“Abby, you aren’t bad. You’re remarkable. You are a brilliant, beautiful, passionate, alive woman. That contamination business is pure garbage, and at some level you know it.”
“Keep saying those things. At least it tells me I have one fan.”
“You have a lot more than one.”
A profound silence settled in; over the phone that is a compounded nuisance since there are no visual cues to help read the other person’s intent. I hated the phone as a vehicle for resolving issues. Okay to leave or get messages, but deadly for winnowing out harsh feelings, deeper meanings, and even expressions of care. Ambiguity reigns over the phone.
Finally I heard a small voice say, “We need to meet in a couple of days. I must do some knitting and mending to help repair my tattered life.”
“Any time,” I answered.
I didn’t see her life as tattered. She had passed some milestones recently, and they ought to have restored her to her preabuse vitality. Too bad we don’t live our lives with ‘ought-to.’
Dr. Sophie had said when I left the last meeting that she thought I ought to see her again soon, since there was a lot to absorb from the encounter with my mother.
Her office, when I entered the next time, felt strangely different. The heavy canopy of my nightmarish history had hung over the room for weeks; if I were so inclined, I might have seen the walls and ceiling and floor and windows as possessors of my secrets. I wondered, foolishly, if the other patients could sense them or somehow feel their essence. Silly thoughts, I decided, and set about to explore some final issues, albeit with a peculiar, uneasy feeling.
“It’s beyond my understanding,” I said sheepishly, “but my horror dreams have stopped. Well, replaced, really, by others, which have no connection to my actual life.”
“They may or may not,” Dr. Sophie said. “That you don’t understand their messages doesn’t mean they aren’t symbolically tied to you.”
I was puzzled and said, “Can you explain how that works? What the hell is the function of dreams anyway?”
She smiled. “Not universally agreed upon. I can give you my take, but first tell me about your current dreams.”
“Okay. In the main one, which I had two nights ago, I’m flying in a Cessna, which I’ve never done. The vistas stun my senses, a winding river of pure aqua, mountains like castles of raw stone. Since it is summer, there is sparse snow, but I recalled reading about this area, the Valley of the Kongakut, a tundra in Northern Alaska. It is inside the Arctic Circle, where polar bears prowl the icy shores and fog, rain or snow can swirl in without warning.
“I feel both exhilarated and apprehensive. The newness and pristine qualities are heady stuff, but I’m not much for roughing it, and the prospects of setting up camp and sleeping in a tent are daunting.
“There are companions but I don’t know them, or at least I can’t identify their faces. I’m not positive, but I think our purpose is to explore the shoreline for something, minerals maybe, or check out the abundance of wild life, their variety and state of vigor.
“Now, here’s where it gets weird and confusing. One of our party is a woman, and I’m aware that she and I are connected in some way. Again, no clear image of her face, but the feeling is that I can trust her, that she is totally trustworthy. In an odd sense, I tell myself that love exists between her and me; I mean the words aren’t spoken, but I’ve convinced myself that it’s true.
“We land, kind of a rustic strip of cleared brush, and just before the dream ends the woman decides to hike into the rocky crevices despite warnings from the others that it isn’t safe. Because of my sense of love between us, I join her, and we climb along sheer precipices, though our destination is vague.
“At last we reach a kind of summit, and she tells me—remember, I have no idea who she really is—that I should turn back, and she will go on into the wild by herself.
“Though she does this—disappears under a green parabola of foliage—the sense of trust remains. Now, isn’t that bizarre? I awake with a snug feeling of trust comforting me.”
“Before any attempt to interpret, tell me your take on the dream. What does it mean to you?”
I knew she’d toss it back to me; she always did that. “I don’t know,” I said, but then, added, “I hunger for novelty, and though change is a challenge, I embrace it because it grows me, makes me stretch. Being in a wild place is awesome, and frightening, even scarier because I don’t know the people I’m with. The woman is a mystery. I feel love for her, but how can that be if I don’t know her identity?”
“You can only love someone you know. The rest is lust, is that it?”
“I guess you can say that. But, in the dream, it isn’t a lustful feeling I have for this woman. It’s a closeness, a sense of comfort.”
“Like the woman in your fantasy dream that day, your companion cruising about Europe.”
“There, you see, only I didn’t know who the hell that woman was either.”
“No, but you felt at ease with her.” She shifted gears, “What meaning do you place on this woman wanting to go into dangerous territory, and wanting you to turn back?”
Stumped again. I rubbed my forehead, scrunched up my cheeks until my eyes were slits, and finally, uncertainly, said, “In my relationship with Abby, she is always on the edge of something, an explosion, an off-the-wall opinion. I keep thinking she will lose it completely, and that she’ll disappear. She could be the woman in the dream, but then I don’t feel that safe or trusting around her. I do love her, but I’m guarded at the same time.”
“Okay, so it’s not a totally accurate depiction of Abby. Dreams, rather different from our waking world, can amalgamate events and people. Things can be oddly combined. The folks in your life can be melded into one personality with diverse motives.”
