Published in Dark Reveries Magazine, Feb. 2007 (electronic)
FAITHLESS
Last week I noticed there was one dream missing.
In a room like mine dreams can go missing: we turn off faucets to save water and the room doesn’t flood at all, but floats above the waves, murmuring.
In winter, laden with water and sinking with salt, the room is heavy, all panic and bowing walls, hardly a voice left.
Nevertheless, it is my room in summer that I fear, my room whispering and laughing, and me somewhere near the ceiling.
You will understand that I do not bother myself with counting the ideas or feelings or dusting them or mantle piecing them. Others do that. Dream by dream the room is unquieted for the summer, until they sip at my windows. Them and I, the inside and outside of their bodies, the room and I unbearably light together in the night.
It was a stranger’s room, and a stranger before him, and so on, back through 80 years as though time were a number. I flick through decade by decade and come to myself, girl-alone, different from the family who put up the tire swing, the stoner who once painted the bedroom purple, the unfortunates who lived here when it burned down in the 60s. Different by my face, not my movements. My face could not be theirs, it isn’t theirs, but this house was theirs and now its mine.
It is not necessary to remember strangers; strangers remember themselves. The window they looked through I look through. The rug they stained I cover up. Whose hand turns the low knob? Theirs or mine?
When I back down the long drive way and imagine myself leaving for the last time, can I be sure that I have not left already? The line between past and present is a couple of unhappy dreams at most. The length of time it takes to fry an egg. The gone are, as we say, just moving on. Indeed they are, moving on a different plane, and sometimes these plans overlap: Their hand on the knob or mine?
My family has not been careful with dreams. There is a strain of humbleness on both sides that has been scraped into the DNA ever since the Protestant Reformation, when, I believe, both my parents’ ancestors in Germany knew better than to sin with the hubris that they themselves actually had some part in creating reality . Since then, farmers and farmers have perfected the art of dulling the inner life. It is not abnormal for a person to be labeled as neurotic if they feel they are always being watched. My ancestors, white, god fearing, badly dressed, zipped up, and so am I, still, holed down inside myself, waiting to break out.
We dream wistfully, but the more wistfully we dream the more vicious our disappointment. My mother, as earnest and unfortunate a victim of the fifties as you could wish for, developed a busywork disorder and prefers to always have her hands at something that won’t necessarily change the world, or even then house, permanently. Eventually, to help her, my father let her have the cleaning all to herself and she woke at 5 am and made lists and did laundry and baked cookies and sewed quilts until 9 when she went to work. He turned my old room into an office and shut the door. He complains that she is never home and treats her kindly as he has no one else to talk to, but she has been trained since birth that sitting idly gets the whip of some great gods displeasure, so what should have been generous was useless and what should have been born of a mother’s diligence was simply frenetic obsession. My sister and I grew up with two mothers, one who is here in my room now, busily threading the walls with a taut cord, teeth chattering against some inexplicable fear.
I am never sure who those people are who come here to count the dreams: a room full or none at all. The dreams are counted and cleaned but by whom? As I pace from wall to wall the dream I lost vanishes softly, the others are gilded and boxed and set out and breathing, but no one, no one to say, “these are the best, these are the worst” or bat them around, as in my mothers day. In the winter it is quite different. The sink overflows with the water weight of dreams, they lay on me like cats while I sleep.
This is winter. This is not summer. The house creaks like an old boat, and I am tired of bailing water.
When there was God, real God, the layers of brain waves were inlaid with mother of pearl and rimmed in topaz. It was my great-grandmother who lived 100 years in Christ. That is, she lived in Minnesota and made reference to Him often. I have a photo-come-bookmark of her, oxygen tubes up her nostrils, but alive, upright and eyes aglow on her 100th birthday, a miniature bust of her, blurry, thanking us for a ‘century of wonderful memories’.
That century, the longest, most violent of its kind, silted up with holocausts and world wars, race riots and nuclear weapons. It has to be abandoned just like her corpse. There it is now, open, displayed, a history wound. The accumulated oppressions of the past not lost to a non-returning time, but heaped up, as Benjamin said, like garbage, packed and waiting. Waiting for what? The angelus novus to finally turn away? You see, cruelty served some of the most impressive purposes in history. Slavery brought the black influence to America, affecting culture, music, thought, sensibility. The holocaust’s aftermath includes Israel, the beginning of the final wait for the Messiah,. Think of the desk you sit at, your car, your shoes and jacket, C.D.’s, the Internet, your trip to Japan. The costs of technology which binds workers, the drudgery of most workers in this world which produces so much daily pleasure for others, wars which eventually bring nations together. Think of the strangers who lived before you, their looks, sleeping habits, hygiene, personal secrets, entertainment choices, lovers, catalogue of notions about the world, vocabulary. Past, past, all past, adding to the rubbish pile of history their private lessons made public.
