The First Principles of Dreaming

by Beth Goobie

  Looking equally dismayed, her husband stepped toward her. “No, Rachel!” he said sternly. “Not here! Not yet!”

  Undeterred, Rachel Hamilton continued to grunt and jerk, sprays of saliva flying from her lips. Something’s wrong, thought Jez, watching in consternation. She’s not supposed to do this until after she’s been strapped inside the box.

  “Holy shit!” whispered Dee beside her. “She’s calling.”

  “Calling what?” asked Jez, then fell silent as the air above her mother’s head began to shimmer and spin, creating a tunnel of light that extended upward. At its tip a distant Tongue of Fire could be seen, unfolding delicate wings and preparing to make its descent.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this?” demanded Dee.

  Fervor mounting, Rachel Hamilton rocked and jerked in the armchair, sending out her voice in a series of low circling cries that rose and fell like a landscape. Wrapped in her own arms, the swaying woman set out along the journey of her voice, a collage of sound that captured every tortured stumble, every blunder, trial, and betrayal of the human soul. As Jez listened, the landscape of her mother’s pain opened like an ethereal travel map, and she saw how her mother’s heart had been torn from the flesh to live in the shimmering lies of the mind, those illusions that protected her from the truth of her life: an early-morning sun rising in a garden lush with fruit and promise, two stumbling figures being chased through a gate by fiery angels, a man and his son leading a mule laden with firewood up the side of a mountain.

  All this pain on the road to no pain, thought Jez as her mother’s wail slid through itself, knife-edged and empowering falsehood after falsehood—the high holy figures of archangels, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the small white stone that held her secret name. Like an ecstatic mountain climber, Rachel Hamilton’s voice rose and rose, ascending its scale of wonder, and as it shredded on the very peak of sound, Jez saw vibrating within her mother’s body a figure of such light, her eyes burned to look upon it. Wings, she was sure it had wings…and horns—many horns growing from its head. Its eyes glowed like sapphires, its tongue forked like a snake’s, and it had the breasts of a woman and the groin of a man. But for all this, it was the face that brought the terror of recognition, a face that had not changed since that long-ago day when she had been forced to her knees in front of the congregation to receive forgiveness for trying to break the code of her mother’s babbling and had looked up and seen it—remote, Sphinxlike, and as far from pain and suffering as the human mind could travel: the face of the Divine Sister.

  Without warning, Jez felt herself yanked back through the wall and into the heaviness of flesh. Disoriented, it was a moment before she was able to tune into the nearby sound of high-pitched screaming. Whirling around, she saw Dee, her eyes wide and staring as she backed away from the office.

  “Jezzie, babe,” the butterfly girl hissed, terrified. “Your mom’s calling death.”

  Turning, she took off down the hallway, heels skittering as she made a mad dash toward her car.

  Eleven

  When we were five, Louisie and I invented a secret game we called Mirror See. Having stumbled upon it by chance, we played it in front of our bedroom full-length mirror, where we would stand hand in hand and stare directly into each other’s mirrored gaze, letting ourselves go quiet until we rested on an inner emptiness the way a house without inhabitants stretches into silence, and knowing, and doorways the living like to keep closed. If we were able to reach this inner calm, and often we were not, we would find ourselves shifting gradually into a shared pattern of breathing and heartbeat, our eyes closing and opening in synchronous slowed-down blinks until everything settled into the same rhythm and our separateness dissolved.

  At this point, a shimmering landscape opened around us, a realm of vibrations, pulse, and motion—that fabric of absolute possibility from which the material world evolves. All known structure disappeared, along with the slightest memory of it, and Louisie and I would stand awed and watching multiple levels of reality interweave like the many individual melodies in an intuitive symphony. Completely at rest together, we then merged into a single vibration within that greater symphony and, as one, explored other vibrations—mingling with the celestial, the merely disembodied, elementals, and all that could not, or was not allowed to, manifest on the material plane.