I was hesitant to bring it up, but what the hell, no secrets from Dr. Sophie. “Well, my stepsister, the younger one, Jeri, is past twenty now, and she and I have an amiable, easy connection. She also loves to write, and her insights are remarkable for someone so young.”
“She is trustworthy. You feel comfortable around her.”
“She is. I do.”
“Yet she is not ready to disappear into a jungle, or leave you behind.”
“Well, we don’t have that kind of a relationship. I mean she and I have never been romantic.”
She looked at me hard, one of those penetrating gazes I had come to recognize as prelude to a powerful insight. “But,” she said, “you would like to be.”
First time ever that such an idea was verbalized. Surprisingly, it did not take me completely by surprise. Instead, the words brought on spreading warmth the way spring zephyrs envelop one, and delightfully energize the blood.
I shrugged, felt embarrassed, felt exposed. “Maybe so,” I said at last.
Dr. Sophie caught the whole sequence of emotions on my face, in my body, and said, “Stepsister. Not supposed to have romantic feelings for her, yet you do. Abby. The person you have loved, yet feel off balance with. A dilemma in the making.”
“Not completely. Not yet. Abby wants to talk with me about what she calls her ‘tattered’ life. I’m not sure what she’s going to do. Jeri is not in the picture in a practical way.”
“Only as a subconscious imperative popping up in your dreams.”
“Yes, so is that what dreams are supposed to do? Alert you to the issues you kind of keep down and don’t want to look at?”
“The event with your mother took that form. The way I see it, dreams are often examples of unfinished business clamoring for the light of day. They could represent the way we internalize the people we care about. Some life happenings are too entangled to comprehend, so our unconscious works on them. You wake up and say, ‘Ah, so that’s it. That’s what I have to do.’”
“So, our nightmares are the ugly things, the disappointments and hurts trying to be processed.”
“In a technical sense, REM sleep, which stands for rapid eye move
ment, is the deepest form, because brain activity is most similar to the waking state. The amygdala, a pea-sized gland at the base of the skull responsible for emotions, is active during REM sleep, so dreams that occur can be filled with powerful emotionality, positive or negative.”
“It’s like two completely different worlds inside the same person. The awake world with all its joys and troubles, and the asleep world which struggles to make sense of them.”
“That’s a good way to put it. The Greeks kind of looked at it that way too. Created a whole mythology about dream gods and their enchanted realm.”
“But, what do I do with this newest dream? How is my awake mind supposed to react to it?”
“There are no supposed-to’s. You try to decipher your messages to yourself and make the best choices you can.”
The awareness crept over me like an invading chill, that after this session, Dr. Sophie would be out of my life, her insights would be history, the balm of her discerning presence a fading memory. Could I handle that? Was I healthy enough to deal with my upcoming joys and troubles without her?
Facetiously, yet with more than a semblance of desire, I said, “Can I take you home with me?”
THIRTY-TWO
I received a summons for jury duty. I mention this because, in an unusual way, it had an influence on my relationships. In one sense, it was a coincidence, but in another, such things seem to happen to me.
Assault charges against Alejandro were dropped, the public defender appealing to the assigned judge that he had prevented his cousin’s rape. Even though that trial had not yet occurred, the judge agreed, but ordered a full psychiatric evaluation, which proved salutary for Alejandro since he was found to have a dual diagnosis of alcoholism, and affective disorder with schizoid tendencies, and was remitted to a hospital for sixty days of observation and assessment.
Probably the first guaranteed meals he had in years.
By contrast, Kentucky Prism was to be put on trial for attempted rape. His neck had healed, and except for a tremor when he spoke, he was back to his former health, tic and all.
When I got the call to report to the Van Nuys Courthouse, I saw it as an opportunity to see how the system worked—a rehearsal, if you will, for experiencing Prism’s trial. But I was annoyed as well, because it meant canceling any and all activities for at least that day, and up to as many as ten if I were assigned to a panel.
Check-in was as severe as airport security. I even had to go back outside and stash my nail clipper, which had an attached blade, in a sand receptacle for cigarettes.
In the assembly room, I was in a crowd of a hundred and forty, not one of whom wore a smile, our civic duty to serve, less than pleasant, hardly the choice of how to spend a summer day.
There were computers in one corner for those who could not cut themselves off from outside obligations. Cell phones proliferated—and irritated—voices popped up anywhere, connected to invisible ears. Wall signs cajoled prospective jurors to donate their fees to worthwhile court projects.
I amused myself by gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the trees in the park area of the Van Nuys Civic Center. Pines climbed well above our building, a goodly share of their needles browned by the ever-present Valley smog.
An American flag hung almost straight down on a flagpole in the atrium, waggling back and forth in the mild stir of air, like a red, white, and blue dancer doing a slow twist.
An orange and black butterfly––might have been a Monarch––flitted among the leaves, stirring me, since, in the big picture, they seemed to be diminishing in numbers.
Contrasts, as they often did with me, shouted starkly: greenery, nature’s gifts, flora and fauna in the exterior, and marble, fluorescent lights, plastic, legal jargon in the interior.
Pigeons marched through the patio, their heads thrusting and receding, like horizontal pistons—I wondered how their brains could be calm enough to take in what they saw, given all that jarring movement.
