Douglas McCollam: Zero Hour 2 A.M.

Sometimes it seems the tide of the night is going to carry us where it’s going to carry us, no matter how hard we swim.

The New Orleans skyline (credit: Moreiso)

       I have been one acquainted with the night.                                 
       I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
       I have outwalked the furthest city light.
                                      — Robert Frost

By Douglas McCollam 

New Orleans

I’m getting reacquainted with the night. 

We were close years ago when it was common for me to hear the chimes at midnight in cities from New York to Paris to Shanghai, often accompanied by the sound of tinkling ice and the lure of what might come next.

These days our relationship is very different. Passing through late middle age in my high aerie here along the banks of the Mississippi River, I wake with a start, restless, alarmed and alone and wander out on to my balcony to watch ships glide by in the dark, their names illuminated in glowing halos, suggesting far off destinations I’m unlikely to see again.

The scene is somehow familiar to me. One of my earliest memories is waking up in my grandfather’s bed only to see his covers pulled back and his place empty. Sitting up groggily, I’d find him pacing the narrow balcony outside his bedroom communing with the thick southern sky. If I came out he’d shoo me back inside saying young boys needed their sleep. Apparently old men do not.

Sitting out on my own balcony in the heart of the night I can still make out his voice. It’s odd how that quality endures in memory. He was a bluff Texan by birth, sent to south Louisiana by his employer, The Humble (long since “Exxon”), just before the outbreak of the Second World War when world events precluded a planned relocation to Egypt. “Move over shallow water, let the deep sea roll!” he’d say on entering a room to our squealish delight, one of a seemingly endless string of colorful expressions and aphorisms at his command. 

Over the years, many of them sunk into my subconscious only to reemerge unexpectedly. Once, in an editorial meeting on Madison Avenue, I responded to my boss’s query about whether I could file an assignment on time (for once, he might have wanted to add) with: “Sure, that’s no hill for a stepper.” Focused on my notes it was several beats before the silence that followed caused me to look up at the mystified faces around the table. 

But the night is a landscape of regrets and I can’t keep from remembering one of my last conversations with my grandfather when I went to visit him one day after my grandmother died, leaving him alone in his house. Now suffering from emphysema and using oxygen, he was much weakened and it was difficult to see. Sitting on the couch eating peanuts he had roasted to perfection and watching a baseball game on the Super Station, my teenage hormones began to agitate and I told him I had to go see my girlfriend. I’d only been over for an hour or so and in a tone I’d never heard from him before he asked if I could just stay a little longer. My reply to the man who’d taken me on countless fishing trips, zoo visits, who had let me steer his car while he punched the gas, who taught me how to cook flapjacks and how to build a trap to catch haughty squirrels was: “Sorry. Gotta get going.”

Maybe he understood. Maybe he had done the same himself to an older relative in his callous youth. But when I think of him all alone in that house, pacing the balcony, strapped to his oxygen at 2 a.m., I feel a sharp pang of shame at my indifference and a deep need to apologize, if only I could. 

In my own advancing years, as I start to restock my medicine cabinet more often than my bar, I find myself drifting into the same kind of back eddies that held my grandfather and caught my father as well. The terrible life inertia that leads to isolation. I always vowed not to make the mistakes they did and I fight against it. But sometimes it seems the tide of the night is going to carry us where it’s going to carry us, no matter how hard we swim. 

On my balcony, the night is peaceful and as thick as it was for my grandfather years ago. I think of him often, of the stories he told of the characters that populated his childhood memories and marvel once again that I spoke with a man who spoke to a man who was wounded in the Civil War. The mystic chords. 

Across from my apartment building is the Audubon Zoo where my grandfather took me as a small boy. Sometimes at night, for no reason that I can detect, the lions there begin to roar, their calls echoing into the dark, touching some primal alarm in my chest and carrying in them all the pain of their exile and confinement. 

How I wish I could roar.

Douglas McCollam is a writer and lawyer living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and Slate, among other publications.