  Within this vibratory realm, thought was simultaneously as singular and as collective as a wave releasing itself onto a shore then plunging back into the deep. Voices spoke to us; angels appeared and disappeared within mundane molecules of air; the singing of a lone siren could call up entire worlds or end them. As long as Louisie and I were able to remain merged, this womb of utter imagination continued to weave us through its fabric of possibility, but the material world presented so many interruptions—a car door slam, footsteps in the hall, the voice of an urgent parent. Without being told, we knew enough not to be caught in such togetherness, and so reserved the mirror game only for those days on which our parents’ attention looked to be otherwise engaged for some length of time.

  Sometimes we used mirrors in separate rooms. In this version of the game, Louisie took up position before our bedroom mirror while I climbed onto a chair in front of the guest room’s mirror-backed dresser. Alone and intent, I would sink into the rhythm of my breathing, all the while watching my disembodied face in the glass and waiting for the moment Louisie’s breathing surfaced out of nowhere into my own; without a sound, my body and the surrounding room then vanished from my perception and, together with my twin, I passed through the mirror into another realm.

  This realm was of a lower order than the one we had discovered standing hand in hand before our bedroom mirror, and it seemed to exist only between the household mirrors. Once Louisie and I had merged minds and exited our bodies, we could together look back and see my head and chest leaned over the guest room’s dresser, my nose plastered to the mirror glass, and, in the other direction, Louisie standing serious and prim against a backdrop of pink rose wallpaper, both hands pressed to her chest. Then, leaving this behind, we moved onward into a shadowy, muffled world. Poking and prodding about its obscure nooks, we gradually mapped out a murky landscape that appeared to represent our physical home in reverse—a dimension packed with the thoughts and vibrations that were not normally allowed to surface on the other side of the mirror. These thoughts, by and large, had a shape—hunched, for instance, or scuttling along nervously—and belonged for the most part to previous inhabitants of the house. As such, their outlines were vague and their speech indistinct, close to dissolution. Thought forms that belonged to my parents, on the other hand, were clearly identifiable but generally full of such anger that Louisie and I steered well clear of them.

  We also came across thoughts that belonged to her and me. My thoughts, not surprisingly, tended to stomp and yell a great deal. Many of Louisie’s, however, dragged an intense sadness, so much so that both she and I kept our distance. As a result, I did not discover the reason for this grief, the secret burden that weighed them down—one so enormous, even Louisie seemed to have banished it from her awareness. I did not learn it, that is, until one afternoon late into our sixth summer. On that day, as I took up position before the guest room mirror, I heard a distinct giggle coming from Louisie’s and my bedroom across the hall. To my astonishment, before I had a chance to begin quieting myself, an intense pulling sensation rose up from within, sucking me out of my body and through a quick whir of darkness, then out through the mirror and back into my body. Disoriented, I stood letting my confusion dissipate, and when it had cleared, looked around to find myself standing not in the guest room but before the mirror in the bedroom I shared with Louisie, surrounded by pink rose wallpaper.

  Immediately, I noticed small things were wrong—my mouth tasted unfamiliar, the air came too thin and quick into my nose, and my toes pointed inward as I stood. Bit by bit, I became aware of a high-pit
ched noise in my head and a fishhook of pain in my chest. Try as I might, I could not figure out how I had gotten from the guest room to the bedroom, and the room itself seemed confused, fading in and out of its outlines. Sweaty and shivering, I climbed onto the bed I shared with Louisie and gave myself over to the dizziness that sang through my brain in a high, white voice.

  When my twin entered the room several minutes later, I barely noticed until she clambered onto the bed and straddled my hips. Squinting through blurred eyes, I noted her unkempt hair and sagging socks, the carefree movements of her body, and on her elbow a large scab where I had scraped myself falling off a neighbor’s tire swing several days earlier.

  “You’re me!” I whispered, horrified.

  “Don’t tell,” she said with a preposterous grin. “It’s a secret.”

