A Bright House
Chapter 17

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? ~ John Lennon

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty. ~ Herbert Gold

You have to know who you are; if you don’t you have nightmares. ~ Stephen Rea

Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares. ~ Peter Ustinov

Consciousness is nature’s nightmare. ~ Emile M. Cioran

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. ~ James Joyce

Vision with action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare. ~ Japanese proverb

Perhaps surprisingly, or not, Jenny slept the sleep she had been waiting months for. The feeling of energy seeping out through the heels and arches of her hard worked feet, down into the claw foot tub drain as she showered, stayed with her during the one cup of chamomile tea that she enjoyed sitting up in bed. An eventful Saturday had moved to take its place at the front of the line, ahead of all the ordinary namesakes that were the makeup of her pastiche of the mundane. The precious hours spent with Ray Townes had revealed the latest off-Broadway production, “A Parody of Jenny”.

She sat upright against pillows, sipped tea, and was mildly surprised at her relatively quiet thought patterns. Scott would be making no miracle return. What was left of him, of his rugged beautiful form, littered the bottom of a lake she had never laid eyes on, and maybe that was part of the problem. His family had done the subsequent searching after provincial police had found nothing with a thorough dragging of the waters where his ice fishing hut had been; a task that had to wait until Spring thaw, prolonging the agony for those who loved Scott. Jenny caved. She shut down for weeks. No wonder his family had no use for her. Not five minutes after finishing her cup of tea and pulling the little chain to her bedside reading lamp, Jenny was submerged ever so deeply into a thick soundless sleep that would take her directly to the morning alarm.

Ray’s sleep arrived quickly upon his return to the hotel room. Showering and feeling his energy reserves rapidly depleted by the satisfying pelt of hot water against skin, he dealt with an almost overpowering sadness for Jenny. Not only from his impressions of her residual bereavement and lack of closure, but as a hangover effect of her physical energy. Pressed back against him, her cool skin under his fingers, Ray had been flooded by the vibrational responses of Jenny’s body. She had trembled, the skin of her forearms reacted with a hunger, her hair suddenly an exuberant exaggeration of wildflower extract; even engaged within the flow of opaque visuals, the increasing weirdness of his feel for them, Ray’s attention had been siphoned off and into the physical Jenny.

Newfound territory, indeed, and a not welcome distraction when he wanted so fervently to help her. He got into the bed and kept his mind away from Sunday’s funeral service, which was sure to tax him mightily. With an early departure on Monday morning, he would have precious little time left to help his new friend, if she was as willing to continue as she had seemed during his session on the island. Backlash resistance to that form of intimacy, psychic intimacy, was not uncommon in even the most well adjusted people. Well adjusted, he thought with a wry smile into the darkened room, knowing how most opinions view psychic workers and their clientele. With the Saturday that altered his life concluding, Ray Townes drifted into sleep that was punctuated by staccato dream vignettes.

Restless location shifts and morphing visitors who at one moment seemed familiar, then altered their features into hybrid forms of interspecies mutational energy. At some transitional juncture, Ray heard a male voice that could have been located inside the hotel room. It said twice, “not so rare, after all - not so rare, after all”, but Ray’s conscious effort to break free of the dream and back into the reality of the bed was met with a new shift outward... flying... his visual body gone. Without seeing arms, he knew he could point them with the fingers outstretched, to move with great speed over a landscape he didn’t recognize. The tighter he held his invisible fingers together, the greater his velocity.

When he placed his hands palm to palm and angled the wrists either left, right, up, down, his astral flight would proceed in that direction. This was a night flight that seemed both lengthy and abbreviated, for his mind enjoyed the sensation as much as it regretted what he sensed was coming. Previous astral flights had almost invariably taken him to his mother. Against his rising will to resist, to terminate the dream, to change direction, he would fly languidly over the farm of that day and replace his eyes unable to close when he approached the front of the house and her dangling body.

Ray always saw himself from this removed view; like an actor playing the role of a tragic son, wailing and lifting her down from the potted plant hook to carry her then place her corpse on the lawn. His astral body would float, helplessly, forced to watch his previous incarnation accruing fresh wounds at the back of the universe’s classroom for special cases. Saturday into Sunday, however, brought Ray’s flight across the threshold of pre dawn. He caught sight of the approaching lake with its frozen perimeter, felt a vague relief from his sleeping brain, then was flashed ahead into a place where he stood on the ice.

The huts were scattered far apart here. He knew that the closest one to him must be Scott’s, that this was a snapshot of an event still playing in the vast unknowable archives. Ray, feeling the cold without a visible body, yet with eyes to see from, moved toward the small hut as heavily overcast sky barely began to lighten. This movement, this approach across time and dimension, awakened Ray’s need to help Jenny. He wanted to know. As in dreams where he replaces letters, journals, a suicide hint in his mom’s pretty penmanship, Ray wanted to enter the hut for any answers within. A loud brittle sound stopped his forward movement. Watching intently, Ray’s astral eyes noted a counter clockwise and very abrupt rotation as the hut quarter-turned with another harsh scrape. He awoke just as abruptly to the Sunday morning telephone alarm.

