Odd Hours

and their rigid geometry melted into mist at both ends.
    Portions of trees floated into and out of sight, like driftwood on a white flood. Gray grass spilled down slopes that slid away as though they were hills of ashes too insubstantial to maintain their contours.
    The dog and I ran for a while, changed direction several times, and then we walked, out of nil and into naught, through vapor into vapor.
    At some point I became aware that the weather was something more than mere weather. The stillness and the fog and the chill were not solely the consequences of meteorological systems. I began to suspect and soon felt certain that the condition of Magic Beach on this night was a presentiment, a symbolic statement of things to come.
    The dog and I journeyed through a dreamscape where thick smoke smoldered from fires long extinguished, and the fumes had no odor in a world purged of every stink and fragrance.
    The air pooled in stillness because the winds had died and would never breathe again, and the silence betold a world of solid stone, where the planetary core had gone cold, where no rivers ran and seas no longer stirred with tides, where no clocks existed because no time remained to be counted.
    When the dog and I stopped and stood entirely still, the white nada settled under us, no longer disturbed by our passage, and the pavement began to disappear beneath my feet, beneath his paws.
    Such a terror rose in me that I exhaled explosively with relief when the sudden swish of his tail disturbed the bleached void and revealed, after all, the texture of the blacktop.
    Yet a moment later, I felt that I had entered the Valley of Death and at once had passed into some place beyond even that, into an emptiness of such perfection that it contained no atom of the world that had been, not even a memory of nature or of the things of man, a place that lacked the substance to be a place, that was more accurately a condition. Here no hope existed for the past or for a future, no hope of the world that had been or of the world that might have been.
    I was not having a premonition; instead, I was walking through a night that had become a premonition. Black is the combination of all colors, and white is the utter absence of color. The fog foretold the nullity of nonbeing, a vacuum within a vacuum, the end of history following the ultimate annihilation.
    So much death was coming that it would be the end of death, such absolute destruction that nothing would escape to be destroyed hence. The terror that the dog’s tail briefly brushed away returned to me and would not be dispelled again.
    For a while I was aware of proceeding from nothing into nothing, my mind a deep well from the bottom of which I tried to scream. But like the lingering dead who came to me for assistance, I was not able to make a sound.
    I could only pray silently, and I prayed to be led to a haven, a place with shape and color and scent and sound, a refuge from this awful nothingness, where I could press back the terror and be able to think .
    Like a dreamer aware of dreaming, I knew that a geometric shape half resolved out of the amorphous clouds. And I was conscious of the exertion of climbing steps, though I never saw them.
    I must have found the heavy door and pulled it wide, but even after I had crossed the threshold into shadow and light, with the golden retriever still at my side, and even after I had closed out the foreboding mist, I did not immediately realize the nature of the refuge into which I had been led by providence or by canine.
    After the whiteness that denied all senses, the fragrances of wood polish and candle wax were so poignant that they brought tears to my eyes.
    I passed through a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled room into a much larger and somewhat brighter space before realizing that I had gone from the narthex into the nave of a church.
    Beside me, the dog panted with thirst, anxiety, or both.
    The side aisles were softly lighted, but the main aisle lay in shadow as I followed it to the chancel railing.
    Although I intended to sit in the front pew until my braided nerves untwisted, I settled on the floor because the dog needed to have his tummy rubbed. He had earned all the affection—and more—that I could give him in my current distracted state of mind.
    When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made—which is different from the world that it was given—my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that