The First Principles of Dreaming

by Beth Goobie

  “Fuck!” muttered Dee. Then she was silent, but Jez heard it loud and clear—the smoking-crowd goddess’s tight-lipped unvoiced judgment: Basket case. Sudden breath returned to Jez, deep, gulping caves of it. Pushing herself upright, she punched Nazareth into oblivion.

  “What?” demanded Dee, turning to glare at her.

  “This is what,” said Jez. Shoving her face into the other girl’s, she opened her mouth and screamed—no vapid sob-story words like “love” and “hurts,” just a great gut-digging, raw-clawing banshee shriek. Then she turned, the entire world in a slowed, blurred tilt turning with her, and slammed her fist against the closed passenger window. A second time she pounded and a third, the cracked glass now smeared with blood, and still she was drawing back to pound again, but Dee was on to her, had launched herself swearing over the gearshift and was scrabbling for the door handle. In the small enclosed space, bodies thudded and grunted, the door lurched violently open, and the two girls rolled out through the wet slap of willow strands onto cold, hard ground and on into the downpour, Jez choking on huge chunks of sound, earth and sky wrapping them tight as pigs in a blanket as bit by bit they slowed, coming finally to random dizzy rest. Head spinning and soaked to the skin, Jez dug her face into the sodden grass and gave vent to empty desolate sound.

  “You knew it would happen,” she whispered.

  Silent and unspeaking, Dee pressed down upon her, the wet sky above them immense with falling, word by word.

  “You dressed me like that,” Jez rasped, forcing herself onward. “You took me there. You got them going, and then you left me alone.”

  Still silent, Dee lay over her, breathing, just breathing. Finally she spoke, her voice low and tremulous. “You wanted to know what I knew,” she said.

  Jez’s body contorted, one long jackknife of agony. “So that’s it?” she cried. “This is one long lesson plan? What’s it going to be next week—murder? Heroin? Syphilis?”

  With a hiss, Dee scrambled to her feet. “What d’you want from me, man?” she snapped.

  “No,” said Jez, following her up. “What do you want?”

  Dee’s face was all nerves, twisting across the surface—all the endings and beginnings of nerves. Whirling, she took several strides toward the car before forcing herself to slow and turn back. Then she simply stood for a moment as if emptying herself, letting the rain wash intensity from her face.

  “You’re different,” she shrugged. “I’m not bored yet.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” shouted Jez, helpless with disbelief. “I’m the fucking Muppet Show? D’you get a kick out of watching your friends get raped? How long did you stand there and watch?”

  Dee’s face contorted and she took a step back, both hands raised as if fending something off. “I came as soon as I knew,” she protested. “I jumped him…I got him off you. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Meaning splintered like pick-up sticks; Jez began to shake uncontrollably. “I’m not me anymore,” she wailed. “I don’t know who the fuck I was, but that’s gone now and I don’t know what’s left. Is this the nothing place I’m supposed to be seeking? Well, I don’t want it.”

  Retreating into the cave of her hands, Jez shrank into loneliness—a thin, rib-shivering sound she couldn’t believe she was making, couldn’t believe the way she ached to make it, to press deeper into it, find the wound, the first wound, the original hidden truth.

  “Jez,” said Dee, her tone distressed, urgent. “C’mere, okay? Would you just c’mere a minute?”

  What were the options? Jez wondered wearily. As the rain continued its random patterning of nothingness, she turned like a compass needle toward the girl who sat slumped on a nearby picnic table, black leather jacket soaked, hair plastered to her head. In one hand, Dee held the red-handled jackknife that she had thrown at her brother; as Jez stared, wide-eyed, she made two quick incisions, cutting into the skin of her other wrist.

  “What are you doing?” screamed Jez.

  “Shut up,” Dee said tersely, wiping the blade on her socks and snapping it closed. “There has to be blood.”

  “What the fuck for?” cried Jez.

  “It’s the way it works,” said Dee. “The way it comes to me.” Shoving the jackknife into a pocket, she fell silent, her eyes lowered as if focused on some inner shift. Balanced on a knee, her upturned wrist pulsed with blood and rain; drawing near, Jez saw the two incisions curved together into the shape of a fish.

  The secret sign! she thought, glancing startled at the other girl’s face. The sign of the fish! But how would Dee know of it? How could she possibly have encountered The Chosen Ones’ secret, most inner-sanctum code?