This room has its own private rubbish pile. I live on top of a glacial garbage dump, which cuts deeper and deeper into the earth instead of ascending each day. My bed is balanced precariously on tip of this drilling discarded material. There is a faint smell, not horrible, but distinct. It consumes my attention when I notice it, when I remember why my bed rocks back and forth sometimes.
There is talk on the outside of these walls that there is more in this pit than the past. Yes, I say. Yes. But not only in this pit. There is more in your time than can be numbered. More in your dreams than you will tell. More in the unwritten books than anyone can read. More in the winter than heaviness. More in the summer than irritating lightless. What more? The fear, anger, murderous rage, selfish, listless, apathy that made tripped the first deed to the ground and began from there the pile of hurt humanity cannot erase.
If humanity hides these things, so do you.
My hidden life. Unknown items under the earth, like species of worms that haven’t been identified yet. At night I can hear them chewing. I have noticed how much talk their is of catharsis and breakthrough these days, which must mean there is a great deal more buried.
When I open my house to my friends I designedly cover the emerging heap with a decorative dust ruffle. It looks like part of the bed. The dreams are afraid of company and conveniently steal away, except for the most presentable. My friends sit comfortably in the living room, they feel only a complete stillness at that center. When I welcome the kindly faces at the front door I wear a ‘look’ I never wear for any other purpose. It is a very good look and it was made for me and it is quite similar to all my other looks. Nevertheless it is a ‘look’.
What do you think? That I am a typical product of my age and my class? Perhaps I am but so are you, and don’t you, when others come to your home, twitch your mouth up in a bit of a smile, strain a bit at the teeth, arch your eyebrows or smooth them back, make sure the dust ruffle is straightened and any writing you might have done on your walls is scrubbed off? How many of us want anyone else to see us as we really are? Isn’t your private insanity scary enough?
Help me, help, redeemer of man. All debts ledge red and paid at last. All past moments known in that infinity that cannot be known. Perhaps that is why I covet my dreams.
There was someone once. Someone whose fingers touched me so lightly that bits of unknown things started to present themselves, and having been presented, disappear. He slept on the far side of the bed where I could think him near but not be kept from my own solitude. It was a favor he gave me, and I gave me. He wasn’t willing to look under my dust ruffle. He had a garbage heap of his own.
On that slab of see-sawing I still see him, his hair warm and curling around his ears, his eyes, mud-brown. He shifted to keep balance with me at the other side, his hands, empty and warm, eyes wet, with only the skin of him, his clothes left behind.
Secrets. The redeemer never comes. Certain pieces of his trash end up in mine. The bed rocks even more precariously.
My name is Faith Becomb. I am twenty-five. I live in a room of dreams and garbage and have done so for thousands of years. I come from farmers, salesmen and teachers. History has given them a place in the heart of America, literally and figuratively. History will continue to do it, as long as we play by the rules.
Before my ancestors landed in the late 1700’s they were into potatoes. Over the sea, every one of them, German, English, Scottish, even that thin strain of Spaniards on my fathers side started Pineapple plantations when they got to Puerto Rico.
In those days survival was the earth bearing fruit, the fruit of their labors. Most families labored. It was difficult to survive without laboring every day. It still is, but we can do it without God now. We don’t feel so constantly judged by God, that Protestant grandfather with a Sunday coat and stern expression. Now we just judge ourselves, and the judgments come from everywhere.
I prefer the more direct method. But God is dead.
Don’t stop reading. It’s just a joke. Just a joke.
You will notice that you either react strongly or shruggingly to Nietzsche’s preamble that God is Dead. Some of you would like to stop reading at once. I enjoy the visible struggle of faithful hearts nonetheless curious about reading, continuing the faithless story.
The story wins. It is waiting for them, holding out a promise of the a resolution where all is indigo nighttime dreams and clean swept underneath-of-bed. I am in the past and present with the deeds of humanity. I am a figure already disappearing into a room marked “Faithless.”
FAITHLESS. That’s the past they really fear, those readers of mine. There’s always someone ready to put the book down when it alludes, like a treasure map, to the place growing beneath their bed. They duck out of the pages of the story as though they were white walls closing in around them. Where is the story if the reader goes away?
There, always there, waiting for them patiently. A story like this, people don’t understand, a story like this returns. They think it’s closed, shelved, sold. No, no, its the person themselves.
The other day there was a bang at the door and I answered it with my ‘look’. I had to inform the visitor that the house was not open for viewing until March. Unenthusiastic by nature, a boy, he said, ‘No problem’. I took that to mean he would come back in a few weeks. He took it to mean he would see the place now, ask questions about plumbing, when I was moving out.
My ‘look’ was a little lopsided, unprepared. I tried to say, “My name is Faith Becomb, I am twenty-five…’ but he cut me off. He had read it in the classifieds, yesterday at a cafe, wouldn’t I just show him around, answer quick questions?
