Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  The Time It’s Always Been

  I could see the tree line, where I knew the trail led down through the forest all the way to Gran’s house. The house was full of old things: a Maori mask from New Zealand on the wall and old leather-bound books on the shelves, like a twelve-volume edition of One Thousand and One Nights, and bits of driftwood Gran had picked up on the beach and decorated with shells. In the early mornings I would go to Gran’s bed and pretend that the bedclothes were mountains through which my teddy bears traveled on long and wild adventures. Anything could happen in those imaginary mountains. Sometimes when my bears came home from the mountains I would lie on my front and let Gran stroke my back underneath my pajama top. The trace of her hand making circles on my skin felt calm and lovely. In the evening I would sit by the fire in my tartan dressing gown after swimming in the cold sea with Gran, or climbing in the hills up through the gorse and bracken, and then I would lie in bed while outside the rain poured down, and listen to the roar of the wind through the trees and the raindrops pelting the window and feel the bedclothes wrapped around me. I felt so safe and warm in bed at night in my grandmother’s house, underneath the mountain by the sea.

  The steep, winding trail started in a forest near the sea a few hundred yards from Gran’s house and followed a river up to a stone wall at the saddle between two mountains, above the tree line. There, the path to the right led to the summit of a smaller mountain, while the path to the left led to the summit of Slieve Donard, the tallest mountain in Northern Ireland. From the top of Slieve Donard I could see the town and the beach and the Irish Sea. On a summer afternoon when I was about ten, it took the four of us—me, Mummy, Daddy, and my little brother, Sebastian—most of the afternoon to reach the top. Standing on the summit, I gazed at the dark green hills surrounding me in the north and south and west and at the beach almost three thousand feet below and at the gray blue sea stretching far away toward the eastern horizon.

  LONG AGO THERE WAS nothing, and it was timeless and infinite. Being exploded from nothingness: space and time and matter, cosmic runaways through the emptiness, spiraling through the eons into stars and worlds and living things, and one day a naked ape stood upon the Earth, gazing at the sunrise, wondering at the light above him and how it came to be there and what it meant to him.

  There were two lights, he realized. One was the light in the sky. The other was the light within him: self-awareness. I exist, he thinks. I can look at the mountain on the horizon and when I close my eyes, I can see the mountain in my mind and remember my wish to go there. His eyes open. He runs toward the mountain.

  In the beginning there were no words, only sound and feeling. Baboom baboom: I hear the primordial rhythm of the womb. I have no conception of past or future. I am outside of time, outside the world organized into separate things like shoes and spoons that persist in time and space. I am not yet separate from the Giant One, this magic being from whence I came and whose arms and gaze form a sphere around me. There are lights and sounds and strange emanations from inside that come out as cries and giggles, and I see eyes watching over me and feel arms that circle around my little body. This moment is the universe. Leave me alone and being alone is all that I know. I have no words or thoughts but the feelings to which my mother’s mind gives form. One kind of cry means hungry, another means tired. Now a need has a name attached to it.

  A nascent self emerges, a rhythm of being and nothingness, embodied in the mind’s emergent core, a music of light and sound and feeling. Around me there are hands and light and the gaze of the Giant One. The big hands keep me warm. I exist inside this sphere of the magic being above me and her gaze. It is a kind of dream, a space where the two minds run together. I come to feel a rhythm in the way the light becomes the darkness and turns back again to light, the way the cold and hunger form the feeling that forms the cry that summons the hands that turn the cold into the warmth and the hunger into milk.

  Then I come to know another rhythm. I feel it in the way the Giant One comes and goes, when I feel her presence and when she disappears, when I am seen and when I become invisible, when fear turns into a cry that summons hands that turn the fear into calm, into the assurance that my cry can be heard. My tiny hands reach out to grasp the hands of the Giant One. Soon, I’m moving by myself, wriggling on my belly across the floor. Eyes that once watched from the outside become a sense on the inside, deep down in the parts of me that formed in the wordless flow of sound and feeling in the womb, of an invisible circle linking me to the Giant One.

