by Beth Goobie
In fact, I thought with more than a trace of envy, rather than preoccupying herself with her husband’s disappearance as might have been expected, Rachel Hamilton seemed to be shedding his memory like an old skin. While I still woke regularly thrashing about my bed, heart in an ugly thud as I tried to shake off a blood-soaked, clinging dream-father, it had been weeks since my mother had mentioned his name. Ever so gradually, the deacon’s widow was beginning to move more freely about our house, to look me in the eye when she spoke, even to laugh on occasion. Several days ago, to my astonishment, she had broached the possibility of applying for a job.
Beside me Dee continued her sleepy breathing, quietly conducting my thoughts. And as ever, come hell or high water, those thoughts pressed on. Since the night of my mother’s rescue, I reflected, neither she nor I had returned to the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle. Pastor Playle still called the odd time, but by now I had learned to let go of my panic attacks, having seen my mother repeatedly hang up on him. With the healing of her inner gate, Rachel Hamilton seemed to be returning to a firm-boundaried sense of herself; her night prowls had ended, she habitually slept until daybreak, and the house walls were slowly losing their high-frequency field. The change this brought to the home on Quance Crescent was so tangible, I could feel it in the air—something unclenching and opening, by degrees, to easier breathing.
If only, I thought as I lay listening to the heater’s quiet drone, my father had simply taken off. If only I hadn’t brought that Billy Graham paper doll to the proposed séance. If only…if only…Ultimately there were countless if onlys, and one dead body under a ten-foot snowbank, awaiting the inexorable approach of spring. Things had happened the way they had happened, and if I was completely honest with myself, my father’s death was an apocalypse that had been in the making for years. It could have occurred so many times earlier—like the instance in the kitchen when I held the bread knife to his throat. So many times, I thought heavily, but it had waited for my grad year, a particular room over a garage, and Dee.
Briefly, then, I wondered if the entity that had transformed my mother into the Divine Sister had somehow also entrapped my father, but I ditched the thought. That thing fed on pain big-time, and Deacon Hamilton had never exhibited the slightest inclination toward self-abuse. As far as I could tell, neither he nor Pastor Playle ever figured out what was really driving Rachel Hamilton, never glimpsed the true visage of the Divine Sister.
What had been evident to both men, however, was that Mrs. Hamilton was the conduit for a mystery called the Tongue of Fire, and if they set themselves up as her keeper and translator, they would thereby gain enormous power. It probably hadn’t taken Pastor Playle any longer than it had his right-hand deacon to connect Rachel Hamilton’s access to the Tongue of Fire to her personal suffering, and further, to realize that his own power depended upon maintaining that agony. Only men without internal sanctuary—men who were no one—could have done what my father and the good pastor did…to my mother, to myself, to Dee. In the end it was that simple, that clear, and a relief to see it without judgment or apology—how the wreck of my mother’s life had been created out of the wreck of my father’s. The only thing left now was to climb out of the debris and carry on.
Nuzzling my face into Dee’s damp hair, I snuggled a hand around her naked breast. What had surprised me most about our loving, when it came to us, was the uninhibited wetness of it and the startling inconsolable cries that erupted from us sometimes, as if our souls were soaked with grief. Sex was another kind of twinning, really—a reaching through short-lived ecstasy toward oneness. Afterward, all one could do was lie on the bed, returning to the exile of one’s body as if it were a place from which one had been gone a long time—these arms, legs, hips the prison guards of division, separation, all the questions and loneliness of flesh.
And that flesh was still lonely. Not for the loving that could be created body with body, but for those worlds beyond the body, those other realms that could be called open by pain and need. For with the closure of Louisie’s death gate and her final departure, I, Mary-Eve Hamilton, had been left healed and at one within myself in a way I had not previously experienced. In tandem, the external physical world had also mended, presenting now solidly to me within boundaries, no longer continually bleeding color, energy, soul, as had been its wont. While the gains this had brought were undeniable, in the process something had been lost—something ephemeral, beyond, the quintessential mystery of all things.
The question was: How to regain it? How could I once again seek and call out to other realms and their questers without creating wounds so profound that they caused irreparable damage? How much blood was required to see; how did one learn where and when, how deep to cut? Restless, my mind on the prowl, I lay pushing mentally against the physical plane and its restrictions, that curse of the mundane with its oversized thumb pressed down, as ever, upon the world; then, as if some psychic fault line had given way, I felt a gentle rippling and a buckling, and a cave-like darkness opened up around me and flowed outward to envelop the room. Off to one side flickered candlelight, accompanied by the rustling of robes. Raising myself onto an elbow, I watched a line of gray-hooded figures approach and encircle the bed. It had been a while since The Chosen Ones had dropped in, more than ten weeks—the winter solstice, to be exact, the night of my father’s death.
