A Bright House

“Sir? Would you like something to drink?”

Ray opened his eyes to look at the flight attendant. His ear drums had just finished popping after he worked the spearmint gum steadily. “Coffee would be just fine,” he told her from his aisle seat. The attendant then asked the young woman to Ray’s left an identically phrased question for which the answer, “ginger ale”, came on a lilt. Further left, an elderly man was slumped sideways with his big forehead pressed against the small window, eyes shut. The flight attendant first poured and passed a small cup of ginger ale to the middle passenger, who leaned forward and to her right side as she accepted it. Ray felt a soft breast press down firmly against his left forearm, and resisted the urge to overreact by jerking his torso away.

“Thank you sooo much” said the twenty-something redhead as she resumed a position upright in the seat. Her right knee had been almost constantly touching Ray’s left, even when he angled his legs slightly to one side in order to make room. As he accepted the small paper cup of coffee with sugar packets and a tiny half and half cream, the woman beside him reached to lower a plastic tray and once again touched Ray, this time with the fingers of her right hand brushing lightly over his knee.

Other than a brief nod and “hello” when he took his seat, Ray hadn’t spoken with her and hadn’t given her much thought at all until the bodily contact ensued. He was a balanced and fairly non-judgmental man. It wasn’t his nature to size someone up and immediately place them into a tidy category. Attention from both genders was not something new to him, and with his appearance and energy field, it was probably to be expected. He did, however, find it interesting that on the flight to Toronto, to Jenny and the vast potential horizons beyond, his fates would place a flirtatious young woman beside him.

He opened the sugar and cream, poured them into his coffee, glanced at the window and peripherally sized up the profile next to him. Pert. Perky. Confident. Bright blue eyes pretending to read an article in a magazine. No wedding ring. Straight red hair, shoulder length. No detectable perfume or scent. Black slacks. Brown leather cowboy boots with fine tooling across the visible upper feet. A light brown button shirt with collar embroidery that screamed “Calgary Rodeo”. Ray’s glance lasted a scant few seconds but he opened his mind to read her.

“Wow.”

His voice escaped before self control could suppress it. She slid her eyes sideways, then her face to glance directly at him with an inscrutable expression. Ray met her gaze squarely, seeing crystal clear visuals of what he assumed she wanted to do with him. These involved a kind of riding that didn’t adhere to the parameters of rodeo. He experienced the visual as viewed from a first-person perspective; her face was flushed, both hands gripped his shoulders, her shirt undone to the navel, breasts bouncing with her determined movements. When Ray looked into the blue of her eyes, the vision liquified and collapsed down upon itself. He didn’t feel flattery or arousal. With a brief sighing exhale, he turned back to his coffee cup, raised it to his lips, and said “please don’t” before sipping.

“Excuse me?” He kept his eyes fixed on the cup, then the seat ahead of him.

“You know what I mean.” His tone was mellow, even keel.

“Honestly, I do not.” She had twisted around to face him, one slender hand gripping the armrest that separated their seats. He slowly turned his head to look at her again, perceiving yet another piece of visual information that her voice helped to dial in. She flashed a sparkle in each eye, and as he looked at her, bit her bottom lip. He was sorely tempted to say what he truly wanted to, which was “Jim would be thrilled to find out how you use your air miles” (this name attached to a tall thin dark-haired man who felt to be her fiancée)... with a long flight ahead of them, Ray censored himself and settled for “Look. I’m into men.”

“Now it’s my turn to say wow.” (he noted the absence of a girlish lilt)

Those were the last words exchanged between them. Ray finished his coffee, eventually handed the cup back to a passing attendant, then opened the book that he had started reading yesterday afternoon.

Song-Zi Xian county, China, 1880. On May 8, a local farmer named Ju Tan discovers a misty light in some bushes. He later describes a very strange tingly paralysis as well as a low humming sound. His next recollection is of floating upwards and subsequently losing all perception of time and space. The very next recall, as though experienced moments later, is of being found in a dazed condition by a farmer in Guizhou province. Three hundred miles from his farm. Two weeks after the occurrence.

Hockliffe, UK, 1982. The Smiths are a family from Bedfordshire, numbering four with two young daughters. They are driving along near Hockliffe and are amusing themselves with the singing of Beatles songs. Quite suddenly a “strange mood” overcomes them all, and Mrs. Smith later says “we went in on ourselves.” The children stop singing abruptly. An utter silence befalls the vehicle and as the family stops singing and laughing, all other cars on the busy road disappear.