  Picture a woman in her early twenties. Trendy white jacket. Brown hair, beautiful, smiling, brown eyes radiant with adoration. A baby in her arms, asleep, wrapped in a yellow blanket and the feeling of being held. Mama and baby: Mummy, I called her. I found this picture of my mother and me in a box of photos in her flat in England when I went to see her following her fall almost half a century later. There was a handwritten document in the box that listed the times that she fed me when I was twelve days old: 2:35 a.m., 3:20, 6:45, 7:20, 9:10, 1:40 p.m., and 5:25 p.m.

  My parents were both in their early twenties when I was born. My father had read Doctor Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the parenting bible of the era. But unlike his Vulcan namesake, Spock the childcare guru didn’t know everything. My parents were on their own, a young couple from Ireland, a Protestant man and Catholic woman at the peak of Ireland’s centuries-long sectarian war, migrating to a safer life in England, someplace where they could be together and build a home, doing their best to take care of a baby. “It’s like children having children,” said a Belfast college friend of my father, poking fun at him.

  I am told that my first word other than Daddy and Mummy was carry. “Mummy carry,” I said. “You said that anytime you were upset,” my father told me. Mummy carry: sometimes I can still feel the hole where her arms used to be.

  In the middle of the rolling green hills of southern England stands a vast and ancient cathedral. History doesn’t record the image that once appeared on its stained-glass window. Perhaps it showed the faces of God and the Holy Family. Nobody will ever know. Long ago someone smashed the window into pieces. Legend blames a soldier in the English Civil War who launched a cannon attack at the cathedral from a nearby hill. One of the soldier’s cannonballs soared from the hill and went through the window. The faces became a pile of shattered fragments on the ground. The people of the town tried to put the window back together. They remembered the beauty of the original faces and yearned to see them again. But the task of solving this giant jigsaw puzzle proved impossible. The new window showed none of the old faces, just a kaleidoscope of broken pieces, reassembled in an abstract form. It fit the space but would never match the original. The area where the soldier staged his attack was known centuries later as Cannon Road. By the early 1970s it was a peaceful, leafy neighborhood on the edge of a quiet town of thirty thousand souls. When I was four, my parents bought a house there.

  Later, memories of my boyhood years were likewise shattered into a thousand broken pieces. I have put the fragments of my childhood memory back together in my mind. I was always waiting for something. Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for my birthday or Easter Sunday or Christmas Day. Waiting for Doctor Who on Saturday night television. Waiting for the bell to ring or sweets after supper, waiting for the referee to blow the whistle, so I could get out of the freezing rain and go home with numb hands and feet and lie in my hot bath and feel the chilblains aching in all my limbs but then taste the creamy deliciousness of the cocoa that Mummy brought up to the bathtub. Waiting for the start of summer, for the morning when the chestnut trees were sprouting again, all bushy and green, rustling in the breeze with their flowery cones, little branches dancing against my window, saying, Hello, hello, wake up, and I would hear the birds again saying, Coo-coo, coo-coo, and on the way to school, someone would say, “Race ya!” and all the boys would take off, sprinting toward the trees, and for a while I would be neck and neck with the others, but then I would feel my leg
s speed up and I would surge to the front and sense the other boys falling far behind me, as I ran faster and even faster, until I could see nothing else in front of me except the empty field.

  I liked being fast. I liked being first. It meant the teachers would see me. They would tell me I was good and clever. They would tell me I knew the right answer. I liked that. I liked knowing things. I would sit at the front of the class with my hand stretched high in the air, begging my teacher to call on me. Her name was Mrs. Mahon. I would give her my answer, and she would tell me I was right, and I would feel so good inside, because I knew things. I knew that the speed of light was 186,282 miles per second. I knew that plants and animals were made of cells and that inside the cells of animals was DNA, which stood for deoxyribonucleic acid. And I knew that inside my head was my brain and that the brain was what told my body what to do. I knew so many things.

