From a dream that stuck with me.

Easter Sunday

I wake up on a vibrant floral chaise. I’m in a garage of sorts. Cinderblock stacked walls and metal sheet garage doors line the walls.

Oversized garage doors sit a few feet behind me – attached are a pair of large windows. I look out the window as best I can. I can see a small gravel lot and beyond it the familiar highway that courses through the town I grew up in. I didn’t realize I was back home, but here we are.

Lenore is next to me on this chaise. I see a haze in her eyes reminiscent of the same drowsiness I feel. I’m not sure of anything right now, but I expect it to come to me.

Maybe we drove all through the night and ended up here? We were invited to church service, I know that. It’s Easter Sunday. Since our nap, about thirty to forty people found their way and tucked into this out of the way laugher of an auto shop.

I wonder if panic of stress is an appropriate internal response to this moment – given my disorientation, but I don’t feel even a sprinkle of either. I gently place my hand on Lenore’s shoulder. Having her by my side is natural, and I think that casts a wave of tranquility in what should be a moment of distress.

At the front of the garage are a pair of men, each in their own set of blue jeans and blazers. I recognize them.

One man is being interviewed… questioned… I guess I’m not really sure the format. He’s being interviewed by a man around fifteen or twenty years his junior. I vaguely recognize him. He was a smaller figure that runs in the same circles as the older man he is up there with; reminds me of a college professor I had. The man he is questioning is Dr. Wambel.

I’m not sure how Wambel ended up in this ratchet hole. I remember him best as prominent intellectual; penning best-sellers and going on tours with other figureheads of an online movement of scholars, academics, and other personalities. He was selling out historic auditoriums – crowds packed in to hear a couple of men argue over ontological, epistemological, and maybe even illogical subtleties of truth – and now… he’s here.

It’s weird.

The two men appear to be, in tandem, delivering their sermon by some sort of Abbott and Costello call and response exposition. I’m not really listening, though. Instead, I absorb some more of the room. This is the least dressed Easter Sunday service I’ve ever been to. I say this having grown up in a very laid back, southern Californian incudbated church of flip-flops and t-shirts and ex-hippies.

I don’t really notice any kids, maybe a few who appear teenagers. It is mostly a t-shirt and jean affair, with dirt, grease, and oil stains being in like tie-dye at Woodstock. Holes and ripped jeans feature, but not like any of those flavor of the week clothing lines. Rather the genuine flavor. Worn out shoes and disheveled faces round out the very humble appearances of the small gathering as they wear an eagerness to couple with the weary.

I make nothing of it, but still, my subconscious files it somewhere in mental storage to add to the background processes.

Up front the two men share a pair of cheap microphones that blare out of a small cube amp, and are currently droning on about what it means to be steadfast in today’s age. I can’t say I’ve really been listening so far, but my ears have hooked just enough into my mind that it sticks out to me that I don’t remember either of these men being so overtly religious. Instead of tickling at these subjects, they are latched on and flying through them like attached to a zipline.

Reflective of my own state, the entirety of the room gives off this feeling – how would I describe it? – it makes me feel like I’m not actually here right now.

I could be invisible or hidden or even dead, but nobody, not even Lenore has paid not even the smallest microtransaction of attention to our little corner of the room. Chalk it up to being asleep while everyone else trickled in the honor of the greater sacrifices of the day.

They must be enraptured in the sermon of the two, and now I feel somewhat heretical or at least like I have found my inner Peter. Before I can continue to ponder that, I hear a loud hiss and deep purring outside. There’s something waiting in that gravel lot. I can practically feel the mass of the nearest garage door gently rumbling along with the faint purr.

The angle of the two windows doesn’t really lend much visibility from where I’m at, but there is just enough metal lining the large door frame that I catch a large red and white blur in the poor excuse of a reflection the surface gives me.

It’s obviously a truck.

Nobody continues in their non-existent donation of any notice to anything I do as I pop up from resting position on this chaise. I turn around and quietly motion to the garage door and place a hand on it. I can feel a slight vibrating sensation so I rise. As if being slowly pulled by an invisible line, my head tilts forward as the rest of my body slowly follows and I try to find an angle to get a look out of the window.

