Prisons of Stolen Dreams

by Christopher St. John Sampayo

  He grabbed a cup that was still on the counter from one of the counters previous occupants. It had ice tea in it. He poured it over Isiah’s head. He then spit into Isiah’s face.

  “That’s a special from our nigger menu.”

  Isiah heard the other people in the diner laugh.

  Isiah closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He went deep inside himself in that moment. From inside himself he pulled strength and courage.

  “I want a menu,” he said again.

  “We’re sick of this shit, nigger,” a man behind him said. “You all need to be taught to remember your place.”

  Suddenly arms were all around Isiah. They pulled him off the chair he was sitting on. Somewhere in the distance Isiah heard Ethel scream. Isiah was slammed to the ground. He felt punches and kicks all over his body. He tried to cover his head and curl himself into a ball. In the moment of chaos, he had an instant to wonder how people could be so ugly to other people.

  The blows hurt but Isiah pushed the pain from his mind. He thought of his father. He thought of his father being told to get off the bus. Isiah did this for his father and for his sisters. He did this so when his sisters had children they would grow up in a world where they were treated with respect.

  Suddenly there was a heavy kick to Isiah’s lower back. The pain was great. Isiah was not certain but he thought he heard something crack. Have they broken my back? Isiah had a moment to wonder. The pain made his body spasm. His hands moved to reach for the part of his back where his nerves were suddenly on fire.

  When he did that he realized his mistake. A man in the crowd pushed some people apart. He took three quick steps towards Isiah. In the last step he took his other leg and brought it far back. He was going to kick Isiah full force in the face. Isiah had a moment to realize he was about to die.

  Things seemed to slow. The man’s foot flew through the air in slow motion. Suddenly that motion stopped altogether. The man’s boot froze less than an inch from Isiah’s face. As Isiah stared at the man’s boot he noted the boot had metal tips.

  The image of the man’s boot changed. It became grey and intangible. It was as if it was made of smoke.

  Isiah looked around. He saw people with rage and anger frozen on their face as they looked down at him. They were all frozen. They were all made of gray smoke that flickered almost as a flame does. The grey smoke like figures of hate looked at him like ghosts forever frozen in rage.

  The world was silent. Then Isiah heard giggling. He looked to his side. There was a large man there. He sat like a child on the ground. He was giggling as he looked at Isiah.

  “Hello Isiah,” a voice said. The voice was coming from behind Isiah. He tried to turn completely around. He could not. He realized that his back had been broken. As if sensing this the speaker moved around him so they could be seen.

  Isiah saw the voice belonged to an old woman who wore thick glasses.

  “I’m sorry Isiah. We have to take something from you.”

  Through the pain in his back Isiah had a moment to ask, “Why?”

  The woman reflected on his question.

  “What if I told you there was a world...a better world then this. You…are about to die. But you have something we need.” The woman sighed. “You are very special. But we cannot take you from this place. You will die. In this moment you will die.” The woman paused. “But know…that you die for the greater good. Here you die a hero. And you are remembered often.”

  The woman smiled when she said this. She looked at the man who was about to end Isiah’s life. She then looked to Isiah.

  “Things could have been worse. This could have turned out differently. You could have survived this. It could have been one of your other friends who died. And you could have become bitter and hateful after that. After a church is bombed you could have become angry and thought that justice meant an eye for an eye. You could have then taught yourself to build explosives. Bombs. And you could have placed them in the churches of these people who you thought would hurt you and those that you love.”

  The woman reflected on her statement for a moment. Then said, “But you don’t do any of that. You just die.”

  She looked back to the man who was frozen in time and frozen in a kick that would end Isiah’s life.

  “It’s strange,” she said. “Things are composed not just of our decisions…but our lives are controlled also by the decisions of others. Imagine this man had made the decision to not step forward and kick you. What could have been…what could have been…”

  The old woman let the words trail off. After a moment she blinked and looked back down to Isiah.

  “My time is growing short.” She knelt down behind Isiah. “Come here Joshua,” she said. The smiling man crawled to the spot where Isiah lay on the ground. He grabbed Isiah’s head. Isiah tried to pull away. However, the man’s strength was too great.

  Isiah felt pain. He heard himself cry out. His body began to spasm uncontrollably. His leg kicked out. Isiah wondered how that was possible. He knew his back was broken but whatever the old woman was doing made his leg kick out.

  How is my leg capable of movement? Isiah had a moment to think. Then his thoughts were blank.

  Behind him the old woman sighed. “It is time to go,” she said. Isiah did not register her words any longer. Words didn’t mean anything to Isiah. They were just sounds. He looked at the image in front of him. It was a grey image made of smoke.

  Isiah’s mind produced a final thought. The image of smoke in front of him was pretty. His eyes were dazzled by it. They were so dazzled by the image that he did not register the moment that the old woman and the large smiling man were gone.

  Isiah instead focused on the pretty boot of smoke in front of him. A second later the boot was no longer made of grey smoke. Instead the boot was brown with silver tips. Isiah registered sounds. They were the sounds of an angry mob. Isiah could no longer comprehend what was happening. He could not comprehend what was occurring as the boot connected with his face and ended his life.

