Two images occurred to her.
The first was melancholy, sad, painful even, but carried a warm hope in a vague manner. She didn’t know if she understood it; she didn’t know if she’d ever understand it; but there was a hope there, to be sure, even if she didn’t see it:
She saw him bruised, scratched, beaten, bleeding, crawling on his belly through the sand. His face was caked in mud, his body in dirt. The sand clung to the mud as he dragged himself along. She didn’t know how long he crawled for; it didn’t seem to matter. Eventually, he would come to the end of the path. The dirt would run out, and before him would be a sheer drop to the land below. It was the Badlands, she thought. She thought he had come to a cliff in the Badlands. It was the end of the day. It was dusk. He would lift his head, just enough to see the sun skimming the horizon, and a look of realization would come over his face. His chin would be drooping, quivering, showing a hint of worry, but his eyes were wide, clear, as if what he saw had not been unexpected, that it had logically followed from a set of axioms, that he hadn’t expected any differently, that he had accepted it long ago. He would give one last look over the land with the little amount of light that was left. The land would be bare, and he would smile. He would lay his head down on the sand and close his eyes in contentment, and she knew that he finally had seen what could have been and that that had been enough.
She didn’t like this image. She was grateful that it came infrequently. She liked the second image better, and it occurred much more frequently:
She saw him sitting on a beaten-up leather chair in front of a worn-down command console of some sort. The console and the chair would be in various conditions of disrepair every time the image occurred; but no matter how bad they looked, the chair always supported his body and the console always had lights flashing. Around him would be a network of beams well above his head; the beams closed into each other, funneling upward to the sky, giving the impression of a spire above his head, his body seeming to serve as its foundation and point of origin. There was no glass between the beams. The air was free to blow through them; she knew that it was this feature that gave the beams so much strength. Through the triangular openings where the structure parted, the same brown land as in the first image could be seen. But the land seemed too far away and distant for him to be standing on it; from his perspective, the land looked like a topographic model. The console and the chair were on a wooden platform, suspended high above the ground by this network. The sky would always be dark, and he would always be speaking into a microphone on the console. She never knew what he was saying; the words were indistinct. But they were not indistinct because he was saying them improperly; she knew that she could not hear them because it was she, not him, who was insulated by something. But that didn’t seem to matter. The power the words contained would cause the barrier between her and him to quiver. He had been talking for a long time. He would speak his last sentence and then lean back in his chair. His words, long after they were spoken, would hang in the air like thunder over the earth in front of him, a formidable presence that commanded everything below, an imperative to rise and behold that what was said and that what logically followed. At that moment, the sun would peek out over the horizon, a faint, dull purple, like a bruise healing. He would put his hind legs up on the console in front of him and say nothing; he would only watch. As the sun climbed higher, the sky became red, then orange—then yellow. He would be in darkness until this last color appeared; he did not permit the other colors to touch him. When the light filled his tower and his platform, he took it. His mane of golden bronze, tossed over his neck in the frozen undulation of sine, shone with an impossible intensity. His insolent posture challenged the sun, owned it, gave it permission to be the same color as his hair. The sun was no longer the source of the light; rather, it was the epicenter of the mere reflection of the radiance of his mane, flowing to all corners around him, illuminating what was below. She would see that the land before him was bare. Desolate piles of rubble stood here and there, but it didn’t seem to her that the scattered bricks were ruins; they seemed more like building blocks. They quivered in the light, gesturing in a tremble of desire, waiting for him to put them into some shape, anything he wanted. And she knew that he would.
It was his blank slate.