Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  In the evenings I ran through the 100-degree heat, inhaling the humid air fragrant with sandalwood and sewage, rivers of sweat pouring from my face and chest, dodging cars and skinny cows and throngs of little emaciated homeless children in rags staring at me with their sad eyes, saying, “Please, sir. Please, jogger man. One rupee, sir,” and then at night I would take a rickshaw to Nariman Point Fire Station and lie in bed, still with my clothes on, my camera on the floor right next to me, waiting for the siren. The station chief was a local legend, the bravest firefighter in Mumbai, or perhaps the world. An article I had read about him in one of the papers reported his actions in the aftermath of a terrorist bomb about a decade earlier that had blown up the Bombay Stock Exchange. Prabhat had been first on the scene. The Mumbai Fire Brigade fought fires wearing woolen suits and a smattering of rusty breathing apparatuses that resembled nineteenth-century diving kit. Prabhat had run into the ruins of the building to search for survivors, ignoring warnings from colleagues that the terrorists might have lain booby traps inside. He was the purest archetype of heroism I could possibly imagine. Yet he wore his bravery with the humble air of a quiet and jolly man, with a hearty laugh, who doted on his wife and daughter and understood his heroic actions as the choiceless outcome of the role that the secret and sacred cycles of the universe had bestowed upon him. “It is my karma,” he said, and he picked up his smiling daughter, put her on his knee, and giggled with her, then looked toward me, asking me why I always looked so serious.

  It was dark in the corridor that led from the apartment’s doorway to the inferno in the living room. The thick black smoke stung my eyes. I pointed my camera at the firefighter. Holding my breath, I figured I had about ninety seconds before I’d need to get out. The blaze in the living room through the smoke-shrouded camera lens appeared as a blurry orange flicker in the upper fifth of the dark frame. I crept farther into the living room. The fierce heat of the air seared the skin on my face and forearms. The firefighter glanced behind him and saw me. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out now!” I held my shot of the firefighter for a couple of seconds longer and then ran back out of the room.

  I had to keep running. It was hard to recall a time when I hadn’t needed to run, to chase one mad adventure after another. By the late ’90s, I had a job as a freelance television documentary producer in London. The work could take me almost anywhere. I could have picked less dangerous assignments—a gardening show, for instance. In a forgotten eon I might have felt happy in a garden. But not anymore. Stay in one place, in the same room, relationship, job, city, or even continent, and the Darkness caught up with me: a sad, worried, desperate, trapped feeling that had lurked inside me as long as I could remember, and got worse the longer I remained motionless. If I kept moving, I stayed ahead of the Darkness. I felt like Dr. David Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk TV show I had watched as a kid.

  You know the story. At the start, he’s this regular guy. He shows up someplace random, where no one knows him, looking for a fresh start. Hi, I’m David, he says. I’m looking for work. No, you can’t be my friend, because you won’t like me when I’m angry. Then disaster strikes! A landslide. A plane crash. Now David is angry. His muscles blow up five times their regular size. His shirt rips open. He has this mad look in his eyes. Now you’ve done it: Goodbye, mild-mannered David. Hello, Hulk. He saves everyone. Afterward, they can’t wait to thank the strange green monster who came to their rescue. But now his secret is out! How dearly regular old David yearns to stay, finally settle someplace where people really know him, someplace where he belongs. But there’s that pesky gumshoe reporter on his heels. Who is this so-called Hulk? The public has a right to know . . . David’s gotta go. As the credits roll, there he is again, week after week, hiking at the edge of town, knapsack over his shoulder, hitching a ride to next week’s identical episode.

  That was me. On the outside I wore the mask of a mild-mannered English nerd. But find out the secret horrors that lurked deep within me, and you wouldn’t like what you saw.

