of a screen door - and the creak of weatherbeaten deck boards. Rising, I watch from the window as he goes down the steps from the beach house's deck. His hands are in his jacket pockets. He walks slowly, methodically, looking neither to right or left nor behind, with a perfect precision he never has in daylight. It is a moonlit night, and in the moonlight his white fur, and the jacket he wears, a long blue thing with a high collar, has a spectral effect, ghostly, as though he were the spirit of a Victorian sea captain, a pirate born three centuries too late, adrift in a landlocked life. Like a ghost he is present one moment, and gone the next.

Now that he has gone from sight I return to bed. God knows where he goes. He'll return in an hour or two or five, his feet sandy from the beach, his fur damp and frosted with the salt smell of the sea, and crawl silently into bed, rigid beside me.

I never ask where he goes.

Does he merely like to walk upon the sand, smelling the brine and the sea spray, wandering long and far, until whatever inner emptiness spurs him on is satisfied? Does he find a bench or a pile of driftwood and sit listening to the sea, filling his ears with the crash of the waves, watching the white curl of the crest upon the dark surface of the water, and finding in it salvation? Or does he find nothing - just searching, searching, for something that cannot be found.

It has occurred to me often that there could be another explanation. He may not be alone, on these night walks; it may be that on the beach he holds rendezvous with some other, a new love or old, or that he goes there to be picked up in a car and taken away, and uses the sea shore as launchpoint only to throw me off with sandy paws and salty fur. But I know he is too innocent and honest to contrive such a scheme. If it is a lover he walks to, the beach is a place to which that lover must also flee. The sea is something they alone share.

Sitting up wide awake on the bed I find my own reflection in the mirror across the room, much more shadowy than his own ghostly form was; dobermen do not stand out in darkened rooms the way white wolves do. It must be something with me, something wrong, that makes him go at night. Most people's lovers do not lie awake weeping, or walk by the shore at night.

It may well be that I am indeed to blame, for never having tried to stop him, never having asked, never having offered comfort, but fragile people made of glass cannot be embraced and comforted, lest one crush them further. Or is it just my fear...

There on the nightstand are his car keys, and the curled cord of his phone charger. This is another fact of his night walks: he takes nothing. I have before noticed, after he's gone, his phone, or his wallet, or other necessities, the sort of thing one would never go out without in day, abandoned carelessly at night. It's possible he thinks he will not need them, but more likely he does not think about such things at all. Phones and car keys and wallets are elements and needs of daily waking life, and his night walks are drawn from something else. Something I can never understand, and that he can never explain.

There is more and more that is inexpiable in him, as late. He's quieter now, growing quieter all the time, but that same glow I've always loved is still there, the glow which, yesterday afternoon, had him running to me in childlike enthusiasm, tail flying about, at having discovered an abandoned hummingbirds' nest in one of the trees behind the beach house. Then we planted a new Rhododendron bush, and he fell down reverently patting down the earth around the little scrub, and remarked that someday people living here will be blessed with flowers. A truth, if subconscious, expressed in that remark, I thought. People living here, but not him, for he will be gone.

At first the night walks were rare, or only on calm nights, but there have been times too when he goes out in storms, as one night last winter when I woke to find him dressing in the midst of a terrible winter gale. That time above all I wanted ardently to pull him back into bed, kiss his neck and beg him not to go, but as always I only watched, as though he were a ghost truly and not a real person. He seemed to disappear down the steps in slow motion, the wind whipping up the tails of his coat, the fur of his mane all blown up above his head like a halo. I never slept that night, and when he came in later, completely drenched, shivering terribly, the scent of his wet fur perceptible from the moment he opened the door, I sat up in sudden irritation, thinking that for once I would demand an answer...but he had already gone into the bathroom and closed the door, without so much as one glance at the bed. And when he returned I, as always, said nothing.

Deep down I know that though it may not be tonight or tomorrow or next month, there will come a day when he doesn't return.

I can't say how I know it, but watching him fade - for the frequency of nightwalks is growing higher all the time - watching him collapse deeper into himself, retreat further and further from life and from me, it's as though every night another imperceptible, untraceable little part of him disappears away out over the sea, into the waves, and is gone. Someday there'll be nothing left, and I...I'll blame myself.

I fall back into the sheets, knowing I will not sleep either, though I do not walk. In the distance the crashing of breaker waves chants like the chorus of Greek tragedies, a higher tempo signalling rise of conflict.

What is it that changed a happy laughing wolf into a ghost who cries at night and wanders by the sea? Whether it's to a secret lunar paramour or merely to the solitude of a windswept shore that he flees, the cause must be the same.

Deep down I know it must be me.

I close my eyes.