He knew. He knew it before he fell off the log. The dream log, that is — the hollow log. The unconscious always seemed to tip its hat in some way.
It was just before Jan left. He saw it in her eyes. Or was it the it behind her eyes that seemed to say, “I’m frightened for you. If only you didn’t have to sleep. My God, it’s coming back again, isn’t it?” Maybe you call it mindtalk. It doesn’t roll off the lips. It seems to whisper to your eyes, but the mind overhears the conversation.
It was about the dreams again. The dreams that had more color and perception in them than his own drugged-boozed existence. Now when he had time to think, he imagined himself waterskiing on a sea of booze of the cheap whiskey variety, dipping his cup in the water as he glided along something that was not quite tranquility. Or was he the king of Ski Shit Mountain? Like the guy whose mind is about to take the final dive and everyone knows it but him. Well, the king of Ski Shit Mountain couldn’t smell it even when he took a spill in it.
But there was always a smell in the log…the tunnel. He could dimly see the light now. The smell of flesh in flames. Intuitively, he knew it was human flesh. Intuitively, it was hell. He had been through this enough times that he could tell it all in detail without his subconscious having to do it in his sleep.
The smell of burning hair again. The kitchen stove. “Stay away from the damn matches. Don’t strike that, you stupid little shit.” The hairs on the back of his hand disappeared. Like little twigs in a forest fire. His brother Tommy grabbed his hand as if it was something he had always wanted but never got. Tommy’s eyes flickered like Jan’s…frightened. “You could have burned your ass up, man. What the hell do you think you are doing?” He loved his brother, but Tommy’s nagging could be a real pain in the ass most of the time.
The smell, small but pungently sickening, curdled the PB&J sandwich that he had just crammed in his face with a couple of swallows. Before his twelve-year-old brother could scramble back, Kevin left the remains of peanut butter, grape jelly and mangled pieces of bread intermixed and being acted on by stomach acid upon the number twelve on Tommy’s baseball shirt. “You stupid little shit. I ought to kill you…you…you…you…” echoing through the log. Through the tunnel and disappearing in faint whispers.
The smell of any kind of burning flesh would tumble his gastronomics. By the time Kevin was ten or so, he couldn’t even take the smell of a hamburger frying. “But, Mom, it makes me sick. I want to puke just thinking about it. Please, I just can’t eat it. I’ll puke. I swear I’ll puke right here on the table. I’ve done it before. You know that.” He could see beagle eyes and knew she wasn’t going to make him eat the chopped cow, even if she really believed he would die if he didn’t eat meat. Shit, everybody knew that if he could live entire days scarfing down candy without anything else of real substance, he could live without eating the flesh of other living things. And he didn’t really care if Noah-fresh-off-the-Ark had okayed the eating of animals. He supposed this meant that those who were swallowed in the deluge were vegetarians. That’s what Mr. Hanley, his Sunday School teacher, had seemed to say, as if that was one of the big sins that sent Noah’s boat a’skipping across water filled with dead bodies. With his eyes the size of golf balls, he listened as old man Hanley recounted the boat floating as the bodies bumped and banged against the bow. Kevin’s mind dipped deep enough into the horror that he could see the bloated bodies, eyes wide open in a terror that he imagined to be like the tales of men buried alive. Opening the coffin years later, they would find the scratch marks on the inside lid of the casket.
Inside the coffin. The fear of suffocating. He felt that same fear even when he was in the dream tunnel as if the flickering light at the end was merely the last crack of light in the pine box before the last shovelful of dirt ended all hopes of escape. Darkness. The only sound the whirring noise of thoughts screaming for freedom.
The whirring noise. The sound of wind circling in the log, in the tunnel. The only noise, drifting wind. Drifting toward a pinpoint of light. No direction home. The smell of burning flesh growing a bit stronger as the pinpoint grew larger.
“No more dreams.” He could feel his thoughts shriek. Not this pisser of a dream, anyway. He felt like he was on the merry-go-round. His guts about to spill from the sickness or merry-go-round sickness, if you want. But he always kept coming back to the same spot, the same site. Burning flesh.
