Eluthia Ch 9

Minus bedded down for the night after trying to press Will for the missing pieces of memory that only Will could supplant, but he refused to talk about Caleb.

 

The doors of sleep gradually reined Minus into the dreamy hallway, the tunneled expanse vacuuming him into the magical repose of surrender. The hallway itself was adorned with Picasso depictions of his family. The experience of being siphoned inwards was like the forgettable plunge of birth. No recall in such a manner, but Minus would feel the marks when he would awake.

 

It also didn’t occur to Minus that what grabbed him was like his world on the other side like that faint recognition of home in alien places. Perception might have it that Minus was floating purposely, wading his arms and legs as if underwater, but a third eye paraded the phantom chariot and readied the horses. The steeds trumpeted with fierce agony, their beckoning neigh elicited by the gold framed mirrors that scaled the ceiling of the hallway. The mirrors wavered like the surface of a pool, daring the gazer to eye some uncomfortable truth.

 

There was yet a door in Minus’s life and that door was Gerald.

 

Minus unawares to the pictorials of love, fathomed the definition in early childhood blanket memories. The feeling presented itself with a strange girl with Eve-like blond hair, her locks lazily drooping with unfurled innocence, and with eyes that could stare right through a gleaming mirror. Minus did not know why, but he knew this girl, and as they made love they both uttered inner pasts, their moans a back alley to heavily articulated sighs. She made him feel like a child again, as if he were back home indulging in his mom’s cooking, but his desire towered too high and home was thousands of miles away, beyond the isolated school yards, the ragged hills and the deserted city where nymphs fabricated their incestuous activity and the Ullkrest hammered his minions into submission. Caleb faintly whispered in Minus’s ear and that was when Minus realized she was gone. Where did she go, he thought? His desire anchored him to the mirror, and there she was. He called her back, but she did not come, she could not for her dream warranted something else. Then Minus peers outside the window and hears a metallic banging coming from across the street in an abandoned warehouse. It was the rape of her soul that had kept her there and Minus could do nothing about it. The banging, sounding as if a pipe were hitting a gasoline drum, was nothing but the wishful snoring that had come out of Minus’s nose.

 

The dream elicited in him a feeling of distinct euphoria, as if his past regressions had been swiped away by a street cleaner, his foils transformed into magnanimous marble sculptures. He felt light as a feather, buoyant enough to accomplish his writing feats, durable enough to not be swayed by the darkest fervor instigated by his uncle, clarified enough with such mental acuity that he could identify the most miniscule piece of lint on his shirt. He could remodel and refurnish his whole bedroom if he wanted to.

                   

Today Gerald was taking Minus fishing and the appointed time could not have been so convenient, for Minus wanted to confide in Gerald about the dream he had. Without effort, Minus scoped the room for his fishing gear and found it in a flash right in the closet stashed behind his comic book collection. Minus sauntered out of his room, hastily grabbed his coat like a super hero on the run to save the day, and stealthily scurried upstairs as not to alert the villainous uncle. On the drive to Gerald’s Ocean Blue store, an enveloping flame stirred within the pit of his stomach, like that crush he had on Mindy Lee in the fourth grade, except this flame had given him formidable powers of sight and observation.

 

As Minus peered at himself through the rearview mirror, memories that were once clouded by obscurity came flickering through in a strobe light effect that complimented the day’s widening sky as the sun bled through the cotton clouds. His cheeks were rosy, his eyes buggy yet delightful, his body on the verge of youth again, rediscovered youth that had been dormant since that night at the campfire. His memories no longer blemishes of the eye, Minus could smell his mom’s homemade cooking, her perfumed neck scented with Chanel number five, and he could hear her playing Sonata number nine by Beethoven. In that old house memory of his, the chandeliers came skirmishing down in the foyer, the sunroof over their front door landscaped the front yard outside with its marbled bushes, and trimmed magnolias. Also in the foyer, his father painted brush strokes of this delightful scene, Carefree Days was the name of the piece and children frolicked and played around a gazebo, the grass sprouting and veining around it. “Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart was playing adding more watercolor schemes to Minus’s scenic recap of his mother and father, the song itself a vanity piece of Minus’s youth, “On a Morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time.” Minus remembered the whole scene like a painting in motion, stout characters coming to life like that canvas piece “Sunday in the Park”, the beady textures coming together to make a whole person.

 

Minus could not explain why the dream left him on a pink cloud. It wasn’t the rape of course, but the discovery of her in the mirror that tantalized him, made him ever urgent to look twice or a thousand times more in the mirror. A total recall, clairvoyant feeling had emerged from this dream, although he was unable to psychoanalyze the dream, he knew he just felt good. The woman in the mirror certainly was not an ex-girlfriend and she certainly wasn’t a stranger either. There was something eerily nostalgic about the dream coming through those deep waters, some familiar visage of humanity that Minus had once known.