Simultaneously the car enters or is surrounded by a bank of mist not unlike fog but localized with plummeting visibility. The next recollection from the Smiths is that they are returned to the road as it was only moments before; after a short period of disorientation they realize that they are in Woburn Sands. About eight miles from where they had encountered the mist. “We just seemed to BE there” recalls Mrs.Smith.

None of them have looked at the clock but all report a sense of confused timelessness. They then continue driving to Milton Keyes where they begin to notice after-effects from the event; the children are subdued and not themselves, which lasts for several hours. Both parents are more seriously altered, with red rashes on their hands and shooting pains that take days to subside. “A tingling sensation and muscle pain bordering on paralysis”... another odd result of the strange fog is a general lack of body coordination that lasts for two hours. At a gas station, Mrs. Smith fumbles repeatedly to open the car door. Her husband struggles mightily to fill the car’s tank. “We were out of sync with reality” says Mrs. Smith. This “frequency shift” is so intense at first, the adults speculate as to whether they have perished in a crash and are wandering the world as phantoms.

Ray stopped reading for a few moments. He closed his eyelids and attempted to focus upon the nature of these strange mists, fogs, clouds. Nothing came to him. It “felt” terrestrial, a natural but as yet unexplainable phenomena. His hunch was that it connected directly to ley lines, portals to other realms, and assorted other anomalous but terrestrial-based events rather than the work of space visitors. Life was challenging enough, wasn’t it? There were so many randomly occurring chaos-based events happening at every moment, and then the predatory humans, our utter helplessness to climate... add an array of bizarre unknown phenomena, and it would be easy to live as walking fear.

Somerset, UK, 1974. In late July a man named Peter Williamson suffers a harrowing reality shift that begins on a sunny day with a barbecue party in the garden. A heavy electrical storm rolls in quite suddenly. The Williamson’s dog cowers beneath a tree, spooked by the strange atmosphere, and Peter goes to rescue it. As he nears this tree there is a huge flash, and in the aftermath Peter has vanished. Police are called. The children are sent to stay with relatives and Mrs. Mary Williamson is put under sedation.

An immediate massive search reveals no sign of the missing man. It is postulated that the lightning strike must have confused the guests, and that Peter has wandered off in a state of amnesia. Three days later at 8:00 a.m., Peter is found in nearby shrubbery with his foot in a pond. Inside a locked garden area with only one key that is constantly in the care of a gardener. Peter, the mysteriously returned man spends several days in a hospital, suffering shock and with no recall of what has taken place. Gradually a series of dreams begin, escalating in clarity as he becomes more lucid. He states that they begin to feel more like memories than simple imagination.

In these dreams he finds himself soaking wet and standing in an unfamiliar garden. He begins to wander the roads, dazed, and is eventually found and taken to a hospital where he undergoes various tests. He is able to recall the names of a doctor, various nurses, and a sister as well as the name of the ward. The people and place are not familiar to Peter in “real life” but the dreams are long and mundane, fueling his suspicion that they are more than mere astral visits. He recalls that from time to time the hospital room would “shimmer”.

Furniture would appear in places that were previously empty. Then just as suddenly the room would return to “normal”... in these dreams, as Peter’s condition improves, he is allowed outdoors to walk the grounds of this unfamiliar hospital. Moving down a lane outside, he begins to feel a familiarity. This is the last thing remembered until he is discovered within the locked garden. A researcher, Colin Parsons, spends three days with the family. The dream hospital is traced and is found to be a nearby cottage infirmary with a ward name to match Peter’s description. Furthermore, the doctor and sister are found to exist. The doctor doesn’t recognize Peter and hospital records show that he has never been there.

How baffling, Ray thought. An implied alternate reality, parallel and closely aligned with the real world occupied by Peter Williamson. Did this suggest that we may leave and return to our original reality? Perhaps there were many Peters who vanished that day from multiple yet similar realities simultaneously? What if the man who returned to his family was not the true Peter, but had come back slightly altered? Ray thought of the many cases of sudden and utter disappearance, but that also there are reports of people who show up seemingly from “nowhere”, unable to explain where they came from or how they arrived. Chilling. It put Ray in mind of the altered states of his most intense clairvoyant work; impressions that appeared as blurred photographs, liquid opaque visuals, or unintelligible “sounds” and un-words that he somehow could intuit the truth from.

