Eluthia Prologue

Minus could not help but dream hard. Although his alcohol-sanctioned days were behind him, alcohol still saturated his memories catapulting him everyday into a dream mythos. When he would bed down for the night, his dreams would engulf him, and he would wake up oftentimes from a lengthy pilgrimage that displayed a twisted bird’s eye view of his childhood. Memories they were not, but reinventions, reimaginings…   His dreams did not compartmentalize into smaller unhinged mini-dreams, but there brevity suggested the dream of a self-contained place independent of excessive luggage we may bring to them. Yet this dream possessed a sentient intelligence of its own that somehow flirted with his waking life, mocking it, laughing at it and even at times training the eye to see around corners and initiate unfinished roads.

 

Minus peered back at his dreams as to contain them in jars to take a closer look. He did not live through them vicariously or objectify them as a psychoanalyst would do. The psychoanalyst lived a detached trivial relationship with what he observed, yet Minus immersed himself into his dreams, coursed his fingers through them, and lolled on its proverbial field of grass.

 

Dream Narration

 

Dream within a dream, a body within a body, my torso is the everlasting landscape, my eyes black manifesto. Thrown from another dream into this mechanical, engineered world. An army base that appears to be surrounded in barbed wire. They are barricading themselves against something else. They are coming! Hungry mouths and faraway eyes like shark eyes. Gleaming red. Deemed zombies I suppose. A world emptied like a peanut shell without the peanut. The landscaped scales upward into snowy peaks 20,000 feet high, I look below me and I am back down again. But they were still chasing me through air conditioning vents, through schools, playgrounds and backyards. The scenario concludes on the rooftops.

                                    

 

I am still trying to find my way back home. Lost in a dirt country road where I had left adolescence long ago. In those days there was a lot of driving. This is a using dream, drinking my fake beer and smoking my imaginary joint that never seems to get my high. I frolic from party to party, from stranger to stranger, and end speeded up at the 7-11, now listening to the unsung lyrics of encore never written yet.  The colors of this dream, asphalt and lots of greenery. Sometimes mountains get in the way, but not too often. It’s mostly the street signs that confuse me, driving home in a daze, coming from the all night midnight party. I circle back on the roller coaster highways, looping around in endless recession. I may have to recess to the rivers to get back the way I came. Although it is a long way down to those army of ants at the end.

 

 

 A brief narration of a dream hung on the pinnacle of memory, a marriage tightly uniformed in Minus’s head. There was something discerning and mystique about the way he remembered his parents. He could remember his parent’s house with the fireplace and the piano sitting in the corner, his parents socializing with their high society friends and his uncle meanwhile basking and scoffing in the corner. Minus was about four years old at the time.

 

That same night he remembered spiraling down an endless staircase, as if the memory had birthed him that night, as if the womb were the dream that placated him there, that his own flesh was the product of someone else’s dream. His uncle’s resentment towards him was as real as sunshine, but the endless spiraling staircase was the red eye that tainted a photograph. Being a fan of Jim Morrison, Minus related to the shamanic dream or trauma, that Morrison experienced as a child. In Jim’s memoirs and poems, Minus could tell that Jim had been baffled about how one as a child-separated dream from reality. Recounting the writing of Morrison, Minus could feel the inevitable realness of the crash described that killed the natives. However, how Jim recalled the incident, his writing indicated a dream reality disassociation, a psychological distancing of that trauma. Minus personally knew somewhere on the ocean line of the subconscious that something else had been distancing him, keeping him from his identity.

 

What would a dream actually look like on paper? He thought. The dream was still faintly there as if its roads were carrying him down, brushing through trees and doorways.

 

Nine months of sobriety, but who is counting? Footwork, they preached in Alcoholics Anonymous, paid the bills, constructed highways, formed workable relationships. Minus, however, had an infatuation for the weird, the uncreated, the unrealized… he never poised himself on one side of an issue, always walked on a bridge where there was none, insisted that the ghost of a voice lounged somewhere articulating that novel he always wanted to write… it was just unrealized, its birthright never satiated by the sap of nature’s donned finger.

