What had the song said? “Long as stars are in the blue,” he whispered and then jumped when his phone rang.
“Are you there yet?” Annie asked when he answered.
“Almost,” he said.
Jeremiah could hear her shuffling papers on her desk. “Good.” She paused. “You’re remembering more, aren’t you?”
He swallowed. “I think I should’ve seen Feltzman.”
Annie laughed. “There’s time for that later. Give the magic a chance. You saw the cards.”
No, he saw pieces of paper and characters drawn with swords and wands and cups. She saw something bigger, some vast conspiracy of epic love and heroic measures. This card was something ancient returning. This other was a present reality that could sustain that return. This one meant a journey longer than any he’d undertaken before and the last, the only one he truly believed, was a wife that loved him enough to send him off to Oregon pursuing a dream. They’d all become a blur as she’d enthusiastically spelled them out. He smiled at the memory of how she told that story with her hands, her eyes bright and level as she did.
“Yes,” he finally said. “I saw the cards.”
“I’m way better than Feltzman.”
Jeremiah chuckled. “You’re cheaper.”
“Follow the dreams, Jeremiah. Let them take you where you need to go.” More shuffling. “I think you need this and I’m proud of you for you going.”
He sighed, glancing at his GPS. “Thirty-eight miles.”
“Good. Call me when you get settled.”
The silence after her voice was oppressive and he turned on the radio, settling into a classic rock station out of Astoria. When Maroon 5 came on, he rolled down the windows and tried to sing with them about fire burning in her eyes and chaos controlling his mind, about saying goodbye too many times before. He felt the lyrics washing through him, over him, and wondered at their sudden power over him.
The sky answered Jeremiah with the first sprinkles of November rain and he pressed on.
He drove into Canon Beach as the rain picked up and when he turned the corner and saw the rock looming up in the surf, he pulled over. He thought his first sight of it would fulfill a longing that had built in him since the dreams began but instead, it deepened and twisted it into an ache. He heard what he thought was a quiet cough and realized it was his own sudden sob.
I’ve lost something here. Lost and forgotten, leaking back into him with each dream.
Blinking back tears, Jeremiah climbed back into the car and eased slowly back onto the road. He knew the motel as soon as he saw it and checked into a room remembered from his most recent dream. He unpacked, folding his clothes into the bureau carefully, then slipped down to the grocery store to stock his kitchenette. Peanut butter, jelly, bread, instant coffee, frozen dinners and orange juice. Easy food and drink.
Still, when he reached the seafood section, he bought fresh oysters, too, along with corn starch and butter. He’d never eaten them before and had no idea how to cook them but he tucked them into the refrigerator all the same.
Annie would say that the magic told him to do it and he listened. She would be proud and say it with her hands.
Feltzman would say that Annie was crazier than Jeremiah but he would say it more politely than that and reach for his calendar to schedule their next session.
“What do you say?” Jeremiah asked the giant rock beyond his balcony.
Then he went out into the rain to walk the empty shore.
#
He is drowning again.
He cannot breathe. Did he need air before? He cannot remember. Did he need anything before?
He needed her. Needs her still. He screams her name as cold salt water fills inadequate lungs.
Then something tugs at him and he is pulled out of the dark abyss, dragged floundering onto the shore by three strong beings that his body already mimics. They have long dark hair and tan skin, glistening wet in the afternoon sun. They are careful to examine him with their eyes only. They keep him in the net.
Across the rolling waves, he sees her. She still shines even in their newfound darkness.
She calls for him as another net and group of young men is sent out into the water.
The sound of her voice feels like home to him but the natives of this place cannot bear it; they cover their ears and mutter. When she struggles, screaming on the shore, two of the female beings grab her and hold her down, soothe her. Her voice is gone wrong now. Her light dims as incarnation takes root and she absorbs the building blocks needed for life here. He looks down at himself and doesn’t recognize what he has become.
Inadequate and awkward, these beings wrapped in darkness.
Later, the natives of this place feed them bits of meat roasted in sharp shells over fires on the beach near the massive rock. They taste like the ocean he fell into and it makes him gag. She laughs and eats another.
He is hollow and in the morning, when he awakens to the cries of unfamiliar birds, she is gone and he cannot remember her name.
A day passes and he can’t remember her at all.
#
Muscles sore from three days of walking, Jeremiah found a driftwood log facing Haystack Rock and sat, slowly chewing the sandwich he’d brought. There was a beauty in that pillar of stone but there was a sorrow in it, too, and it called to him. He’d started out onto the low rocks that led up to it a dozen times over the last few days, turning back at the warning signs. Climbing out on the rock was a steep fine and people had died doing it, snatched by waves and incoming tides.
But yesterday’s dream had seized him here in the shadow of the rock, dropping him to the sand, and for a moment November was gone and summer bathed his naked skin as he dried beneath a sun that burned eyes still unaccustomed to it.
