by Jann Burner
CHAPTER TWO
"Harry's Dream"
They were sailing; a knife in the water, cutting through the great surround. They were moving at speed. They were like a chord, an arpeggio, a mosaic, a fine weaving of consciousness--a carpet with a thousand hand-tied thoughts per inch. They were a coat of many colors. They were here for a purpose and they were in for a treat. How many of them were present was hard to tell. Certainly more than a few. It felt like a goodly number. At least eighteen. This was a sizable gathering.
They were warm-blooded creatures of great intelligence and they were riding a wave of realization. They were the wave come up from the deep. They were the new dawn about to break upon the world. They had come from the sea for a look around. But especially they had come to laugh, for of all the creatures in the universe, only one could actually laugh aloud. That one creature was once warm-blooded, smelled funny and called itself Man. Of course, there were those whose entire existence was but one long happy thought, but Man was the only creature that at one time could actually laugh aloud. Mankind was also the only species in the universe who thought itself alone. Perhaps this accounted for its cry of laughter.
On this evening, for it was indeed dark, with neither moon nor fading light of day to illuminate the scene, there were numerous candles burning in the parlor of the last wooden house. These candles hung from the ceiling and were part of what the humans once called a chandelier. This specific chandelier was constructed from the finest rock crystal, imported at great expense from a distant land, and ground and cleaved by expert craftsman so that the merest hint of light might be caught, trapped, and reflected throughout the room.
Directly beneath the ornate assemblage of dangling crystal, stood a very thin and frail looking creature; it looked like a human female of maximum years. She peered about the large, apparently empty, room with wide, pale blue eyes full of much intelligence and humor. When she spoke, it was as if her tender voice was coming from a long way off.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," she said with a quiet whisper and a slow smile.
Small pools of laughter exploded around the empty room like hot glass marbles dropped into a vat of liquid nitrogen. It was a curious statement. It was meant to be funny--"Good evening ladies and gentlemen!" It was what they used to call a joke, an attempt at earthly humor. It appealed to the sense of the ludicrous and the incongruous for, in fact, no one in the entire room had ever been a lady or a gentleman. No one present had ever been human and yet here they were about to undergo the experience, to take the trip. But this was to be only a short trip, a mere two-hour sojourn, a simple tour of the last wooden house in San Francisco.
"And so we begin," continued their gentle guide.
"Once upon a time, long ago and far away, far beyond the shores of ignorance, far even beyond the dense jungle of imagination, in the midst of what was once called the Pacific Ocean, lay a large forested island known in those ancient times as Califia. And upon this almost legendary island there was a most miraculous city and this city was called by name--San Francisco. During these ancient times, the city of San Francisco was renowned as a place of eternal youth, which is not to say that the inhabitants were immortal, but rather, through strange mystic practices, they were able to maintain a youthful spirit even while their bodies grew old. People came from all over the world to admire the beauty and style of life within this area. It was not a city of industry, factories, or slums, but a city of artists, poets, small shopkeepers, and others of romantic persuasion. In those olden times, in order to gain access to this truly beautiful city, one was obliged to sail beneath a bridge of solid gold, which separated a natural bay from the open ocean.
“This Golden Gate connected the city of hills, which was San Francisco, with the oldest forest on the planet. The trees in this forest grew for thousands of years and reached such gigantic proportions that they blocked the sun from touching the ground, casting the floor of the forest into eternal darkness. Aboriginal legend tells us that in order to see the top of one of these giants, one would have had to lay flat upon the ground. And in the entire world, these miraculous trees of redwood grew only upon the coast of ancient Califia. This house that we now occupy was constructed with bits and pieces of ancient wood from the red trees."
Sighs were felt around the room, for the late 19th and early 20th centuries were exciting periods in the development of human consciousness, and everyone had heard tales about the red giants and the city of San Francisco.
"You may be wondering what a tour of this house will be like. Well, it will be rather like a poetry reading, for in the final analysis, what is a tree, if not a slow poem. And what are houses, if not frozen emotions and attitudes--thought forms brought through the organic stream and then dried, tied, cut, sectioned and fitted into place. Finally, entire sheets of melted sand were stood in place across the large openings so that the humans, who once resided within the confines of these marvelously artificial caves, might peer out at the surrounding natural world with confidence, marvel at its excitement and its danger, and feel safe and secure.