Questions? Secrets? The room, me, me the room. My face slides off to the left even farther. My voice is loom-straight and full of dissention. I am wall-bound, like the room, a choked box, there is a mess in us both.
What shall I show him? The kitchen has no counter space, I have never painted it, there is no need to prepare food when the dreams feed me. The house and I lock sympathies and there is no one else. Those other people left a long time ago.
I watched the apartment-hunter taking in my bedroom. I stood back. Perhaps it does look normal, the bed, flat and orange sheeted, the dust ruffle, empty aired underneath, the closet clothes-hung. I did explain that I liked to keep things straightened.
He asked me to show him under the bed as though I were a sloppy private. His voice was as solemn as a Presbyterian minister. He stood on those strong legs of his and I crouched down, the sound of his breathing like a gale in my head, myself moving as silent as ever.
“There’s plenty of room under there for you to store things.” he said, as the dust ruffle parted and fell back into place.
“The space is already being used.’ I said.
“But there is so much of it.’
I laughed. The crouching made it hard for me to breath, but I laughed. The garbage of the past piles far into the earth like bodies fossilized under the pressure of centuries.
I showed him the spare bedrooms clean sweep of wall and floor, the tire swing out back, the view from the main windows, the hall closet. I showed him the dreams, perched like inanimate objects on the mantel.
“How beautiful.’ he said. I nodded. Myself, I hardly notice them at all these days.
“Here’s the rest”. I said, pulling up the floor boards. Balloons of dreams floated out, slinking close to the ground in the middle of the room, some black and painted with silver outlines of images no man had seen.
My visitor fainted. I had hoped he would.
Night came and with it the snow. The room was held in the snow’s incubating arms. I half carried, half dragged my visitor back to my room, whispering to him, stroking his hair. I told him the stories of what else was under the floorboards and under the bed and all the stories I had learned from the other people who lived here.
As I talked it seemed to me that the bed started to bulge and tilt again. Then I knew it was the heap growing. My arms waved uselessly. I pushed at the bed to hold against the rumble. I put the boy on it to weigh it down. He was heavy.
March 1st. Visiting day. The door is a portal of strangers; spectacled, haunted, curious, khakied, square-cut, a parade of raw flesh, wading through the mingle of dreams, raising the dust ruffle to the dim lamp light. Apartment hunters are so nosy.
I am content. Content with the forms at the door and my ‘look’, perfected for the hopeful new. My first visitor, the boy, helped me see that. We talk almost every night. He loves my room. He loves the room so much he will never leave. I have let him explore all the floor boards. Did I mention the floor boards?
The floor boards are not part of the tour. They are nailed down exactly as when I found them a year ago. At least when visitors are viewing. When he went down there exploring, he was bound to run into many fascinating, uncollected, uncounted, uncategorized dreams we had the other people and I had left there. The aftershocks, underbellies, butt-ends and unspeakable outsides of dreams with the shifting images, ‘I am always alone’. There is something melodramatic about the unspeakable.
I took my visitor down there the night he arrived. I thought it unwise for him to attempt to leave in the snow. I made him as comfortable as possible, although the space between the floor boards was narrow and relatively shallow. I told him to knock when he was ready to come back up. From my own bed I heard the floors bang. I would have the others help him out if I could see them.
I talked to him the following morning. I talked to him in the afternoon. I thought it unwise for him to leave in the snow and ice. We talked that night and many others, he made stranger and stranger sounds until there were none. It is something to do with the dreams.
The dreams. How many there are. How different. Do the apartment-hunters come at all? Are they here today or was it last year, ten years ago? My name is Faithless Bedcomb. I am twenty-five. The dreams are bubbling over, floating heavy. My hand is on the door knob. The others are not appearing.
I went to find him. I called down through the cracks in the pine, ‘Dreamy, where are you, come back, the others are here.’ He didn’t answer me, and the lonely girl jumped harder on her bed, pushing down the multiplying heaviness that penetrated the earth.
Where was he? The house grew smaller and smaller and the beneath he was in filled up with more and more history. I saw a warp in the wood where the nails has been rescrewed, nothing more, and the oxygen pouring out of the underworld.
Spring comes. The dreams release rounder and softer and start to tickle the ceiling, old heavy dreams sinking underneath.
The dreams are there, somewhere, they must be. I can feel them fall plumply into the crap pile of history, the good and the bad, and mix with everything in between. I know the way down and back up but when I lift the carpets to find him the room mocks me. There is no him.
He must be there somewhere, on the other side of the floor, separated from me by a couple of unhappy dreams at most. I can feel him walking, waking, thinking, uselessly pounding the wood floor. They are all in here and I am here, caught in my room, dream by dream, unable to find the one dream that redeems them all.
