A Bright House

The final string of earthly hours in the story of Rich of Goderich will unwind suddenly, ruthlessly, almost casually in the coldest of unknowns. It will be a dynamic weather day in Autumn’s last gasp. He will be at work on the back dock of the supermarket, just having loaded an eighteen-wheeler with empty pallets and stacks of plastic dairy cases that the day before had arrived carrying milk products.

Rich will be unusually raw that morning, having slept hardly at all, plagued by a double dose of the same vivid dream that has owned him throughout much of the year. His normal efforts to be friendly, or at least responsive, are buried beneath a taciturn expression and quite noticeable cloak of darker mood. Despite the high wind that lashes around the exterior of the loading docks, he decides to take his fifteen minute break out on the metal staircase. His breathing has felt restricted all morning long, as though much of his lung capacity has remained behind in the running terror of the dream realm. “What if I don’t like who I was?” he mouths into stiff lake Huron gusts, looking off into his brain. “But who are you now?” comes the synaptic response.

For all of the human generosity extended by his savior, Roy “Over Easy”, this impostor renamed Rich has been carrying weight that increases by the day. There are no deeply felt connections to anything here. The world itself, the ingredients of life, seem to mock him with each new pang of identity seeking. There are clues and hints of memories about to unleash full force upon him, but nothing holds the promise of truth that was revealed on the shoreline in the vision of a massive bird, or in the repeating tease of those escalating dreams.

As is so often the case in a human mind, his breaking point is not previewed for examination before it detonates. Rich went to work on his last day under that guise, without knowing he would be forcefully taken from the prison that had become this octagonal town with its tidy routines and gossipy weave. He sits on a cold metal staircase platform, the dock door wedged open with a brick beneath its bottom edge, and stares at his feet, then his hands spread flat atop knees. The only emotional precursor to what comes next will be a flutter of butterfly wings within his stomach; an irrational cocktail of quick panic-anxiety that impossibly feels like excitement for that flash of lucidity just prior to the sound above his head.

It is a loud heavy thud. The metal flashing that runs around the building’s roof perimeter emits a buckling sound. As Rich lifts his eyes with a tilt of his head, an elongated scratch of gravel from the roof seems to flood his awareness with what he must have already known on a sub-level of waking consciousness. His body pivots, eyes staring, to see a huge talon slightly overhanging the metal flashing above the staircase. His intake of air and gasp seems to free him from the chest constriction of all morning long, but it is loud. With another scrape of stones above, the huge bird lifts off with a voluminous flapping of its generous wingspan. Straight up and sluggish at first, due north.

Rich stumbles to his feet, a shaking hand to grip the cold metal railings, eyes staring, tearing up, following the awkward flight pattern of the raptor. It seems to be injured in some way, its flight nothing like he knows it to be. This is when an ordinary day becomes the spiral of exit. Permanent change that snaps to fruition with every bit of ruthless inertia that a hungry bird of prey brings to a death dive in a meadow. He leaps into the receiving area, grabs his gloves, then forever leaves the place of his temporary employment. Around the rear of the building, through a mostly empty parking lot, jogging across a two-lane street that runs parallel to the western fringe of downtown’s octagon of retail, he is able to keep up with the bird because it is flying slowly at a height of approximately two hundred feet. The giant wings flap three, four times, then it rides a wind blowing from southwest to northeast.

The location of this initial pursuit being rather on the northern edge of town, Rich finds himself jogging along the shoulder of his escape route and into the final cluster of housing before Goderich dissipates into a smattering of structures which suddenly dissolve into raw countryside. Rich’s lungs are burning with cold air, so fresh off the lake as to be an intoxicant. His eyes stay with the huge bird, ignoring every curious look during his departure, every passing set of eyes through windshield glass. Tongues will be wagging in Goderich tonight. Perhaps a half mile out, running but slowing down beside idle crop fields, he is afraid that all will be for naught. His reserves are depleting and the raptor has gained enough distance as to become a fingernail sized image through his wind-watering eyes.