Though Ray had never truly felt a classic out-of-body sensation during an in-person reading (for they were the most intense, depending on the client), he had experienced a troubling time shift and subsequent feeling of lost reality during several extreme sessions with the more deeply troubled people seeking his assistance. Townes did his best work when in a semi-trance state. He was “present” in the room, aware of some of what he was speaking or hearing, but it was cloaked and diffused. It was his request that clients ask of him what it is they seek to know, in broad topic strokes such as “career”, “health”, “love”, etcetera, but that they not ask questions during the session lest Ray’s concentration be broken.

He allowed notes to be taken but not recordings. The final phase of a reading, in particular one done face-to-face, involved a very brief question and answer exchange although Ray didn’t always remember what he had just seen and shared. Over the course of his psychic career, Townes had shed some of the purely romantic outlook and had reluctantly adopted a business sense. People in enough emotional need to seek help through “outside means” were also prone to overstep boundaries. Townes was careful about who he read for in person and the sessions were carried out in a tastefully decorated little office in Regina’s outer limits.

He thought again of time warps and similar parallel realities; indeed, multiple versions of a given soul travelling through endlessly variable pathways. Why was this concept so elusive for most people to grasp? Weren’t feelings of deja vu commonplace and widespread? Haven’t a great many people experienced ghost sightings or felt sudden strangeness in the air around them? And what of these mind blowing numbers regarding human beings who seem to be swallowed up entirely, never seen again? The airplane skipped gently across a band of turbulence.

Ray checked his watch and noted that he would be touching down in Toronto in less than an hour. His thoughts went to Jenny and her vanished husband. As mad as it seemed under the ordinary light of pragmatic view, Ray couldn’t help but feel that Scott’s soul was alive somewhere unknown. Alive and trapped in place. In tandem with that feeling was the intensity of his sense... that his mother... her energy... remained intact and was attempting to contact Ray through a conduit he suspected to exist but could not name.

The young woman beside Townes let out a small snort. He glanced over to see her asleep, head tilted toward the shoulder of the older gentleman and indeed resting on his shoulder... Ray smirked, noting that the old guy didn’t seem to mind at all. On cue, the two men looked at each other and exchanged smiles. Where was her mind, right then? Was she dreaming of her fiancee, Jim? Was she about to emit another sound, perhaps more carnal in nature, during a dream flight atop the intriguingly different man with his wild tattoos and long braid? Ray stifled a chuckle and returned to the book in his lap. However briefly, it felt good to want to laugh.

Linhares, Brazil, 1981. On April 20, Jorge Ramos is driving from his home at 6:00 p.m. to attend a business meeting. It is a short distance but Ramos doesn’t arrive. His wife, Noemia, reports his disappearance to police and is distraught over the potential for foul play, because her husband is a stickler for reporting his whereabouts to her. Investigating officers make a disturbing discovery the very next day; Jorge’s Volkswagen is found abandoned on a side road just a few miles outside of Linhares. The key is still in the ignition. All of his business papers are intact, files and samples pertaining to his job as representative for a chemical company. Absolutely no sign of struggle.

The vehicle is given a forensic examination to no avail. Five days after his disappearance, Noemia receives a frantic phone call from her husband. He tells of driving to the meeting and suddenly seeing a white glow ahead that enveloped his car before he could react. Next, a sense of pressure upon him that made it difficult to move and brought muscle pains. Then, a “dreamy, floating” state immediately followed by regaining consciousness into disorientation. The car was gone and he was standing beside an unfamiliar road. He was relieved to find his money and personal possessions intact. Not knowing where he was, Jorge says he entered a town in search of medication to relieve the pain flooding his body, and to find a telephone. He entered a pharmacy to discover the following : it was no longer April 20 but had become the 25th... and he was in the town of Gioania. Six hundred miles from where police had discovered his car.

Ray closed the book, then leaned forward to tuck it into his partially opened carry-on bag. The hunt for now, he thought, glancing at the rows of seats ahead of him, feeling the light jostle of bumpy air during the approach to Toronto. It seemed that finding a semblance of a definition for now would open other locks into every nearby reality; would answer so many imponderables. How does one measure the interval between past and future? In trillionths of a second? It was equally impossible to measure a synapse. A fleeting in-between reaction to something just beyond comprehension, or perhaps so far removed from “reality” that it could never be considered anything but sheer fantasy.

(by those who are threatened by all that is unknown, or “unprovable”)

Ray had long ago given up the profound paradox of “now” and “ultimate why” in favor of being as involved as possible in each moment during his perception of it. In favor of savor. Should this very airplane hit a lethal pocket of wind shear, and ultimately crash, at what point does the tragic event become “now”? Upon impact and explosion? Or is it a fait accompli but for the brutal formality of having to physically manifest?

