His clarion call comes at night to me from inside my dreams….Like a gust of wind blowing through an attic full of sheet covered objects. And even though it looks like shivering ghosts in here, I’m somehow more terrified of what is underneath.
I know he is dead. I know it.
Still in my most recent dreams, he’s as real as me…feelable…his presence could stand on my shadow and pin it to the sidewalk. And he’s never where he should be.
It’s one thing to dream about The Back There…where I’m small and he’s not. It’s one thing to dream about the terrible things that happened in the trailer over 30 some-odd years ago. Even though it’s still awful to dream about those early nightmare years that made me into my own little piece of troubled real estate, I’ve grown around the problem–because I can always wake up to the Here & Now…where I’m 40, where I’m safe, where I’m not being assaulted daily by evil men while God is on another call. But these dreams are not that. In them, I am living my current life and he pops up like an extra in places he isn’t scripted to be.
I am at my desk at work, surrounded by Medicaid billing to check, a half-drunk cup of lukewarm coffee, too many writing utensils and notebooks, lovingly selected—as I am wont to be found in real life. I look up to see there is someone at the desk in the cubicle across from mine. Seated at the desk is my ratfuck uncle. No one else seems to notice that he’s there…just type-type-typing away at the computer, his clothes stiff with sweat and manure…I can’t see his feet but I intuitively know that if he were to get up and limp towards me, he would be wearing calf-high rubber boots that slap against his pants…Probably with some amount of duct tape holding them together. His cane, that fucking cane that came down on the dimples of my little chubby hands as I frantically scrabbled on my bruised hands and knees trying to get to the door, is leaned up against the desk…It’s almost as if it’s waiting for Charlie Chaplin to come through, pick it up and do a comical waddle, swinging it side to side, while twitching his Hitler moustache…My uncle pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and he moves his face closer to his computer screen. In the glow of technology, I see the face that sometimes is blurred in my dreams to protect me. Everything is so clear, bathed in screen-light. The crag of his wrinkles, the rasp of his stubble, his chapped lips. My mind comes unstuck from reality.
I drop to the floor and cower behind my desk.
The feeling is familiar.
How many times did I drop to the floor from that little wooden chair? Crawl behind the table and try to make myself small as possible, before being dragged out by my lace-trimmed bobby socks? Screaming for a mother who never appeared to save me and desperately grabbing for table legs, chair legs, cracks in linoleum? Anything to prevent what was about to happen…
I peek over the edge of my desk to see if there is a way to get out without him seeing me. He makes eye contact with me and grins in victory. It’s clear he’s been aware of me the whole time and been waiting for this exact moment. I feel myself start to shake and the most horrible of wails comes out of my mouth. It is like a train whistle, high pitched and powered by years of rage and grief. Steam and vapor and ear-piercing volume.
As I’m breaking down in screams, he lumbers out of his chair, grabbing his cane.
I somehow get my body to cooperate in ways I never could as a child. I get the hell up and run for the door. I feel the smallest whiff of touch—as he grabs for my summer dress.
I am suddenly in a grocery store. The Price Chopper on Genesee. I spin like a camera in a movie, trying to orient myself to how I got there, what I’m supposed to be doing. Stranger things have happened in my reality due to my ability to dissociate my way in and out of situations. I’ve woken up in a graveyard, trying to dig up his grave before-without remembering driving there. I’ve come to miles off course from a midnight walk, unsure of where I’ve been or where I am or how to get home at 3 am. Again, my knees dirtied. In contrast, waking up at a store in a dream hardly seems weird at all.
I don’t know who’s at the control panel of my mind, but if I’m at a store, I guess I’m supposed to shop. I get a basket & I’m walking aimlessly. Even in my dream, something is off. There is no muzak. The produce bears no scent. The fruit looks too bright. It’s decoratively waxy and doesn’t yield to my touch. In the middle of the produce section, there’s a pyramid of limes and oranges and limes. I’m drawn to it. I reach for an orange from the outermost side, one that won’t disturb the rest of the structure should I remove it. As I touch the orange, old, bent fingers grab my wrist and painfully twist it.
He laughs at my surprise. I want to bash him in the face, but all I can do is pull fruit frantically from the pyramid with my free hand, hoping one topples the tower of fruit on top of him, so that I can get away.