Mumbling their endless indecipherable chants, the robed figures surrounded and held me within the vibratory plane of their circle. Who are they? I wondered as I floated on the gray hymn of their voices—guardian angels, the dead, a gathering of personal phantoms? Whatever their identity, it was entirely disconnected from the mind-searing brilliance of the Divine Sister and the miasmic black sludge that had entrapped Dee’s mother. Those two entities inhabited extremes, whereas this particular set of Chosen Ones seemed to resonate between dimensions, close to the human but not quite of it. Deep in a gut-world of tunnels and caves, lost parts and loneliness, they had traveled from some place of collective knowing and bequeathed themselves to me.
But that bequeathing, I recalled as I watched them, had been for the purpose of the Apocalypse—to guide me toward and through it, to give me the necessary strength. And the Apocalypse, at least that particular apocalypse, was now over. What could they possibly have to communicate to me tonight?
As if in response to my thoughts, the robed figures standing about the bed lifted their arms. Then, as I watched wide-eyed, The Chosen Ones turned their hands, open-palmed, toward me. Empty! I realized, staring at their circle of raised hands. Every one of the curved spirit knives they usually carried was gone.
Quietly, then, a voice began to speak inside my mind. Pain is not the only way, it said. There are others. Thought. Memory. The inward gaze. Look inward, but do not force the veil. Force creates wounds, and wounds call out in the vibrations of anguish and despair that created them. Whatever consciousness enters this world enters through you, your mind a delicate sounding board that vibrates between realms, receiving the stories of other universes and reenacting them in your flesh. But you can choose what you receive. Hear this—hear it as a song: You were conceived not as a chosen, but as a choosing one.
With this, the empty hands began to lower and the chanting to trail off. And it came to me then that The Chosen Ones were fading out on me, probably for the last time. Dismayed, I pushed aside the quilt, rose to my knees, and reached toward the nearest figure; it did not flinch, did not pull back. Swiftly, my heart thudding, I slid back the hood, then cried out as the entire robe collapsed formless to the floor.
Empty! I realized again. Each robed figure currently standing around the bed was, and possibly always had been, uninhabited. As I stared in amazement, the rest of the robed figures collapsed in like manner, leaving me surrounded by a circle of empty cloth.
There were no chosen ones. They had never existed beyond the empty forms I had given them. And the message those cherishe
d thought-forms had come to bring to me tonight was the same one I had been sending myself for years: There is no code, no law—only possibility and the desire of the seeker.
And it was flesh that contained all the stories and the mirrors, all the names necessary to each seeker’s finding out. Jezebel, I thought, smiling down at the girl sleeping next to me. Maybe the nickname hadn’t come written on a small white stone, and it certainly hadn’t been secret, but it was, arguably, divinely inspired. What an incomparable gift Dee had given me through the alias Jez—truly an identity ready-made for seeking, for finding out. Could I return the favor? Was there a name I could bestow upon Dee that she could use to dream herself toward truer selfhood?
Beside me, Dee shivered as she often did in her sleep, clutching herself and whimpering. “Can you find me?” she whispered in a high broken voice. “Can you find me?”
Leaning toward the beloved, I murmured, “Yes.”
About the Author
Beth Goobie grew up in Guelph, Ontario, where the appearance of a normal childhood hid many secrets. Beth moved to Winnipeg to attend university, became a youth residential treatment worker, and also studied creative writing at the University of Alberta. She is the award-winning author of 23 books, written mainly for young adults, including The Lottery and the CLA award-winning Before Wings. Also a published poet, Beth makes her home in Saskatoon.
Copyright
Dedication: for Sue and for Edna
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Goobie, Beth, 1959-, author
The first principles of dreaming / by Beth Goobie.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927583-27-2 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-927583-28-9 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8563.O8326F48 2014 C813'.54 C2014-903454-7
C2014-903455-5
Copyright © 2014 Beth Goobie
An earlier version of the first half of chapter two was published in The Pottersfield Portfolio.
Editors: Stephanie Fysh, Carolyn Jackson
Copyeditor: Kelly Jones
Cover: Natalie Olsen
Design: Melissa Kaita
Printed and bound in Canada
Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Published by
Second Story Press
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Toronto, ON M5V 2M5
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