A Bright House

Kevin May, who at seventeen years of age has already written off the world. Kevin who has a roof over his head, food in his belly, a part time job, so much more than many others of his ilk do not have. Kevin who lives and breathes disdain for his parents and sister. Kevin who has an undeveloped roll of film that he uses to keep the giggling blonde underachieving promiscuous Susie under his thumb. Kevin who once wore the roll of film around his neck at dinner, delighting in his sister’s acute discomfort. Kevin who keeps the lurid frames of blackmail hidden in a place away from the house, deriving a sick power from the charade.

This young man, this nihilistic mess of an angry boy, awakes bathed in cold sweat to Whisky’s barking next door. He bolts out of the twist of bedsheets to cross the floor. Through the bedroom window he sees that the golden retriever has left his aluminum shed hiding place and is standing, stiff legged, in open yard with his eyes riveted to Kevin’s room. Two sets of pupils meet, engage, lock. Whisky’s gaze is laser sharp. Kevin’s is watering in new terror waves. Do dogs dream? Of course they do. Do dogs dream of more than chasing, playing, eating? Of course they do. Is it possible for the sleeping brains of two separate species to engage in a single astral journey? Is it possible that anything is truly impossible?

Waiting for Ray’s taxi to arrive, gradually calming after he had agreed to come over, Jenny found her flashlight in the proverbial junk drawer. She forced herself to sit in one of the small chairs at the equally small kitchen table. Whatever had happened, and even whatever may still be inside the shed, was not an immediate threat. She knew that instinctively. Her best guess was that an animal had gotten in somehow, possibly one of the huge neighborhood raccoons, and broken its way to freedom through the window.

Sitting there, heart still jacked, Jenny mused about the breaking points necessary for freedom to be attained. Since Ray entered her very quiet life, only two days prior, she had been finding herself embedded ever deeper into the introspective side of her psyche that was long lost. Ray’s agreeing to be of immediate assistance, all the more a generous act after what must have been a trying day for him, filled her with a gratitude that felt both welcome and foreign. She hadn’t had many grateful feelings since her husband took his fishing trip of no return.

Was Ray Townes, then, a knight in shining armor? A heroic male to the rescue? No; she rejected that inner query the instant that it was posed. Though she was attracted to him emotionally and physically, Jenny also knew that she was attracted to the waking potential that his presence had stirred within herself. Choices had been made without her having a say; cosmic rolls of the dice that had placed her into the womb of a monster who would abandon her, or was forced to. Cosmic higher powers had decreed that the one man she could feel immediate love for, of the romantic unspeakable knowing kind, would be snatched away as quickly as a god can change its mind.

And if that was how the Universe wanted to roll, she would god damn it make some choices of her own; no more offering up the heart. No more willing steps to the sacrificial altar, history be ignored, hope be glory. Ray had a heart of gold and a confounding cerebral mutation that allowed him to see into the lives of others. She mulled over the many ways that she could never know what that must be like. Perhaps it explained his being so odd; a virgin in his fifties. It may also have played a role in his grace, innocence, giving soul, to have been not only blessed and cursed at once, but to have lost his beloved mother so brutally.

As the Diamond taxi rounded the turn from Queen street east to Bright street, Jenny made a decisive choice. One that on the surface might appear selfish, delusional, reckless. She was going to ask him to stay the night. It was a lot to ask, a hugely personal inconvenience to a very sweet soul who would not be able to refuse; this she knew. His sense of chivalry and protective manner would place him there with her until morning. It was what she wanted, more than anything she had wanted other than news about her missing partner. In her heart of hearts, Jenny knew that it wouldn’t lead to anything she could build upon; she suspected that a man like Townes was operating outside of the normal male parameters.

She no longer cared if this newfound reckless opening of the self would result in only more pain. Pain, Jenny could do and do well. Emptiness, however, had taken on distinctly other overtones. It was such a void as to make pain feel like life. Like being alive. One night in her home that had never felt like home in the traditional sense, or in any true definition, with Ray beside her... he didn’t have to touch her, look at her, speak to her. She just wanted to remember what it felt like to have someone there, with her, palpably present in a room that had taken on the frozen black characteristics of the universe itself. From the front of the house she heard the taxi pull up, two male voices, the shutting of its door. She heard his steps coming toward the front stoop. “Thank God for you, Ray” she whispered.

With the onset of the unfolding dream travels, there will be no relief for young Kevin May. He carries the residue of that first night’s details all through the day. He is disturbed at the odd behavior of the dog next door whose image he cannot photograph without blur distortion. He is slightly bothered that none of his family members take note of the extra sullen energy coming from Kevin at the dinner table. Why would they?, he allows. When he isn’t mouthing off about one thing or another, he is a brooding teenager.

His father, forearm in its hilarious plaster casing, refers to Kevin as “snot nose”, “puke”, “punk kid”... his mother barely speaks at all, ensconced in her own personal hell of failed expectations. His sister is a cartoon bimbo with her fifty word vocabulary loop and world by the balls entitlements. She speaks openly with her well chosen girlfriends of pursuing and landing a big NHL hockey player. The man of her dreams, on ice. Kevin suspects she will do it, too. He chews his lukewarm dinner, takes quick mental snapshots of Susie with her worked to the Nth exterior, and has no problem at all envisioning her as one of countless stacked slender blonde sports trophy wives. In fact, Susie is a big breasted faux-giggly disservice to millions of intelligent young women the world over who just happen to have blonde hair. It doesn’t matter. He chews, broods, feels weight on his shoulders from the bizarre dream and canine alarm clock, and revels in how sick they all make him feel.

