A Bright House

This is no way to start my day, Jenny noted whilst showering and still feeling the vivid linger of that awful dream. An astral souvenir to take its place beside the episode that starred a younger Ray Townes and his suicidal mother. With hot water soothing her jangled nerves, Jenny replayed the nasty details of what she had just witnessed; was it simply the loose ends of thought patterns in her subconscious, or something of more depth? Losing her husband the way she did had irrevocably changed Jenny’s world. For all the lonely nights of soul searching, coping, having no one with her to express the pain of her journey to, there must still be strands of raw emotion.

Stealthy fears to be re-triggered with an unexpected bright light arriving in her life, attached to a new improved worry that he too might disappear. The days leading up to Ray’s return had been a dynamic flow. Jenny did battle with her ego. She calmed the urgency one hour, then caved in to undiluted need, the next. And what was it that she needed? It was premature to think that it was the man, this Ray Townes. More likely she wished for certainty. The comfort of certainty.

Jenny toweled off, completely lost to the tangle of disparate thoughts, feeling an undercurrent of pissed that carried no identification tag. It wasn’t about the timing of a lousy dream, or even that the symbolism was infused with potential warning, or her own deep-seated reticence. Perhaps, more accurately, she had at last reached a can’t-turn-back threshold. Ray might only be her catalyzer. His presence in Jenny’s world may prove itself invaluable through other means and not the romantic ”I could love you" pathway that his involuntary observation had suddenly lit. For the five days of last week she had walked a tightrope. Exhilaration meets terror. There is no safety net anymore, now that her armor has been cast aside. Scott is most certainly gone. One leaves, another arrives.

She didn’t duplicate the dream’s attention to her hair. She wasn’t one to wear cosmetics and most certainly not when working in the diner. If not for the ugliness of that astral vignette, she might have devoted a few extra minutes to shine Ray’s potential new trophy... where is this coming from? Am I really this angry now? Universe; do you see me? I am not a pawn for your continued amusement.

I have paid my dues and then some.

Jenny tucked her wavy mane into a double pony tail and glared into her own eyes in the bathroom mirror. “Do not mess with me” she muttered, finishing with a tiny smirk, fishing for her emotional fulcrum. Poor Ray. He’s going to show up for breakfast and I’ll be a total handful. He won’t have a clue why. “He’s psychic” she told herself before breaking mirrored eye contact. As she dressed and the clock kept time, Jenny recognized yet again that it seemed her very own Everest to summit, this steep climb back to happiness. With a double check of the back door locks and after a quick glass of orange juice, Jenny left the crooked foyer wearing a light denim jacket over her work clothes. She also left most of the lingering funk of that awful dream locked up behind her as she walked away.

In the hidden cosmic metaphysical classrooms where magic math is studied, what would be the odds against Ray Townes renting a 1991 Buick Skylark for his drive from Pearson International Airport into Toronto and then northwest to the land of the vanished? Although a few years later of model, what would be the odds tally against, on the abacus of the absurd, that Ray’s rental would be the same sporty slant-six sunroof vehicle that had been a vessel for mystery and disappearance, three hours drive distant? What incorporeal gremlin fingers manipulated the ingredients of this quantum recipe, made just for Ray Townes as he drove out of Pearson in that tan-colored Buick with his stomach grumbling for breakfast? It won’t be for several hours, the moment at which Ray notices the vehicular wink and nudge, when he is booked into a Days Inn and is taking a goodnight look through the files spread across a less than welcoming mattress.

During his wait at the baggage claim, Ray has made an impulse decision to alter the driving route northwest. He will take highway ten north past Shelburne, then turn west on the first available rural artery that will place him just south of Goderich. It has become suddenly important that he briefly visits the octagonal town. On his own, for during the course of the week he is to be accompanied there by investigators for a meeting with the kind old man who had taken in and then sadly lost a new friend; the stranger who had wandered into town from nowhere only to depart as mysteriously as he had arrived. Ray also wanted to drive into Kincardine for an early dinner, and to locate a room for his five day stay. He would also be interviewing a family who had lost a member under bizarre conditions. Right next door, the neighbors whose dog had vanished and returned many months later as a changed animal only to die suddenly and strangely... Kincardine was going to be clairvoyance headquarters.