"Within these special zones of frozen emotion lay mystery upon mystery. The entryways were often paneled in rich mahogany, Zebra wood, walnut, or redwood stained a deep purple-brown. Within the rooms were little hidy places, where skins from once living creatures were stretched and stitched to form pads and cradles onto which the tired human might lay his or her fleshy body for a while, perhaps in order to escape the oppressive weight of earthly gravity. Scattered about the rooms could be found bits and chunks of aged wood, slabbed and polished so as to form boxes for containing and concealing treasures and collections. Other surfaces were designed solely for the display and ingestion of food. And, distributed throughout the house, were green plants. Green, growing things were to be found everywhere--stuffed in corners, hanging from ceilings and even perched on newel posts. There were ferns of all types and palms and exotic varieties of bamboo. In the most lavish houses, whole rooms were constructed of glass and filled with living greenery. All this was done so that the occupants might forget for awhile that they were imprisoned within a maze of hard, angled surfaces, frozen emotions and rigid attitudes.
"Such was their desire to split things apart and categorize them that they even had individual names for their box-like rooms. There were 'living rooms,' 'bedding rooms' and 'resting rooms'. In the larger, more ornate, houses there were even special rooms set aside for ingesting the smoke from smoldering herbs, while other rooms were used solely for a game called billiards in which grown men would use long thin rods of wood to push small balls around a cloth-covered, slate-topped table.
"While the men gathered to ingest smoke from burning weeds and pester small, glossy balls, the ladies of the house often sat together in what was called the 'morning room.' Here they would chat, drink tea and create large complicated patterns of knots out of simple balls of string.
"These people, as a race, spent thousands of years within the confines of flat, angled surfaces. They spent so many generations within these houses that eventually, the very insides of their minds began to take on the smell and character of wood. In the healthier humans, there was reported to be the faint odor of cedar and pine and redwood, while in the general mass, there was said to be nothing but the smell of plywood, particle board and mildew. In certain areas of society, their lives eventually became so artificial and so removed from any natural base, that there was rumored to be no odor at all. It was as if their entire existence were merely a surface impression photographically reproduced so as to represent the real thing."
She gracefully turned beneath the chandelier and gestured towards a crystal punch bowl situated at the very center of an ornately carved oak table in the middle of the room.
"And now," said their guide, somewhat breathlessly, as if embarrassed by her own bold suppositions, "if you will..."
The bowl contained eighteen small, circular wafers: there were nine blue and nin
e pink. The wafers were exactly three inches in diameter and looked not unlike small slicks of oil compressed between thin sheets of plastic. They were good for two hours. These colors, pink and blue, were for gender: male, blue and female, pink. These particular dream wafers were further classified according to density of color. The darker the color, the older the earthly impression. Hence, if an entity wished to be a young female human for the two hours it would take to complete the tour, then it would be wise for that entity to select a pale pink wafer. Conversely, if one desired to be an elderly male, one would select a very dark blue wafer. And on this particular evening there was to be a bonus, for the complete experiential record of the house was to be in the bowl. Not physically, of course, but among the pile of dream wafers was one particular disc, imprinted with the entire history of the ancient house and of everyone who had at one time lived within its hard angled surfaces.
"Come, come now!" exclaimed their little old guide, clapping her hands together for emphasis. "Let us quickly make our selections and get physical! We don't have all day, as they used to say..."
Soon the dream wafers were spinning and twirling about the candle-lit room like small, colorful birds and within a twinkling, the guide's attempt at earthly humor was greeted by earthly smiles as nineteen people of various ages, sex andstyles of dress stood, where just seconds before there had been but one. They looked as if they had just stumbled in off a charter bus or perhaps off an old aero plane. They had that dazed look of conventioneers, newly arrived in a strange city, and this impression was reinforced by the fact that each and every one wore a rather large, plastic name tag neatly pinned over their heart.
