A Bright House
Chapter 52

River mud flash glance; am i dead out of body, in body, have i left? He is sitting between his parents on the wide bench seat of dad’s beaten truck. Not quite eight years of age, already keenly aware of how different he is from other children. Truck bouncing over and through pockmarked gravel road on the way home from school. Words are stuck in his throat, even deeper than the thoughts instigating them. There is both an urgency to seek counsel from his parents and a wise beyond years knowledge that it will not be welcomed. This child’s finely tuned instinct keeps him quiet, sullen, gradually relaxing at the sight of their old house looming on its Saskatchewan horizon. Safety in those walls. Safety waiting in the slanted sunshine that bathes the kitchen from its window over the double sink. Tiny ever glittering dust motes that he always seemed to enter the realm of, as far back as he could remember, seeing beneath and beyond the room itself. Perhaps his earliest clairvoyant flashes occurred there.

Voices? Of men? Above and dulled, only briefly, seeming to intrude or beckon. A deeper flash. This one cuts cleanly through distant body pain and his forefront confusion of mind. The older boy at school who bullied him for weeks. A much larger boy who had fallen behind in grades, homing in on the sensitive Ray, calling him a “little faggot” without understanding the insult. He bloodied his victim’s nose after school one day. An out from nowhere palm first face shove that knocked Ray down in front of everyone, thus eliciting laughter by the gale. Flat on his back with the warm sick feeling of blood flowing, a brittle sunshine in his eyes, Ray received a crystal clear psychic impression. “I feel sorry for you” he spoke up at the bully who stood over him, partially blocking the sun. “You are going to lose an arm one day.” He received a kick to the ribs in response, and then a male teacher interrupted the fray. That bullying older boy and his family moved away from the Regina area during the following year, and Ray never actually heard whether or not his words had come to pass... he hadn’t wished it to happen, but in his deepest instincts he had little doubt that the threshing machine eventually claimed its morbid prize.

Back to the glittering dust motes; they seem to have him now. He feels them as much as sees them. His body is no longer, yet he has sight or something similar to it that actually perceives far more stimuli. There has been no perceptible edit into this strange glowing underwater dust and bubble storm, this fizz. He is inside it watching something birthing itself repeatedly, as in the undulations of a belly dancer, with wide rings of deep amber “dust” that issue forth from whatever it is composing its own ever morphing silhouette in this indescribable void. Ripple out, ripple out wider, one ring following another in the undulating visual poetry. He is floating in a space where these widening rings expand and wriggle free of themselves, their circular form collapsing into what appear to be tiny living things that swim. Though he has no feeling of being inside a body, his field of vision is now tilting clockwise in a way that would suggest a physical form. The will to move these eyes, or any part of what he has become or is becoming, does not yet coalesce into action.

There is a glowing floating ring that nears him. He sees the swimming of millions of its specks as it falls apart. Like radiant self illuminated shrimp, but featureless. No fear in this. It feels precisely dreamlike, harmless, educational in some bizarre way. He can feel the tendrils of his mortal self-memory, in pangs of protest at being thrust into this new reality. No introduction. No preparation. Choice? Yes, there had been that much. He had chosen to take on the missing persons investigation. He had also chosen to proceed despite dream warnings and every molecule shouting “no”, and had made it all possible by arriving at the ley line crossroads, alone. An infinitely distant part of Ray’s mind sought the return tether, when these thoughts filtered through and past him, but it was gone. It is gone. He is gone. He is new. He is not He. He knows nothing.

Where is the white light of near death experience testimonies? Where is the pale diffused glowing tunnel? Where does he look down to see his body floating in river water as his soul lifts off and away? Where are the loved ones to greet him, usher him in? Where is the... choice? Here in the gulf between what was and what will be, where does the will of Ray Townes manifest? Is this how Life is treated? Flung into one dimension under the temporary supervision of parental beings and other loved ones, with an illusion of love and belonging, only to be brutally dispatched and dispersed back to the cosmos’ energy pools? There is an unjustness to the turmoil between there and this. An anger remembers itself. He senses it even as another edit smooths its way into cognition.