I realize just how small the front lot to our hovel is as a beached white whale of a tractor trailer parallaxes into my view. It’s pulled off the side of the road, parallel, and blocks the only obvious exit to the road with its length. It’s unsettling how ominous the muted grumble it gives as it idles. Patiently, it waits. What is it waiting for?

I feel like an iris transition that you’d see in an old film strikes my vision and suddenly the rest of the garage, the gathering of people, the esteemed speakers, Lenore, even musty air behind me fades out in entirety and the idling truck floods the full arsenal of my senses. It’s overwhelming.

This flood of senses; it’s like I’ve suddenly hit some superhuman state of perception, time hunches down to all fours grows a shell on its back and just… crawls.

I’m now aware at just how grimey and unkempt I am – a perfect correlation to being jammed into our white truck and driving for hours on end. The thinnest layer of sweat glazes my forehead, swells into something with its own surface tension, and slowly bleeds onto the rest of my face. Relative to the day’s sunlight, it is dark in the idling truck’s cabin, but I can just barely see the driver.

Even further beneath the pulsating hum of the hulking mack truck, I think I hear the downbeat staccato of reggae music. I think it could even be Bob Marley’s Is This Love, but honestly who knows what my head thinks my ears are reeling in from this far away.

The man driving, quasi-silhouetted, might be around thirty. Bearded, wearing a white and red hat to match his trailer and faded flanner underneath a tan vest.

I don’t know by what device or knowledge, but this crippling fear strikes me and rattles its way through my entire network of bones as paranoia swells. Some intuition or maybe prior, temporarily lost knowledge opens my eyes to an awareness that I lacked just a second ago.

It has become a commonality, of sorts, for congregations like these to be gunned down or attacked by both rogues and small activist groups alike.

I have no idea if there is any truth to this ‘fact’, but it feels true in the moment.

Maybe… we shouldn’t be here.

Finally, and only just now, I feel the inconvenience of my currently hazy memory. Unreliably, I can only trust what I feel, and I feel impending doom as if it just slipped into bed and is dancing with the sheets, trying to get comfortable before it snuggles up next to me.

Lenore, Lenore. I see Le still on that chase a few feet next to me, and I can’t think of anything else right now. She’s been swept away in the service. My tunneled vision and hyper sensory state hasn’t faded, so she seems so far away from me. I’m only guessing, but she probably has a clue what’s going on and where all we were before I woke up here. How else could she be so calm?

I touch the splinters of memory I can and I see our battered white truck. We pulled it down a path around the building and it is tucked away in a makeshift grass lot with everyone else. I don’t know how much of a time we would have getting out with the trailer practically blocking off our only clear exit.

I stare at the thin metal sheet that calls itself a door and ponder the thought of bullets tearing through and filing in like a pack of rabid, starved dogs being released into a henhouse.

Calm down. I need to relax a little bit. I don’t know where this fear is coming from. My attention veers back out the window and I peer into the darkness and dim of the truck cabin. I’m pretty sure the man inside is holding a camera. Attached to it, I can only assume is a honker of a telephoto lens. So this is something else than what I feel. The feelings of terror don’t budge, though.

My assumptions shift and a narrative forms in my mind. This man is taking photos of anyone his camera can capture from his elevated view in that truck. He pops partially out the door and his hand turns the camera lens and starts firing away. On one shoulder, my brain is telling me that any glare from the sunlight outside would obscure our gathering with reflection in the window, while my imagination shows me what he sees from his lens; the backside of the heads of several of us near the outskirts of the group, and my face. In the battle of brain and imagination, a picture is worth thousands of words.

He must be here to identify anyone he can who is at this service. I’m not sure what, if anything, we are doing wrong, but I know that there are enough people out there to take umbrage with us… that it’s going to be a pain in the ass if he starts spreading photos of Le and I over social media and other mob breeding grounds.

