Then it hit him. The blow struck him square across the jaw. At least that was what it would have felt like had it been a physical blow. His legs went watery and while he could breathe in he could not figure out how to the release the air. The noise continued to vibrate the window and he remained frozen where he had been standing, his palms flat against the panes of glass, physically still looking for the explanation for the noise, but mentally somewhere else. He no longer needed the noise explained. He knew. He knew everything like he had never known anything before. He tasted his thoughts and they were syrupy sweet, so sweet he was nauseous but could not stop sipping, fearing his new reality would crash around him. He didn’t think anything should be known like this. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t even possible.

Everything about him shook. He stopped looking outside the window and shortened his focus to his reflection. He saw himself staring back. His eyes looked weary but wise. His pupils expanded as he studied them. He had known this person once, but he no longer recognized him. His eyes had seen things that they shouldn’t have, things that he wasn’t sure he could ever explain. The noise dulled to a blunt sound, no longer pouring down on his thoughts or overflowing his fears. Had he ever even heard the noise? The noise didn’t mean anything, he realized. And it was everything.

He wished she were here. He wished more than anything that his wife was in the next room, reading the newspaper in bed, her reading glasses perched at the edge of her noise with two gold chains swinging near her cheeks and wrapping behind her neck. The newspaper sections would have been fanned across the bed in the order she planned to read them. A neat pile of read sections would slowly build on her nightstand until the pile threatened to topple. It never did topple, and she would carry the finished newspapers downstairs with her when she prepared for her evening tea. He would stand in the doorway and watch her read the newspaper. She sometimes lost herself so completely in the inky words that she wouldn’t notice him leaning against the doorstop. When she did see him she would give an exaggerated wave with her hand and look away, embarrassed that he would be watching her, her lips pursed together as if to cluck in disapproval, but she wouldn’t make a sound.

He knew that such revelations as he had needed an audience. Without an audience he would never know if they were real. She was gone, he knew. She had left him many years before. He always thought he would be the first to pass. He could not remember a time when he was healthy. She had never had those problems. She was the rock that they had built their life around. He always knew that he had tied himself to her good fortunes and was always happy to be towed in her wake. When she was gone his world ended with her. His daughters saw him through, convinced him to continue living at least for them and their children if not for himself. He blamed himself for her death. She had known there were problems and she had not shared them with him. He could have been there earlier for her. He could have comforted or healed her. He knew he had that power if she only told him. When she died, he had been angry at his own anger when he had learned the truth. He wasted weeks of anger at her end that were so precious. He wished more than anything he had those weeks back.

Around his palms on the window, the glass began to fog. His hands fell away from the glass and he saw an almost perfect palm print in the glass. He watched it slowly disappear, the edges running toward the middle, breaking apart before vanishing into the glass. He still felt the vibration. It was no less than before but now that he knew, now that it had all been revealed to him, the noise did not scare him. Knowledge is a powerful defense against most terrible things. Knowledge with acceptance is an impenetrable defense against everything except loneliness.

He was surprised by the world around him. He had seen his room thousands of times before but in that moment he felt like he was seeing it for the first time. The bookshelf held six rows of his favorite books. He had stuffed the books into the shelves at various angles trying to make them fit. The bookshelves bent under the weight of the worn books. At one time the bindings of the books had been lined up by size and genre. He had organized each group of books by their relationship to their neighbors, creating a rainbow of connections that only he understood. Knowing that the bookshelf was there comforted him. Even in his new reality there was something old and permanent.

The bookshelf fell away and he saw his small wooden desk where he had spent many hours working, preparing correspondences and recording his thoughts. He had taught his students that a life’s work doesn’t amount to much except where the work touches someone else. What he had seen was the creation of everything. It happens at every moment and at all times. The world ends at each moment only to begin anew at the next. The universe is not a onetime act, but an ongoing gift. Without the gift there is nothing.

At that moment he had seen everything. He saw his life and the universe and his wife and everybody he had ever known or would know. He saw the world around him shimmer and fade. Everything is connected to each moment. He laughed at the size of everything. It was so small. And then he released his breathe and saw the whites of the ceiling before it opened up over him.