  A sigh shuddered through Dee, and she stood and reached for Jez’s injured hand, turning it to expose the bloody scratches left by the cracked window glass. “This here,” she said, nodding at her own cut wrist, “is the Eye. The true Eye.” Bringing their damaged wrists together, she sealed them with her free hand. “Blood and pain,” she added gruffly, leaning her forehead against Jez’s, “open this Eye. All you have to do now is close your outside eyes and watch.”

  Together they stood in the falling rain, eyes closed, foreheads touching, and pulsing with the pain in their joined wrists. Blood bleeding into blood. The thought came to Jez, and she didn’t know if that thought was hers or Dee’s. Blood knows. Then, for a while, there was nothing—just the coldness of rain and the regular soft puff of their breathing. Gradually, a sensation of denseness crept over Jez, and a heaviness, and darkness that pulled downward. Thickness rushed her mouth and dizziness; she felt so exhausted she could barely breathe. This dissipated, and she found herself lying on a bed in a dark room, her body naked and small. Young, Jez realized, bewildered. She was young—maybe three or four. And she was crying—her lungs, every part of her, filling with panic as a great weight pressed down on her, trapping her so she couldn’t move. Pain began then, much worse than that which she had experienced at Dinky’s party—the kind a steamship would bring into a rabbit hole. And with her mouth and nose jammed into the soft flesh of the stomach above her face, she couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe.

  But what was most different this time was the hatred she felt—only three or four years old and already she knew it like an old friend, a confidante who realized how much she detested her own skin and so peeled her out of it, inch by raw inch the way a carrot is peeled except feeling the screams, all of her now red gore and uglier than anything she had ever seen but free, she was free, and nothing—not love, not revenge, not hunger or need—would ever pull her back into a body that could be done to like this.

  Again, briefly, Jez found herself looking directly into the skinned-raw ferret’s face of Dee’s demon, those haunted glints of eyes, as it rose before her inner vision, blocking the image of the rape on the bed from further view. Then, like an exhaled sigh, the entire experience slid from her mind and she felt herself being returned to the mundane world. With a low moan, Dee pulled away, releasing her wrist, and Jez opened her eyes to a gray-raining world that somehow seemed lit by an inner glow.

  “It’s…so full of light,” she said, looking around herself in awe. “Everything.”

  Dee nodded. “It’s like that when you come back,” she said. “Because it’s so dark inside, maybe.”

  Jez hesitated, swallowed, then asked, “Was that…how you got your first demon?”

  “No,” said Dee, turning toward the car, her face like a door slammed closed. Too much, Jez realized, watching her. Too much, too fast. She had to walk carefully here. And yet, she thought, awareness humming through her like a cold little ditty, Dee hadn’t walked that carefully with her. And it was obvious, in spite of her casualness, that the smoking-crowd goddess had planned this entire episode—from the willow tree and her cut wrist, to the Eye and all that Eye had revealed. Just as she had intended the lessons learned at Di
nky’s party—not the exact events, perhaps, but, like she had said, she was the sex gun that shot it all into motion. She had known all the possibilities.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” said Jez.

  Dee nodded and kept walking. Running to catch up, Jez took enough breath to keep herself going. “I still want to know why you took me to that party,” she added hoarsely.

  Dee stopped, her back to Jez, motionless in the gray glow of the rain. “Because,” she said finally, her words quiet and bleak, “I didn’t want to go alone.”

  For a moment all Jez could do was stare, her brain numbed by the rain, its constant dull fall. Then, slowly, she began to get it, the meaning of alone—that it included everyone else who had been at the party, even Dinky; with all of them, Dee had been alone. Only Jez was excluded from the word; only with Jez was Dee not alone, because theirs was a friendship that was seeking beyond the flesh—a friendship that wove minds, spirits.

  But that kind of seeking, Jez realized, her mind leaping thought to thought, took blood and pain, as Dee had said—shared agony—and the smoking-crowd goddess had known it. Knees buckling slightly, she stared at the other girl’s unmoving back.

  “You weren’t alone, Jez,” said Dee, as if reading her mind. “I came, didn’t I? I didn’t leave you alone. I won’t,” she added, turning slowly so Jez could see her profile, “ever leave you alone.”