  I understood that there were limits to my knowledge. Looking south from the summit of Donard, a few miles over the horizon, I could see the little fishing town where Mummy grew up with Granny. Granny was Mummy’s mummy. But not her real mummy. Her real mummy was a model. Her real daddy was a soldier from the US who was sent to Ireland with the army to fight the German soldiers on the beaches in Normandy. After World War II the model and the soldier gave Mummy away to a priest when she was eighteen months old, then ran away without her to America. The priest gave Mummy to Granny and Grandpa. Granny had grown up with her ten sisters and brothers on a farm and had dentures because one day when she was little a goat kicked her in the face and smashed all the teeth from her mouth. Grandpa was a laborer who had returned from England, where he had helped build the first motorway in Britain. Granny and Grandpa couldn’t have a baby, so the priest gave them Mummy, but Mummy didn’t know about her real parents until she was ten and one of the girls at school said, “Clara, you’re adapted,” because that was how the word adopted sounded with a Northern Ireland accent, only Mummy didn’t know the word or what the girl was talking about, and she wondered what it meant to be adapted, and from the sound of the girl’s teasing voice it sounded like being adapted was bad. When she ran home from school, she told Granny about the girl, and Granny told her about the model and the soldier, and Granny said the soldier was a big man who came to the house once, but that was all she said and all she knew, and she was sorry she never told wee Clara before, but she had been scared that Clara would run away if she ever found out she wasn’t really Granny’s natural child, and that sure would be dreadful, would it not, because Granny loved wee Clara and that was why she got her that smart uniform and sent her to the school, where Clara learned to sing and got medals for Irish dancing, and yes, there was the time when she was little and playing by a Primus stove and it fell on her and she caught on fire and still had that brown patch on her face that looked like freckles, but that had been an accident, and sure, she didn’t pass the exam for grammar school, so she went to the nuns who gave her those bad dreams, but they taught her to read and write so she could go to technical school and learn to type so she got a job as a typist and met that lovely Protestant fella with the long beard, home from college in Belfast, though it was an awful shame, sure it was, that some of his family hated Catholics because of all the bombs and killings, so when they got married they had to run away from Ireland.

  I knew that sometimes I had to run away as well. One time, on the way down Slieve Donard, Daddy said, “Why don’t you run on ahead”—although maybe it was Mummy, or Daddy echoing her wishes, or my impression of their wishes combined in a single presence. I can’t remember what happened before I heard those words. I can remember thinking something like Well, all right then. I’ll show you. I must have felt belittled or angry. I set off running down the mountain. I was amazed how fast I flew downhill. I let my legs spin round, and gravity pulled me in a matter of minutes down a trail that had taken us hours to ascend. I sped downhill, jumping left and right over little piles of loose granite fragments, feeling such joy in the experience of becoming as close to airborne as an animal without wings could hope for, how the mere intention of pointing myself downhill and allowing gravity to take hold aligned my body with the full downward force of Earth. As the path through the tree line came into view, an idea took shape in my mind.

  Run on ahead: I understood there was a limit to how far ahead meant I was supposed to go. When we went on walks in the woods near our house in England, ahead meant round the next corner, or the corner after that at most. But it wasn’t an exact distance, like a meter or a light-year. So the instruction had given me a sort of freedom. That was good, because now I had the dark, angry feeling that Mummy and Daddy called sulking. You could tell me I was the worst little boy on Earth and it wouldn’t matter, because I was done listening. Done. You could tell me I shouldn’t keep making that sulky face because the wind might change and my face would get stuck like that forever, and I’d think, Okay, good. I like my sulky face, and I like the thought of you having to look at me looking back at you and knowing I won’t stop sulking—never, never, never, not until the sun blows up and swallows Earth and all the stars flicker out and die. So the dark feeling was good because now I could run on ahead. I could run to Gran’s house.