It has been prearranged that Townes will contact the investigators on Tuesday morning, so that he can rest after his flight and drive. He still doesn’t have full agreement regarding his request to visit the site of disappearances, alone. From the speaking voice of the man in charge, Ray has felt the bull-headedness. “I’ve got news for you” Ray speaks over wind noise as he drives south on highway 427 toward the Gardiner Expressway and downtown Toronto. He has the sunroof pushed open slightly. Radio off. It is a very pleasant morning that carries sweet promises of Spring to bloom, and in fact Ray sees the fresh green of new leaves to his left in the subdivisions of Mississauga.

To his surprise he finds that Jenny has not been cycling through the most recent thoughts. He is finally entering professional mode, where calm must rule. Without words to tie it all together, Townes believes that he is entering into a profound chapter of revelatory truth. The Buick noses around the ramp heading east and Ray takes in a backlit skyline view that is both foreign and intimidating to him. The CN Tower and assorted clusters of financial district buildings jab upwards into a violet-tangerine cloudless belly.

Traffic is heavy on the expressway. Ray is catching the last wave of commuters as they cluster downtown. He pulls the sunroof shut, glancing across lake Ontario which is dotted with sailboats although the breezes out there must be chilly. He could never live in this city, but several of the photographs of Bruce and Grey county in the road map-brochure have mellowed Ray and even caused him to look forward to the drive. It is farmland not unlike Saskatchewan’s, but with rolling hills, more forest. The eastbound lanes near Parkdale’s old rooming houses and forlorn decrepit warehouses have become clogged.

Ray is moving at twenty miles per hour. “See you not so soon, Jenny” he says. Earlier in the morning, waiting at Regina’s airport, Ray had allowed himself to attempt a “seeing” of what might lie ahead for he and Jenny during the weekend following his work to the northwest. Nothing had arrived, not a hint. In fact, heading into this important week he felt oddly flat. Timing had presented him with a bombshell in Delsin the Cree, and in his mother’s hidden history. It wasn’t only his imagination that after opening the secret cookie tin, Ray’s blood felt altered.

At the foot of Bathurst street, traffic thins slightly due to the off-ramp. Ray considers taking that route and decides upon lower Jarvis street which should be quieter, situated as it is a few blocks past busy University, Bay, and Yonge. He drives on, stomach grumbling, and feels odd in a philosophical way. He imagines himself as the light of a star that has already been born, shone, and burned out. He is here in this “present”, able to be perceived, to indeed exert influence upon the meagre substance of this dimension, but his span has already been lived, his story told. Jenny, gods bless her, might find herself gazing at the luminosity of a long dead star.

He had to decide something about her, him, the two of them. What that was resisted focus, naming, and time itself. Although for Ray there wasn’t a sense of urgency, he did pick up on Jenny’s. He could not be sure that hers was built exclusively or even in part on a foundation of entering into a romantic partnership with him... he has placed importance directly at his own feet, on this morning. Whatever is to happen for them, should it feel natural and mutual, will be revealed within the tired but cozy confines of a greasy spoon.

Jenny arrived at work somewhat braced. Walking up Logan on the opposite side of the block so she could glance across into the diner’s large side window, she wondered how she would cope if the customers from her dream began to arrive before Ray did. At Logan’s traffic lights she stood for a moment, staring at the spot where Ray had been struck down in the dream realm. True; Toronto’s pedestrians were fair game at busy intersections like that one. Annual statistics bore it out.

She felt clenched. Pinched. This wasn’t how she wanted to be, not that morning. If by some stroke of horror, the nightmare played out in a physical replication, Jenny promised herself it would be the end of her recent dalliance with hope. It seemed that karma and fairness might be phantoms, God’s smokescreen, fragile wishes made against the awesome terrors of all unknowns, just so humanity could cope with its infancy. Yet she wanted to believe that her own hard journey was coming to an end. That reward and true happiness would light the remainder of a tough-luck path.