Unfortunately for us, we are in the group of people closest to the back garage windows. I don’t think to concern her with any of this yet, but I keep an eye on Lenore. As long as she is facing our two esteemed guests, she shouldn’t be in immediate risk of being identifiable.

I’m sneaking along the lower half of the garage door now. I don’t even remember initiating any of the motions, but I already find myself well moved. I’m at the door now. It’s thick, heavy, metal. It has window of its own, though much smaller in size and it frames my head perfectly as I stick to it to observe our bearded paparazzi member.

I realize he’s probably grabbing photo after photo of me right now as I try to lock eyes with him, but I wouldn’t really know where his eyes are behind that giant bulb of a lens. I do pick out the CB radio in his other hand and see him mouth into it, but I can’t really hear anything amid the idle engine and thumping of reggae; not to mention the distance.

This isn’t good. I can only assume he’s phoned in the location and details of our assembly to the members of his mob. I’m on autopilot right now. I’ve been watching myself move and slink around. I haven’t felt any input into the actions of my body this entire time. I’m merely observing.

Just as if I turned a movie on mid-scene, I’m outside the front door now. There’s a school desk right outisde the door for some reason. I’ve already picked it up and I throw it down and slam it into the gravel.

Not sure what I’m trying to prove with that, but it’s already happened. The man in the truck is unstirred. He takes another picture then recedes into the truck cabin again. It kind of looks like he says a few things into the radio and hunches over and I just see the peripheral motions of fumbling around. He could be gathering stuff. Maybe he has a gun or rifle. This feels like a realistic possibility to me.

I’m not moving anymore, though. As if I just nudged things past event horizon, I stand there and just let the motion I helped set off take its course.

Like a swarm of ants, people from inside start filing out of the garage. They each go through the steps of catching the blaring light as their vision tries to catch up from the dim lighting of our church service to the early day brightness. Then they notice the truck and see the man who now appears to be moving with more urgency.

It is too late for him, though. Some of the more aggressive members of the church are only a few feet away from the open driver’s side door. There’s a small altercation. I’m not even sure if you could call it that because it almost immediately results in the man being yanked out of the truck.

All around me are the screams and shouts of commotion. An object in motion stays in motion. There is no force out there of which that motion can now be stopped.

I begin to recognize people I hadn’t noticed after I woke up. At the forefront of the handful of people dragging the man is a friend of mine from high scool, Kerle. This is the first time I’ve seen him in years. I recognize him by the back of his long, smooth, bald sphere of a head. He lost it young and ever since then has looked like a less aesthetically jarring Conehead.

These details are irrelevant though. I finally have connected eyes with the truck man, but the life in them is already gone. A mist of scarlet is disrupted by a second strike to his chest. Kerle has a small, almost hand-sized mattock in his right hand. He imprints a second and a third puncture to accompany the first one in his neck. He gets a few more off until his brother rushes up behind him and tries to stop him.

He turns and smashes it into his brother Kal’s head. The unstoppable, inevitable motion of the moment continues. I turn around and spot Lenore. I grab her and we sift through the outer perimeter of the crowd in a scramble toward the back of the building.

There was this tension – two wires taut and spring loaded with anxiety waiting for victims to trip them and motion a set trap. I could tell that either side was looking for any inklinkg of provocation from the other side. Mountains that wish to move – provided a mere mustard seed.

For Kerle, it was the clatter of sound from the desk then the sight of the obtruder. I don’t know what he thought it was. Why – I don’t even think he really cared. I saw a fanaticism in his eyes.

I’m rushing to the back door of the garage to the back grass lot as I replay things in my mind. Lenore’s hand gripped by mine as I bust through the door.

Whatever beliefs Kerle had and whatever events over time that led to their formation…

I don’t think they were representative of the congregation as a whole. I felt that energy maybe from a few around the man in the truck, but I saw dismay and fear and bewilderment on the rest.

The sounds of crisis and chaos fade into unintelligible reverberations. Le and I didn’t even bother with our truck. We just needed to leave and get as far away as possible. Of course, I don’t know what to do beyond this moment. I just envision the chaos ensuing in the murderous scene behind us. I see the authorities showing up as it continues decaying. There’s a camera with my photos there.