Kevin is a scholastically adept student whose teachers cannot reach him. Some of them want to shake him, slap him, raise their voices to his parents. Not many have the patience to wait for him to come around, join the rat race proper. His outward appearance and general conduct makes it hard to like Kevin May. Those who know him best, and that isn’t much at all, have the sense that he has coalesced into precisely what the adult Kevin will be. Most people are capable of emotional growth and change throughout the entirety of their lifespan, but there are Kevins among us who have constructed rigid structures to live by. They are the ones beyond reach.

He goes to his bed very late that second evening. It was a day of broken ritual; Kevin didn’t look even once at the yard next door. He wants to forget Whisky’s morning appearance, the crazed barking urgency. Kevin attempts to drift off whilst listening to a mixed tape on his portable player, angled on the small table next to his bed, and cannot stop his mind from its restless cycling. This goes on for an hour or more. He replays the sleazy visual memory of his sister giving head to the vice principal on a rainy lakeshore road, probably for school favors regarding her many detentions over missed classes. What a pig. Fenton, Susie, both. He revisits recollections that please him, of the last visit to see his friend’s grunge-punk band play in London Ontario’s “Cellar”... this is where Kevin’s bedroom ceases to exist and his eyes close. This is the point at which, seeming to be paused just for him and some purpose way out beyond the miniscule intellectual grasp of a human mind, the specially constructed dream tableaux resumes.

He realizes with a subtle sinking gut that he has returned to the horror farm, and also never has he known back to back dream visits to the same location. This realization that he is indeed in a dream abruptly fades at the maddening sight of both farmsteads mirroring each other. Right down to the placement of parked tractors and a rusted out GMC truck near the barn entrance. It is the same yellow tinge of a sky, but this time without a cloud and what seems to be late afternoon light; his shadow is thrown off to one side and he sees that for this astral cameo, he is clothed in what he had been wearing earlier. Again the sun is invisible.

Kevin dimly recalls reading something about the meaning of yellow skies in dreams being a foreshadowing of death by drowning, or was it a symbolic warning of suicide? He pauses in the knee high crops, losing all contact with his sleeping consciousness. This is a place with power in its holding; he looks from one group of buildings to the next, remembers the woman who had waved him over, and waits. What seems to be a long time later, her distant figure appears just as it had the night before. He watches her seeing him, lifting first one hand and then the other to wave. When she begins the two palms scooping motion, her beckoning, he swivels abruptly and begins a steady trot through the field in the opposite direction. Live, dream, and learn. Kevin reaches the high lawn of the farm house.

Strangely, he is without fear and knows what not to repeat, where not to go. He has no wish to enter the strangeness of the flanking forest growth, with its flitting darting peripheral beings. At the rear of the house, he turns to gaze across the distance between where he stands and the other choice rejected. She is no longer there. Kevin’s dream body relaxes somewhat. He turns to face the front of the house, slowly steps through the grass to approach the identical wide veranda. Insect buzz is increasingly a part of the setting; it seems to come from below the porch and Kevin wants to hesitate but feels pushed, pulled, drawn around to the scene that greets him. She is there in all of her horrific glory. The long hair piled in a haphazard bun, her flowery flowing dress, the yellow green trimmed slippers. This time she doesn’t see him immediately because she is preoccupied with balancing on the wide arm of a wooden rocking chair, up on her toes with a thick ring of rope around her slender neck.

“Be a love, will you?” she asks, facing forward to the county road, not in Kevin’s direction. He isn’t sure what to do, but understands what she is asking of him. “Be a good lad, now.” Her voice is younger, less of the rasp. He moves numbly around the corner of the veranda to stop in front of the steps, looking through her glasses into crazed eyes with violently crisscrossing capillary tendrils of a raw crimson. It is the same woman, now a decade or more younger, and he marvels that perhaps she has been here lodged in this awful repetition of brutal exit, hanging herself over and over. Her reddened eyes are fixed into his upward gaze for cold seconds before they dart downward, twice, indicating the chair upon which she stands.

What does a sunless yellow sky say about this? How does a seventeen year old societal misfit feel about assisting in the mortal termination of a stranger in what seems to be a nightmare but could be his new reality? He speaks and is surprised to have a mouth this time with which to do so; “You said ‘dirty world’ the last time I saw you.” He climbs the stairs and feels that he has something in his left front pocket. Stopping at the second last step up, Kevin yanks out his automatic 35mm with a bewildered sense of recall and dé·jà vu.

Why was the memory of being here, naked and terrified, now falling to a fresher recollection of just this? This now; his looking at the camera and back to her expectant eyes. The way she squints and totters on the arm of the chair. “What do you think you are doing?” she rasps. Kevin slides open the lens cover on its little track, aims and presses the shoot button twice. Her stare grows livid and her tiny fingers grab up dress fabric. Kevin replaces the lens cover, tucks the camera back into its pocket, treads the final steps as she admonishes “you shouldn’t have done that”, and gives her what she wants.

He pulls the chair out from under her and steps to one side to watch her kick. Gurgling. Clatter of falling glasses. Soft thud of a slipper. Air being choked off. Insects buzzing madly beneath the porch, all around the house, from the trees that seem suddenly closer. Her words “you shouldn’t have done that” will replay again soon, but for the awful moment he watches with transfixed wonder. She is spinning, kicks subsiding, lungs emptying, hands locked into the dress at her sides. There he begins to sense, intensely, that he is being watched. He wishes to wake from this. He wishes to wake.