A Bright House

“Can you believe this guy? Can you...” he wheels in against the curb behind the parked Buick Skylark, pulls forward to almost touch its rear bumper. “Can you fucking believe this guy?” The lead investigator, a proud and long serving member of the Ontario Provincial Police, doesn’t have proof that the car ahead of him was driven there by Ray Townes, but two and two equals four. Townes hadn’t called in at their prearranged time, and thirty minutes later, bingo; a car with rental plates parked near the access points to the missing persons scene. He exhales in a short loud hiss, watches the patrol car pull in behind him, also parking. “Goddamn prima donna psychic” he mutters, leaving the driver’s seat with a rising anger. Two Kincardine officers climb out of their car, the tall passenger yawning and stretching for all he is worth, fingers splayed straight up and out as if to pull down the sky. The driver takes a look at the Buick. “He’s already out here, then?”

“Yep. I had a feeling about this guy but was hoping to be wrong. Let’s get out there and see what we see.”

Three hulking cops unknowingly cut through the same section of private property that Ray Townes had, earlier. They commiserate about the high strangeness of these recent local mysteries, of how pathetic it is to have psychics coming aboard, and their early afternoon shadows align across the raised track bed as they make their way to the latest and greatest confounder. Shortly after they have traversed the bridge above Mill Creek, the bizarre and out of joint sight of a downed Cessna catches all of them at once. Piety and the expletive pairings of unison “holy shit” issue forth from both Kincardine constables. They all break into a steady lope. Crunch goes the gravel. Rasp goes the ground cover.

Where Ray has been snatched away, from the same field grasses and wildflowers and thick growth trees, there is no sign of anything amiss. Animal sounds fill the air, mostly birds that cross-talk and intimate a complex social structure beyond any human’s assumption. The three big men run past the section of woods where so many inexplicable events have allegedly taken place, straight to the crumpled wreck of a small airplane that has chewed a ragged groove into the ground before dying an ignoble death beside a closed down railway line.

“I see blood in the cockpit” one of the town cops shouts, unbeknownst to his self awareness as he has become intoxicated on the adrenalin rush. The men approach the front of the plane. Violent arcs of blood trace back and forth across the windshield glass, which has become veined by the crash. The cockpit is empty, which comes as a cold shock given the copious amount of arterial spray and the buckled metal of this downed aircraft. “Everybody stand still” instructs the O.P.P. officer. “Don’t move a goddamn inch.”

He begins to survey the cockpit interior, and then the ground near this wreck. No footprint evidence; not a single bent blade of grass or broken shrub limb. In the heavy breathing harmony of three befuddled cops, two of whom will never get used to what has been happening in their sleepy little township, the land beneath their feet tangibly withholds what they seek. The sky, not long ago filled with a strange glowing mist, is now a meld of beautiful blue and shape-finding cotton candy clouds. Even the sounds of bird and insect seem to hint at secrets better kept from human minds.

“Well now... what.the.fuck.” The lead investigator for this perplexing series of events, is normally not a cussing sort. The months have been changing him. Putting fresh edges on his edges. He is a man used to getting results. “Might as well be the goddamned Bermuda Triangle” he mutters, fixing hard eyes at the two local police officers. Moments later, his growing headache worsens when he realizes that the cockpit door has been crumpled into a permanently shut position. Another human being has completely vanished, and looking back toward the trees where all of this began, he makes it two.

What remains of Ray Townes, or more appropriately what has become of him, is both measurably nearby and immeasurably removed from the landscape upon which the three cops stand, lost and confounded. Without the possibility of applying a back and forth “movement” to this timing of mind-blown perception, the Townes soul is quickly ushered into a bombardment of sensory detonation that “follows” its initial shock of disconnect. All of it feels comparative to the dreamworld, but holds the potency of his clairvoyant “sight”. Rather than a falling sensation, there seems more of an explosion. Something subatomic from the deepest root of his physical and mental entirety; feverish childhood memories, flu afflicted, the bed and floor tilting to and fro at high speed according to Ray’s inner subjectivity but hardly the “real word” reality. His mother, suddenly appearing as a long backlit shadow in the doorway, floating across the old floorboards to administer to her hallucinating son as only a mother may.

All at once he is remembering this and expanding outward into the invisible river flow of Everything. There is the keen panic of loss. All that he has lived and learned felt indelibly imprinted by and linked to that surface world, limitations or not, and to be coldly yanked from that without any buffer of preparation time... ludicrous to dare to request such from a Universe so inscrutable, vast and complex. For elongated moments he is able to not see anything; this is fervently willed, deeply summoned from a reservoir that he will require over and over. He willpowers the eyelids closed, be they actually attached to his body or something dreamt. This hurtling exploding terror continues but he does not behold its visual detail.

Death is an opportunity. Death is an opportunity? Somewhere from within the cauldron of this titanic soul bomb, a voice or undefinable entity is audible or perceptible from within what was once named his mind. Where is the opportunity within an hour of earthquake and tsunami devastation? Where is the opportunity when tens of thousands of lives are snuffed so ruthlessly, so outside of our need for order and comprehension? When these rebellious indignant reactions rise like bile, Ray’s vision returns to at first show him cloudy water that is strafed by long even tubes of sunlight, and then this dissolves into a distorted glimpse of volunteers struggling to dig a survivor out from beneath a mountain of collapsed building rubble. And so in death there is guidance? There is a sentience to assist in the shock of transition? Without voice, whatever it is states that death is impossible. There is none. Only a change of energy.

