A Bright House
Chapter 55

Jenny wasn’t one to ask a lot. Of any thing or any person. Perhaps being a cast-off child, left to possibly perish on a beach, had something to do with that. There is no way to know how differently the baby toddler youngster adolescent adult woman middle-aged lady would have turned out. Life in the time period of Jenny’s storybook had no technology to concretely reveal the countless pathways of her soul’s many travels, and as such it is only imagination that narrates. It is only imagination that hints at every possible outcome for the lonely and kind-hearted woman who taught herself how to shut down in order to best survive, cope, avoid. Having the best occurrence of her life show up in the gift of a man named Scott, who loved her truly and with gentle devotion, was sadly balanced out in the antithetical : the worst occurrence of her life when he went forth on a one-way ice fishing trip.

If the walking wounded needed excuses, Jenny had them. Only the most motivational or cold-hearted of parameter-people could write her off as copping out. When her years of exhausting prayer went unheeded, and when the old floorboards in the house on Bright street creaked with more persistence, Jenny forgave herself then for closing down the brightest parts of herself. There were peaceful and indeed happy hours for each week of her regimented existence, most of them spent with the implements of artistic expression (or purging) at hand. There were also the tearful shuddering lonely nights when pulling the chain on her little bedside lamp announced a constricting heavy blues that clamped down immediately. Lack of light, literally or metaphorically, brings its insidious character to the fore. Those darkest shadows and loneliest hours are where the whispers reside. The wicked defeatist internal voices that resemble truth but tell only lies because weakness is useful sustenance for negativity.

With enough years and more than an ocean of tears behind her, Jenny crossed another personal threshold; she needed no man to replace the one she had loved and lost. The idea of being held, loved, feeling safe... yes, there was a beautiful wistful ache. The more deeply buried memories, of lovemaking and eye to eye trusting, of letting herself go completely into Scott, of reaching orgasm with him and weeping at his own wide open vulnerability... These were the less welcome thoughts. They had been mostly controlled, stunted, locked in the back of a determined mind. When an erotic dream or a daytime echo reintroduced those intrusive ache makers, Jenny reminded herself that the effort of ever again attaining such a plateau of love for another as well as self-trust was beyond her reserves. As ironclad as any “truth” was the certainty of her heart accepting a limited role in Life as she would live it out.

Then Ray Townes arrived.

Inexplicably, irrationally, irrevocably, she fell headlong into his natural energy. Within a shockingly abbreviated amount of time, she was connecting. He was in her dreams almost instantly. She felt herself caring just as quickly. Was it her own doing? Was it simply that his sweet and easy confidence and carriage aligned with the internal list of her needs? Was it that his living hundreds of miles away made it safe for her to lose some of that precious and hard-earned control? Was it the genuine selfless concern that he showed for her? It was all of that and so much beyond. His laugh and the crinkle around his beautiful eyes. The unusual yet unquestioned pathways of his own lifetime. The way he had spent his heart on helping others. Most devastatingly, his actual physical presence and touch. She could summon his touch, voice, smell and taste. She could feel the firm anchoring of his feet to the earth. Her arms around him in the kitchen, where he had professed that he could love her, had been replaying constantly ever since. The feel of his back muscles against her when she wept into his shirt, the closest thing to Home she had experienced since the early months of her marriage to the only other man she had loved.

And there it was.

Jenny loved Ray Townes.

She loved him enough to let go. She loved him enough to hurt. Jenny loved him in a way that opened her up to every wound that had ever been inflicted. Oh, and how quickly her mind embraced the sweet possibilities. The lingering buzz of their kiss had vanquished years and years of wall building. She had even been able to ignore those insidious whispers. That it was too good for true. Too wanted to happen. That the cruelty of these lessons lined up for her humble life story had only been preparation for the most crushing lesson of all. Most injurious, most beautiful, most elusive, most truthful. It always comes back to Love. That it saves, promises, points to The Way, and reserves the right to take everything back without notice. That it is the demanding One Thing. Love says “rejoice in me always now, for now is not always.”

And, damn it, Jenny knew this. It was what kept her alive in the darkest hours after her husband had disappeared. She was able to summon forth and survive the best memories, but it had to be done judiciously, such was the power of loss or perceived loss or whatever the fucking truth was. It was such a fine line, such a tightrope strung above the shattered bones of her life lessons; to remember all that was blessed and treasured and not let it eviscerate what was left of her.

Then along came Ray Townes.

She could not admit to herself, during the first hours of scalding worry, that this was coming as a surprise. That his phone kicked her repeatedly into voice mail. That her many messages went unreturned. Her brain simmered between genuine concern for his safety and the darker thoughts. The ones that whispered doubt notes. The raw vulnerability of their kiss had amplified as he drove away to whatever it was he was paid to investigate. It had inevitably freaked him out. By the time they had last spoken, however sweet and true his tone had been then, he was as out of reach as any crazy dream. Did she really believe that? Jenny paced her crooked floors and gnawed at the thoughts. Her eyes went repeatedly to the telephone. The clock. She sat for a long disquieted time at the kitchen table, striving to listen to her innards.