  I spent six months in Mumbai. When the day drew near for my return trip to London, I wondered, What’s next? I could picture myself in my dingy flat, sitting at my desk, waiting for the phone to ring. I took a rickshaw through the boiling heat to an internet café. There was no such thing as a smartphone in those days. The internet was a simpler and far less insane place, composed, for the most part, of words and photos and perhaps a dozen grainy cat videos. Sweat dripped from my face as I entered the air-conditioned interior of the café. I sat down at one of the computers. I clicked the mouse to open Internet Explorer. I typed in the address for some crazy festival in the Nevada desert that my old college friend Ned and I had talked about going to in the early fall. Our friend Robin had been to it the year before. Burning Man was utterly bonkers, she said. You could do and be absolutely anything you wanted there. People gave everything away for free. Some of the participants had worked for months or even years on insane sculptures, like dragons that breathed actual fire. Show up in the desert and wander around at random and you saw miracles in every direction. At the end, they burned a giant effigy of a man, and after you had danced all night for days, high on drugs, something burned up inside you as well, and so you went home feeling as if the fire that engulfed the giant Man had also burned up all the old rubbish in your mind.

  I completed my assignment in Mumbai. I flew back to London. Among the junk mail and postcards from my mother on the stack of mail my flatmate had left on my desk, I found an envelope postmarked from San Francisco, California, containing a ticket with a warning printed on the back: YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING THIS EVENT. Sounds like just my sort of thing, I thought.

  FROM SAN FRANCISCO, I drove east with Ned and Robin via the shimmering casinos of Reno and about a hundred miles north into a flat, white high desert that stretched to mountains in the far distance beneath the limitless azure sky that formed a featureless plane of vaster dimension than I had ever encountered anywhere on Earth. Nothing much had happened here since the Pleistocene, and to inhabit its primordial aura catalyzed a perceptual shift into geologic time.

  The camps were positioned in a series of concentric circles that formed an enormous U-shaped array, enclosing the empty expanse of desert, at the center of which stood the giant Man. The concentric circles were organized in a plan that duplicated the Copernican model of the solar system. The closest circle to the center was named Mercury; radiating outward were Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Radial streets, numbered 2:00 through 10:00, intersected the circles like the hour positions on a clock. According to the event guide, which I had read on the internet, the theme that year was The Wheel of Time. As I gazed across the expanse of the desert and the vast blue sky above, anything seemed possible. I put glitter on my chest and rabbit ears on my head. Ned put on a top hat and an orange sarong and daubed his face and bare upper body with blue body paint so to me he wound up looking something like the English-toff equivalent of Krishna. I opened the van door and stepped onto the dusty ground. A warm wind blew in my face. Techno thundered oontz in the distance. The low evening sun cast long shadows of the people crossing the white plain on bicycles and bathed everything in a golden light. Our wandering path through the desert brought us to a man with several large and expensive-looking cameras draped around his neck. “Can I take your picture?” he said, looking at Ned. Why not mine? I thought. I watched the photographer snap several pictures of Ned in different poses from multiple angles, switching from one big camera to an even bigger one with a long lens for a close-up. “Good luck finding your party, Bunny Man,” the photographer said. I felt diminished in his eyes. Yet I soon came to appreciate the giant scale of psychedelic marvels against which a humble rabbit disappeared in the dust clouds.

  In every direction I saw something unprecedented and magical. A tree made of bones. A buried submarine, its prow emerging from the dust. Wandering farther, I encountered a wooden box upo
n whose sides were inscribed the words hope, wish, prayer, dream—the creation, I discovered later, of an artist called Steven Raspa—and from which a woman’s voice emerged to utter prophecies. “In the future,” said the prophetess, “we will remember the peacefulness of parking lots . . . Everyone will receive a single orange ticket . . . Children will scrape their knees on the sound barrier . . .”

  I approached a scaffold structure above which hung a sign that said CAMP DOS. I understood the name as an allusion to the acronym for disc operating system. I learned that no such technological meaning was intended. The name invoked the Spanish dos: Camp Two. But two of what? No one knew.

  I drank a pint-size margarita as the sun sank close to the horizon, and Ned and I washed down our Ecstasy pills with swigs of orange Gatorade and waited for nightfall. All my fear was gone. I was aware of needing to breathe out with slow, heavy sighs to steady the crashing waves on the inside that shifted now into delicious electric tingles shooting up and down my spine. I walked toward the music and the pulsing green and orange lasers. I began to move in time with the bass and the shimmer of the lights and with the bodies moving next to mine, all the people with their smiling faces and eyes that when they saw me did not look away but rather held me in the single field of light into which all our gazes merged as one, and I felt my body moving with the boom and pulse and with every man and woman as if it were our bodies moving together that made the music and the light.

