A Bright House
Chapter 28

Dim voices. Very present, nearby, and cloaked at first. Male voices, one female. The beneath body sensation of movement. A rolling. Something that sounded like ′astronomical odds′ repeated thrice by the deepest of the voices. Rolling wheels beneath. Eyelids then cracked just a little. Overhead rectangles, harsh light shooting through smears, octagonal phosphene blobs a bounce, afloat. Eyelids shut again. He became aware of constrictions and weakly tried to move his arms, which wouldn’t.

Some other long lost memory billowed up like a jellyfish. The wheels rolling brought him to an old movie, “Seconds”, that starred Rock Hudson as a protagonist undergoing a radical surgery to preserve youth and beauty. Why, that? No panic in the threshold of crossing, from long bright hallway into operating theatre. Strangely numbed, probably sedated, but striving to focus in on the information as it drifted by in his mind vision, like pale smoke rising from Cuban cigars in a richly appointed room within an exclusive club for demons.

It came to him as they put him under. It came to him as their heads gathered ’round above him and he felt the depth of his strangeness in a world not built for his type. They were going to open his skull. He saw a portion of the procedure bubble into view and burst when the visual depicted the implant being inserted. This slipped away, floated beneath, evaporated into, a sense of the actual operation underway, as from a great physical distance but his body. His cranium invaded. They were going to use him for a new technology. His thought patterns would be recorded, possibly the images made visible, for study. That horror sliced like any scalpel, clean across the expanse of his knowing, flown directly into his brain by terrorists disguised as his own people.

He would have screamed for all he was and ever would be, if not for an interruption.

Jenny knew that there would be no game in play. She missed him the instant his feet left the front steps. She fought tears when the taxi door banged shut, but they were shed of a sweetly different type, being the tears of joy. After the easy beauty of their night before, embracing in a kitchen given new warmth, and then his body beside hers through the darkened hours... they parted ways almost casually in the threshold of her crooked old home. No lingering meaningful eyes. No hug of unison’s pounding heart proportions.

It needed no language, their parting, for she felt it to be as temporary as had been the many years of heartache in mourning her vanished Scott. All through the Monday, Jenny remembered him through the scent of his shampoo, lingering where she had breathed him in. She worked in a float. A bubble. Centered in her belly, a flowing warmth undulating. Waiting. Wanting. She would move in a work routine so embedded as to be unconscious. He would call that evening and of this she knew something sweeter than all the rest: certainty.

Elsewhere, in a segment of time before the time of Jenny and Ray, a stranger in Goderich Ontario has begun a quest to replace himself; salvage his identity and therefore existence. That first appearance of the massive feathered key has galvanized him toward a replaceing of the lock. He knows now how it came to pass that terrible scars were added to his body, but there are no visual recollections to accompany this knowledge. The day of his bolting from work to escape the in-heat Sheila had been “designed” to bring him to the remote lakefront place so that the first clue could reveal itself. Only one very dim memory lay within, wanting to focus, and it was of a wide open field and his lungs afire, legs churning to escape either that which pursued from above or in the dead wintry grasses. Not known yet, but hanging around in the lost part of him. He was reprimanded for leaving work.

The store manager liked Rich but was of stern work ethic fiber and reminded his newest employee of the generosity that had been extended in a town where solid jobs are hard to come by. A union job. Something with legs for the future. Rich apologized profusely and mentioned nothing about the woman who had made him so uncomfortable. As though appeased through her own gained insight and renewed power, Sheila spared the oddly appealing Rich any further attention. She smirked and said hello when they crossed paths, but no longer did she seek him out on the back dock. He is relieved, having devoted almost all of his free time during those ensuing months to walking the same stretch of rocky shore. Looking for it... over the seemingly endless span of those winter weeks there are no reappearances of the raptor, though Rich always walks as far along the shoreline as he did on the day of the sighting.

He settles into a pattern of pretending that he is doing well emotionally. Works hard, is as friendly and responsive as possible with anyone who engages him, but is thoroughly clamped down into a waiting game of concentration as he seeks further signaling. It is during the middle months of Spring that the dreams begin. Identical captures, it seems. He is alone in rolling hillsides of both open field and dense dark green forest. Moments into awareness that he is there, then that he has dream-returned to the precise mystery location, the cry of it hits him. His eyes replace it above a distant arc of horizon and it senses him always in that instant. Flight, but on thick stumbling legs, feet slipping through tall grass blades, sheer terror because within the nightly repeat of this he knows an answer is attempting to catch up with him. Why then, does he flee?

Be careful what you ask for.