This is no comfort for the mighty resilience of mortal mind’s determined clinging; that it is designed for the mortal vessel to fight at all cost for Life... and even this fundamental “truth” becomes mocked by a piercing lifelong image of his mother’s saddened defeated eyes, her long sighing unfocused looks through the kitchen window, hands and forearms buried in dishwater. The front porch ceiling that held the hook that held the escape route rope. “They are going to get into the car” comes a familiar voice, to his right, and it is then a dream he recalls, now returning as he drowns?

Ray perceives the details of that recalled landscape, completely immersed in crashing waves of flood waters that are wind borne and vicious. He feels a steering wheel in his grip and the vehicle is a shining 1961 black Cadillac convertible with the roof down; his father’s favorite car. One that he was forced to sell in order to save the farm after several hard low yield seasons. “They’re getting closer” the voice shouts above howled winds, and it is his father beside him. The man lifts a cracked and fissured hand to hold a beaten ball cap in place atop his head. Ray wants to look at his dad’s face but it is the background of surging sea water, so many trees and houses poking up through the broth of it, and the sharks...

oh god, the sharks. Hurtling all about the floating Caddy that he seemed to have been both driving and sailing. They are of every known species. He sees past his father’s turned head, the leaping Great Whites as they swim with the current, mostly oblivious to the men in the car, and then Townes has the returning panic loop to echo that which stayed with him all morning once upon a time in Saskatchewan. The sharks begin to take note of the men and a nasty hybrid Hammerhead lunges at an angle, that normally docile animal now a frenzied mutant. It collides with the top of the passenger door as his father yanks himself frantically away, shoulder impacting with Ray’s... and they swerve sideways. A tall wave-crest crashes into the vehicle across his legs, cold shocking intrusion. He looks to his father who has sat upright once again, and it is Jenny there. She is facing Ray with a dark pair of sunglasses ashine beneath a wide-brimmed hat that feels familiar.

“Do you know how I cry for you?”

Her voice is all that he hears, for the winds and lashing seas have suddenly been hushed to utter muteness by the words. It seems that the car is something else undergoing a fluid metamorphosis. The steering wheel melts away. Ray’s right hand is extended across the rippling, changing front seat, and Jenny takes it into hers just before a physical-body pressure steals him away from wherever this is that has made itself known. Boulders in each lung again, bringing a dichotomous emotion of wanting to return and live as before, or needing to plunge headlong into this exploding frontier that has either taken him or offered itself up.

Given a few more cognitive tools to peel away the layers of noise and illusion that so successfully cloak our three-dimensional locales, Jenny of Bright street may have been able to intuit that the timing of her worry pangs were in alignment with the rapidly mushrooming transformation trajectory of Ray Townes. It would be the day named Wednesday, before her panic achieved must-act inertia, but on the Tuesday of Ray’s sudden departure from and entrance into, Jenny spent successive hours in a simmering worry. She wanted to phone him, but felt a more powerful need to respect that he was working on a very serious case. There were two worries; one for his safety that also called out for the illumination of just why she felt so concerned, and one that she might overstep his professional boundaries. She didn’t phone Ray on the Tuesday of his vanishing. It was a decision that didn’t sit well, and would later haunt every immeasurable ingredient of her soul, but she abided by the caution override out of fear. Fear, yet again.

Fear that hungers. More attention, mental focus, stronger return visits to its needless altar. The type of fear that ruthlessly mocks its victim, once that mind has adopted the recidivist’s weaknesses. Jenny worked a slower than usual diner and strived to place her emotions into something positive; she replayed the sweet chemistry of their kiss, the truth and mutual vulnerability of their potential. Fear was a persistent clarion call, however, and it ruined her day. She felt an annoying impatience for Ray’s calming voice, telling her that everything was alright, that (feeling this between his spoken words) the fruit of their courage would be sweet, not sour.

She walked home in a slight daze, taking a different street south. It ran adjacent to an empty park, a hardly used baseball field with rotting bleachers and a corroded chain link fence to anchor its diamond. Her feet felt leaden, as if borrowed from another’s body.

It occurred to her as she slowly shuffle walked, that she didn’t feel very well at all. Her period wasn’t due to start. She had slept solidly. How different would I be right now? How much more mentally healthy would I be if I had known my biological parents? If they had loved me enough to raise me? If I knew who my siblings might be? If my husband, my love, hadn’t disappeared?

Nearing the bottom of an empty park’s expanse, Jenny noted that which had become increasingly prevalent in her city. In a three-sided glass transit stop shelter, under a makeshift blanket of corrugated cardboard, a middle-aged man asleep on his side in a heartbreaking time-shifted version of what he once looked like as he perhaps slept in a crib. Under a roof. Loved, cared for, wanted. That this man’s story had written itself into such a cruel chapter, and yet he carried on with life... Jenny walked slowly past the bus shelter, her eyes to his bearded visage. He had placed a filthy balled up jacket beneath his cheek, and wedged between that and his ear, a hand that seemed to have lost the tips of its first two fingers. Frostbite, she thought, wanting to cry. Wanting to summon forth the powers of instant salvation, change, balance for an unfair world. Instead she did what she usually did when confronted with these visual assaults and reminders; took a good hard look at herself and knew in her deepest gut that she was still a blessed soul.