  The camps shone in kaleidoscopic fluorescents. A man in a fire-protective suit standing on a truck fired lightning bolts from a device in his arm, launching the bolts high above his head with a shrieking sound. A circus troupe appeared, juggling sticks on fire. I saw Ned’s pupils dilate in drugged wonder. A tingling sensation shot from my lumbar vertebrae to the base of my skull. “Oh my God,” I said, breathing hard, like I’d just run a fifty-meter dash, as waves of pleasure rippled from my sacrum and up my back. I felt an inner weight lift from me, as if conferring a reprieve from an ancient and forgotten crime. I was aware of the pounding techno and the flashing lights converging into a kind of single living field of warmth that beckoned me to merge with it. A glittery dome appeared in the distance and I walked toward it as if drawn to the tunnel of light reported in near-death experiences. Time dissolved into a single radiant now as I wandered to one distant shimmer far away and then back across the desert to another. I encountered a woman in a silver gown with whom I fell into conversation concerning children’s television. We could both remember the names of all four Teletubbies and repeated them in unison. Tinky Winky. Dipsy. Laa-Laa. Po. Her blue eyes met mine and did not look away.

  As the sky turned from black to cobalt, I returned to our van and fell asleep for a while. The square of blue sky I saw through the van window in the dawn filled me with an inexplicable sadness. I became conscious of my impending departure. I could picture the gray skies of London and could feel the futility that would creep through my veins as I walked through the city streets alone in the cold, damp darkness of the long English winter. I wandered with mild despair through a waking dreamworld, an environment created by the sort of unrepressed human beings I had always imagined might exist somewhere in the world but seldom encountered in England. I was conscious of the beauty and freedom outside me and of my role as observer. I took my clothes off and covered my body in red paint and put my bunny ears back on and ran through the desert.

  As the sun sank low again in the sky, I climbed the scaffold of Camp Dos to eat dinner while watching the sun set. Afterward, I descended the scaffold by a ladder with a salad bowl in my left hand, holding the ladder with my right. A woman observed my awkward descent and took the salad bowl out of my hand to help me. I thanked her and then went into the van to dress for the evening. I joined a crowd of thousands assembled in a circle around the wooden effigy of a man with his arms held aloft like a runner first across the finish line. A long time passed. “Will someone please burn this fucking man before our drugs wear off,” someone said, to laughter. The scale of the inferno that soon engulfed the Man transcended any fire I had previously witnessed. A swirl of orange spirals wrapped together and morphed like something alive and sentient, its tangerine glow igniting the crowd into yawps and whistles.

  The inferno reminded me of Guy Fawkes Night. I remembered how the name of the park in the middle of town where the bonfire took place every year in my youth was mysterious because I heard the word arbor as an abbreviation of harbor. The park thus had fused in my mind with a cryptic resonance of the maritime, as if haunted by ghost ships. In the Arbor in October the people of our little town left offerings of rubbish: branches of dead and dying trees; broken chairs and tables; clothes; newspapers and even unwanted books. Day after day, the pile of rubbish grew, until the stack rose twenty-five or thirty feet high, a pyramid of debris in the center of the park, and then on the fifth of November they lit it on fire. The streets were full of people, and we made our way toward the Arbor carrying sparklers, chatting, and laughing, craning our necks as we heard the whoosh of rockets blossoming in the dark sky like magic flowers. The air smelled of gunpowder, and we were eager to reach the Arbor, but there was no way of moving faster than the crowd itself, so we gave ourselves to this movement, and soon we had flowed into the park, past the stalls illuminated in pink and purple neon. I was struck by the fire’s heat on my face, even from fifty yards. Pressed against the metal railing, gripping Mummy’s hand, I was amazed by the fire’s power, by a heat so intense I could not face it directly for more than a few seconds. Later, we watched the bright spinning Catherine wheels and more rockets soaring high above us, but it was the bonfire that commanded my fascination even as the crowd began to dissipate, leaving small groups of teenagers with plastic bottles of cider. For others, it was a fire that commemorated the defeat of Catholic insurrection in the ritual immolation of a traitor’s effigy, but knowledge of gunpowder treason was lost to me, for the figure I saw in the flames was not Guy Fawkes but the captain of the ’arbor—a sailor shouting, Ahoy, ahoy there, ahoy.

