The First Principles of Dreaming

by Beth Goobie

  Face shifting between thoughts, Dee continued to drive silently, then ventured, “I remember the first time I got raped.”

  Still braced against what she had expected to hear, Jez fumbled toward Dee’s actual words. “Who raped you?” she asked, startled.

  “Who cares who?” replied Dee. “It was years ago. I was spaghetti for a long time afterward, okay?” Grabbing a pack of Player’s from the dash, she dug out the last cigarette. “That’s when my demon was born, see?” she said, lighting up. “My first demon. She came out of me while it was happening, and she’s been with me ever since—outside of me, but always near. Always watching. She sees things I can’t see, things far away or maybe in the next room—like you with that guy in the hall. I saw it happening in my head while I was with Dinky. My demon showed me.”

  Again, the vision of the peeled-raw ferret face flashed through Jez’s mind. Grimacing, she made herself look at it straight on. “So that’s what it was,” she muttered. “Just before that guy started…Your demon—it was watching me while…”

  “Yeah,” said Dee.

  Jez stared through the side window into darkness. A demon watching over her? she thought wonderingly. A demon born out of a rape?

  “If that’s how they’re born,” she asked haltingly, “do I have one too?”

  “No,” Dee said immediately. “You went back in. At first, when I ran out of Dinky’s room and that guy was whamming you, I could see a fuzzy light starting to lift out of your body. But then when I hit him with the brick, the light went back in. It didn’t leave and take on its own life. That means no demon was born.”

  “So you’re telling me,” faltered Jez, “that creepy red thing is you? You’re a demon?”

  “Not exactly,” said Dee, dragging on her cigarette. “But my demons came out of me, and I know that’s how they were born.” Taking another drag, she paused, then said carefully, “Look, thanks for trying to save me, but you need to know—this is the way I am at parties. I’m the spark that gets the fun going. It’s like pulling the trigger on a sex gun—see how many people you can shoot.”

  Lifting the skirt of her midi, Jez cleaned the mess of tears and snot from her face.

  “None of it’s personal,” added Dee. “None of them are my friends. At least, not like you are.” Falling silent, she drove, her fingers stroking thoughts onto the steering wheel. “A lot of girls get jumped,” she mused. “Hell, all the girls I know have been jumped some time or other. None of them ever picked up an ax over it.” Slightly awed, her eyes flicked across Jez’s. “You gonna be all right?”

  Gingerly, Jez shifted around the tunnel of pain in her gut. It was the same pain Dee carried; if she was to give it a shape and a name, it sure wouldn’t be angel. And after years of watching the false serpent Playle parade around as God’s right-hand man…well, this wouldn’t be the first time she had seen something manifest as its opposite.

  “I need a smoke,” Jez said gruffly, lifting the cigarette from between Dee’s lips.

  A hesitant smile crept into the corner of Dee’s mouth. “Sure, take my last one,” she complained.

  Their eyes met, and Jez realized she had passed some kind of test. “Cerro Pelon,” she said quietly. “Some day, I really want to see that place.”

  “Jez,” said Dee, “you are that place. Or you’re no place.”

  The darkness took them home.

  Seven

  It was during an Easter weekend retreat that I saw Pastor Playle and my mother having sex. God presented me with this revelation during the wee hours of Sunday morning just before the Resurrection originally took place, when Waiting for the Rapture believers were supposed to be worshipfully asleep, burying the old self in dreams so they could wake reborn into the morning light. At least, these were the instructions Pastor Playle had given us during Saturday evening chapel, after which we had devoured juice and cookies and retired to our conference-center family rooms—narrow cells of concrete and linoleum furnished with several sets of bunk beds. My parents had immediately selected lower bunks, my father’s next to a window that overlooked the grounds and my mother’s (significantly) nearest the door, while I took an upper one, preferring to sleep afloat above their heads.

