This is the climax to a short story I wrote in 2008, called Blackout, and which I revisit often to feel a bit more at ease with whatever chaos is swirling around. It makes me miss California in a weird way, and certain old friends more.
...When I felt myself let go—to tune out to the vision of the Dream Journal and its drug-inducing solutions—I dreamed another long, tunneling dream. The first one in a long time that didn’t involve spiders or bees. The first one I remember actually recalling almost all the way through. The one that brought me back from the shadow’s song. It was of the anxiousness of an impending storm.
In it, I went to greet the rain and winds in the middle of the park across the street. I stood alone, with cascades of soothing rain showering me, with the park people staring at me in admiration. Lining up to gape. Beaming in the low-light of the blackout. I stood in the center of the concrete that underneath once birthed the trees of John Bidwell, in a cross-pattern of limbs with one clear direction toward the southwest of town down Broadway, and back again to the rows of bars, and the other path headed straight from the heart of the town unto my Tower. I became engorged with pride of the memory of these trees, and turned toward the Tower and saluted the amber-capped apex of its phallus.
I danced in the water like a Cherokee, inviting the surge to cleanse me, and to become one with the core of the enveloping brood of hobos. They encircled me now, applauding, as if I’d figured out what to be free and clean and true had really meant. I looked into their eyes and looked further into what I thought might be their hearts, and further to their souls.
And all these people of the old oaks looked at me to find a higher solace within the words of their own world, and rejoiced in a singular bliss, morose and monolithic, with bitter relation to the common thread of soul and singular truth. They did not need the power; their routines persevered where others’ went awry; and the city’s citizens simple lives were now made simpler by the wrath of Mother Nature and the awe of cawing beat of Earth. It was simple, real, now…but they didn’t understand.
The group parted ways slowly from the back of one-half of the circle and turned to let her by. Heloise walked slowly through the swarm, her eyes glowing, her perfect teeth gleaming in a familiar smile. She walked to me and the rain stopped.
“We will find each other again,” she whispered. “Being happy is a bore. But being sad is deadly.”