An hour after we gathered, a judge appeared, and on microphone pitched his standard prose about how good we all were to be there in the interest of justice, even though, he added with a grin, we were summoned.
When the time came to call names, randomly selected, for each panel, I, for one, was already on edge, testy, and eager to go home.
Six criminal trials, the staff worker announced to us, twelve jurors with four alternates for each, so, as I did the math, I realized that close to a hundred of our one-forty would be impaneled. My slim hope for a reprieve was if I could be challenged by one of the lawyers, but I didn’t know what grounds I might have. Maybe being a writer would prove threatening to one side or the other.
Here’s where the fluky connection to my life clicked in. My name was called. I was ushered into a courtroom with twenty others and we waited till the judge, a woman, entered. One-by-one we were tapped—I was number nine—until twelve were selected and asked to sit in the jury box. One-by-one the judge asked us questions about ourselves, and, in the process, revealed the nature of the impending case, outcome options, and finally, the name of the accused.
Voila! It was a rape case, and the defendant was one K. Prism.
I was not permitted to interrupt the others during questioning, but when it came my turn, I blurted out, “I know him. The victim is my girlfriend!”
My voice was so sonorous, its timbre so ferocious, that the judge broke into laughter.
“Go home, Mr. Candle. You’re excused.”
The experience unnerved me, and I totally forgot about my stashed nail clipper.
I decided to be a background spectator at the first day of Prism’s trial. It was important to check out his attitude and appearance. There was no doubt he would be convicted, even if Alejandro did not—and he would not—testify. The prosecutor had told Abby she would have to take the stand, most likely on the second or third day.
I sat near the back of the courtroom, not interested in the defendant seeing me, certainly eschewing any kind of confrontation, visual or verbal.
Then I noticed it. At first, nothing registered. So what if the animal wore an earring? But that earring! One only, a circle of silver in his left ear, a partner to the one I picked from the ashes at Abby’s parents’ house.
At the time I had thought it a woman’s bauble, and I questioned Abby, who disowned it. We both dismissed its importance, certain that no woman could have torched the place.
Prism had always worn two ruby studs. I had never seen him with a dangler of any kind. But then, for the courtroom, in his vanity, he had inserted his ring of iniquity, his remaining clone––unaware, I was sure, of the fate of its missing twin.
That first day in court lasted only two hours, the judge hearing pleas and the jury hearing opening arguments. Prism’s lawyer, a small bald man in a dark suit that seemed to give off a luminescent sheen of its own, spoke in an oily voice. I had been told he was a shark, from a firm known for its gaudy tactics, and that made me uneasy, knowing Abby’s low boiling point. The shark told the jury that the alleged victim had a history of conflict with the defendant, and that, of all people to claim to be a rescuer, how come this one turned out to be her mentally disturbed cousin? My earlier assessment about the conviction being a slam-dunk was suddenly shaken.
I couldn’t wait to consult with Abby about my earring discovery. It seemed imperative that we go to the police, though it would be only my word that the second earring of the pair had come from the fire.
At home, I frantically dug out the plastic baggy with the evidence, held it up to the light and—yes, thank you, fates, for your bounty; it had been seared by the flame, blackened on one arced area, solid confirmation of its origin in the ashes!
With profound relief I said to Abby over the phone, “That should do it. Arson ought to add a couple more years to the asshole’s sentence.” I didn’t tell her about my latest appraisal of the rape trial.
When Abby had said she wanted to meet with me to discuss repairing her flawed lif
e, she specified in a couple of days. Ken Prism’s trial interrupted that plan, and without words I knew we would not speak about us, and her troubles, as she saw them, for quite a time.
Just as well. There were too many balls up in the air. The world needed to settle, decisions had to be reached, the recent sequence of Abby’s encounters with cousin and culprit had to be reconciled and put into perspective. That, I hoped, might alter her view of her life as shredded and in need of mending.
My mother, at this chaotic time, added another dimension to our little tableau.
First, she wrote me a letter, on her perfumed, linen stationery, in which she addressed the now exposed secret of her trespass against me. I consider it sufficiently poignant to present here:
My Dear Son: You likely will not believe me, but as with you, I had buried the incident between us when you were a child. Your father had left only a few months before, and I was suffering, sick with loneliness, hungering for a relationship that would reconfirm me as a desirable woman.
No excuse for what I did. I certainly did not expect you to be that relationship. Craving something beyond one’s reach can infect like a virus, compelling and obsessing. I recall how tormented I was during those days.
I looked in on you, as I often did at night, to make sure you were secure, and there you were, adorable, innocent and all mine. My emotions conquered my logic. I didn’t hurt you, at least not physically. You were so drowsy, I doubted you’d even remember—and I was right, at least until a few days ago.
If I was the instrument of pain for you, and now I’m certain I was, I apologize, though I am aware that apologies are anemic in a case like this.
Again, it may be hard for you to take this in, but this is the first time I can remember—maybe in my entire life—that I’ve owned up to a heinous offense. Perhaps in the light of that revelation, you can forgive me, or at least keep open a place for me in your heart. Love, Mother.
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