  ***

  The Philosophical Principles of Death. The Scripture of Farinata Uaegli Abertio.

  Gospel 010946

  Blessed are those who see these Scriptures.

  Blessed are those who see these Truths.

  The divine salvation at the core of existence cannot be found in life. Life is a falsity created to deceive the weak. Life is a brief instance designed to test the soul. The truth lies in what comes after. The state we know as life is temporal. It is a cocoon state which prepares us for our more perfect state next to God.

  The great gift bestowed upon us by the Lord is death. Death once reached is eternal. Once death is crossed into there is no retrieval and we will at last become pure. The weak allow themselves to be deceived by the passing moments of this existence. That is why we shall cut them down like wheat is cut down with the scythe. We are the keepers of the scythe.

  Death is the great inevitability. Death is patient. It is the constant companion of all living things and the moment we are born it casts its waiting arms around us. It embraces us in each moment of our existence. Death is the point where all things intersect and for a brief moment are in unity.

  Death is where all roads eventually lead. This has been ordained by God.

  All that is will end. All that is will fall. All things in existence will be erased and eroded by time. They all shall wither and die. Life is nothing more than a state of decay. We begin to rot the moment we are born. Each breath we take brings us closer to our last.

  The truth is the turn to death. The wise are the lovers of death. The embracer of death is meritorious.

  We are the chosen servants of God and God only created this state we call life to celebrate the coming of his greatest creation which is death. We, the chosen people, have been blessed with the understanding of these scriptures which have been handed down to us by God.

  To all those that live I say we who worship Death hold true dominion.
/>   To the peoples of every place and land I say we hold dominion.

  To the worshipers of false religion I say we hold dominion.

  We hold dominion over all.

  Verse Two: After the Rain

  There was music in the rain. Patrick Resnick’s grandmother always used to say that. She would say it when rain fell on hot summer days in Louisiana.

  Patrick thought back to those days often now. As a boy sitting on his grandparent’s porch he could almost hear the music his grandmother spoke of. The music was carried in the rain drops. It was carried on the wind. It was a symphony of nature.

  He carried the music from those days in his mind for years afterwards.

  The tragedy of Patrick’s life was that he could no longer hear that music.

  Patrick was in his fifties and he lived a quiet life. This was his curse. Patrick had once not been meant to live quietly. Once he had heard music everywhere. He heard it falling all the time around him like drops of rain.

  However, the music in Patrick’s life had been taken from him.

  In Patrick’s study was a piano. He often sat in front of it and hit the keys. To Patrick’s frustration the keys just made noise. A lifetime ago Patrick had been able to sit at the piano and his fingers could produce poetry. He received a music scholarship to Purdue University. He auditioned for the scholarship by playing a piece by Chopin. He learned the piece by ear. At his audition Patrick played the piece of music perfectly.

  After college Patrick spent many years as a professional musician. He loved the dance of the keys as he played his piano. The Vietnam war was ripping the country and the world in half. The beauty of music was a perfect escape for many. As the world turned to madness on the streets around him Patrick lost himself in music and those who listened to him play were lost in the beauty of his music with him.

  This was Patrick’s life and it was a good life. It was good until the accident took all that away from him. The accident took Patrick’s music away.

  The accident happened in the rain. He was driving down Highway 10 on a trip from Houston to New Orleans. The roads were slippery but Patrick was cautious. The car next to him was not. The car next to him suddenly started spinning on the rain slicked highway. It slammed into Patrick’s car and threw his car into a concrete divider which separated his lane from traffic going in the opposite directions.

  Now as an old man the music in his life was hard to remember but Patrick remembered the sound of glass shattering.

  Patrick awoke in the hospital. He moved in and out of consciousness. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing his wife by his side. He could see her crying. Then he lost consciousness again.

  In the hospital he had a strange dream. He had a strange dream that a man was in his room. He was a young man with a bald head. He had a look in his eyes that chilled the soul. From the shadows in this strange dream Patrick saw an old woman appear. She wore thick spectacles. In this strange dream she approached Patrick. She stroked the side of his face. Then Patrick saw the glint of metal. She had something with her. A moment later Patrick realized it was a scalpel. She started cutting into Patrick’s skull. In this terrible dream this old woman was doing something to his mind. In his nightmare Patrick cried out for help. No one came. No one heard him. Patrick’s dream faded into darkness.

  This dream always haunted and frightened Patrick. A few days later the doctors visited him and talked with him about his condition. He was told that he had suffered severe head trauma. The doctors said they could not determine if there would be any long-term effects.

  Over the course of the ensuing weeks and months Patrick seemed fine. He could speak. He had great recollection. However, one day he sat down at the piano and he realized he could not play. He could not see the poetry he once saw. He tried to play. He remembered the theories of music and the dance of the notes in an octave. However, it was all different. Now when he hit the notes all he produced was noise. Sometimes he would cry because of this. He would bang the keys and desperately try to hold on to who he once was.