Of the nineteen, one entity, appearing as a rather elderly man in dark, conservative dress, stood off by himself trying to conceal the hint of a smile. In this guise, he was a large man and the grey suit that he wore appeared to have, at one time in the distant past, hung upon an even larger man. The white plastic name tag on his chest identified him simply as "HARRY." As Harry, his face had a dusty, almost deathly pallor that fitted perfectly the ambience established by the darkness of the stained-wood eating room. His thinning, long grey hair hung low over his large ears in silent testimony to ancient times when things and fashions were different. He would have walked unnoticed through the ancient streets of San Francisco had it not been for his eyes.
His eyes were brilliant, flashing green, and looked as out of place upon his old weathered face as emeralds in the hand of a street beggar. He slowly walked over to the window and ran a wrinkled old finger along the sill as if testing for dust. His nostrils flared and his mind began to spin as he drank in the ancient odor of the place. He glanced around the room at the others. Without anyone having to tell him, he knew that his dream wafer was the ONE. He suddenly knew the house of redwood...intimately. He could scarcely contain his excitement. As their guide continued to speak, he shook his being through the memory frame that once constituted the building's total experience and reeled from the emotional impact. Kaleidoscopic patterns of pure memory and sensation swept over him. It was a vertiginous feeling as his mind began to spill feelings and images like water in an overfull bucket. He grasped the edge of the window frame to keep from falling. He glanced around quickly, seized by what humans once called paranoia. No one had noticed. They were all too busy checking out their new bodies. They were like children trying on their parents' clothes. They viewed this new experience as funny and fascinating.
"Oh, yes, yes!" cried one.
"My my, I didn't realize that this was how it was going to be!" uttered another.
"Crazy me, crazy me. Just look at these hands, these fingers! Look at the way they...move!"
"Oh these eyes...what fun!" said one young lady, as she turned around, ever-so-slowly taking in the others while at the same time watching her own reflection in the surface of a large mirror across the room above the mantle.
One man, around forty, fingered the fiber of his fine wool suit and stared in awe at the crystal display from the chandelier. "The light," he said quietly, "look at the way it...sparkles!"
According to the unspoken rules tourists were always to appear in appropriate costume when visiting an ancient historical site, but in the case of a Victorian house, this loose edict resulted in one man in a pale blue leisure suit standing next to an older woman wearing a Victorian gown, while across the room stood an authentic American cowboy speaking in low tones to a young blonde in a beehive hairdo and a green mini-skirt.
"Oh yes, yes, yes," said the young girl in the mini to the cowboy. "Isn't this simply marvelous, one instant we were something else in an entirely different space and now we are Humans--being."
And then they all laughed because, after all, laughter was why they had come.
As Harry, the old man found himself knowing many things about the house constructed out of redwood. It was a many-faceted house. Depending upon one's position, the dwelling seemed to take on the qualities that the observer held to be important. At one point, it was a new house, as lithe, trim and slim as a newly constructed sailing sloop. It was, on the whole, a contented house, serving its occupants far longer than most, and with a cheerfulness and enthusiasm not usually expected, nor anticipated, from working class dwellings. It was a brown suit in a closet of many colors; serviceable and dependable, with just the slightest hint of fancy stitching along the seams.
Harry knew, for instance, that the house had been originally constructed for Lucy Stone by her husband. But then, less than a year after its completion, Lucy had been killed by a runaway horse and wagon. Lawrence Stone sold the house at that point and moved on. It next became a sort of halfway house for young school teachers on tour of the Western states, as well as for latecomers, newly arrived from the East or just returned from the gold fields of the Yukon. Later, during World War I, it was divided into different units and served as a boarding house for doughboys awaiting rides out into foreign places to meet their destiny.
During the "other war" (the second one), an old German man had lived in the lower rooms. He had once been a famous photographer in prewar Germany, but by then was forced to eke out a marginal living, taking pin-up pictures of loose young ladies which he would then sell to soldiers passing through the city on their way to the Pacific Theater.
Harry also learned, for instance, that during the "Fifties," the neighborhood in which the house stood began to slip and the building was filled, year 'round, with bohemian artists and self-indulgent writers with their heads full of sand.