Something was horribly wrong.

How could she so easily entertain these most unreasonable notions about him? Something had gone terribly wrong and he was in danger. Her heart pounded a helpless tattoo. She was going to have to act on this. In the late night hours of the evening of Ray’s worrisome silence, Jenny called her employer to inform him of her unavailability until further notice. She would be rising early to board a bus headed for Kincardine.

Elsewhere is where he drifts. It is a womb of swoon one moment, a hellacious pool of icy cold skin pressure the next. The elongated vivid experience of flying seems now to have happened many years ago, or not at all. He flashes into a vignette of telling a very pretty woman, probably Jenny but he cannot be sure, about the dream. About what he had seen and how the shock of replaceing the soul of her missing husband so very near... Elsewhere is where he sinks. It must be what a coma is like. Visions come and go. Blackness redefines itself but cannot stay because sporadic visual jolts keep flickering into view. Some of them are deeply personal moments from what must have been his young life. He sees his mother often in them, inside the blurry visuals that feel as though drowned in tears. Strangely, the man who loved him and raised him does not appear. Delsin Schacapot, however, floats in and out of this. There are cinematic visuals, without sound but packed with sensory feeling, of Delsin the Cree as a younger man dressed in native garb. Always alone, he seems troubled even as his love of and connection to the landscapes is so apparent.

One flowing tableaux has him instantly wanting to cry, though without a body he knows not how; a poetic mental movie plays for a long perceptive span. It is his blood father astride a beautiful mustang, and with the “knowledge” that this horse was captured and broken by Delsin who loved it dearly, both souls covering open land at great speed. It resembles the wheat fields of Saskatchewan but cannot be, for the skies are a glowing yellow and the landscape itself seems to rotate on an axis that renews a horizon that Delsin shall never attain. Some riddling metaphor for life? It feels hundreds of years in the past, this riveting visual poem of his father giving chase or fleeing but looking every bit of unity with the mustang that seems tireless. A great distraction becomes part of the vision. At first it is heat, felt and then heard all around but not yet seen.

What the limbo dwelling mind of Ray Townes watches gradually becomes three directions of inferno’s horizon. It burns ferociously with a wind-whipped ravenous tempo. Quickly it is spreading behind and to the flanks of Delsin and his horse, gaining ground, belching thick brown smoke into the yellow sky. As though being directed by the sure hand of an otherworldly artist, this cinematic comatose limbo feature film brings Ray’s viewing angle in closer. He is caught up rapt in the body-less power of emotionally being thus engaged, yet also recalls a similar viewing distance and angle when flying behind the Thunderbird. This briefly distracts him and threatens to remove him from what he is seeing, feeling, living... and he is aware of “wanting” to stay “here”, to “see”.

At high velocity the dream reel plays. He is flying at such speed to keep him at a constant distance just to the left and slightly behind the urgent unity of Delsin and the mustang. Sheets of wildfire encroach with a great searing danger, and even the visuals become rippling waves of temperature. Sound begins to bleed in, as it has before when flying, dying, dreaming. This is a roaring not unlike the most starving beast to ever devour. A brittle treble of burning crackling field growth, with the lower registers of horse hoof and howling prairie hell-winds.

Voiceless and invisible, he watches helplessly as the ferocious conflagration closes in on Delsin, whose face is grim and etched as stone bathed in sweat. The mustang falters, making a pathetic sound. First a hitch in its full throttle gait and then a visibly pronounced stumble that has its rider clutching harder at the mane, for he is atop the animal without saddle or reigns.

Then brutally, down they go. In a sick violent flash, man and horse collapse into rolling jarring impact with knee high fronds that are surely about to burn. The velocity and momentum of whatever is carrying the sentient witness-dreamer continues forward. He must summon willpower again. It feels like a cortex thread that he can barely perceive due to a spiritual infancy, but somehow he is able to grasp it and the whole field of vision slows... it loses inertia and rotates around to show him what is happening. The mustang is down in an unmoving broken heap, and Delsin stands hunched with his palms clasped across both eyes, fingers rigidly closed and pointing skyward. The flames then jump. As only a rule-less dreamscape can have it, they leap forward across the waving field to lap at the fallen horse and feet of the man whose native clothing ignites.

The burning man’s son, a now floating and completely helpless witness, can only watch the hungry orange lick of fire as it rushes up Delsin’s leggings. His father doesn’t react as a mortal man would. Instead he removes his hands from eyes that are crying. He looks to the mustang body being consumed at his feet, to the flames climbing his own legs, and then his eyes swivel slightly to fix upon Ray directly. There is a sudden universe-wide eloquence within their eye contact; a blood bond that carries the eon age of stars and comets, and in it Ray falls forward even as the entire visual seems to pull itself apart. The last visible detail arrives in the same moment that his consciousness shifts back to a cold deathly still water pressure of utmost dark :

it is of Delsin the Cree lifting his hands straight up, breaking off eye contact, and shape-shifting with a mirage-like dance of motion into Thunderbird. He lifts away from the burning world below and begins to fly off into what becomes a renewed absence of light and perception for the man he fathered.