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Monday, November 17, 2008
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Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
1,800 words (c) 2008 Vanessa Campbell Marshall Cray hasn't slept in five years. He wants to, but every time he closes his eyes, the dreams are too terrible. Two hours of sleep are the most he has gotten at one time. He doesn't know where the dreams come from, but he assumes he is haunted by angry spirits. He tries to understand what they want. He tries to communicate with them, hoping they will find peace and leave him for The Light. But for five years they have held on, and Marshall has fought, and run. He lives in his van, if you can call it living. It's a life of bars and cafés and the most impossibly boring people in the world. Marshall had created some very successful art before the spirits came, and now, those damned paintings are all people want to talk about. It's exhausting. It reminds him of better days and makes him feel like a failure. He wants to talk about the spirits. He wants help getting rid of them. But no one can help, and no one cares. They are all worthless, boring people. Being an artist, he did try at one point to create a new series of paintings, but the spirits quickly found their way into his work. They absolutely horrified Marshall with their streaming grey anguish and bursts of stark red fear, so he stopped painting and promptly hid the unfinished series. He could not, however, bring himself to destroy them. He might need money someday, or he might want a record of his descent into insanity. Plus, he wouldn't openly admit it, but he knew the paintings held a strange appeal, like the old black-and-white film Death Takes a Holiday. Death assumes human form (as a prince, no less), goes on holiday, and falls in love with the one person who doesn't fear him---the one person who can see beauty in darkness. Lately, Marshall has been having trouble separating dreams from reality. He's so tired, he isn't always sure whether he's asleep or awake. The dreams follow him into the daylight---into wakefulness---and he no longer feels safe. Ever. But the worst part is, he knows, in his soul of souls, he will have to sleep soon. Not just for an hour, but an all-out, deep, drooling sleep one step away from coma. A month ago, he went from stumbling along the Seine, which had somehow been painted pink and orange, to sitting on the floor at some seedy dive in Amsterdam sweating bullets and smoking the best shit ever, to having a heated discussion with a coterie of incredibly persistent film directors in Berlin. They were saying blah blah your painting The Sails blah blah inspired the so-and-so scene in my film blah blah. And Marshall kept saying who gives a fuck about sails we are talking about quantum physics! Poor Marshall. He still wonders if his European adventures were real or dreams or a combination. He suspects he is lying sedated in some hospital bed, trapped in sleep, wholly possessed by the spirits at last. He is so tired of being frightened, he either ignores threats, or screams back at them. He surprised a would-be mugger in Barcelona by throwing him across the street. (It was a narrow, Old-World street, yet sufficiently wide enough to allow lift and flight.) He also surprised a tree in Stockholm that had gotten quarrelsome and needed a good scolding. He wonders if the soul leaves the body during sleep, able to roam the world and possibly even the Universe. An orb of energy just bounding around. He wonders if that makes him more vulnerable, or less. Does he go to the spirits, or do they come to him? Will he be able to wake up if things get sticky? For that matter, will he wake up at all? When he finally surrenders to deep sleep, will the battle be over, once and for all, or will he wake up to the same nightmare? Just thinking about it makes him cringe. But buried beneath his desperation is a festering anger over what has been taken from him. So much. He will fight to win it back. Yes, it is time to sleep. To spiral down toward a lonesome ocean floor where sunlight never visits, the last sparkles fading high above. To walk dark lands where his fate will be decided by powers unfathomed by the simple minds of mankind. But before the epic battle ensues, Marshall wants to have one (possibly last) blast of an evening. He can think of no better place for that than London, especially since it is nearly summer. ___ __ _ So, two days ago, after five years of fighting ghosts, soul-weary and war-torn, Marshall Cray drove his van to London. Arriving long before sundown, he had plenty of time to situate himself and find a well-peopled area reasonably near a hospital, just in case. He would never go to a hospital freely, of course, because the disappointingly inadequate staff would just give him sedatives, which he knew from experience did more harm than good. However, he did want to be close in case someone found him sprawled in a dark alley, with a scream plastered on his face, barely conscious. Yes, it was a stretch, but he was planning for contingencies. Every good artist sees the details in life, whether he wants to or not. He had time to walk around Soho and Leicester Square, taking in the sights and smells, the rowdy tourists, the even rowdier locals. He bought a black scarf with sparkly silver thread that read, "London Rocks!" Not only would it help keep him warm in the spring-chilled night air (especially if the dark-alley scene