 

Coming out of contemplation, Minus gleamed into the rearview mirror one last time, sorting out the remembrance of the dream he had along with the train of cars that passed him by on the highway; his sorting out the dreams of reality was like beaming from one place to another. The orange and purple sunrise seemed like an ethereal backboard for a scene in a movie, the faces of the drivers seemed airy and without regard of human emotion, they were being carried by an invisible mechanical force. From Minus’s side view, he could have sworn he saw a man’s face contort and ripple like a mirage on a hot day.

 

Minus parked his Chevy nova in front of the store and met Gerald at the front door, Gerald stood there like an ornament on a windowsill with ready to advise grace and astute expression of knowing where Minus had been and where he was going. He had that gift of knowing beforehand what you were going to say.

 

“On the pink cloud are we?” said Gerald.

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“The thing is I am not really sure.”

 

The riverbank’s waters glistened under the sunrise’s guise forming symmetrical kaleidoscope orange diamonds. From across the bank, Minus and Gerald sat silhouetted against the dark green brush of the trees, the sky tidal waving over, nature’s folds enveloping the both of them in a Monastic painting. The dream world of Eluthia, drawing very near to where they were, commenced its sentience in the rippled waters, the faint whispers of the air; Eluthia mimicked the decadence of this scene, in which Minus had dreamed occasions such as now, the mind manacles’ reaching outwards to compensate for the void from within; finding the right paint from the scenery to be used later in sleep, nature wilted in repose, for she would have her dreams too.

 

Gerald motioned his fishing rod with a straight shot into the water, the fishing line gliding gracefully to find its mark.

 

Beyond the riverbank, a train steamrolled on by, its haunting whistle announcing it had many miles to cover, conveying into barren lands no one has ever seen, composing a musical entourage to Gerald and Minus’s conversation.

 

“Well, I won’t oblige ya with my stories of women.

 

“It certainly feels better than love, yet it is more elusive than that. I feel strengthened, whole. I bear a lot more clarity then I did than.”

 

Gerald possessed the eyes of an owl; a man who himself had went through many pilgrimages on barren lands. Gerald obliged Minus with a look of consternation.

 

“You can only be on a pink cloud for so long, a sense of clarity can only be so enduring. It is our clouded judgment, the way of the fool, that teaches us the most. You are too young to take things so seriously. So who is this girl?”

 

“Well, there was this strange girl in my dreams.”

 

“The girl of your dreams huh? Pun intended.”

 

“No girl ever living made me feel that way. She was a stranger, yet I felt like I knew her. I woke up with this sense of euphoria.”

 

“Maybe you do know her. I don’t know, not too much on psychoanalyzing dreams, but she may be an unrealized part of yourself.”

 

Minus anchored his fishing pole with extreme rigor, struggling with the release of the line. Gerald had said something he did not realize. Of course Minus never had that much experience with women, so it was hard for him to discern or make sense of this dream woman.

 

“A lot of things I have tried to make sense of on my own never worked until now. Everything I have tried to will on my own in the past became frivolous and futile.”

 

“It is good that you became sober at your age. I have had a time or two with drinking myself, and believe me you can’t help but search for your own footing and your place in the world. But the tricky thing is when the booze is all out of your head for the first time in years, your equilibrium isn’t quite right. And your mind and body is trying to sort itself out, trying to make right with what’s out there in the world. At first they usually don’t mix, but you have to make it work. And maybe these dreams and your dreamgirl, there is a point to it. Like I told you the last time, be careful, don’t dream to hard.”

 

A reign of fire encircled the both of them as Minus listened intently to Gerald like a tribesman at story time. The riverbank and the brush of trees encircled them, nodding forward to listen to a tale that had been told for ages. The sun began to peek its head above the horizon like an ancient Greek god, casting a celestial ambience to the morning dew, and glorifying the tales that would be told thereafter. 

 

“I knew a man just like you who I fished with off the coast of Puerto Rico, I think he was mixed, Spanish and Indian, and he had this thing about dreams, visions he called them. He would get glary eyed and he could stare down a shark to death, really intense eyes. He was a hellavue fisherman too, he had the strength to to rig that sucka in and he’d clean it too. Had a bit of a drinking problem but who had’nt then, including me. We was on the wharf one night and he said he had a dream we would catch one of those large mackerel and he was specific about it too, said it would have a dry patch of white color on its forehead. Said we would encounter it when the sun was directly aligned with the horizon which would have made it nine o’ clock in the morning. And what do ya know, we caught a mackerel that had a white patch on the stem of its forehead. He believed the dream world was a real place like here. And he had a strange name for it too, something like esluthia or something.”

 

A jolt ran of surprise ran through Minus’s body, almost made him jump.

 

“Did I say something to startle ya son?” said Gerald.

 

“No, I just felt like I have heard that name from somewhere.”

 

“Small world, isn’t it?” said Gerald.