  Patrick’s world, his life, his universe changed. His wife, Leslie, supported him through it all. Patrick changed careers. He worked selling corporate insurance. He was good at the job but he often thought of what his life could have been if he had decided not to make that trip to New Orleans.

  Despite how alien it had become he still liked to sit at the piano. He liked to sit at the piano and dream of who he could still be. Sometimes he would sit there for hours. He put a picture of himself and Leslie near the piano. He would look at the picture and dream of the music he could not play.

  As he looked at the photograph sometimes he saw something strange. Patrick had no children but sometimes he looked at the picture and he saw a child in it. He even knew the child’s name. The child’s name was Benjamin. He saw the boy in perfect detail in the picture. He even knew things about the boy. Benjamin liked to be read to. His favorite story was the Velveteen Rabbit. Patrick knew this as well as he knew his own face. But then he did not know. Because he had never had a child.

  This is what happens when a piece of your mind is damaged, he told himself. A response always followed. This is what happens when a piece of your mind is taken away. That was no dream, his mind screamed. In his heart Patrick knew that the old woman and the strange man with the look of madness in his eyes had been real. He knew that they had taken something from him.

  However, when he thought about it too much Patrick felt silly. The accident had robbed him of who he was, he told himself. Not some strange nightmare.

  Patrick also realized that it was silly for him to continue to mourn a life that wasn't his. That was the only way that he could explain this strange feeling that something was missing.

  He often still had strange dreams but stranger then the dreams was the moment of waking. As he woke, just for a moment, his mind told him he was someone else. He remembered a dream of a life that wasn't real. It's didn't exist. But it was him. The dream was a dream of Vietnam. Something had happened in Vietnam. But Patrick had never been to Vietnam. Yet sometimes he woke up and he could hear the sounds of the jungle. He could hear the sounds of his friends crying out as they died. He even knew their names. They were good friends. They were friends he had never met but sometimes he remembered the way they laughed. He also remembered the sound of the rain. He remembered the rain outside a window. It was the window of a cell.

  Patrick woke from these ghosts of rain in the jungle. They were ghosts that Patrick knew had never existed.

  As the years passed the thoughts became more clear and vivid. Over time Patrick became more and more afraid. He was afraid he was losing his mind.

  Life is a tiny ripple in the ocean of time. One day Patrick realized he was old and he knew soon his days would end. Sometimes he thought they had already ended. He tried to explain this to Leslie once. He tried to tell her about this strange sense of alienation he felt. He tried to explain this sense that he was in the wrong place and the wrong time. He told her about Benjamin. He told her about the son they had but did not have. Leslie looked at him oddly when he told her this. She looked at him so oddly that Patrick never brought the subject up again.

  Now Patrick spent most of his days sitting at the piano and staring at the picture of him with Leslie. He would sit and remember the life that wasn’t. He remembered sitting down at a piano and teaching Benjamin about it. He explained to Benjamin that of the twelve tones eight harmonize. He explained to Benjamin that once you understood that principle all that followed was poetry.

  He also continued to remember this other strange life where he went to Vietnam and died with a bullet to the head in a yard. He died in a yard just as it started to rain.

  Today Patrick sat at his piano and stared at the picture. He remembered a life where he had a child named Benjamin. Benjamin smiled brightly in this picture before him. It was a picture where Benjamin didn’t exist. Of all the things in his life the picture confused Patrick the most. He sat at
the piano and tried to arrange his life in his mind. As he hit the piano keys he tried to solve the puzzle of what was real. Which picture was real? Was the picture with him and Leslie real? Or was the picture in his mind where he had a son named Benjamin real?

  Which picture was he supposed to see? Patrick wondered.

  Patrick sat and hit the keys of the piano desperately trying to organizing his ideas. He slammed his fingers into each key. He played with anger, rage, and frustration. However, it was just noise. It was noise because something important had been taken from him by an accident.

  However, even now the piano helped Patrick think. It helped him organize his world. There were pieces of a puzzle in his mind and he was desperately trying to put them together. He was trying to arrange them so there was some logic to the world. It was a logic that he was missing. He had a son. He did not have a son. Who was the child he saw sometimes in the picture? Who was the child that was not there? The madness was pushing Patrick into strange places. The madness pushed him further into his music that he could not play yet continued to play.

  Then as he sat at the piano on this August day somewhere in the music that he played Patrick found himself. He played and for a moment everything was clear. He started to cry. He was an old man sitting at the piano crying dreaming of a life he had but did not have.

  Leslie found him later that night. She found the man she had loved silent and unmoving. He was sitting on his piano bench. He was slumped over onto the piano. Sadness washed over Leslie. She understood now that she was alone. She understood that now she was a widow. She would move forward through this journey of her life with the man she loved no longer by her side.

  She approached the body of the man she had been married to for thirty-three years. She saw that he had something beside him. It was a piece of paper. The writing on the paper was scrawled and hard to make out at first. Then Leslie realized what was written on the paper. It read:

  “Leslie and Benjamin...I love you.”