An astonishing turn of events as the flier suddenly drops into a landing posture, legs stiff and down, dropping elevation rapidly into a tall tree near the roadside far ahead. Rich stares, experiences the language-free knowing, and stops his run to bend in a gasping pose, ribs heaving into well-fired lungs. It is going to wait for him. This is not a dream. His true self, whatever dregs remain, will be revealed to him this very day, at last.

Jenny had a week. A smooth flow of a week that was remarkably comfortable as it passed. Where there should have existed a fear, or at least a lingering anxiety over the strangeness of what had transpired with her shed and the massive falcon (or whatever it was), she merely contacted a handyman known to her employer to arrange for a quick repair. This was taken care of on the Wednesday as she worked her shift from seven to four. The fellow arrived early at the front door, all beer belly and loud speaking voice. Jenny instructed him to pull his truck around to the back lane where she would open the double doors from within the shed.

A few moments later he was plugged into an exterior outlet and had begun his work. In a leap of faith that would not have been possible a week before, Jenny gave the man a spare key so that he could lock up the shed from within, leave via her house, and return the key through the front door mail slot. She walked briskly to work that morning on a natural high. Ray Townes was returning, and soon. She would have a precious new opportunity. There were no flaws in the gift itself. The amazing chance to open into who she once was, no matter whether or not love waited in the wings. As Jenny had the thought, “in the wings”, a barest touch of ice hit her veins when she pulled open the Logan street diner door.

With his torso bent forward, hands to thighs and sucking in huge gulps of air to regain a semblance of normal heart rate, Rich feels a vehicle approaching-slowing-pulling to the shoulder a dozen yards ahead of him. He lifts his head to see the driver’s side window lower, a youngish man’s concerned expression come into view through the opening : “buddy, you okay?” The fundamental decency of the gesture and query comes across more like intrusion, and Rich’s tone is flat : “I’m fine. Thank you.” He stands straight up, watches the Toyota truck pull back onto highway 31 in all of its narrow winding weather-whipped glory, and wonders if the driver will take note of the huge bird perched in a tree as he passes.

It occurs to Rich that he may be the only one capable of seeing the creature. Anything is possible in a reality where one’s entire identity is wiped out in a flash. He finds the outline of his feathered “key” , near the middle of the leaf-free wood skeleton upon which it seems to wait, and decides to walk briskly rather than jog. This decision and his renewed slower gait ushers in a symbolic slowing of the day’s vibrations; where the morning had been sunny but cold, suddenly there are thick banks of cloud coming in from the nearby lake. He hadn’t noticed them at all, yet here they are moving rapidly across the sun in clumps both dense and widespread, creating a dappled effect over the rural landscape.

He walks then. His strides are long and he keeps his eyes fixed on both the mostly empty road and the tree up ahead. As he suspected, his approach to within a few hundred yards brings the large raptor up from its perch. As before, it rises awkwardly and takes several flaps of its wings to reach the desired momentum. Rich resists the urge to break into another run, instead keeping his pace and admiring the spread of the bird’s long and pointed feathers where they are fanned out at the terminus of each flying appendage. The next two hours are spent in a repetition of the loop that is bird and follower. It flaps slowly, rides thermals, gains a large territorial gap and then lands in a tree near the road.

There are many trees to choose from. It lands in the tallest of them and sits very still until the human figure below is near enough for a new flight to begin. The man who has taken the name, Rich, is no longer thinking of any one idea beyond following the presumed guidelines of this pivotal day, those being to pursue truth until it is finally presented. A man walking with stiff winds at his back may cover a fair amount of ground in two hours, but it seems to Rich that he is experiencing lengthy moments of blackout.

He feels and hears his rasping breath, often looks to his moving feet, and yet time itself becomes increasingly slippery. He has a locker at work. It had become his habit to remove the nice wristwatch that Roy had given to him, lest he damage it doing the bottle sorting and truck unloading. This means, of course, that time cannot be taken note of during this epic walk toward an unknown event or revelation. He merely walks, walks, walks, and keeps his gaze fixed upon the oversized avian that is obviously leading him to something. Is this a dream, too? How can he know? The succession of night travels have been taking him deeper into that peculiar “reality”, rendering the morning alarm ever more artificial.