During the middle "Sixties", the house was the lair of a wealthy, LSD-crazed drug dealer who finally met his demise in the balcony of a theater in the neighborhood. Later, there was a quick succession of colorful characters. There was a bottomless dancer and a taxi driver. They watched a lot of television, laughed, snorted cocaine and ate only natural food. Next, there was a string of young singles and divorced suburbanites fresh to the Magic City and intent on carving out a new life.
Finally, the entire neighborhood, which had been tottering for years, tilted to the left and collapsed into total disrepair. The space downstairs was transformed into a Chinese laundry. The top flat was leased to a convalescing transsexual. The front room was occupied by three armed Zionists and the two side rooms were rented to an attractive young, big breasted hustler named Candy whose twelve-year old dwarf son made his living training tarantulas for guard duty in the town's better jewelry salons.
"And now, if you'll follow me..." cooed their guide with a suppressed chuckle, turning and striding off down the long hall. Harry smiled, too, and slid into control of his new body, like a man at the controls of an exotic machine. He fell into line as they all began to file off like a bunch of innocent children on their way to class--eyes bright and shinning. And in a very real sense, they were a bunch of children on their way to school, and once again it was to be the very first day and everything was...new.
"On your left, ladies and gentlemen, is what
was once termed the bathing room. The large ceramic container on the right is where the ancient ones would deposit their envelopes of flesh for ritual cleaning. It is here that they would come for purification, for the removal of the residual dirt and grime, both physical as well as psychical, that would be acquired through movement in the world. The large container on the left, in which the body was left to soak was filled with water (something with which you are all very familiar) while the smaller ceramic bowl on the floor in the rear is where it is believed they prayed."
Chuckles were heard from her group of men and women crowded around in the bathing room, for they knew that this last comment by their guide was another attempt at earthly humor and humor was honored and appreciated above all other human tendencies.
"Actually, it is believed that one was supposed to place one's nude body upon the device, as if in a chair..."
"Ooh's" and "Ah's" were heard from the group as they grasped the real purpose of the strange device.
"...and by concentrating upon one's minor place within the overall scheme of things, ones negative residual emotions would somehow solidify and finally pass on out of the body physical. At that point, one would be obliged to pull the long, metal chain to the left which would activate a stream of fluid from the holding tank above. This water would flow down into the ceramic bowl and both dilute and flush ones bodily waste down through the opening in the floor and hopefully back unto the source from which all things originate."
Individual members of the tour nodded and looked to one another with sly winks. The ancient ones certainly were clever. Had a definite sense of style.
"And now, if you'll follow me..."
Sounds of swishing skirts and smooth skin scraping against the hard celluloid of starched collars underlined their amazement and accompanied the group down the long dark hall. Rather abruptly, their guide stopped and turned, pointing down at a small metal grate recessed within the surface of the wooden floor.
"Below this surface upon which we are standing, in what was once referred to as the basement, stands a giant, cavernous, black metal container into which the ancient ones would stuff their disposable combustibles. By thus altering the molecular structure of these disposable items, sufficient heat energy was generated to warm the entire living structure."
The cowboy immediately dropped to his knees in order to peer through the metal grating in hopes of catching a glimpse of the thing that ate disposable combustibles. It was extremely dark and he was mildly disappointed.
At this point, Harry turned and slowly moved off, for he intuited a secret in this house and he sensed that the secret was to be found somewhere in the rear sleeping room on the very lowest level. He deftly descended the stairs unobserved and passed through numerous rooms and anterooms, with all the familiarity of a long term resident until he finally came to the special room.
It was a small, cheerless, grey room and the mood established by the grayness was cracked by the sun baked, once-red corduroy drapes that hung now like flimsy stencils admitting selected beams of diffused moonlight to shine softly through the paintless patterns and onto the far wall, across from the open doorway. Harry entered slowly and slid his attention around the small room and over its dusty surfaces of dark wood like a thin layer of paint. His eyes continued to scan the room for details. He felt like a restless gunfighter from out of the Old West.
