Dr34m: Arabia, Burning at Dusk
I go to meet my family in Europe. The house is ours, and we are not on vacation, although we are not rich. It appears to be dusk, the sky a burning orange at the horizon, then successively darker shades of blue until the top of the sky is nearly black. The house is infused with the dusk-darkness and lit with very few, low-power lights or candles.
ED is there [, a woman from that city, whom I used to date when I was 18 and she 16. In her teens and early 20s at least, she had a reputation in the city's music scene as a tough and independent girl, a punk rock singer, whose large breasts had developed early].
E suggests “walking around Arabia.” I am confused and agitated and ask, “What? The subcontinent?” and I won’t rest until I find it on a map. I trace my fingers around the sand-colored mass of land indicated on the large wall map and imagine walking around it. Then, I read a comic book in which a superhero team goes to Arabia to chase a supervillain, one of their archenemies. The sky in the comic is the same dusk pattern as outside. The villain is flying over a field of extremely tall, dense wheat or some similar grain in his private, one-seat airplane, and his plane crashes. Jets fly over and drop a chemical that burns the field. The villain is horribly burned and disfigured and blames “Arabian poison” as well as the superhero team.
When I finish reading the comic book, E is gone. She comes back not too long after this and she wants to go to the city. Next thing I know, it is bright daylight, maybe early summer from the heat, and I’m wandering alone in a city that looks something like the city of my teens and 20s, the dirty parts by railroad tracks with old warehouses that have been converted into nightclubs or rentable cheap workrooms or party rooms, signs and stores that mix small town and college town, local/provincial with generic national flavors. Everything looks dusty and faded. I’m walking down a street without any purpose, not looking for anyone or going to any place, feeling lost in semi-familiar surroundings …
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When I very young, there was a play put on for us young kids in school, in which a big wooden puppet of a soldier changed from good to evil by swiveling his head around to reveal a different, ugly face. To be honest, so much in that statement could be dead wrong factually, but that’s how I remember it. Almost immediately, that vile, corrupt, rotten, two-faced maggot-eaten wooden puppet began to live in my closet, threatening me with its morally ambivalent presence.
There were other monsters in the house, but always a nearby friendly monster to balance the threat. The evil vampire in the downstairs hallway was matched by the friendly Frankenstein’s monster under the stairs; the robber in the hallway between the upstairs bathroom and my parents’ room by my friend the Invisible Ape (who I could see only at certain angles, from the corner of my eye). There was no balance for the two-faced wooden puppet, so I gathered my stuffed animals around me at night, and gave them all super powers and costumed alter-egos.
There has always been a beast inside the closet door for me, though. Something of which I’m most afraid, that never shows its whole face to me at one time, the identity of which seems to shift if only because the rigidity with which we define our (psychic and geographic) environment does not reflect reality.
To bring the story into the present, I had a dream last night. Apparently, my high school class had a reunion party of some sort in my parents’ basement.
Before that, or concurrently with it, my old debauched friend KF had a party at his house with lots of booze and drugs and several females from my high school experience who served themselves completely naked to each of the (fully clothed) male guests, formerly of the black t-shirt tribe, stoned and outfitted in the leather, flannel, and hooded sweatshirts of the 1980s metal heads. I twittered on the edge of sobriety and fidelity, too excited to leave, too frightened to indulge. (Were there nobler causes for my hesitation? I don’t remember feeling them.)
Back at the reunion, the crux of my dilemma, everyone seemed to pass by staring intently but uncertain, and pass on without a word. In the recesses of their minds, they had a hazy recollection of me, but none was sparked to recognition.
This is my current beast inside the closet door, that which peers over my shoulder in the neverending darkness: my own two-sided, amorphous nature, being neither one thing nor another, lech nor virgin, holy nor depraved, drunk nor sober, child nor grownup, consigns me to be forgettable, to be nothing.
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I don’t have much time, but I want to write a little about a dream I had this morning, after I fell back asleep.
In the dream, it was twilight and I was preparing everything for a gathering, some kind of celebration, that I think was for me, but ultimately seemed to be for my father. He was the host …
(or the “patriarch,” as my Jungian therapist says)
You see, my father was just diagnosed with colon cancer two days ago, on top of chronic and worsening heart problems. Last night, working as a nursing assistant at the hospital, two of my five patients were there for colon cancer. Two others with pancreatic cancer.
It was my father’s kingdom, a sprawling complex of farmhouses, barns, storage sheds, all converted to welcome my friends and acquaintances. I remember setting up a computer room, and the handful of antisocial techies who came to hole up there, along with others who flitted in and out to check e-mail. I remember dusty and dark rooms through which I searched for something I couldn’t quite name, with the lights out, having the sense that the room was much more vast than it seemed.
My sisters were there, and my daughter, I think, and my wife. Though I can’t remember if I saw these people, I have a sense of their presence.
My friend K was there, who recently lost his father. K was happy and friendly, in his easy-going way.
My friends J and C were there, married (I can’t remember if their son was with them).
Later in the evening, C would approach me, filled with such desparate grief and seemingly drunk. She fell into embracing me and kissed my face over and over. I thought maybe it was getting out of hand, she didn’t know what she was doing, her husband, her son, my wife, would end up being hurt. But she needed comfort, and took it. She kissed me on the mouth, her lips and skin soft and moist with tears, her lips parting and her soft tongue entering my mouth. And I struggled with whether to stop it or enjoy it, to inevitably feel guilty about taking pleasure in my friend’s desperation …
And it was late in the morning, and my wife woke me up so I could do some homework and get ready for work.