  The Man burned. I did more Ecstasy and danced until the morning. From the Black Rock Desert on the drive back west to San Francisco, Ned, Robin, and I stopped for the night at a motel on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Several Camp Dos members were also staying there en route to Bay Area homes. Before dinner at a Mexican restaurant, we gathered in one of the motel rooms. Everyone was showered and groomed and, absent the dust and glitter and costumes, hard to recognize. I sat down on one of the beds. “Hi, I’m Miriam,” said the woman on the bed opposite me. I was conscious of her beauty and of her kind eyes looking at me. Over dinner, along with tacos and margaritas, we shared shards of memory. I felt as if we had all woken from a collective crazy dream, shattered in a million random story fragments about dragons and trees made of bones and buried submarines. Sometimes one person’s piece of the dream fit with a piece owned by someone else, so the two of them could put the pieces together in a form that corroborated the existence of dragons and bone trees in the desert. But other times, all that could be recalled from the dreamworld in its aftermath was a solo mad wander through the dust storm, and the uncanny convergence of impossible things that appeared when the wanderer was lost there. Such singular memory fragments belonged to the wanderer alone. Everyone remembered Dr. Megavolt: the man atop a truck in a protective fire suit with a gizmo strapped to his arm; the crackle of lightning, audible from half a mile away, as the air fizzed with millions of volts and Megavolt raised his arm and a cobalt fork of lightning shot from the gizmo, igniting the crowd beneath this modern Prometheus in uproar; the hallucinatory perception, as we stood beneath him, that perhaps we had been transported to a distant future era in which humans had become godlike beings who could channel universal forces with the power of their minds.

  To Miriam, she told me later, I seemed extremely serious, an Englishman in glasses droning on about Prometheus, until in passing I disclosed my rabbit alter ego. These two identities struck her as surprising in their coe
xistence. In turn, I realized that the woman who had known the Teletubbies and the woman who had helped me down from the scaffold were one and the same: this Miriam. Long ago, when people looked at the horizon, they saw two lights, one at dawn and the other in the evening. They called the first one the morning star. They called the second one the evening star. In time they learned that the two lights were in reality a single one, shining not from stars but from a sphere much closer to Earth, Venus, the planet named after the goddess of love. The two women from Camp Dos were in reality a single Miriam: she was lovely.

  I completed the journey with Ned back to San Francisco, intending to fly the next day back to London. A plan had emerged for a Camp Dos farewell shindig, to be convened in a nightclub. The campers assembled beforehand in someone’s house. I saw Miriam the moment I entered the living room. I was conscious again of her large blue eyes. We said hello. I learned that she was an artist. She sustained her attention upon me as I spoke. I felt liberated in her presence to tell her anything that came to mind, without fearing the sardonic tone that had pervaded almost every conversation in my twenty-nine years in England. I told her about something I’d heard on a record by Fila Brazillia called Old Codes, New Chaos that sampled the audio of a journalist describing the LSD experiments performed by the Pentagon on US soldiers in the 1960s. Under the influence of psychedelics, one of the soldiers said he had traveled back in time. It felt important to me that Miriam should know this, significant that she permitted me to tell her about it at some length without interruption, yielding then in her attention upon me the feeling of a force field that pulled our twin gazes into a single timeless zone. We went to the nightclub. I danced with Miriam. We left the club and stood outside on the street. We were standing very close to each other. I took my glasses off. Our lips met. I closed my eyes. The universe collapsed into my consciousness of only the flowing motion of our tongues, a warm, wet darkness within which I felt as if I had always been enclosed.