  But I didn’t like the dark feeling. It meant I was bad. I was supposed to be a Good Boy. And how hard I tried to be good! I cleaned my teeth and said my prayers. I knew my twelve times table. I got two gold stars from Mrs. Mahon for my horror story about the killer on the run from the police. I read so many books that on parents’ night Mrs. Mahon said I had “swallowed the encyclopedia,” and as well as the first two pages of Jayant Narlikar’s The Structure of the Universe, I could even read the long, hard books that Mummy was reading for her degree. Early in the morning before school I would see her downstairs by the electric fire, bundled in a wooly sweater with her cup of steaming coffee and her notebook and all her squiggly writing in it and the big stack of thick books in front of her. She had gone back to school. She didn’t want to be a typist anymore. She wanted to be a teacher. “Sit down,” she said one day, and opened one of the books. She showed me a page with lots of big words. “Prelapsarian—it means before the Fall,” she said. “But not like the actual Fall, when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden. It’s a metaphor. Do you understand?” “Yes, Mummy,” I said. I did. Then she told me she had received some wisdom from one of her professors in response to a paper she had written that she wanted to pass on to me. “Remember that you must always use words in the right way,” she said. “You can’t make words mean whatever you like.” “All right, Mummy,” I said.

  Always use words in the right way. It was as if Mummy was Alice and I was Humpty Dumpty, in the bit in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll when Humpty Dumpty tells Alice words mean whatever he chooses them to mean, because in the end all that matters, according to Humpty Dumpty, is who is the master of them. But I knew what Alice knew and a long word like prelapsarian and what a metaphor was and how there were different meanings of Fall, and I knew that knowing this was the clever part of me, which meant that I was good.

  But I also knew about the bad part inside me. I was a sinner. When Adam ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he got free will, but God threw him and Eve out of Eden because they had broken the rules of the original garden. There was the time I didn’t take my books back to the library and got so worried about what would happen if Mummy found out, I took the books to a field and buried them. There was the time I told Sebastian to close his eyes and open his mouth and I shoved in a fistful of sand. There was the time I built a platform out of Legos at the top of the stairs and told him to sit down on it. “No,” he said, “you’ll push me off.” “I promise I won’t,” I said. Sebastian sat down. I shoved him as hard as I could. His skinny body soared into the air and collapsed on the floor with a thud. Daddy heard the thud and Sebastian crying and came running. “Father Christmas won’t be coming this year,” Daddy said. Then he made us hold hands and sing the song we sang afte
r fighting. “Make friends, make friends, never, never break friends. Because if you do, you’ll catch the flu, and that will be the end of you.”

  Then there was the time I hid sweets in my boots. When Mummy was in the kitchen, she would send me to pick up milk or margarine at the local shop. I would buy the milk or margarine with the pound note Mummy had given me, then visit the bakery across the street and buy myself a little cake and scoff the whole thing leaning against a tree in the woods. It felt so good, sitting there in the sunshine, eating something yummy. I knew it was bad. A good Catholic boy like me was never supposed to steal. Mummy said so. Mrs. Mahon said so. Father Tim and the Bible said so. Good boys went to heaven. Bad boys went to hell. But what was one little cake to Jesus? He would surely forgive me. And besides, Mummy never noticed. I would finish the cake and walk home and give Mummy the milk or margarine and the change from her pound note and then go back for more cake the next time.

  One day she counted the change and asked me why milk cost so much. “Inflation,” I said. She nodded. But wouldn’t it be so nice, I thought sometime later, if instead of needing to scoff the cake in the woods, I could take a little something home and eat it watching television. I devised a plan. It was sunny outside when I walked to the shop, conspicuous on a dry and cloudless lunchtime in my black rubber Wellington boots. I went to the candy section. I looked at the Revels and Space Dust and Mars and Maltesers and Bounty and Twix and Marathon, and the thought of all the wondrous sensations in store for me when I smuggled them back home and crept upstairs and went into my room and lay down on my bed and turned on my little black-and-white television and watched The Six Million Dollar Man sucking each morsel of chocolate one at a time until they dissolved in my saliva filled me with the joy of giving myself an early Christmas and Easter all rolled into one. How I loved chocolate! At Christmas and Easter, I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted. On Christmas morning I would eat six candy bars before the sun was up. The rest of the year, the rule was three sweets after lunch and supper, except on Saturdays, when I was allowed a Zoom lollipop along with my Buster comic.