  It was the year I turned thirteen, the year I watched other girls turn doe-eyed and stupid, pluck the wings off thought and ground themselves. It was also the year the Eleusis and Eastbrook Waiting for the Rapture congregations decided to combine for their Easter retreat. The Eastbrook youth group was twice our size and considerably more worldly—the girls were allowed to wear makeup, and some of their skirts had inched above the knee. Just before Good Friday dinner, I overheard several of them in a washroom making plans to sneak off later that evening during a scheduled stargazing activity. So after night snack, when everyone began pulling on sweaters and heading outdoors to listen to the two pastors’ competing oratories about stars, wonders, and the end-times, I kept my eyes steadfastly ground-level, monitoring the furtive figures that were edging out of the upward-gazing group and into the nearby trees.

  Slipping stealthily after them, I followed their giggling whispers to the conference center’s rec room, where a large collection of old sofa cushions had been stacked in one corner. Quickly, the twelve Eastbrook teenagers headed for the pile and paired off. Odd girl out, I huddled in a nearby corner, maintaining a careful analysis in the dark, though it didn’t seem as if those vague huddled shapes could be doing much—they were all grouped close together, so quiet that there was only the odd sucking or giggling noise, and the pillows barely moved. Every now and then, partners seemed to be switching, but what with the frequent trips the girls were making to a nearby washroom, it was difficult to be sure. Either too much lemonade had been consumed at night snack or the girls were spending a lot of time comparing notes. Whichever it was, with so much traffic tiptoeing in and out, I figured no one would notice if I subbed in.

  Cautiously, I crawled among the whispering bodies and waited, and soon enough someone rolled toward me. I didn’t have a clue who he was—couldn’t remember a boy who reeked of the odd combination of Vicks VapoRub and Esso Supreme—but since I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, I allowed his mouth to bump tentatively against mine as he worked his way into a hesitant pucker. The girl beside us must have been allergic to dust—she kept sneezing and complaining because the pillows hadn’t been vacuumed—and I could hear other couples bargaining back and forth.

  “Come on, let me,” mumbled a guy.

  “Not if you do that,” demurred his partner.

  “You did it with Garth last year,” protested the guy.

  “I didn’t do it like that,” hissed the girl.

  The Vicks-Esso boy had gentle hands, but an odd kissing style that involved puffing out the wet insides of both lips, then plastering them in all their gooey glory across his partner’s mouth. All in all, the experience could only be described as wormlike, and did little to inspire desire. In addition, he kept pausing to trace his fingers over my face and whisper, “Renita, is that you? Joanie? Sylvia?”

  Afraid my identity was about to be discovered, I decided the best defense was a good offense. A recent junior-high gossip session had aroused my curiosity as to the merits of French-kissing, and since this boy’s lips had turned out to be a complete loss in the passion-incitement department, I resolved to bypass them. That I might thereby be setting new standards for the mores of the Eastbrook youth group’s female members did not occur to me; I simply waited until Mr. Vicks-Esso had whispered his nervous way through several more girls’ names, then sent my tongue energetically into his hovering mouth.

  The results were electric. Jerking back with a loud gagging noise, he yelped, “What was that?” I froze, and in the seconds that followed became aware of a surrounding stillness so deep, nothing was breathing. The entire room literally ached with the intensity of listening, and it was then that I realized the r
eason the stack of sofa pillows had not disintegrated, but remained intact against the wall—the Eastbrook Waiting for the Rapture youth group’s idea of sin in the dark was a two-button-down hickey. Sliding out from under Mr. Vicks-Esso, I felt for the pillows anchoring the bottom of the pile and pulled hard. Pillows and bodies cascaded everywhere, and in the ensuing melee, I took off without a backward glance.

  The next morning, I rubbed some of my father’s aftershave under the collar of my dress then ventured casually among the Eastbrook youth group, intent on sniffing out Mr. Vicks-Esso and secure in the knowledge that he would not be able to identify me. I need not have worried—Eastbrook’s older teenagers were busy giving each other speculative glances, but no one appeared to have considered the possibility they had been infiltrated by an alien thirteen-year-old. Careful sniffing led me to a tall, pimply fifteen-year-old who wore a READY FOR THE RESURRECTION T-shirt and played guitar during sing-alongs. All day I studied him, trying to decide if knowing what he looked like was an out-and-out deterrent to the possibility of future passion. The memory of his wormlike kissing technique almost tipped the balance, but in the end I resolved to return to the rec room that night to see if the Eastbrook youth group managed to pull off a repeat performance—one that got some pillows moving.