  “But you can’t be me!” I protested, fighting the blur in my head. “I didn’t say you could!”

  “Oh yes, I can!” she said, breathing triumph. “I’ve been thinking lots about how to do it, and now it’s done.”

  “Give me back!” I whined, pushing at her.

  “I don’t want to,” she replied, bouncing slightly on my hips. “Not yet.”

  “Louisie,” I whimpered. “I don’t like being you. You’re tired and sick.”

  “Not now I’m not!” she sang. Scrambling off the bed, she headed for the door.

  “I’ll tell Mom!” I howled as she ran out of the room, but we both knew I could not—who but Louisie knew enough to believe me? Sprawled limp on the bed, I stared at the empty doorway and listened to the oversized thump of my heart. No, not my heart, I thought, terrified. Louisie’s. While I had heard it often enough lying beside her at night and during the mirror game, this close its rhythm seemed full of odd angles—sharp pieces of glass or nails. Every few beats, I felt a pain like a bright, ripping sensation. It was as if I had been naughty and was about to be punished, but the punishment was hidden and lurking inside me, and I did not know how or when it would come, just that when it did, it would be part of me—an inner apocalypse, some part of my body going horribly, finally wrong.

  Fighting nausea, I slid off the bed and stumbled through the house to the backyard, where Louisie crouched next to my mother, chattering happily as they painted the rock garden stones a startling unblemished white. Splayed in the shade of a nearby poplar, I watched their bright, blurred forms, determined not to degrade myself completely by sinking into one of Louisie’s frequent naps. About me the air sang with heat, and the ground felt as if it was rippling beneath my back. Every now and then, huge flames of color rose from the earth and danced through the trees. Bright, jagged moments came and went with each heartbeat; the air flashed crystalline edges as unseen spirits sang wild, lonely notes.

  It was the world of Mirror See, I realized, horrified, as I stared around myself, or some distorted version thereof—either way, a realm I had assumed Louisie and I could access only together, through the mirror game. Now, however, it was becoming rapidly obvious this had been her constant reality for years, forced on her by a weak heart that kept her continually on some sort of threshold, one foot in the material plane and the other God knew where, and constraining her to live a drippy watercolor kind of existence—an existence, I thought, as fear crawled up my throat, to which she was not likely ever to want to return. And, having experienced it directly myself, how could I blame her? This was not the paradise of the womb, but a vague headachy place that could not keep its sounds and colors straight. No wonder she had been scheming to switch bodies, and now that she had succeeded, her obvious goal would be to keep as far away from me as possible.

  Trapped within incommunicable panic, I lay fighting the heart that clenched within me like a fist. Cicadas called back and forth, their harsh cries drilling through the afternoon; gradually, my best intentions dulling, I drifted off to sleep and woke sometime later to find my father leaning over me. In that surrounding sea of shifting color and sound, he reached down to me, solid and steadfast, an underlying, ever-abiding reference point for all that changed; gathering me in, he lifted me toward the fortress of his body, where his sturdy heartbeat caught and carried mine. Cradled in the strength of his arms, I knew that as long as he held me I was safe.

  “There, there, Louisie,” he comforted. “Daddy’s home now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  I wasted no time considering what it must have meant for my twin to have lived this way. For her part, she expended no sympathy on me, refusing to sit in her usual place beside me at the dinner table and plastering herself against the opposite car door whenever we had to share the Valiant’s backseat. Desperate and silent, I waited three days for her to relent and return my birthright. Interminable, indescribable, those three days were a Persephone between-world existence, waiting for mercy; when it did not come, I started attacking the body that imprisoned me—slamming the head against walls, clawing the skin, and gouging at the eyes.

  There is no telling how much damage I caused Louisie’s body during this period. As my assaults continued, my parents grew frenzied, my twin merely more distant. Finally, one night when the sky roiled with clouds and the wind howled and pulled at corners of the house, I climbed on top of a sleeping Louisie, placed my mouth to hers, and began to suck. Deeply asleep, she did not fight. For one brief moment, I felt her rising out of my body toward me—next, that fleeting second when, in transit, our souls met and merged. Then, leaving her behind, I reentered my body and pushed hers emphatically away, reducing us both once again to permanent isolation.

