by Jerky » Fri Jul 22, 2005 3:19 am
This is a dream I had recently:<br><br>I was in the great room of an old, rambling house. There was a party going on. Music was playing; happy, upbeat, unremarkable. Friends and family from every chapter of my life were there; some with drinks in hand, others just standing around or sitting in the wide wooden stairway, talking to each other but not to me. I walked through the crowd, past and around them, content to observe. <br><br>Then the house shuddered. Everyone stopped talking. For a moment, it was silent. Then a great groaning. I felt the floor beneath me drop and shift. The crowd's silence broke into bewildered exclamation. I joined the rush toward the double doors across the room. I was one of the first out the door.<br><br>As I crossed the porch I saw the pillars beside me splinter and buckle. They made a sound like twisting celery. I jumped down five steps into a courtyard of bare earth, landing on my hands and knees. People swarmed around and past me, screaming, their legs a blur. I climbed to my feet; turning in time to see the front half of the three-story house rip away and collapse into its own foundation.<br><br>Outside it was night, starry but moonless, cold and dark. Around us, nothing but black hills and forest. And silence. Then, the muffled cries and whimpers of the buried broke the spell. We survivors moved towards the ruined pit to pull at jagged timbers, to save our loved ones, to lend what help we could.<br><br>That's when I looked up and saw them, two friends and their infant child, in the rough cross-section of what remained of the devastated house. They were in a room on the third floor, just a ledge now, with their backs against the wall. The door had been ripped away, and they were trapped, their wild eyes open wide, looking for an escape that didn't exist. The baby's wailing cut through the moans below.<br><br>Looking up at them, I knew instantly what I must do. I would make a net by stretching out my sweater. I would come as close as I could to the house and get them to toss down the baby. I started moving towards them, towards the straining remains of a structure threatening further collapse.<br><br>Then the mother's searching eyes locked onto mine. And in a pulse of instantaneous psychic communion, this terrified woman knew my plan. She knew my plan as though it was her own, as though she had found me in the crowd and planted it in my head. She knew my plan, and she acted on it… before I was ready. She heaved her child into the night. And then her terror was my terror.<br><br>Oh God no, I thought - or screamed - scrambling forward in a desperate outfield panic. Hot chemical lightning washed over my bones as the bundle arced in slow motion towards the cold hard ground. I followed its trajectory, legs pumping, my brain burning with the autonomic calculus of chance. No time for the sweater trick. But I will save this baby. If it's the last thing I do, I will save this baby. Still running, I reached out.<br><br>Cloth brushed the tips of my fingers and the baby hit the ground with a sickening thud. Physical shock seized me, a Novocain fog. My heart stopped. Then it beat backwards. It was the mother's howl - part grief, part rage, part insanity - that pulled me out. <br><br>With the shock gone, grief washed over me. Not abstract dream-grief, but a grief as authentic as any I've experienced in waking life. Too filled with shame to bare witness to the fruits of my failure, I closed my eyes and dropped to my knees. The ground was shaking. The rest of the house was falling.<br><br>I found the baby directly in front of me. I gently cupped my hand over its head, dreading what I might find. But there was no break, no hot wetness of spilled brain. With my other hand I could feel that its heart was still faintly beating. But it was not breathing. So, with my eyes still closed and the sound of screams and thunder filling my ears, I found its mouth with mine and blew a trembling, hopeful breath.<br><br>Then I woke up, finding no comfort in the so-called waking world.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