came true), but it also gave him a degree of swagger, which he had been garnering for the upcoming battle. He sat outside a café, smoking exotic cigarettes with jittery hands and lingering over peppermint tea. No one said much to him. He looked too insane or drugged out---with the black-rimmed eyes of the haunted---to be approachable, at least during daylight hours. Finally, blessedly, the sky's bright blue gave way to indigo, and he wandered from club to pub for a while, eventually settling on one with a great band. They were so alive and loud and just... free. Freedom is something one can never fully appreciate, Marshall knew, until it is threatened or gone. He drank ale and whisky. He danced with strangers. He even laughed a few times. He searched the eyes of those strangers for someone he might tell his story to---someone who might stand watch while he helplessly slept. But how do you tell someone that? How do you explain it when you don't even understand it yourself? Marshall had been wandering the world long enough---telling his story, hoping for help or at least understanding---to know that most people are far too needy themselves to help other people, especially strangers. They don't have the energy or empathy for it. No, this was Marshall's showdown to face alone. He wasn't sure who or what he was fighting, but he knew the fight was his own. Later, with his merriment quota satisfactorily obtained and himself bearing the bravado awarded by alcohol and a sparkly black scarf, Marshall stepped out of the pub. He gazed up at the sky. He had intended to go straight to his van and into sleep-battle but, for some reason, the stars held his gaze. Of course, the ale was adding extra razzle-dazzle to the heavens, as ale customarily does, but he suddenly had to get away from the city lights so he could see the full swath of the Milky Way. Beauty had been his best friend in life, and he wanted it beside him until the end. Being able to create and appreciate beauty was, in his opinion, the best part of being an artist, and a person. It made him feel sublime and part of something far greater than himself. Only natural that he needed the stars now, impossibly unreachable, but also reliable and reassuring, always twinkling above. Visible markers of the vast magnificence of the Universe. Crippled by inebriation, fatigue, and a few stumbles incurred previously that evening, Marshall hobbled toward his van. When he reached it, he wasted no time in climbing in, finding some bottled water, drinking heartily, and then driving, carefully but determined, until the London lights were far behind him. To avoid having his epic battle interrupted by an arrest or, perhaps, a pack of marauding bandits, he parked in the safest-looking area he could find. He grabbed a tatty blanket and climbed onto his van's roof, intent on staying awake and stargazing as long as possible, wanting to enjoy every last moment. But of course he slept. He was out before five minutes had passed, and it was indeed the absolute oblivion he had suspected would come. It was also dreamless and nearly motionless. No spirits, no epic demon battles. Just the slumber of utter exhaustion. A mind so tired it cannot dream. He slept not just that night, but the next day as well. For nearly 24 hours, Marshall Cray slept. When he woke the next night, he opened his eyes to the same stars that had lulled him to sleep. He slowly realized where he was, all that had happened. At first he thought no time had passed---that he'd been out for a few minutes, like always. But his restored body and lucid mind told him something was different. Very different. Cautiously, with both hope and dread, Marshall held up his watch to see the date. He pressed the light button and blinked the tiny numbers into focus. He stared, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, at the unequivocal evidence that he'd actually slept a night and a day... and had survived! After several breathless seconds, he filled his lungs and let out a wail that had been five years in the making. Lying there under the stars, on the roof of his trusty van, in worn-out clothes and a sparkly black scarf, Marshall didn't know everything, but he knew he had won. He had won simply by refusing to run any longer, to avoid, to fear. Maybe it was more exhaustion than refusal, so maybe he had won by accident, but the strategy was clear to him now: Welcoming a demon is the only way to get rid of it, to take back your power. His stomach rumbled. His throat screamed. He slid down off the roof to raid his stash of edible treasures. After gathering a vacuum-sealed pack of salmon, two packs of rice crackers, an orange, a chocolate bar, and a bottle of water, he carried them up to the roof for a moonlit victory dinner. He ate and smiled, smiled and ate. He said "thank you" to whatever might be listening around him, then looked up at the sky and said it again. Marshall suspected the spirits hadn't disappeared completely and would drop in from time to time, but he knew he could handle them. He had, amazingly, won the biggest fight of his life by giving up. The spirits could do whatever they wished, but he would no longer feed them with fear and anxiety. He had surrendered, but he was not captive. He was free. ___ __ _ "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." – Oscar Wilde
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Fix You
By Coldplay
Release date: 2005-09-12 |
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