A Bright House

Ray Townes is an excellent swimmer, but that won’t matter now. He has also logged many an hour attached to scuba diving gear, but that won’t matter now. His lung capacity for underwater duration is remarkable for a man of his years, but that won’t matter now, either. He sinks like a proverbial stone. His mind mirrors what his external body seems to be experiencing, as it sinks within the pool of its brain. Water feels at first very cold, near freezing, and encloses his face with a soundless finality that is both terrifying and comforting. Back to a womb that has remained alluringly evident through his clairvoyant cognition, Townes plummets and the water grows warmer, darker, a muddied swirling storm cloud stack of brown notes.

He seems to be looking up at the roiling surface, but can’t be sure within the drunken stupor of this shock. Tree figures huddle ’round like spectators to a hit and run victim’s final bleed-out. He sees the wild waving dance of their silhouettes up there, and then dozens of large bubbles issuing forth from his open mouth. This is where the creep of audible reality begins; the lungs exhaling a farewell parade of Ray’s last earthly breath, with hurried upward flight to the rejoining air of a surface world that may as well be another universe.

Ear drums beat themselves with pressure mallets. His feet kick about instinctively at thickening weight that invisibly presses upon him. A collision of his backside with what feels to be a rocky river bank slope, over and over the heavy impact and drag, his skin on fire. The wolflike eyes in his head are still fixated on that vanishing surface world, and there he gasps in a full mouth of now warm muddied river, where a river didn’t visually exist only moments prior. Just before a sickening blackout impact at the back of his skull, his eyes find the side to side motion of a large avian shadow. It divides what he can see of the rippling light dappled surface, now twenty or more feet away. Flying across his field of flickering view in a mocking savage brutality of form.

The base of Ray’s cranium crashes against an immovable surface, at first thought to be a boulder but in the fadeout seconds that follow, a long twisting arm of tree root. He is spun counterclockwise by the collision, and as his eyeballs roll up into the blackest cloak of this comes next, he sees what remains to be seen of his extended forearm and hand. There in the sad clutches of almost invisible digits, the braid of his monstrous revelation made father. It shows eight inches of dangle that has caught a finger of the tree root arm, and Ray bounces a few times in dreadful slow motion against the ungiving river bank. He goes then, beneath the blackest and deepest of under, with an imploding chest cavity and the taste of muck and blood to exclaim his mortal frailty’s protest.

Where, exactly, is “where?”

Where does Townes go during those undetermined initial expanses of untethered being?

Do we remember how we arrive at a dream episode’s threshold? Does the precise shift in reality-fabric announce itself? No. We are simply thrust into a hyperspace constantly stacking itself, smashing its details, mashing the memories of mortality-based rules and regulations. Where do the comatose reside? As their bodies wither and become one with a bed in a hospital room, where then goes the mind? Where are your recollections, from the first year of your life through to that terrifying debut drop-off at a school? There are large gaps that span so many years, with seemingly irretrievable information.

Ray Townes becomes a nameless body. There is a tiny fleeting synaptic awareness that sparks up from within the death soup; pain in a hand that somehow won’t relinquish its grip on a woven strand of hair... a horrible weight within the lungs... burning popping blood vessels in his blinded eyeballs... a haunting plaintive refrain of that stricken “oh no”, from a great distance both externalized and inward, her voice piercingly familiar, but evasive to a dying brain. As for those gaps of “seemingly irretrievable information”, there are indeed methods and tools for the prying open and obtaining. Hypnotism. Meditation. Past-life regression. Naturally occurring hallucinogens that act as catalyzers, door keys, barrier removers... and sudden jarring full-system shock.

It is the latter that permeates the sinking stone, Ray Townes. It is fissured lightning forks of a quadrillion micro tongues. This unlikely marriage of impossible event and improbable clairvoyance, if the skeptics are to be heard, is creating a lingering limbo for the man between two realities. These tiniest external sensations of water pressure and a mortal succumbing to it, are dissected by something now encroaching rapidly, from within the visually impenetrable void. Black, the lack of hue, does not serve what Townes perceives without functioning eyes in the mortal sense. So much less and more than the achromatic sable of a younger Ray’s coloring books. He is falling directly into a removal.