  I’m right, thought Jez. It was an initiation. Astoundingly enough, her rape at Dinky’s party had been a kind of sacrifice. Through it, her body had been split open and shoved full of terror, in order to teach her something about the spirit. Before the rape, she hadn’t known the first thing about the spirit. It had been all words, pronouncements and pontifications, contemptible to The Chosen Ones. Now, finally, she understood those gray-robed figures—the pain and fear they had endured in their rites of passage, and the way it had opened them to the realm of spirit so that they stood with one foot locked in the world of the flesh and the other in dimensions of utter possibility.

  “My mother,” Jez said haltingly, “does this too. Different, but still the same—blood, pain, the Eye. Her demons are white, your angels are red.”

  “Angels,” said Dee, her mouth quirking. Hesitantly, her gaze flicked across Jez’s. Without blinking, Jez met it dead on.

  I don’t believe you, she thought straight at the other girl. At least, not everything you said. But you’re not alone, either. I won’t ever leave you alone, Dee, even if I get bored.

  She waited, testing it out, and was rewarded by the slow understanding she saw creep across Dee’s face. “Okay,” sighed the smoking-crowd goddess, her shoulders straightening as if this time it was she who had passed a test. “We’d better get moving, unless we want a late slip.”

  Without warning, Jez was rushed with exhilaration, broadsided by it. “Nah, no late slip,” she sang, getting her stiff legs into gear. “No late slip for this baby.” Putting on a burst of speed, she passed Dee and ducked into the watery strands of the willow tree. “Come on!” she called, opening the Bug’s passenger door. “Step on it, eh? I’ve got English in ten.”

  “So?” asked Dee, getting in opposite and turning the ignition.

  “So,” said Jez, leaning into the backseat and grabbing the opened bag of chips. “We’re reading The Diviners. I happen to like it.”

  Dee gave her a knowing smile. “My class finished it last week,” she said. “You get to the cock part yet?”

  “Huh?” demanded Jez, cramming her mouth full.

  Dee backed the Bug out of the willow tree, then cut across a small park and out through a gap in the surrounding fence. “Should’ve seen everyone’s faces the day we were supposed to have that chapter read,” she said. “It’s about a third of the way through the book. Teacher was grinning her fool head off; the rest of us were in shock. I hadn’t started the book yet, but Pierre Chartrand showed me—the word ‘cock’ right there on the page. I couldn’t believe it—a school textbook that actually knew what one was. I figured maybe I should read it.”

  “The page or the whole book?” asked Jez.

  Dee’s lips wavered, but her eyes remained thoughtful. “Yeah, that book was okay,” she mused. “The river runs both ways. You got a river running both ways, Jez?”

  “You mean up and down?” teased Jez, reaching for the pack of Player’s on the dash.

  Dee accepted the lit cigarette slid between her lips. “I mean lost and gone,” she said quietly.

  “You’re not lost and gone,” protested Jez. “You can’t be lost when you’re with me—it’s a simple matter of geography.”

  “Guess not,” murmured Dee.

  Leaning back against the seat, Jez stretched into the luxury of ordinary conversation. “How come you get to read The Diviners in grade twelve and I have to wait for grade thirteen?” she complained.

  “You academics are so pure,” said Dee. “They probably thought you needed an extra year to matuuuuure.”

  Jez rolled her eyes. “Manuuuuure,” she replied. “Man, they probably won’t even let me into the classroom. The only dry part of me is this cigarette.”

  “So tell your English teacher you fell into Morag’s river,” said Dee.

  “And the river took me both ways before I could get out!” hooted Jez.

  They giggled, impressed with the literary quality of their joke.

  “Baby,” said Dee, “you tell her whatever the Manawaka you want.”

  Eight

  My father held a shadow position in my mother’s life, carefully manufactured for public consumption. To the average Waiting for the Rapture attendee, he was no more than the amenable balding man who escorted her to Sunday services, stood in the aisle passing the offering plate pew to pew, and lingered, chatting in the lobby with anyone who would bother, long after most of the congregation had gone home. Only the two who knew him best recognized the tension underlying his Sunday morning smile—that smile an uneasy weight like a Charlie Chaplin mustache, and part of me always on the alert, waiting for it to fall off.