Perhaps there is a finite amount of energy allotted for the collective of human souls, and some mystery machination or divine law decrees that tragedies must take place to maintain a manner of balance that is not knowable to a mortal being’s mind? Chilling to consider. A cosmic cull. An enforced natural control that seems from the human perspective wasteful, painful, horrific. These were foreign thought patterns for Ray. He pushed them aside. Soon enough, but for the lovely interlude of seeing Jenny over a brief period of time that morning, Townes would be fully immersed into such darkness.

The skies were clear above metropolitan Toronto. Ray could see the quilt of farmland just northwest of the city, and the pleasant bath of sunlight as it accentuated silos and barns, Victorian homes not unlike his. He felt a pang. Would he really cut those ties? Sell the place? To go where? It was his beckoning from within, shapeless but strong, to pull up roots and claim a kind of freedom that few may actually taste. He looked across the aisle at a tilted window view, the horizon and wing dipping to meld worlds of earth and sky. It was beautiful to be alive.

Maybe there was a Ray Townes corpse down there, burning in the conflagration and surrounded by scattered bodies, moments from this now’s warm observation. Maybe it had already happened and this was a backward loop through the fabric of time itself. Maybe he would find himself with a buzzing bloodstream and this reality fading from sight no matter his efforts to stay, with his feet planted on the soil of a county where people go missing. Maybe he would blink and know the feel of a woman who loves him. He had to believe that every chapter of his story was equally real in its own version of time, place, prayer, and outcome.

What bothered Ray, however, was that he could not preview with any degree of certainty, a single vision of where he was headed.

The Logan street diner is busy. Mondays are always hectic before noon, with the new work week started and regulars wanting their ritualistic breakfasts. Jenny is receiving many compliments on her appearance, more so than usual. The sleep of Sunday night had been remarkably deep and free of recollected dreams. That of itself is quite surprising because Jenny has been straddling a quantum emotional state of Zen-like calm and teenage anticipation.

She had prepared for work with an extra emphasis on her hair, leaving it down as she so rarely does. These compliments are of course more about Jenny’s energy. She is effervescence and youth. Hope flows out of her pores. Rejuvenated confidence steps with her along the old flooring as she serves each table attentively and with a vim not seen from her often, over the years. “Who’s the lucky guy?” one old codger teases from his counter stool, and Jenny’s boss chimes in from the kitchen pick-up window - “I know who he is...”

She flushes and ignores them. Unbelievable; Ray will arrive any minute now. A man who has made a huge impact on her life in next to no linear time, and who by all rights should not have been back to Toronto so soon...

“Yeah?” old codger looks up through the kitchen window, then mischievously and perhaps with a little jealousy at Jenny as she stands by the cash register. “So who is he then?”

The big bear of a man within the kitchen aims a sausage-like finger through the pick-up window.

“He’s THAT guy.”

Jenny follows the invisible indicator beam to a spot on the other side of a large east-facing pane of double-glazed glass. Ray Townes is crossing Logan street with his beautiful eyes aimed directly through the diner door at Jenny. In the same seconds that her heart begins to race, Ray is struck by a speeding blue panel van that has just accelerated to clear a yellow traffic light. His body is instantly hurled aloft like a thrown rag doll. Jenny screams through a thick paralysis of terror reaction as Ray’s body is impacted again with a sickening contortionist thud by another vehicle attempting to swerve away from the van that has locked its brakes up.

The horror of it galvanizes Jenny to tear her shoes away from where she is standing; she lurches for the door through a stricken pall in the diner. Three steps onto the sidewalk and she can see around the front of the van. Ray is face down in a horrible pool of blood that spreads faster than Jenny can gather breath for another scream. But scream she does. From every rib. Each spilled tear during her willful exile. She screams and moves to reach the fallen man who has become so important to her life, then finds her breath has become gasping and damp bed sheets within the clutches of her nightmare inflicted mind.

She hisses... “fuck!”

She wipes violently at tears that have coursed down both cheeks. Looks to the alarm clock and moves to push the lever to “off” before the gasping has subsided.

Again, quieter but with more feeling... “fuck.”

As her feet hit the floor she deals with a knot of panic. Is something happening to him right now? His flight will arrive within two hours of her getting to work. His, flight, WILL, arrive.

She pulls it together in the shower. She pulls it together but is unsettled over the swift change from blissful anticipation to an ugly lurk of foreshadowing.