“Stop that. Stop it,” he hisses in that weasely voice. He grabs my other hand. I’m pulling back, hard…but he’s so supernaturally strong. I’m appealing to other customers for help, but no one wants to get involved or even look at me. He pulls me in towards him, even as I’m struggling, and he whispers in my ear, “I’ve been waiting for you. I’m gonna do what I should’ve done years ago…Enjoy you and then finish this.” I’m not in my body, I can’t feel anything physically, except that my whole being is vibrating with terror. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to fucking kill me. Like he tried to all those years ago…the way he and his friend would cover my nose & mouth with their hands & laugh as I panicked and nearly suffocated…with the car…with the gun. He is starting to drag me out the door, his hand on the back of my neck. My hair woven through his fingers. All I can think about is the term swimmers use when they’re fatigued, how they’ll say “I’ve got no feel.” Baby, I’ve got no feel.
But the light hits us and I’m transported.
I think for a minute I’m dead. I must be. It’s so bright. I’m painless. He’s gone. I’ve accepted that this is it.
But then, I realize I’m with friends at a concert, at the Lakeview Amphitheater. The sun is violent with its shine, but there’s a breeze. I feel a sense of amazement and take a minute to appreciate the blueness of the sky. I turn my hand into the bill of a hat above my eyes as I scan, even though my wrist aches slightly for some reason when I do that. Alicia laughs besides me and swigs a beer…the wheaty malt smell is stirred up and it is comforting. The girls are next to her, the unmistakable skunky smell of weed emanating from their area. I hear K.’s girlish, lovely laugh at something R. said. I feel unbearably light, I’m all helium. I think I’m happy? Or maybe just insane with gratitude and a trifle high? I don’t know the band that is performing, but the sound is a homogenous mix of major key sounds all jangled up in my ear. I turn to Alicia to tell her that I think I’m high or drunk because I don’t remember how I got there.
As I look at Alicia, she is dancing slightly behind the beat, eyes closed, waving her beer in the air. I am mid-laugh, when I see him behind her, behind K & R. My uncle is just standing there, watching me. The crowd shuffles around him, dancing and moving closer to the band. He remains still, locked on me. People push around me, but I am a statue of fear, carved out of unmovable marble by a cruel artist. I know that look on his face. I know what he wants. It’s like a dog whistle, that look. One that only I can hear. One meant to call me to him. I feel the compulsion I felt as a 5 year old when he would look at me like that…being programmed to go to him. He would look at me like that while I was riding my bike in the yard or reading on that rock under the tree. Terrified, I would follow him into the trailer, knowing it would be worse if I didn’t. I would follow him knowing that if I went on my own, he might be gentle…he might not make me do…the really bad things. And, even though it was overwhelmingly likely that he still would, after, he might tell me how much he loved me. He might tell me I’m special, even as I wiped my blood onto his unwashed sheets. Poppies of my young blood blooming in the garden of dirt found on his dirty bedding. Those kind of soul-feeding words were in short supply in my little, filthy, throwaway life. And so, I’m not proud, I would always go. And at this moment, as he looks at me that way, I start to feel the pull. The body drifts towards. A ship on a collision course with an iceberg. A pilot damned by mountaintops in mist.
A girl most certainly destroyed.
As I get closer to him, the world smears around me, losing dimension. Everything feels increasingly unreal. When I’m only a few steps away from him, I realize I should run or fight. I’m not 5 years old, trapped in a hopeless situation where I have no choice but to lay there and take it. But as my fist comes up, I see his hand coming up out of his pocket. A glint of metal reflected in the sun. He brings the gun up in front of him, his hands clasped in a deadly prayer. Slow-mo. Underwater movement. This unreal moment, this other bookend holding the violent volumes of our story from childhood to now. He closes one old blue eye in a vicious wink to lock his target in and I begin to scream….
And I wake up.
You fucker. You bloody destroyer of my life. I wish I could kill you myself. But no, your own body took you out. Blood poisoning from an untreated cut from your manure spreader, traveling up your arm, making its way to your heart…till you were so weakened you collapsed on the milkhouse floor on that cold December day and you laid there…and laid there. When someone finally found your body, you were frozen to the cement. A terrible statue, a monument to evil.
I wish I could’ve been there and watched you on that floor for as long as it took for you to die…I’d sit there drinking with the devil as he waited and I’d tell him all about what you like, Uncle. God might not have cared about what you and your friend did to me, but the devil surely will.
Song Choice: Butchered Tongue by Hozier
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