A Bright House
Chapter 53

With broad effortless wing strokes, it flies fast to an unknowable beacon, compelled from within although conflicted by competing mental visuals. A steady pulsing thrill of flight competes with uprising terror spasms. There is a lack of identity so complete as to cease all thought, but its wavelength stutters and fractures as the mind of Townes continues to do battle. The color of forest below is of a blue that bleeds into black, with tree tops pointing like pencil leads under pale yellow half moon light.

Gradually the coniferous domination becomes a unity of deciduous trees with wide open crop fields and rolling unsettled lands between small towns and farmsteads. There is a peace within its bosom for long stretches of flap and glide, where the cool night against his eyes is all that is asked for, but then the yearning guiding compelling... the call.

At one point it seems other things are flying there, too. Unseen but keenly sensed as if in a flock that transcends dimensions and physics, all a part of what he was and is becoming, moving toward the same destiny from a countless array of subjective perspectives. It is a hinted rasp of hundreds of wings beating on the wind. It is the implied cognitive awareness of intent and thought forms, all in league with his own momentum. Down go the eyes of precision acuity to scan the blue black landscape, and now there is a bizarre horizon to horizon movement.

At first focus it seems a writhing infinite mass of bubbling undulating mud, a wholly other world below, but it gradually takes the shape of human figures. They are all, each one of the hundreds of thousands, locked into a grotesquerie of mortal combat. His wing stroke comes to a halt, to glide and stare into the abyss of churning violence that seems a symbol of every horrid human conflict over every age’s span. There are naked bodies engaged in hand to hand life or death. There are uniforms of every historical era within the bloody tumult, and sabres swords lances hatchets muskets cannons but as he glides over the raw maelstrom it brings constant rippling change to its visible details.

Don’t want to see this. I don’t want to hear it.

Because it is a deathly morbid silence at first.

Because his roving stricken eyes as they share man's mind and something entirely other’s, perceive machinery moving into the hell below, he doesn’t want to hear this inevitable sound. Tanks are softly moonlit, running over bodies, their turrets swiveling to deliver thunderous reports that break his wish not to hear... in the newly perceivable fullness of it, a most horrifying cacophonous unity of human voices meshing. Naked. Pain. Unwanted thrusting mortality spilling its guts and precious blood that gleams black in this nightlight. Ultimate waste. A discordant chilling cry of death, instant regret, primeval terror. Irretrievable loss.

Up above this churning bloodbath, he feels that this is being shown to him. It is more than a forever looping imprint of the wasteful horrors of mankind. It takes every summoned bit of will to renew a wing stroke, to climb higher and away. There is the kernel of knowledge that each nanosecond act of energy, be it loving or hateful and all possible manifestations between, continues forth throughout the universes. There is no entropy. Events and their emotions collide and coalesce, creating newer endless chain reactions of Life’s manifesto. For planet Earth it has been the brutal struggle of a self devouring species that has dared to spiritually crown itself king of all domains. The struggle is but a process in a universe's wide design, though the human ape has been particularly challenged.

He pulls this powerful new body up into the sky, tearing his eyes away from another shift in visuals that seems to show horseback gunmen slaughtering entire valleys of buffalo, and he knows with certainty that a teaching has begun to play out across the dream scape become landscape. This is a shared body. The absurdist comical horror of what is happening to him explodes. It brings him the uniquely human thought of wanting to wake from this. Wanting to return to what he knows, with all of its flaws and futile questions. As the newest vestige of a man in terror jolts this massive body, his wings cease and immediately there begins an awkward tumbling free fall. It pulls hard. It reminds him of being told “you can’t do that, it isn’t possible”. The rapidly spiraling soundless plummet reveals that part of a mind which so easily believes the lies fed by that named “doubt”.

It will be a perfect escape, perhaps, to submit to this falling and to crash with finality into an unforgiving surface. A blunt sad exclamation mark for a man’s lifetime. All good works forgotten or briefly reignited in the memories of spoken tribute after death. This is pure enormity at work as the sky and moon pinwheel with blue night’s landscape, gradually with the return of sound that is now wind rushing past and a thudding heart. In dreams, where Townes flew, where this creature has flown for eons, it is to will a thing that allows its fruition. He remembers floating above his bed. Can’t recall whether it was the fever of his flu or it actually took place without witnesses, but he floated above his bed toward the ceiling and was shocked at the buoyant ease of it. He would clamp his palms together, the fingers evenly aligned in a gesture almost of prayer, and point to a distant ceiling corner where the direction of this floating flight would then take place. In that boyhood miracle of dream or actual clairvoyant visitation, the “you cannot do this” gravity of doubt ended his experience and he promptly awoke.