  After evening snack I retired, hoping this would encourage everyone else to similar aspirations, then lay awake counting heartbeats while members of both congregations engaged in hearty games of Snap and Monopoly. Eventually I drifted off, and woke some time later to the sound of my father’s snoring in a lower bunk. Still wearing my midi dress, I slipped inch by creaky inch down the ladder at the foot of my bed, then out the door and along the dimly lit hall.

  Several turns along darkened corridors brought me to the rec room door, which I found slightly ajar. Edging through the doorway, I crept into the shadow of an old upright piano and stood a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. To my disappointment, the youth group was nowhere to be seen, but this was quickly forgotten as I realized that not only had the stack of sofa pillows finally disintegrated, it had scattered madly in every direction. At the center of this chaos, I could see two bodies undulating—a man on top, his arms cradling the head of the woman beneath him. Her hands appeared to be gripping his buttocks, both her flabby legs had risen into the air, and the sounds they were making could have called anything to them, could have raised the dead. Until that moment, I had never seen my mother look beautiful, her pin curls released, her usual hooded expression vanished, and the gift of tongues claiming her so completely, her voice and body burned as one flame.

  I do not know how long I stood watching. Pastor Playle seemed to last forever inside my mother, and she clung to him as if he were her life. Soaked with sweat, they swore wildly as they came, collapsing so completely I thought they had died. Without speaking, they began again, kissing deep inside each other’s mouths, but I was trembling, my mind blown by what I had witnessed, and stole quietly from the room. Still trembling from shock, I made my way back to our family room and lay in my bunk, trying to recover the mother I had just lost—a mother who spent her afternoons reading Billy Graham, baking brownies, and waiting for my father and me to come home.

  Or did she?

  Pastor Playle had a paunch and training-bra titties; his cock had slid in and out of my mother in a long, hard line. He had called her Magdalene darling, my most beautiful whore. For the rest of the weekend, I watched them, but they gave no sign of what had occurred in that feverish pillow-wild room; I fell asleep that night before my mother returned to her bunk, and when I woke, the memory seemed entirely distant, removed from me as if a dream.

  It had been a week of rain and gusting wind. Long shivers of yellow left the trees, and the sky collected every shade of gray, pouring its sadness down upon the world. Huddled under dripping umbrellas and in school entrances, the smoking crowd’s lunch hours were a bust, a string of sodden butts whirling along the gutter. By Thursday noon, Dee Eccles was more than ready to blow that Popsicle stand, and waylaid Jez as she came through the school’s main entrance with a hollered “Jezzie, babe, get your ass over here!”

  Standing under the damp archway at the top of the stairs, Jez poised in that moment of stillness that comes before a long fall. Across the street she could see Dee leaning through Sinbad’s window, heedless of the downpour—a flash of color and sound beyond the shifting vibrations that rode the smokers crowded around the school door. The last week had been a major buzz. Since the assault at Dinky’s party, Jez had been continually sliding in and out of her own head as she watched a world that seemed to have divided itself into twinned dimensions—one solid and one of glimmering shifts of energy, like a radio and its song. Perhaps reality had always broadcast itself like this and she had only just tuned in, or maybe it had something to do with the feeling that she was constantly emanating out of her body in a silent, unending moan—one version of the way loneliness presented itself when reality got too big and started pushing mind out of body into the electric scream-world of thought.