There is a disturbing anomaly of its times, in movie form, entitled Night Of The Hunter. In it, there is a ghastly yet almost visually poetic scene that displays a woman who has been murdered, sitting upright in an automobile at the bottom of a murky body of water. Her hair trails out in streams, carried aloft from her face by invisible currents that attach themselves from recollection to a glimmer of “sight” from the drowning dying Ray. It isn’t the actress, Shelley Winters, now. The female torso spins very slowly up from silt in a river that doesn’t exist in Kincardine township under “normal” perceivable circumstances. She is a ballerina grotesquerie, arms out, hands clenched, hair like curled smoke in front of her bleached out countenance. The corpse spins and moves closer to a now stilled Ray Townes, caught as he is on a river bank tree root. The thick wavy mane parts and he sees the face of his mother as she appeared shortly before her suicide. Melinda is speaking something inaudible but it is her eyes. Somehow weeping underwater, the eddies of warmer liquid visible to him for a split moment as mirage-like heat quavers... but he cannot be seeing this because his eyelids remain shut. There is a weight of them closed, as if sewn that way by an overzealous grim reaper.

Next is the experiential opening of those anchored eyelids, as though he physically feels the effort to do so, but suddenly understands that he is seeing right through them. It is a horrific epiphany. The decomposed figure of whatever that is, portraying a demonic likeness of his deceased mother, has vanished. Billowing silt in brownish green-flecked expansion clouds, with light refraction diminishing from the surface above, wherever that may be, is all that exists for another deconstructed moment. This feels twinned to the realm of dreaming. Same lack of physics. The same intensity of presence, paradoxically elusive, with a similar sickening potential for permanent soul suffocation. Not to become stuck in this. Not to become stuck. There is no motor function now, back to that hand he could feel burning and aching from the desperate lifeline braid-tether grasp. He is thus somehow “seeing” but it comes without breath, movement of form, sound, and most frighteningly... will.

Is this the communal pool, then?

Is he now back to the primordial soup? His wallet of temporarily necessary documents, irrelevant. Fifty two years of lesson processing, a humorless punchline. What wake has the life of Ray Townes left up there? Do the ripples of his influence and good spiritual works continue into this, whatever this is? Or, is it the broader surface disturbance, like winds across a pond, of things left unfinished that create the more lasting and affecting wake? Down into this growing darkness of water, no longer falling but still with that feeling of a directionless plummet, Ray Townes wants to remember that in a dream it is possible to physically manifest anything that an imagination may construct. This tantalizing memory, or hinted recognition, or reborn instinct, taunts what is now an altered mind. On the tip of my tongue. Kicked the bucket. I could have loved her. Left his son behind. Bright street. This last fragment is a thin pointed shard that nearly pierces the claustrophobic demi-hell around him. He. It.

The ego is among the utmost and tenacious of aspects within the enfoldment of mortal existence, but only in the higher-minded creatures. The ones with awareness of self. Question askers. It is a fundamental Truth within every animate dimension of shared overlapping reality, this Id-based teaching mechanism that is more accurately a spiritual smokescreen. This is not to suggest that a bumblebee is of less use to the perpetually morphing design scheme, than a tool-making hominid that thrashes against its own stunning ignorance, so impatiently. This is not to impose a hierarchy of worth that would divide lakeshore pebbles from fruit bats or monks. None of that is tantamount to a truth, once the proving ground of earthbound classes has been dismissed.

Energy has its own autonomous exchange rate. Balance is more a reality than anything ever proven within the walls of a laboratory. Ray Townes may as well be krill. His decades of kind-hearted doing may as well, for this drowned ended story, be a tornado that randomly erased two hundred human lives in ten human minutes. This is a part of the muddied swirl of his tenacious Id promulgating its final gasping of myth, and even within that foul brine he knows that the energy of his wake has gone forth to create balance somewhere; to fill a gap. Dying, then, or whatever is happening to him under the ancient surface of a forked river, is every bit as harmonious as Love.

His mouth wants to scream but no brain cell hears its call.

When his “mind” breaks through into a semblance of memory in the murk, it uses a plural : we flew. We flew in dreams. Many times, did we. Once it was above a prairie expanse, the white men divided into farmed squares. We flew there. Remember the beauty of that world. There were newcomers, sailing explorers who conquered the faith of our people. Remember? Musket balls. Whisky. Rum. From their mouths came empty sounds. What they meant was never revealed from within the languages of France, England, Spain. Remember it. We flew, then, and we flew long before then. Meek in our inability to understand the new people. Remember, they could not see as we do. The great spirit could not be heard by them. But we flew. Think the direction and we shall be that.

That post-mental excretion meanders into itself, eats its own meaning, and he is seeing the thoughts as pale green scribbles inside this no-photon cosmic bathwater. It must be a portal that has him. An “actual” transfer point between the white noise of earth world and its insanely oblique deconstructed larger placement. Whatever was once a human man with the name Ray Townes, clairvoyant mutant or preview of evolution’s next chapter, suffers an anguish that crosses the threshold from dimension prison three into

this

mad

dream

more

real

than

the

previous

one