Grotesques

Apparently a childhood memory.  I was about three or four, and I was staying up to watch some movie on late night TV.  The movie was called Visage, and it was about this 17th century painter who would paint his subjects by reflecting their faces through a series of mirrors.  By adjusting the angles of the different mirrors, he could distort the faces in a variety of different ways.  The movie opened with a montage of these distorted-face paintings.  Some had one eye.  Some had gaping, twisted mouths.  They were all quite revolting and disturbing.  Then it dawned on me that this was why I had frequently had nightmares about seeing a movie with disturbing faces in it.  It was all drawing on this memory of this movie I had seen as a child.

Point of Departure

Downtown in Cleveland somewhere.  There were crowds of people filling the streets everywhere.  It was impossible to even consider trying to drive through these crowds, so my wife and I decided to park the car in a small lot behind a run-down brick building and continue on foot.  I griped that it was way too far to walk, but my wife assured me that we'd be there before we knew it.  We turned the corner onto a wide main street which sloped down away from us.  From the high ground I could see a vast river of people stretched out before me, channeled by the banks formed by the tall buildings on either side.  There was a constant roar of excited chatter, and there were even streamers and confetti in the air above everyone's heads, along with that strange, dizzy haze that's caused by a large mob of people.

Before long, this river of people carried us down by the docks along the lakefront.  There were several boats anchored alongside one another.  The crowds poured up the ramps to the different boats.  I noted with some relief that the ramps were quite easily accessible, not as narrow and precarious as some I'd seen.  We seemed to instinctively know which boat was ours, and we headed eagerly up the ramp.  At the top, I could see out over the lake.  Some of the boats were already loaded and on the water.  The setting sun was half-dipped in the lake and huge on the horizon.  I turned to my wife.  A warm breeze blew through.  I had no idea where we were going.

Scene from a Beach

I was standing on the beach.  It was 6:30 in the morning, but somehow life wasn't catching up with this place until 8 AM.  Things had to be prepared.  We had to lay all the beach towels down.  We had to find just the right random scattering of people, just the right kids to chase each other with buckets of sand and water.  A precise number of seagulls were brought in trucks, and then released from their cages.  Finally, someone had to go up into the light house and turn this old metal crank that would put the sun exactly in the 8 o'clock position in the sky over the water.  So, everything was set; everyone was in their place.  I looked down at my pocket watch as the last seconds of 7:59 ticked by.  Everything was still.  Even the birds waited.  Then, the second that 8 o'clock arrived, it all slid silently into motion, and the elegant machinery of life continued along in its smooth, eternal waltz.

The Flipside

I died.  I collapsed in a spot on the wooden floor of the dining room where a sunbeam cast the shape of the window on the floor.  I discovered that death was merely a doorway between two dimensions, as my eyes fluttered and I came to on the floor in the same spot where I had died.  It was the same world everywhere, but quieter.  I was just out of phase with the living, but still occupying the same space.  My loved ones who'd died were there to greet me instead.  They had been among us all along.

One peculiarity of being out of phase was that it was impossible to use electricity.  It seemed that the proper polarities didn't operate correctly in this dimension.  As a result, we had no radio, no TV, no phone or internet.  This helped explain why it was no easy task for the dead to contact the living.  We sat around playing cards a lot, and drinking coffee that had been heated over a fire someone had built in the yard outside.

It was all very peaceful actually.  There was no traffic or noise around.  I didn't really see anyone else beside our small group, but I knew they had to be out there.  Imagine all the famous people who had died, just hanging out somewhere! In time we would go visiting some of them, but there was no hurry.  There was a vast sense of relief in the air.  A lifetime of fretting over death was all behind us.  There was nothing more to worry about.  We could finally relax.

There was work for us to do, though.  We had what my family called "missions."  One of them took us to a racetrack one afternoon.  The stands and the track were deserted, but that was only in our dimension.  On the other side, it was packed with people.  You could almost sense the excitement they generated in the air, like an echo without the noise that created it.  We climbed up into the empty stands.  We went to a certain row and waited.  Suddenly my father reached out and caught something out of mid-air that seemed as though it were about to fall 50 feet to the ground below.  I could almost make out one of my nieces before my father pushed her back and she was gone.  "She isn't ready to come here yet.  They're not ready to lose her.", he explained to me.  I looked out across the sunny deserted racetrack, and mourned for the living.

Along the Outskirts

I found myself trapped in a town that was impossible to leave.  It wasn't one thing that kept me from leaving.  There were several different impediments, depending on which edge of the town I tried to escape from, and depending on exactly which road I was taking.  One road circled back on itself.  I left town on one side, and I found myself re-entering it on the other.  It just went round and round in an endless loop.  I passed the same store front three times before I finally figured it out.  A crooked sign in the window tipped me off.

Another road ran directly into the bay door of a rusted blue warehouse.  I pulled off and watched car after car drive in through the door, none of them ever emerging from the other side.  High up on the building there was a loft door that stood open with a cable line running out from it, suspended in the air.  Hooks moved along this cable, and there were people hanging from the hooks, limp and lifeless.  The cable was carrying them high over a field of overgrown grass to another building with smoke stacks.  These smoke stacks didn't smoke continuously, but rather they emitted a single white puff now and then.  The puff settled among the other clouds over the town.  It all dawned on me.  This was where they actually made the clouds!