  Jez didn’t know what to call the scene vibrating in front of her—its mix of Eric Clapton and Emily Carr—or the fact that she could see Dee’s demon manifesting as a slight red halo around her head. It had been five days since the assault. The ache in her groin had since disappeared and the back of her head had lost its throb, but sudden sounds and movements continued to make her flinch and her mind stubbornly clutched the live wire of memory, refusing to let go. Everywhere she went, scenes from the party replayed remorselessly inside her head, so vivid she could smell, even taste, the experiences, yet the world that surrounded her remained oblivious—carrying on with the mundane, everyone sailing their paper boats across life’s surface while she drowned in silence below. Never before had she been made so painfully aware that forgetting made one functional. Since dropping her off after the party, Dee hadn’t once mentioned the rape, and every subsequent lunch hour had been the same—a wild car ride, Jez crowded into the back with two or three others while Nazareth boomed from the dash, Dee in high gear and allowing no pauses, no waiting moments, no way for Jez to hold up her hands, their cupped fluid pain, and say, There is no shape to this. My cup runneth over; I am pissing fear.

  Hiking her sweater over her head, Jez darted down the stairs into the downpour and across the street. As she climbed into the Bug, Dee pulled out from the curb so quickly Jez found herself slamming the door onto moving pavement. An immediate sharp-shouldered quiet moved in on them—Jez sprawled sullenly, Dee staring blank-faced and dead ahead as she drove.

  “Where is everyone?” asked Jez, watching the rain stream down the windshield.

  “Everyone,” said Dee, “bores me. Hungry? Chips and dip in the back.”

  Obediently, Jez hauled a bag of groceries into the front seat, then braced her knees against the dash and placed an opened package of potato chips and container of sour cream on her stomach. Crunching methodically through chip after chip, she listened as Nazareth poured out of the dash, Dee pushing Rewind every time “Love Hurts” hit the final chord, and playing it again.

  “Don’t you know any other songs?” Jez asked after the fourth time.

  “Better than listening to you,” snapped Dee. Silently, they waited out the whirring rewind, Jez sprawled low on the seat, her head tilted back as she watched the tops of trees whirl aimlessly past. She had no idea what street they were on, if, indeed, they had any specific destination. The pulsing pushed-out-of-her-body sensation was on her again, and when that happened, everything solid faded and she became a song leaving the radio, a vibration quivering along the earth’s magnetic grid as it guided thousands of monarch butterflies south—she would get to Cerro Pelon someday, given enough sky.

  The whirl of passing trees took a jarring tilt to the left, and Jez felt the car turn onto gravel and grass. Suddenly, a willow tree loomed straight ahead, brilliant yellow in the gloom. Without stopping, Dee coasted direc
tly toward it and Jez gave a hoarse shout, bracing herself for a crash as the windshield was engulfed by the tree’s countless trailing tendrils. But no crash came. Instead, there was stillness as Dee cut the engine and “Love Hurts” bit the dust, leaving them with the thick, wet scent of earth, the muffled far-off grief of rain, and the radiant inner mystery of an autumnal willow tree.

  “This is incredible!” whispered Jez, staring at the curtain of yellow that had completely surrounded the Bug.

  “I found it last night,” Dee said casually. “Part of the park fence is down. You can come in off the road, so I drove around a bit.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Jez, trying to keep obvious interest out of her voice. “You with Dinky?”

  “Just driving,” said Dee. “You don’t want to overdo Dink. He’s an asshole unless you’re fuckin’ him.”

  Switching the engine back on, she let it idle, and the car was once again flooded with “Love Hurts.” Almost in a trance, Jez listened to the haunted lyrics, her gaze fixed on the wealth of branches that crowded the windshield, traveling their every twist and turn. Unexpectedly, her body gave a convulsive jerk and the bag of chips tilted on her stomach, threatening to spill its contents. Swiftly Dee grabbed it.

  “Just stop it, okay?” she hissed, catching the container of sour cream, which had also begun to slide. “Stop it!”

  “Stop what?” asked Jez, hypnotized by the willow branches, their vivid curves of pain.

  “Stop stopping breathing!” snapped Dee. “You’re like a corpse—you sit there staring and then you stop breathing. You make me want to check your pulse.”

  “You stare too,” Jez said sulkily.

  “Yeah, but I breathe,” said Dee. “My heart beats, all the vital signs are there.”

  “Bully for you,” said Jez, and went back to staring at the willow branches. Except this time she also noticed it, the way her breathing backed inch by inch up her chest and throat until it ceased and she was nothing—not breath, not thought, not being. Just a fixed, long, ongoing stare.