Jeremiah finished his lunch, sipped his water, and climbed to his feet. A few kite-fliers were winding in as the wind rose and the sky darkened. It had rained off and on but now, a storm was coming.
I am part of that storm, he thought. And somewhere, if she were as real as this rock, she was part of the storm as well.
He looked up and down the shore and asked the magic once again to show her to him.
The tide was out and the beach was empty when he finally slipped down to the base of the rock. Jeremiah glanced over his shoulder and then stepped tentatively onto a stone. Moving from rock to rock, he passed the signs and slipped deeper into the shadows. He moved along a wide crack in the stone, wet and smelling of salt and seaweed and as he climbed up into the light, he thought he heard distant voices shouting somewhere behind him.
Jeremiah didn’t listen. He kept climbing until he could climb no more, his feet and hands suddenly sure of themselves. When he could go no further, he saw the slight depression in the stone above him and when he placed his hand into it, it fit him. It had fit him all of these forgotten times before, since the day they first fell. Beside and just below it, he saw the smaller depression, the one made for her hand.
“Where are you?”
Then, he climbed back down and returned to his log to watch and wait for her.
#
The orange polyester curtains flap in the night wind. The moon illuminates silver strands woven into it. His eyes burn from the salt, the light, and the wind. The ocean roars and the cold air runs through him as he remembers. Her shivering beside him awakens the rest of his senses and he glances at her. Her hair is long, down to her waist. She smells of the earth, the sea, and of unknown herbs. He looks down at the cigarette in his hand, puts it to his mouth and takes a long drag. He thinks about the draft notice in his pocket.
She lifts her head up to look at him. “What?”
“One of their wars.” He stomps the butt out on the carpeted balcony and throws it over the edge. “It’s better than polio,” he says.
She frowns and he touches her face. He can’t see her eyes as they should be, sees them only as they are in this place. B
ut he yearns to see the stars in them, the map homeward buried there for him to follow.
He leans close. There’s a flower behind her ear and it tickles his nose. “What’s your name?”
She holds her hand up to his face and strokes it with delicate fingers. They are long this time. When he remembers her from before, she is stretching for eternity. Her inner light the length of the sky.
She smiles and the brightness pushes through. Her voice is low, husky with the strongest sense longing these bodies can provide. “I’ll show you my name.”
She rises from her chair, opens the wool blanket she’s covered herself with, and reveals her shape to him. He stares at her softness. He pulls her down onto him. He strokes the sides of her soft supple legs. She is ready for him. It is as though they’d fit this way forever.
Inside the hotel room, The Doors quietly sing, “Do you think you’ll be the guy who makes the queen of the angels sigh?”
With each push, each tug, each kiss the music grows louder until it is so loud neither can hear the ocean or the moans of passion blending into their own ancient, forgotten hymn.
When they come together, the deejay announces, “Number Fourteen on the Billboard top charts for 1968,” and they giggle as he cradles her in his lap.
After, they run to the ocean unafraid.
He still doesn’t know her name. But he knows now with certainty that even if he learned it, he would forget it tomorrow like so many times before.
#
“It’s you,” she said and Jeremiah opened his eyes.
She stood over him, wet from the rain, and he stood up from the log. This time, she was petite, her blond hair spilling out beneath a knit Hello Kitty hat. Her eyes were blue.
“It’s you,” he answered.
She nodded. “Here we are again.”
Jeremiah sighed. “I don’t remember it all. But these dreams….”
“Hello, I love you,” she said. “Won’t you tell me your name?”
“Yes,” he said, blushing at the memory of her hands, different then, upon him. “Jeremiah.” He extended his hand, then dropped it.
She took it up and squeezed it between both of hers. Her grip was strong. “Imogene.” Her eyes went serious. “Do you know why we’re here?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly. Maybe to remember something.” It sounded weak and he reached for something else. “Maybe magic.”
She laughed. “I’m a biochemist,” she said. “I don’t believe in magic.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully something more Jungian than Freudian. But I’m here and I know you. I’ve known you….”
“For a long time,” he said, finishing her sentence. He looked to the tide, measured it against the rock. “I think I know what we do next.”
He led her out to the rock, her own feet and hands finding themselves as his did. She was younger than him this time, certainly more athletic, and his ragged breathing made him blush. When they had climbed as far as they could, their hands touched briefly just above the space they’d been made to fill.
“Are you ready, Jeremiah?” she asked.
“I’m ready, Imogene.”
Each holding breath, they laid their hands upon the stone and listened as the ocean’s roar around them became an eternal heartbeat they had forgotten, percussion to a hymn drowned in the darkness they’d fallen into.
#
He is light.
She is light.
They are a thousand tiny particles pulled downward faster and faster. Speeding across time. Racing across galaxies, across universes. More than he can comprehend and it makes him want to sing a song only his throat can find. She is singing beside him, out of reach, and their songs blend and crescendo. And as he builds speed something in him slows and blurs. The light of him changes, meets resistance, breaks through into something new, something other than. Her light, too, from the corner of his rudimentary eyes. What was once bright is gone dark, and below them in the distance something shines. They are no longer a part of what was above.