  Watching that smile come into being was an equally covert activity. Hidden behind an upraised Bible and ostensibly memorizing my Sunday school verse, I would sit in the Valiant’s backseat as we drove to church and track every stage of the Sunday morning transformation taking place on my father’s face. All down Lewis Street, along Catledge Road, and over Droney Bridge, he was familiar—my father, Lawrence Philip Hamilton, the gloom-laden salesman from Quance Crescent. But at the Royal Bank on Berkeley Avenue, his face began to change. Beset by small subterranean tremors, facial muscles loosened one by one, and the heavy weight of his eyelids started to lift. Then, at the Tim Horton’s on Bernard Street, the hard line of his mouth trembled and gave way like a plea, and for a moment his face sat empty and vacuous—the face of someone who could become anyone.

  It was at this point that my father commenced his grand deception—pulling a new face, detail by detail, out of the air. Observing the familiar process, I would wonder from what source he was getting these components—the free-floating spirits of the dead? Memories of happier times, before he had married and been saddled with a wife and daughter such as my mother and myself? Regardless of their origin, these facial specifics were stolen goods, I eventually concluded; the glimmer that appeared in his eyes, for instance, did not belong to him—he had to ponder it into being, part of a carefully planned ritual of self-determination that was so predictable, I could foretell the exact moment passing the supermarket on Conestoga Avenue when he would force up the muscles of his cheeks and quirk the corners of his mouth. Still, his face retained the look of a mere practice session, an only partially complete mask, until the instant we turned onto Fern Street, one block from the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle. As the church came into view, my father’s chest swelled and his face filled with joviality. Taking a deep breath, he swung the Valiant into the RESER
VED FOR DEACON HAMILTON parking space, opened the car door with a flourish, and swaggered up the front steps into a flurry of handshaking and exclamations of “How are you, Brother?”

  If my father was a marionette pulling his own strings, his body never fully accepted the disguise and could not seem to move fluidly; when he turned his head, his entire torso rotated, as if the vertebrae had fused, melding his neck to his shoulders. No one except me seemed ever to notice this stiffness, this armor of false joy—women fawned, children sat on his knee and accepted peppermints, and other men waited until he had bellowed his first “Amen!” into the sermon, and then the chorus of male approval began. To a lesser extent, this had also been the case at our previous church, but there Lawrence Philip Hamilton had been merely one of many Sunday morning men, with nothing to set him apart from the next husband and father. With the descent of the Tongue of Fire onto my mother’s head, however, he achieved immediate prominence, it being assumed that the source of her spiritual fervor had to be rooted in her provider and keeper. My father, always quick to recognize a door with his name on it, also realized that my mother’s transformation was the key to unlock this particular door; while I would guess he never glimpsed the Divine Sister’s true visage or had much of an awareness of the high-frequency realms with which his wife daily communed, there is no doubt my father understood guilt—particularly the type of self-recrimination that my mother had been engaging in since Louisie’s death. Once he had identified this festering remorse as the cause of Rachel Hamilton’s transformation, he patrolled it the way a mother watches a sick infant, pulling every breath into its lungs with her own.

  That first Waiting for the Rapture Sunday, the one upon which my mother received the Tongue of Fire, was the day she opened fully to her innate sinfulness and shed it, along with her earthly ways. Though she never explained exactly what occurred at the initial moment of contact, it was obvious that she had been brought into resonance with another plane of existence; from that day onward, the physical world lost all meaning, retreating into a vague shadowland as she focused her activities upon that invisible assembly of the elect known obliquely to the uninitiated as the chosen ones. Through her almost continually whispered prayers, I learned my mother understood her transformation to have admitted her into a select group that lived a hidden history—a secret lifeline that stretched from past to present like a glowing path breathed from the mouth of God, linking the individual minds of the chosen and lifting them into a realm of pure light. Mere centuries could not separate those who lived within this realm, for it was there that the Holy Spirit located Himself, speaking His coded truth in a high-frequency vibration that pulsed far beyond the consciousness of the majority of mankind. Tuned to this vibration, the eyes of the chosen were opened to visions and apparitions, signs and portents that had been concealed from their fellow men, and they came quickly to the understanding that they were the means through which the Holy Spirit acted upon the physical world—their very lives serving as a translation of one level of meaning to another, spirit to flesh.