Here, falling out of all control, it is only the mind and its manifest will that may alter an outcome. The details have been inverted and now he must believe ”you can do this“... a distant but beautifully vivid and comforting memory of his mother’s touch, then, as the ground rushes up to meet him. Half moon blur, wildly rotating horizon tree line blur, wind howl promise of impact any moment, but it is a soothing warm hand upon his brow that bursts open in perception. There are love reasons for her touch, hovering over him in his boyhood bed, very young. Young before lifetime memories that will take and stay have become the norm. Her face in the memory is diffused and distant, but mother is here with her loving caress. With the stabilizing maternal magic of safety’s assurance, before she herself became lost. He begins to replace the muscles that will reawaken those powerful wings, even as the memory’s beauty leaks out darker peripheral feelings. His shoulder blades begin to burn, as though torched by something mocking and mysterious within the recall, but he breaks the clutches of gravity into a horizontal flight path that then begins its climb.

He is rising at a steep angle, facing the moon’s half-face. The darker aspects of what he has relived in childhood wants to tell him a secret. Without the thought-words to give it detail, it could be that he has been told of a visitation by his estranged father who was never entirely human. Who wanted to see his offspring, and perhaps more. This has been a recurring suspicion, dream, clairvoyant tease, and now it feels like a bridge between realities and outcomes. As this awareness washes him over, the whole of the night sky seems to ripple from east to west. It is a push that his body feels, and there where he has been climbing with eyes fixed upon a semi-circle lunar guide he can see the widening undulation as it bends space and time in one massive wave before vanishing to leave behind a completely full moon.

The ripple has reminded him of a man’s body submerged beneath water, somewhere back there now unreachable. Has his tether to what he was, finally broken? Back to a similar altitude as before, now with a brighter landscape beneath him that resembles more accurately the one he had been flying over before the visuals of violence and waste had started... he resumes an obeyed following. The calling is strong and exists within the instinctual. It feels like a loop. Above various scattered pockets of lights when he passes over towns, hamlets, the moon sheen of rivers that fork in a town called Paisley, he flies southeast. What must be the part of consciousness that is Ray Townes has resumed its struggle. There are human thoughts in here, behind the savagely beautiful raptor face. Thoughts that are concerned with chaos versus imposition of order, and why this fallible overlay of manmade design has taken over as a species’ mode of spiritual growth.

But here comes another interruption. No thought seems able to replace its way, let alone a concluding detail. Here comes a great glowing inverted bowl of light in the approaching horizon. Up in a diffused arc, it breaks into nighttime blue and black with a pale yellow grain. He experiences recognition without identity for it. More urgent now with the tempo of these great wings, he flies to the glowing bowl. Hills that have been pronounced and rolling begin to level off, and a gargantuan shimmering quilt of lights and lines opens up before him. He sees the blinking of aircraft as they come into the quilted radiance, lined up in tidy distances. He sees headlights far below as vehicles on the highways feed into the growing expanding hive of humanity that has been built and ever growing over the ancient lands.

It doesn’t take long before he is over the vast array of night lit fractals. Suburban squares, rectangles, identical shapes. On a diagonal he moves swiftly across the gigantic stamp of humanity, seeing a wide dark band of water that swallows everything beyond the city’s illuminated domination. The inward pull is keen to move toward the lake, and as its decreed flight path made body, he follows without resistance. Turmoil has settled down again. He, it, has become movement on a pathway. If he has died, this man named Ray Townes, then he is reborn instantly into something that his tiny wisps of remembered human will cannot hope to override. To the dark band of lake water he goes, over towers and crowded streets where an unbalanced white noise is constant. Familiar sounds, cries, greet his hearing and he flies over a narrow section of open water between the mainland and a long finger of peninsula that is forested and populated by thousands of birds.

Here, positioning his wings for a descent and landing within one of the stripped bare trees, a sickening recognition and confusion takes hold.