The light was now the size of a baseball, and he was picking up speed. Now a grapefruit like the white blur that hit him square on his temple. Softball with his father. A sissy’s sport, but for a sissy’s sport, the ball sure as hell hurt the same as if it had been a macho ball.
A watermelon now. The sound of the wind, as usual louder as he floated closer to the light. Ready to be shot out of the log, the barrel.
The crosslight on the ball of fur at the end of the barrel. Winter in Illinois, and the blanket of snow broken by an occasional clump of grass and a bush or two and there were, of course, the trees. The rabbit sensed the impending doom. It had obviously heard the breaks in the frozen snow as he and his father had stalked their creaturely counterpart. At first it was fun. Then the more they shot and the more the blood ran and the carcasses were skinned, again the smell of flesh burned by buckshot, the less it became a treat to go on the foraging trips through the Illinois woods to shoot living things.
The little furball was back in sight jigjagging and expecting any moment the blast from the stick that shot fire and made thunder. Kevin had it in the sights. His reluctant trigger finger guided by some primal urge to kill other living things, to make them dead. The butt of the four-ten kicked at his shoulder as it hurled its lead messenger of death toward the hare. This time, however, the hare was the tortoise and the bullet was shaped, amazingly enough, like his own little penis. The little lead pecker penetrated the hindpart of the hare-now-tortoise and the rabbit and the furball jerked and did a total flip and lay writhing in pain. “Good shot, boy.” The old man was smiling, brown spittle dripping slowly out of the corner of his mouth. A real Redman chaw. Kevin had on one of those trips to the woods, at the urging of his father, taken a chew. Against admonitions not to swallow, he dared do that which he was told not to. The rancid tobacco hit his stomach like a chili pepper the size of a banana and about fifteen minutes later came back up the same way. The contents of his stomach emptied on the ground. The old man howled most likely scaring the shit out of anything they might have wanted to shoot that day. Kevin saw red, the red being on the inside of his eyeballs.
The red was now on the ground. The rabbit was lying on its side shaking. Its eyes were wide open in the crazed stare that one would expect to see in eyeballs that were face to face with death. It was at this time in the boy’s life he first faced stark reality, an absolute truth so to speak. The rabbit turned its head toward Kevin and looked him right in the eye and shrieked an other-worldly howl the likes of which he had never heard before. Blood-curdling does not describe the sound that emanated from the furball. The rabbit’s eye and his eye and their souls joined in an internal bolt, a mental freak-out. Joined, but one was on its way out of temporal reality. The glaze of horror was broken as the old man’s rifle butt smashed what life was left in the furball’s skull. The jaws crushed with the sound of crumbling crackers over soup. The eyes bulged and the hind legs stiffened and the life force was gone.
That day a piece of Kevin Adams died with the hare. He would never hunt again, something his father attributed to the pussy in him. The eye of the rabbit expanded in his mind to the size of a medicine ball and dropped with the same fierceness of weight upon his concept of verisimilitude.
The medicine ball of light was now a doorway at the end of the tunnel. He could see the clouds now. He was being sucked into bright light. The log was now a wind tunnel. The air was cold. He knew he would shiver if he had something to shiver with. No body. No hands to rub together to get warm. He was not really floating so much as he was being drawn, a type of flying. All he knew was that he could see but not feel physical sensations. He was, and this sounds crazy, he was an eye, a flying eye. He could not see himself as an eye but that’s all he could be unless he was a spirit of some kind. But what was a spirit other than some kind of an invisible eye.
The eye met blinding light as he was shot forth from the barrel that was once a log. The clouds again. Cumulus and white, like new-fallen snow.
Descending. The light grows dimmer. Falling through the clouds. Hazy. Shades of winter ice but the eye can’t feel the pain, an eye that sees but cannot feel the cold.