She stood for a minute that seemed an hour, looking at her outline in glass across Logan street. Maybe I need to stop thinking about this. The power of a human mind should never be underestimated. If I keep worrying this way, I might influence reality into a mimicry of the dream. Jenny of Bright Street was no stranger to visualization. She’d had a gut full of it after Scott’s disappearance. For each day of the first two years she focused everything she could mentally muster. A phone call with a miracle attached to it. She built the stage, wrote the script, played the lead role and directed their happy ending, over and over again.

Jenny whispered “snap out of it” and crossed Logan when the little green figure lit up in permission. She pushed back at nightmare residue and sought the core of her happiness of just days before. No matter what did or didn’t happen between her and Ray Townes, she was better off in this morning than she had been not long ago. That push against the familiar metal and glass front door, her small hands flat against its centre bar, brought with it a welcome comfort of routine. This was no ordinary Monday.

It has grown steadily weaker across the span of waiting days. Too weary for proper roving flight and hunting in the fields. Its sense is of imminent arrival. That which holds great allure and longevity in the mortal realm also contains energy that will pass through into otherworld. Its waiting place, high within the needled canopy of a large Spruce, is thick of sturdy bough. Acute vision is able to watch across a vast distance of unused railway to the south, and a town across a trestle to the north. It has fed upon small hares and field mice, whatever has had the misfortune of passing beneath the tree. At night it rests. The conflict within its mind has grown equally weakened. With each long hour of diminished physical energy comes a quantum promise of renewal.

A visitor arrives during the waning hours of an afternoon. A tall man who wanders in grasses and weeds just beyond the tree line. Its blood is thrumming with the chaotic energies that abound in this location. Hunger and fatigue self cancel thunderbird’s primeval desire to swoop down from the perch. Pure intuitive instinct keeps those deadly talons encircled around the Spruce branch, and eventually that man departs. It is not the one.

For the hours of an earth rotation that will conclude its waiting, that which perches becomes more cognizant of a growing cacophony in the energy field of this place. It is the uncountable indivisible passage of events, trillions at once using and expending and shifting energy in nano time. Here within this fluid passageway. Building intensity. The natural flux. Bundles of mass disguised as life forms that serve as energy’s transportation. Things known, never known, named, impossible to name. That which is self aware. That which acts according to genomic impetus, liberated from the weight of ego. All of this buzzes through the trees around thunderbird. It vibrates up from the soil, shivers along trunks and limbs, rewrites the verses of photosynthesis, gambles with mutative risk in order that energy may accrue new vessels for continuance. Einstein is here. Planck, too. Bohr and Schrodinger’s cat. Now dispersed. Now reassembled. Now elsewhere. Pure energy that cannot cease but must always move. Raw, refined, given, never kept, shifted imploded scattered eroded redistributed energy.

In a realm where visible light waves rule, the lifespans are bridges, and as such they spark and die within a limited duration. In another realm there is no law of gravity, no limitation of photon perception. Where one thing dwells, food is derived from an energy the mortals name “emotion”. Where another thing dwells, energy is shifted through time and space in endless creation. The creation of abstract, never repeating form begets transitional truth for energy to flow through. There is no dying. Is no killing. All of this coexists beneath the tall Spruce upon which thunderbird has been waiting.

The electromagnetic flux of this localized portal has shifted constantly, not unlike an ice age or global warming effect. This is the way of that which purely manifests, through chaotic beautifully random freedoms of particle jump and shift in a quantum leap ballet. A shaman of centuries ago who found this place, stopped speaking afterward. No further words left his lips. He had seen into beyond the beyond, into the inscrutable. It smashed his mind into infinite micro diamonds of peaceful “knowing”, and a glow crept through the remaining heartbeats of his body. Beneath the might of climate, held within one space by so-called “laws” that exist within the provable and nonsensical, this and many other conduits pass through the fabric of all that will ever be. Of all that “cannot”, which is a word for a concept made from mortality, exclusively for mortals.

In one version of reality, this final rotation of thunderbird’s waiting time is named “Monday”.