With slow but sure movements, he edged across the finely-fitted hardwood floor towards the place of fire. It was a beautiful structure. The fire box itself was covered with gold metal filigree depicting forest scenes from the mythos of ancient man. Surrounding the fire box was a wide background of shiny, lime green, ceramic tiles. At the outward edge of the tiles was a white wooden frame and this frame was in turn flanked by two substantial wooden pillars. These two pillars supported a mantle piece and this in turn supported two smaller pillars which served as a foundation for a somewhat smaller wooden shelf. And between these two shelves, at eye level, was a large, oval reflecting surface once called mirror by humans.
Harry raised a hand tentatively and gently slid it along the leading edge of the lower mantle piece. A small strip of exotic wood moved with a distinctive "click". Of all the thousands of pieces of individual wood, this one particular strip seemed to hold the secret. He leaned against the mirror momentarily for support and found himself gazing into a stranger's face. Harry had never seen a mirror before coming to this house. He almost didn't recognize himself. He thought that the face looked unnecessarily severe, almost criminal, but then he remembered that human nature was a prairie for outlaws.
For reasons which he never fully understood Harry placed his hands on the cool reflecting surface and pushed. It moved. It was designed to swing. Without a moment's hesitation, he slid his fingers into the opening, volunteers on a dangerous mission. In the open space behind the mirror was a container--a box of some sort. He slowly removed it from the confines of its dark, secret place and put it on the bed across the room. The container was created from the treated skin of some long extinct animal. It was a dark, rusty brown in color--one of those old boxes that men used to drag around whenever they left home on foraging trips in search of money.
To say that he was excited at his discovery would be a gross understatement. He was literally beside himself. He sat on the bed and gingerly snapped open the small silver clasps, and carefully tilted back the stiff upper lid. Inside the ancient brown leather suitcase, nestled within a softly vibrating blue ring, lay a small clear bowl. So, Harry thought, this is the secret. He carefully lifted the small bowl toward the light for closer inspection. There was something moving in the bowl. At first, in the shadows, it looked like small, brilliantly colored tropical fish, but no, these were more fluid than any fish; more ephemeral than a slick of oil upon the water. The quick, brilliant colors and swift dartings almost made him look away. So bright, so colorful, so intense, he thought. Always emerging, never defined, ever unfolding, never completely caged within any context. There could be no doubt. These were concentrated thought drops. This was a miracle! This was an ancient container of Human Dreams.
Upon closer examination, he could spot certain differences. Here were night dreams as well as day dreams. What a find. A bowl of dreams, small patterns of human spiritual energy, invested with emotion and content which gave the individual bits their specific color, hue, and intention. The brightest, shimmery ones were obviously the night dreams whereas the duller, semi-opaque, slower moving ones were probably the day dreams: products of idle contemplation and bored minds. This was mankind's protector, its cushion. Dreams protected mankind from reality, the same as the embryonic sack protected the unborn fetus within the womb.
There had been rumors and faint, whispered thoughts referring to such things passed from one mind to another but never, never did he suspect that such a thing actually existed in physical form. These were no dream wafers, no limited two-hour sojourn through a socially sanctified city-site. These were the things from which Universes were created...and Minds.
There was only one thing to do. Without a moment's hesitation, Harry moved the small, clear container to his mouth. With a quick snap of his head and a smack of his lips, he drank the entire mix as if it were mere water and he a man suffering from extreme dehydration. He stood and walked over to the mirror. In its silvery reflective surface, he observed one small, shimmering droplet hanging uncertainly from a dark grey, follicled whisker at the very edge of his upper lip. He flicked his tongue, lizard-like, and caught the stray dream droplet that hung so precariously before it could fall to earth. He shook his head and moved unsteadily to replace the container behind the mirror once again. So quick, he thought. As his body moved to lift the container, his mind began to radiate dreams--human dreams. And, because he was old, he dreamed of youth, and because he was in an ancient city, he dreamed of a country place, and because his life thus far, had been relatively dull and uneventful, he dreamed of ad
venture and excitement.
"Oh, what flowers of delight!" he said aloud.
And with this, there was a subtle "click," as from the opening of a backdoor, as from the opening of a human mind, and with this, the rings of realization began to radiate in all directions across the pond of time.