They are no longer light.
They are less than. They are dark on light. And he cannot hear their song.
Another ocean swallows him whole and he is drowning again. Pain cuts him like a million shards of glass.
Cold and wet, weighed down by what he’s lost, Jeremiah opens his eyes upon what he’s found.
They stand within a large room carved from unfamiliar stone, walls veined in light that pulse and take shape, becoming figures. Beings sent out, two by two, dropped into oceans in search of life, their stories played out upon the wall.
“It’s us,” Jeremiah whispers. He wants to trace the images with his finger but can’t let go of the girl’s hand beside him. It steadies and stills him.
“It’s all of us,” she says. And he sees the truth in it. Two by two across universes and galaxies, through vast reaches of time, they travelled and explored and learned.
Light lifts from their bare skin and twists into something braided and harmonious overhead before drifting slowly to the wall. It moves over the stone to find blank space, then adds the most recent images to an ongoing story, a glorious hymn to the emergence and experience of life.
Jeremiah remembers a movie from his childhood and the simplicity of it makes him laugh loudly in this place. “We are ET phoning home,” he says.
“Yes,” Imogene answers. “And remembering briefly who we are.”
He feels an ache in his chest. “I don’t want to forget anymore.”
She squeezes his hand tighter. “I don’t think we get to choose.”
He opens his mouth to reply but stops when the lights dim and then brighten, dim and then brighten like a theater coming back from intermission. He holds his breath, waits and listens.
Then the wall of story sings and they sing with it, their throats no longer rudimentary, their voices no longer caged in the darkness of their flesh. They sing of love and loss and war and disease and hope and faith and disbelief. They sing of life crawling up from oceans and adapting as it goes. They sing of the bond between travelling companions separated and brought together again and again to add their story to the song. Reminders of home in a faraway, frightening place.
Then they are light drowning in light, drowning in each other, until the rain and wind are cold upon them once again.
“I have oysters in my room,” he tells her as they climb down.
“I’ve not had them this time around,” she says. “But I found a recipe online.”
He takes her hand, remembering a thousand other worlds with her, millions of lives explored by full immersion. The careful rinse and repeat to capture every aspect, every essence, every bit of light that can be added to the hymn.
“I’ve not had them either,” he says as they splash through pools of water up onto a moonlit beach.
She smiles at him. “I’ll bet they taste like the ocean.”
#
Jeremiah slept without dreams and awakened to a dry pillow. He reached for Annie but she wasn’t there beside him. When he sat up, he felt the panic rising.
This was not his house. This was not his bed. It was a motel room that smelled of seafood and sex and saltwater. He reached for his phone.
“Did you find her?” Annie asked as she picked up.
“Find who?” He could hear the fear in his voice.
Annie heard it, too. “The girl. You found the rock. Did you find the girl?”
Jeremiah closed his eyes. “Where am I, Annie? What the fuck is going on?” The fear was quickly becoming something bigger, something closer to terror. He’d had his share of problems, a long struggle with depression especially, but missing time and waking up in a strange place had not been one of those problems.
Her tone became soothing. “Jeremiah,” she said, “you’re panicking. Breathe.” She paused. “Focus.”
He listened to her and heard the sound of wa
ves in the distance. Jeremiah climbed out of bed, still naked, and pushed open the curtains to take in the ocean and the massive stone that rose up from it.
“I’m on the coast somewhere,” he said.
“You’re in Oregon,” she said. “You were having dreams. Look at your journal.”
He glanced around the room and saw nothing that looked like a journal. There were dirty dishes in the sink and a box of corn starch tipped over on the table. There were clothes on the floor, along with a blanket, and a fireplace gone cold, its ashes gray and lifeless. “What does it look like?”
“It’s a sketch pad,” she said.
He sat on the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. “When did I start keeping a journal?”
Now Annie hesitated and he heard the uncertainty in her voice. “You know, I can’t remember. You were keeping a journal?”
“Yes. I was dreaming about a rock and a girl.”
She sounded surprised. “You were?”
“You told me that just now.”
Annie was quiet. “Where are you, Jeremiah? When did you leave?”
She is forgetting too. His head hurt; his stomach ached. “You said I was in Oregon when I called.”
“You’re in Oregon?” He heard the beginning of frustration in her tone. When she was frustrated, she never talked with her hands, she held them still and he could imagine her posture through the phone. “Why are you in Oregon?”
He closed his eyes against the spinning of the room. “Ask the cards,” he said.
“When did you start trusting the cards?”
He tried to remember and couldn’t. Still, she found her deck and he packed while she read them. Something about a journey, something about carrying an important message. It made no sense to him. Still, he wanted to write it down.
He found a pen that wasn’t his—it was from some laboratory in San Francisco—but all of the paper in the room was gone and he suspected the fireplace was the culprit. He wrote it on the side of the empty box of corn starch.
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