Kevin May’s first Melinda Emma Townes dream, though he doesn’t know who she is or why he has been shown her sadness, arrives on a good day for him. He has actively exacted a modicum of vengeance upon his stupid father, by way of a bit of inspired creativity that will never be found out. Kevin’s father is very much Susie’s dad, brain cell for brain cell, and his son holds him in utter contempt. Barely concealed, always loquaciously dipped in sarcasm, zero respect contempt. A grossly overpaid job as a security guard at the nearby Bruce Nuclear Generating plant, where nothing ever goes wrong aside from numerous heavy water spills into lake Huron. Where nothing ever goes wrong aside from constantly under mandatory-shutdown Candu reactors, or eons-to-go fuel rod bundles ever decaying the future of the planet’s top of the food chain monkey as they lay in tanks of water like cosmic dynamite sticks.

That is Kevin’s dad, a man any son would be proud of unless that son had aspirations to greatness and actually gave a damn about the planet. This man, this David May, sits in front of cards, playing solitary. Or he engages in pathetic typical male fantasy with his secret stash of Hustler magazines, the hiding place of which Kevin has long known about. In fact, around the May household, there isn’t much that isn’t known to its young budding anarchist.

Kevin’s father sits on his ass all through the night shift, bored into the irony of being witless ever more, waiting for the Russians to attack, or terrorists, or for extraterrestrials to finally show themselves after years of strange lights being sighted over the facility. The elder May is living a part of a Dire Straits lyric “money for nothing and your chicks for free”, but is enough of a loser to be shelling out currency for those glossy pictorials that Kevin delights in pleasuring himself to, often gleefully ejaculating onto the images before carefully returning the magazines to their “hiding place” in the garage. Given his mother’s iron-lunged daily stridency, her heavy-footed domination of all things David May, it isn’t as if the “man of the house” will confront his son over the defiled pages at the bottom of the porn stack... if he ever replaces them.

David May loves to grill all year round. The ostentatiously proportioned propane tank beast, with two massive side grills that have never been lit, occupies a section of the back yard directly below Kevin’s bedroom window. Though there is space a plenty for this smoke belching chunk of man o’ the house, it sits quite purposely below that window, for the lack of love and respect flows in two directions as concerns the male Mays.

David’s slightly younger brother has been the beneficiary of not one but two strapping young specimens of male progeny; both lantern jawed athletes, accomplished hockey players for the local teams, and living-breathing bragging rights during family get-togethers. David looks at his gangly, homely, introverted freak of a son; a boy who clearly despises his own family and the world in general, and wonders repeatedly what he did in a previous life to deserve such a child. This reciprocal dislike frames the waiting game for David and his only son; both wanting the same thing, at the mercy of Gregorian’s calendar and circumstantial details... wanting to get away from each other.

Therefore the oversized barbecue device is planted directly below Kevin’s second level bedroom window, where belching smoke and the stench of seared flesh can sicken the vegetarian outcast. It is a small pleasure for the elder May, whose son has been planning his revenge all summer long. With his paltry savings from work, Kevin has purchased an air conditioner for his window, thinking it may make a difference when his idiotic father grills the days of the year away. Alas, no setting on the unit will remove the entire stink of the clouds rising up past the old double-hung Victorian era window with its wafer thin glass that bubbles and distorts the outside world to ideally mimic Kevin’s view of it. It was during the early summer long weekend, when Kevin blessedly blissfully had the house to himself after declining to join his family for their trip to visit grandma May in the nursing home several hours away in Windsor, that he discovered the method of his vengeance.

The old home is brick clad. Each window is bottomed with a hefty sill that has been cut in one wide piece of hand chiseled field stone. With a large, well treed back lot, Kevin used the visual privacy to climb the household extension ladder for a better look at what appeared to be failing mortar around the heavy sill. His acquisition, the air conditioner, had only needed a couple of weeks of dripping to usher the stone into its final stages of setting within its original mortar mix. Smirking with delicious payback intent, Kevin rummaged through his father’s toolbox and emerged with a wide chisel and rubber mallet from the garage. He climbed back up the ladder on the Saturday of his karma slingshot weekend, and carefully cut into the bottom layering of mortar, then the sides where visible decay had begun to reach critical mass. He worked with his hands to pull the sill stone until it moved freely in place, and then pushed it back in.

Sunday, late afternoon. The day of his newest joy. Hours before dreaming of a place that will soon haunt his nights. Like clockwork, Kevin’s father is down below the window hovering over his precious grill, this time with two long sections of short rib smoking away. Kevin has the air conditioner set to full blast, its dripping condensation pooling on the stone sill before running down the back of the house against its brick cladding. He slowly slides open the plastic baffle to the side of the air unit, then inserts a flat screwdriver into the gap between the sill and the lower window frame. Before pulling the handle toward him, Kevin peers down through the old glass to see the bubbled distortion of his father who stands almost directly below Kevin with a pair of tongs in one hand and a beer in the other.

The barbecue lid is up, as it always is, and David May is fussing with the tongs and the meat, as he always does, moving the ribs from one spot to another over the flames that lick up around them. With his face bathed in the smoke, the elder May doesn’t see his son’s hand and the screwdriver in its grip. He can’t hear the subtle sound of the sill being loosened above his head, for the rattle of the air conditioner. Moments later, after the heavy stone has come crashing down upon the man’s left forearm to shatter it in several places, he certainly cannot hear the gales of laughter being stifled behind his son’s hand in the room above.