Slowly the haze fades into blue sky. Below the ocean is breaking against the shore, dragging sand and life back into the sea. Breaking and breaking. The eye watches the breaking and then focuses on the small stick-like forms near the breaking on the sand, on the beach. Bathers on the beach.
The breaking sea rolls in and rolls out and in and out as fins protrude from the water. They circle. Sharks circling a prey. The eye switches time in his mental rolodex. The fever was hot. It almost killed him. His mother prayed for him. He could hear her murmuring. Kevin opened his eyes. The fins were circling his bed. The water was blood red. Shark snouts jutted out of the water and made pig-like noises. They were hungry. They wanted to feed on the lean young body in the bed. Sweat was drenching the sheets. Kevin began screaming the primal scream of all children, “Help, Mommie! Help!” The bed began to sink and the snouts were now at eye level. Jaws turned and crawled up part way to the bottom of his bed. His feet were nestled nearly between the monster’s teeth. It was pulling him into the water. He was not screaming now. He was pleading with the shark not to eat him. Its sharp pointed teeth were brown like the sticks on the sand. The bathers were like sticks.
And the eye was diving slowly toward the bathers. He could still see the sharks, but the water was now full of them, like swarming flies on dead, rancid meat. The water was now blood red. The flying eye was divebombing, divebombing as if down to hell.
Divebombing toward the bathers, the eye slowly came to a halt a short distance over the bathers, a man and a woman. They were lovers. The eyeball was hovering but not hovering. It was if the eye was blanketing the bathers as they kissed and petted. A man and a woman, and he felt as if he were one with them.
Kissing, passionate kissing. The man gurgled it seemed. He belched and spat blood in the woman’s face as she withdrew in obvious disgust from the guttural sounds coming from the man. The man’s eyes began to protrude, swelling to the size of quarters. His skin begins to boil and bubble, popping like burning plastic. The girl was pushing back as flames started shooting out of the man like propane burners, blue flames. The man gurgled spitting teeth and other mouth parts into the woman’s face. The man is now an ocean of flames. Through the hissing and crackling of the fire, Kevin could see hair burning in little tufts. First, fingers and toes and noses and ears, then whole limbs and torsos melting and blackening. The burning man’s face was contorted to a grimace and then to a hideous grin, then back to contorted grimace and hideous grin, and the cycle kept repeating itself. At the top speed of a kaleidoscope, a long succession of faces came and went, one flickering after another. Faces and expressions that Kevin had never known except in this nightmare. Kevin felt himself hurtling down an unending lane of faces, decades and centuries and millennia ticking by him, until the speed finally slowed. That was when the eyeballs popped like light bulbs spitting a white, milky substance into the air like a water fountain of death.
Her hands burned with the eerie feeling of agonizing burn pain. “Christ Almighty, help. Help someone,” she screams as she watched the man go up in what could only be described as a puff of smoke. All gone except for fragments of jawbone, part of an arm and one smoldering foot.
She tries to get to her feet, but collapses on her back, her face and breast and hands burned in places, frontal places. Her bathing suit partially burned off in the front. She holds her stomach as her abdomen protrudes about a hand’s length and the skin stretches tightly revealing the imprint of a small foot. Like stretched rubber. The foot kicks several times and then dissipates. The woman lays on the beach. Sand ground into her wounds, breathing heavily, not dying but surviving a trip to the furnace. The smell of burning flesh is so rank now that even Kevin the dreaming eye can almost (but not quite) smell it.
The pull, as always, comes at the end of this scene, the burning time. The log is calling Kevin home. Like a film in reverse, the eye is being drawn backwards. Kevin knows what’s happening. The film is being rewound. He’ll have to do this all over again. He can feel the pain coming. “Stop. Stop. No more. Don’t make me do this. No, dammit. No, dammit, I said, no.”
“No, dammit, I said, no,” he mumbles in his sleep. He opens his eyes slowly to fuzzy reality. He is home for real this time. Only the ceiling. No clouds here.
© 2012 Glass Onion Productions