“What’s wrong, momma?” To her half hidden sobs. He, at a gangly twelve years, peering through the crack between her bedroom door and its frame, seeing his mother hunched at the foot of her bed, head low, hair hanging, cheeks glistening. Did she say “I just don’t fit”? Does he actually remember it, or author it now? Where are you? Mom, I truly fucked up. I should have heeded your warning. Look at me here. Is this the process, too? These various stages of life being reviewed as the soul undergoes its transition? He tastes of that mortal anger feeling. It seems still a part of him but physically removed. If he could only replace his hands, then Delsin Shacapot, or even the giant bird named for thunder, there would come a violent reckoning. He would perish in trying for it...

Next, or later, or before, or around, or all at once, the heavy pressure of water volume surrounding him is instantly gone. There is a rich black blindness at first, when he feels buoyant or hollowed out, or that his veins and arteries have become vapor. He remembers that when flying in dreams, it was merely a matter of willing himself into a direction, using his arms to stretch and point, guide the flight. This, however, feels vastly different. Thudding pain hits both shoulder blades, making him aware that there must be a body somewhere under his control. He waits, floats, reels in chaotic emotions. Can’t see yet. His will feels vacuumed out. It lacks focus. Too much is happening and he cannot understand. There is a choice here. To fight to remain, or to submit. Remaining seems a mightier task physically, an easier wish emotionally. To stay within what is known and therefore has become comfortable, or to plunge within something so terrifyingly Other?

His shoulder blades, oh god how they ache now.

It is horror and euphoria to be suddenly flying. Terror and majesty. This is a razor sharp sudden edit from the buoyant blackness to the quick airborne projectile that he has become. Nothing he has ever known or remembered is visible beneath him, though this night moon expanse of forest has every chemical of familiarity oozing from its rolling poking tree top face. He doesn’t want to awaken from this. This is a freedom like no other. He is moving fluidly, the pain reducing with each flap of giant wings. He hears them, then feels the muscles at work in his chest, the cold night air whipping against his face. From his “eyes” he sees the curving beak. Tilts his head to look at the rippling muscularity of his feathered torso, the tucked talons, and yes it is terror and majesty. A brilliant half lunar lamp casts a shine over a lake that opens up below him, far below. The water is capped and gleaming, almost black but for the flecked yellow froth that moves in syncopation with each stronger beat of his wings. Euphoria. Sheer power without complication of thought that used to be wrapped in humanity.

There is the remainder of a man in this thing’s mind, and that is exultant and horrified as the big body propels itself through a beautiful new night. The first night of its new life. There are not yet stabbing pangs of primal hunger. The bone marrow level need to replace prey, to keep seeking from instinct’s signal alone... that hasn’t been awakened in the first hours of glorious energy rebirth. He. It. One. Flying and replaceing its will over body. Dipping, tilting, reducing the wing rate to glide downward hundreds of feet through chilled air that feels nothing other than rejuvenating, over the vast lake or ocean. Only when a hundred yards above its wind rippled surface does some distant calling occur from the depths.

A signal that carries conflicted energies. Something that in human parlance would be identified as doubt.

The man, the earthbound thing, intrudes upon the flight path. It rudely interrupts the winged and feathered all body powerful rapture. Abruptly comes the decision to swivel around, wings renewing a powerful stroke rate, climbing again, feet dangling and then tucking. A one hundred and eighty degree turn. It peers past its brand new savagely hooked beak, shiny from moonlight, and gauges direction before resuming a steady powerful wing beat that heads southeast. Has it, he, at last found its truest manifestation of form? Is this what he had always been? Was this why a man of Cree blood fathered a son and then vanished? Was this wing stroke that of Delsin, and the next a thing of his own? Father and son reunited, was it? Had it the voice of a man, there would have been a mad cackle then. Instead, there was terror and such an exploding pristine freedom. Every mile that passed below its newfound body, aloft and slicing across the dark canopy above a province named Ontario (or a realm in parallel existence named nothing) was a mile that felt ancient and remembered.

With this kind of power... With this kind of transformed exuberant new body reinventing the consciousness of its being, it would not take long to cover the distance from wherever this was to wherever it was heading. To a city. With such a strong calling, to a large city on a different lake.