I eventually discovered that there was only one way out of the town.  One of the clouds hadn't been formed properly.  It settled too close to the ground, and it was too wispy and insubstantial.  It wound through the streets like a long thin stream.  Sometimes it would flow towards the edge of town, and it would be blocked and impeded just as we all were.  I watched it gather, as though against an invisible wall, and just as it was about to gather into the white fluffy cloud that it was meant to be, and just as I thought it might ascend into the sky where it belonged, a black Pontiac suddenly flew out of the smoke, clearing the invisible boundary and fleeing the town with a hard squeal of its tires as soon as it hit the ground.  So that was how you did it.  I just had to find a way into that cloud stream.

Vacation on the Moon

There was a story on the news about how a massive project was under way to build a resort on the moon that would be open to the public.  The main complex would be under a huge dome with a breathable atmosphere, and a perfectly regulated climate of comfortable but mildly tropical temperatures.  Gravity was an issue, of course, but a team of engineers had devised ways of working around this.  The complex would rotate in such way that it would create a centrifugal effect that would perfectly approximate the Earth's gravity.  The rotation would be nearly imperceptible to the guests, although early testing had raised issues of motion sickness and nausea.  However, the designers were confident that within a day or two the visitors would naturally adjust.

Of course, one wouldn't travel all the way to the moon just to spend their time in an artificial environment engineered to simulate the familiar experience of being back on Earth.  The resort would just be a place to relax and gaze at the stars spinning beyond the dome.  It would just be a central hub to return to.  People would go to the moon because they wanted to have the moon experience.  Sight-seeing tours could be chartered aboard a lunar bus that would take passengers out to the Sea of Tranquility for some breathtaking photos that they could send home.  The more adventurous could even don space suits for their very own moon walk, or rent lunar rovers for an off-roading joyride on the surface reveling in the diminished gravity.  Naturally a lot of release forms would be involved.

This all sounded very exciting, but I wondered if I could get up the nerve to board a rocket shooting up into the sky.  I'm not big on flying, but life is short and this was the kind of opportunity that you didn't want to pass up before you died.  Before I had time to really weigh my fears, I found myself strapped into the seat of a rocket, ready to be hurled into space.  There was a moment of panic where I considered unbuckling my seat belt and running for the airlock, but by then the rocket was already in the air.  The blue sky peeled away and revealed the stars.  The agonizing pull of the Earth released me, and suddenly I was floating in awe.

My wife and I stood on the surface of the moon, staring at the Earth across space, spinning in the vast void.  I was glad that we had made the trip.  We had stepped beyond the edge of the world, and onto the larger stage of creation.  I could never have fathomed the feeling without experiencing it for myself.  We dropped off our bags in the small cabin of our room.  I glanced out the porthole window at the rotating sky.  All I could think was, "Wow!  We're really on the moon."  My mind boggled, even though my stomach felt a little queasy.

A Disfiguring Education

I was watching a documentary about the Mad Bomber.  They were talking about his childhood.  There had been an accident with one of the first bombs he had ever made.  His grandfather, who had taught the boy how to make bombs, made a mistake with some of the dangerous chemicals they were working with.  The mixture had exploded in his face.  The narration explaining all this was intercut with grainy 8mm footage from the family's home movies, as well a dramatic re-enactment of the accident.  The grandfather's muffled screams could be heard coming from another room of the cramped, dark little apartment, while the boy cowered in a corner of the hallway, pressing his hands as tight as he could over his ears.

The grandfather refused to see a doctor after the incident, fearing that their bomb-making activities would be discovered.  He had been left with deep, disfiguring gashes on his face, and he had been nearly blinded by the chemicals that had gotten into his eyes.  Thereafter he used a pair of antique pocket binoculars to see, the kind where the lenses fold back and the thin little case snaps shut.  Sepia-toned photographs showed him standing in the sun, filmy cataracts over his eyes and his face spotted with black scars.

   

Pages of Winter

I was driving along a stretch of open road in the middle of winter.  I could see a snow covered field from my window.  It stretched off to the horizon where it mingled and faded into the light grey sky.  As I drove on, I saw a tree by the roadside.  It's dark branches were bare and it stood out in sharp contrast to the white landscape.  I felt drawn to this tree.  

I slowed down, and pulled off to the side of the road in front of it.  I got out of the car and clomped through the deep snow to the foot of the tree.  On one of the branches nearest to me, I could see a tiny little bud.  I cupped it delicately in my hand and watched as it blossomed into a white flower.  I looked up at the tree and saw that it was covered in these tiny buds.  The whole tree began to bloom with white flowers, softly fading the tree from my sight and blending it in with the snowy background.

I stood watching this, somewhat transfixed, when up a little ways across the road a black bear emerged from a snow drift, rearing up on its hind legs with a terrifying howl.  I hurried back to the car.  The tires struggled a little in the snow, but the car finally backed onto the road with a violent jerk.  I put the car into drive, straightened the wheel, and continued on my way.