What would it matter, though, were he to replace his identity and history to be one of the tragic? To be something darker even than his current state of existence? He has no idea of who he was aside from moment to moment thought patterns and visceral reactions to stimuli. The slate had been wiped clean, then smashed. The dreams started out identical; it becomes aware of his eyes replaceing it, then wheels around on those glorious savage wings, tips splayed. He staggers into that awful drunken run, sensing if not hearing and seeing the pursuer. Gradually his own voice awakens him, reduced from a full throated yell in the one dimension to a hoarse whisper against pillow.

The daylong linger of these new dreams is of a dichotomous quality, as he is both profoundly disturbed and deeply anticipatory for the revealing suggested. By June, Rich has decided to attempt some form of exertion of control within the dreamtime. He will stop fleeing. He will turn to face the flying thing. He will wait to see what takes place. If he can, that is. If indeed a human conscious mind may wield its override in a realm where rules of three dimensional shaping do not apply. It is true that when he first saw the giant falcon, or whatever it is, above the shores of Huron, Rich “knew” who he was. This held no name or detail, oddly enough, but sat deep and heavy in the certainty that he belonged somewhere and was loved. Each dream bringing the pursuer closer before he can escape into the world-awake, changes his days. He begins to share dread with anticipation at new levels. Butterfly belly moments as he works and wonders if this night is the answer.

Physics and mysticism make for elegant lovers. They share such mystery. The maelstrom of energy bombarding the mind of an interpreter constantly in flux between ignorance and realization, all of it ruthlessly subjective. Connective and synchronistic forces act as both adhesive and rudimentary liaison between the ageless building blocks of what is named “universe” and the structured overlay resulting from the momentum of humankind. Is there any true doubt, or wonder, at the ceaseless mysteries between these disparate yet interwoven fields?

Doubt and skepticism undergo relentless erosion. It shall never cease, for it is the very foundation of a learning arc. These our immortal minds are capable of collapsing the wave function, yet they live within bodies that must age, die, be replaced. A small man in one perceived “life”, such as the lost and seeking Rich, will resist his own unlimited powers. That he can utilize his subconscious to manipulate and create through quantum reality, is so far beyond his conscious grasp as to be only magic. Or fantasy.

Great thinkers like Jung and Pauli held some of the keys to what has locked the life of a person like Rich. Believing in doors means believing in locks. As June and July bleed across calendar borders, Rich is dreaming more vividly about the huge thunderbird. It is closer each night to reaching him as he runs, just as with each astral visitation he is striving all the more to stop fleeing. To turn and face it. Other emotions beyond the scope of fear are entering this fray. Rich cannot “know” that emotion oils the tracks for the wheels of synchronicity, but without knowing such a thing he is replaceing the pathway home.

He is communing across “time” with a mental reaction to an event not yet having “occurred”, but always present and therefore as real as reality by any definition. Rich is in dreams, trans-psychic. He is inevitably a momentum in a loop that becomes sentient in peripheral awareness. When the summer night arrives with its ritualistic dream, Rich replaces the will to stop running. Unlike the agonizing crawl of gradual dream elongation, this ceasing seems to open invisible doors into a cascade. Details of the landscape, at the instant his feet stop churning through tangled weed and grass, begin to morph wildly. It resembles a watercolor painting blossoming, smearing, spreading rapidly. He is so aware of the massive avian directly above but cannot help but stare as the earth beneath him shifts from the soft give of field soil to an unbending expanse of ice.

“Hello?”

“Hi Jenny. It’s Ray giving you a call.”

“Ray! Like the sun. So good to hear you so soon.”

“How are you? Have you made arrangements to have the shed repaired?”

“I’m fine, especially now. No, I haven’t called anyone yet but will do it tomorrow.”

“Good. Are you okay emotionally?”

“You probably already know... you do, don’t you? What those days meant?”

“I do, Jenny. This is all new territory for me, too. I don’t feel I am back here yet.”

“Sorry... sorry for my lack of words... are you okay emotionally, after the funeral?”

“As well as can be expected, thanks. Listen, I have some news for you...”

“Yes?”

“I’m coming back to Ontario next week, probably Monday through Friday.”

“Really?”

“Really, and possibly into that following weekend, but it depends...”

“Do I need to say that I would really like to see you, if possible?”

“I’m flying into Toronto and then have to rent a car. This is a professional trip.”

“For your clairvoyant work, you mean?”

“Yes. I just received a call concerning some open missing persons files, about three hours drive northwest of Toronto. I’ve done this type of work before and I am in the database with quite a few of the law enforcement agencies in Canada.”

“Are you saying I might be able to see you during the trip, then?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I think I’ll come into the diner for a good late breakfast after I’ve picked up the vehicle. Are you working on the Monday?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you, Ray. This is fantastic news.”

“Wonderful, Jenny. I’ve got to go, have another call coming in. See you in a week.”