 

Minus exercised the fancies he could only summit within his oceanic adorned room. His room was an extension of his body, the walk-in closet, a museum of past encounters filled with literature of and before his time. His ghastly wardrobes had grown sullen, worn and tired as if phantoms discarded their use. Most of his RUSH and Pink Floyd t-shirts were fatigued and cheese clothed by pot hole burns. Then there was that quintessential green flannel shirt coat he wore many times in the Spillway, still scented by charcoal embers from his campfire days with his three friends Valentine, Beef and  Shawn. The shirt coat, tethered and flint coated, had seen better days when it use to wear him. It use to be a symbol of his anthem to adolescence, the green flannelled shirt-coat of his Huckleberry days in the mud infested spillway, a cornerstone of rebellion against his own flesh and blood body. Now, the green monstrosity seemed to take a life of its own, as it hung loosely on the wire hanger like a meat hook.

           

With nine months of sobriety under his belt, his mind and body began sorting new realities, but the nuances of his past wedged themselves carelessly into stored components of wish washy surrealistic, cinematic silent movies whose stale bread, entourage performances made no sense at all. Minus felt casted in a new role stark naked without any remembrance as to whom he was or where he came from. Inebriated by the novel sober lifestyle, only tiny mirror fragments puzzled a conglomerate picture of self, faintly tangible by his recollected portrait of his father over his bedside dresser. He never formed a plausible relationship with his uncle Willard, yet those recessive genes of questionable character Minus had acquired from him. His relationship with him likened to a tenant clientele liability, his uncle Willard a brooding, drunken proprietor given to flatulence and monetary skyscraper desires. All in all Uncle Willard was the stranger in the house whom took it upon himself as the recipient parental guardian certainly not due to charity, but to means Minus had not quite figured out. Willard, a surly man, few strands of hair lost from old age who once had been a prominent individual contractor for Minus’s father. Details of their relationship had been unknown, yet somewhere in the house were papers, contracts and a will reciprocated by Willard after Minus’s parents had died in an unfortunate automobile accident.

                    

Minus and Willard were never close, and they drew apart even further when Minus had ceased drinking, ending the only close proximity they had between themselves and the bottle. However, even their drunken escapades together never quite entitled an Uncle and his nephew kind of relationship. His Uncle snaked his way into Minus’s affection only drunken stupors could manage. Uncle Willard’s hospitality included only those swaying saunters over to the bars and brothels. On the other hand closeness between the two resigned itself to distances managed by an over the seas navy lifestyle.

 

Minus furnished his own room in the basement of the house, partitioning what little space he had to set boundaries for his new life. Minus did the smart thing. He bought his own mini-fridge because his uncle had just become too intolerable. The only time Minus went upstairs was when he had to walk out of the front door on his way to work. In his using past, Minus was like the hobo on skid row down in that basement. Minus might as well have been a decorating sconce on his wall. Minus was his room in those days. Minus had had spent most of his time drinking and his mood belated and complimented the encryptions Minus would see on the wall. It was like Sarah Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The wallpaper, a bleak orange-brown abstract nightmare coarse with faces, barricaded Minus on all sides. It made him utterly depressed in such a cesspool of unending insanity. It provided a wealth of source material for his writing. Minus had written a story, in which the wallpaper came to life and the narrator beckoned with it until he sold his soul and became a part of wallpaper. Colors were different in his using period. A lot duller, more bleak and depressing. Facing his uncle then, was like facing the German Army, in which Minus was like a confined Jew. His writing and paintings were different, implementing coarser browns, yellows, and tinges of bright orange. The browns and dull yellows seemed to implore entrapment and the oranges, a tease of freedom.

 

Now, the wallpaper was just merely bad design.

 

He would often hear Willard’s footsteps pacing the floor above him, coupled with inebriated shouts at imaginary drinking buddies he replaced for the absent nephew. Minus would shudder underneath his blanket to escape not only Willard’s drunken acknowledgements of phantoms menaces, but also to refute the reminder that those same phantoms slowly purged from memories that cutthroat with an uncertain horizon ahead, folding reality and dream together. It would take a while for Minus to pick up those pieces, and make his way back home.

 

Reviews

[Blackbirdsong]

Lionel I can see all the work you've done on this and it just read so much better than it ever did before. This story is really growing from it once was. As always your deft use of inner description amazes me. The landscapes you describe as well the outward ones. I can see Minus and his worlds clearly, along with all of his inner turmoil and confusion. This is a great start.