I recognize a hopelessness that I don’t currently feel. I’m just crawling along this creekbed, hunched over to stay low and invisible from afar. I see myself stumbling along with my love.

Over time, we think we have escaped for the time being. Up the hill I see a small neighborhood of houses. It looms over, but it’s familiar.

The Undying Man

I’m in the driveway of my house. It’s not the house I live in right now. It’s the house I grew up in. The front door is open, I think Lenore went in ahead of me or maybe I’m alone now. Again, I don’t know. I make passing notice of a pair of fresh bodies slumped over in the driveway; the beginnings of a corpse soup in a broth of their pooling blood.

I enter the house. I shut the door behind me. I don’t move. I don’t move for a while.

It’s silent. It’s silent and it’s dark. There is an occasional interruption of the house going about its business, ice shooting into the freezer, a ticking clock, or water running through the pipes.

My dad is here. so I decide to find him.

I feel lost. The jarring feeling washes over me. I spent almost 20 years living in this house, but it feels foreign to me.

I wander into the center of the living room. It’s bare. Most of the furnishings are gone save our couch. This place has been abandoned for months, at least. Or that’s my guess. The abandonment of the house surrounds me. I soak it up.

At this moment, it is like the world’s seal has broke. I understand at this point that it is over. That is not to say that it is at the final point, but rather everything from this point is a futility. The momentum of everything until now will play out, but there is no more force or generation of life, energy, heart, velocity, creation.

You could say that the laws of thermodynamics are no longer at play. The world. It feels like a balloon with a tiny hole in it. And now I feel it. The future is leaking out and nothing can be done to change that.

The pause is over. Now I let momentum carry me once more. I turn to the left and enter the hallway. There are 4 doors. In front of me rests my old bedroom, left again is my parents’ bedroom. Parked on the opposite end is the bathroom and my dad’s office.

All the doors are empty and I can see that those rooms are entirely empty. The only door that is shut is my dad’s office. I decide to start there.

I head that way, but no later than I take my first step my father spills out of the room and falls over into the wall.

I grab him. He’s almost naked. He’s frail and old. He must have lost 30 pounds since I last saw him. He looks starved. Most alarmingly, his fave is shriveled up on once side. A stream of drool leaks out of the shriveled side of his mouth.

I pull him to his feet, open the bathroom door and set him on the sink counter.

I look at his face and we meet eyes. I understand that he organized the congregation back in the garage. The weary look on his face tells me that he accepts that he will be held responsible. Something tells me that the tremors of responsibility won’t end with him.

I don’t know what to say.

“Dad”

The weariness shatters and he erupts into a fit of sobbing. He falls into my chest. He can barely speak, not just because he is pulsing like malfunctioning robot stuck in an infinite loop of in and exhalation, but rather because of whatever happend with his face or the muscles that hold it together.

He tries to tell me he’s sorry. He repeats it. If it wasn’t clear to me before, he also had something to do with the dead bodies outside the driveway.

I’ve only seen my dad cry twice in my life. The thing about your father crying is that if the man you look up to more as if he were a deity reaches tearshed in front of you, it is only in moments of true despair.

This is one of those times. It only takes a few seconds until I feel the walls caving in. I start breaking down. I might be a man, myself, now in my thirties. But the wheels of time reverse in a sonic boom. I feel like a young child all over again.

I begin bawling, whimpering, weeping. This is weeping. I didn’t truly know what that word meant until this moment.

I’m a man, but I’m a boy. I can’t stand to see my dad in this state. I feel any sense of control or agency vanish. I feel like I’ve always been this helpless. I wish I could help my dad, however, I am now the one crying uncontrollably.

I can’t stop. My dad is on the floor now, foam expanding out of his mouth. I think the burden of everything led him to induce conditions that would cause him to have a stroke.

I continue weeping as I watch my dad hoping his body will free him as tears and foam stream from eyes and mouth.

I’m stuck in this moment for a long time. After a fashion, things start to fade.

I wake up in bed. It’s another day.