At last, when it seems he will not be able to continue on his aching feet, through the pounding in his temples that has been with him since leaving the town limits, there comes an alteration in what has been seemingly destined. Because he has been living these recent months in a fog of netherworld dimensions, he has no basis for a foundation of what can be and cannot be possible. He has been a man’s body claimed by a new and tragic infancy, utterly displaced by foreign surroundings and the resultant turmoil of emotions.

A break in quick moving cloud cover tells him instinctively that it must be some time nearing mid afternoon. The slow flying raptor has altered the course of its trajectory, taking it somewhat out into open acreage that is rimmed at some distance by a thick coniferous tree line. Over the guardrail he goes, leaving the relative ease of walking atop a shoulder of gravel to head out into deadened field grass. Ice has formed in scattered pockets, mirroring precisely the landscape characteristics of his dreams. The burn of almost-remembered details, once again, but this time he is not laying in a bed behind the walls of a kind old man’s home. He is out in it, active for answers that simply must arrive or he will gladly perish in the pursuit of them.

Not too far from the road for him to lose sight of it, Rich watches the massive bird halt its forward momentum to transcribe a wide arc. Circle after circle, wings wide but not moving other than to ride the winds downward, it drops elevation and quite suddenly plummets to the earth. Not an intended free fall. A plummet. A something-wrong tumble of wings and legs akimbo, like a dropped boulder. He gasps, struck still in knee-deep frozen grasses. That which has tormented his dreams with vague promises of an answer, his “key”, vanishes beyond a gentle slope into the very same grasses that wind-dance around him.

The galvanizing energy of panic stimulates his legs to a wild churning run, this time into gusts that have changed direction. Like a dimly recalled childhood nightmare where his legs fight to sprint through invisible molasses as he is pursued, he named Rich but not that man at all, bolts into blinding tears and heavy footfalls. Twice his shoes find ice and down he goes, hard. This second fall is a skull cracking blackout moment. Slippery ice, slippery time. His heavy breath is what brings him back, then that soon following image of the bird in free fall.

Within moments of regaining his feet, he is upon the section of grass that has been flattened open in a wide circle. He stops, chest heaving, ten feet from the fallen creature. One of its wings has been dislocated and splays outward away from the large torso at an awful angle. The other appendage is tucked tightly across its chest, also heaving like the man’s. Flat on its backside, viciously hooked talons extended upward in a pathetic gesture of near-death, trembling in quivers of pain. The beak is partly open; easily ten inches of nasty curvature, but it is in the eyes...

the eyes are his answer... already half-glazed with imminent death, they flick toward Rich and lock onto his own. Fear loses its grip on him. He covers the distance between them and drops to a knee above the fallen creature. Its gaze remains fixed and steady, though vivid golden flecks undulate as it adjusts to stare into his eyes. There is a potent sensation of having been here before, possibly many times, as though this is a permanently replaying sequence that dates back to antiquity for all souls that have been inexplicably marked in the way he cannot fathom in this avalanching epiphany.

Their circle is being completed even as the energy within a circle can never end. All living energy is free of any one form. It exists the universe over and there are no “reasons” other than the existence of pure energy from a source never to be known or understood, for to realize that knowledge would cease the eternal growth of all living beings. The man, then, tasting his true identity as he locks eyes with the dying bird, is fearless for his great depths of sadness. He knows the sadness to be mortality’s voice. He feels that love lost is what drives this unbearable hollow ache. Without aptly applied human language to convey the knowledge being passed from golden dying eyes into blue ones that weep, this man knows there will soon be a transition of energy between them.

For this being... this thing that has taken the form of a gigantic falcon, perhaps since the dawn of recorded history... for this life form with all of its hidden knowledge and meaning to continue what it has been designed to do, the human organism once named Scott must submit its own life energy willingly. He touches the savage beauty of its skull, just above the eyes which soften at his caress. Distant traffic sounds draw away his hearing. He is sure of nothing other than he must get this fallen creature to the highway. It makes little sense then, but he is lost in the being found. As he drops his other knee to place both forearms beneath the bird’s torso, this awakening man knows only that he must act and not think. There is a way back to someone whom he loves, who loves him, in this mystery thus unfolding.