  Without remorse, I reclaimed my singular identity. The world returned to its proper alignments; colors and sounds behaved themselves, and I was no longer forced to endure thresholds to other dimensions. Rooted again firmly in the physical plane, I began to observe my twin from a careful distance, watching for evidence of her precarious existence. The frequent naps were obvious, but I also noted the delicate blue smudges that lived beneath her eyes and the way she often paused in the middle of an activity and stared about helplessly, as if having forgotten where or who she was. It was not much, I decided, considering what she had to live with. Over the years, Louisie had learned to chart her course between the worlds with the consummate skill that grows out of extreme loneliness. Unfortunately, no means was ever given her to communicate her situation, and other than our Mirror See explorations and her brief respite within my body, she was condemned to live as trapped and alone as an Old Testament prophet amid the bewildering mysteries of God.

  After the mirror-game switch, Louisie made no further attempts to steal my body. Instead, she turned to Billy Graham and the ethereal night visitors that were visible only to her. In the year before she died, we never again played Mirror See, and for months after her death I struggled with the certainty that it had been God’s will that we switch bodies, His divine plan that my twin go on living in my skin while the Devil bore my soul to Hell on a pitchfork. Guilt grew in me, a series of stacked coffins; within them, I placed the memories of Mirror See and Louisie’s and my explorations of other realms. As time went on, these coffins sank deeper and deeper into an internal graveyard; in the end, I was left with only an odd pull toward mirrors and the sense that something awaited me on the other side of the glass.

  •••

  The stairwell rose, a now familiar habit, muffling the sound of Jez’s footsteps in new-fallen snow. At the landing she paused, suspended in a quiet so weighted, the evening carried it like a sleeping child. Pensive, she stood letting the winter silence sink down through her and gazing over a sepia snow-covered landscape that stretched before her like a prayer cupped in the hands of God. A god, she thought wistfully, that could still confuse by unfolding in her sometimes like blurred doorways of light, like breathing.

  It was midway through the week, four days before Christmas. Normally, Jez would have been about to head out the door with her parents for the Wednesday evening prayer meeting, but she had begged off
, claiming the need for last-minute library research on a history paper. Trudging along the alley a minute ago, she had looked up to see such a faint light coming from the garage window ahead of her that she had panicked, certain Dee had been called out on her father’s “business,” or worse—had decided she preferred the company of someone else. Dee did that sometimes—her whims seemingly deliberately erratic—and it always caught Jez unawares, the flick of a knife through bliss; she always bled.

  But tonight’s knock brought an immediate call of “Come in,” and Jez oozed relief. Opening the door, she stepped into a room once again draped in black and lit by a single candle. From one corner came the glow of an electric heater.

  “Close the door,” said Dee. On her knees before a black candle on the coffee table, she was wearing the skull T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. About her head shimmered the usual red haze.

  “Does this have to be so dramatic?” asked Jez. Shutting the door, she noted the large bump in the black sheet tacked over its inner side—the red-handled jackknife, still stored in Farrah Fawcett’s face. Old jokes die hard, she thought.

  “Close your eyes,” said Dee.

  “Can I sit down first?” asked Jez, on edge. “Can I take off my jacket?”

  “Just close them,” snapped Dee.

  Sighing, Jez complied.

  “What d’you see?” asked Dee.

  “Darkness,” said Jez, irritated.

  “The mind sees in the dark, got it?” said Dee, equally annoyed.

  “Got it,” said Jez. Shrugging out of her jacket, she kicked off her boots. Then she unzipped her green and red plaid midi, dropped it carelessly to the floor, and donned the black T-shirt and jeans Dee had laid out for her on the bed. “Okay,” she said, turning toward the coffee table. “Am I dark enough yet?”