John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

I forced myself to continue on to the ship’s pool where immediately I dove to the bottom and competed for breath, for time, for anguish, for peace, with the other shadows I found lurking there.

In my dream the night is as pure and dark as a blackened negative, and yet I am well aware of the field at the edge of which I stand and of the chatcau which is somehow silhouetted on the opposite side of the field, though the horizon itself is not visible. I stand there, realizing that nothing whatsoever exists in the world except the night, the stone chateau, the waiting field, myself. The chateau and field are thick with significance, though I have seen neither in my past life.

As I cross the field, taking slow careful steps but determined to reach the ominous yet familiar stone building at any cost, I become aware that the entire sloping field has been blanketed with enormous soft round pads of cow manure. They are round as flagstones, thick as the width of a man’s hand on edge, spongy within and thickly encrusted without, soft and resilient and yet able to bear the full weight of a heavy man, though there is always the possibility of piercing the crust and sinking into the slime within. I am picking my way with care and yet also treading on the uncertain field with excitement because no one has ever crossed this field before. But suddenly I know that the shapes lying like dark and spongy land mines beneath my feet are composed not of cow dung, as I had thought, but of congealed blood. With awe and a certain elation I realize that I am walking across a field of blood. And I know too that though I am proceeding toward the chateau, I am also walking somehow backward in time.

I step carefully. I do not want to pierce the crusts and sink to my ankles in coagulated blood, and yet it is necessary to walk across the field, and I do so with pleasure as well as fear. The pads of blood have been arranged on the field’s dark acreage with their edges touching, symmetrically, and to me they seem on the one hand fresh and moist and on the other old and long-ripened like cheese or manure.

Between the far edge of the field and the dark stone facing of the baronial hall there is a ditch. I am positive that the ditch is there and yet I fail to see it and spend no energy crossing it, though I am conscious that I have in fact passed beyond the empty ditch in the middle of the unchanging night.

I approach the cold chateau from the side, moving as if by perfect instinct not to the main gate but to another and smaller entrance in the thick side wall. I know where I am going, I am in possession of myself, and yet I know too that I have no history, no recollection of the past, so that my life, which is specific, depends only on the field, the ditch, the night, and what I am about to experience within the chateau. I know the way. There is nothing else.

The chateau is empty. I enter as if by plan, and I find that the great stone hall consists only of a single vast room that is empty, dusty, cold, from floor to roof windowless and desolate except for one small structure standing altarlike and frightening in the center of the stone floor. I approach, I am breathing deeply. Erect and with hands at my sides I face the sacred structure which is twice my height and circular at the base and pointed on top — like some prehistoric tribal tent — and covered entirely with dry and hairless animal skins.

The skins are hard, scaly, wrinkled, and completely without hair. The light in the vast stone room is gray, the air is cold, the construction of dead skins is familiar and unfamiliar as well. Slowly and conscious only of myself as neutral and of the action as charged, slowly I descend to my knees, insert my fingers in the scam where two large bottom skins are joined, and slowly pull them apart until the darkness will accommodate my entry on all fours. So I, a man fully grown and yet also reduced to my simple and now curiously unemotional intention, on all fours work my way head and shoulders and hips and heavy legs inside the second structure where in a meaningless crouch I survey the desolation of my own beginning. The circular and conical space inside the dead skins contains nothing at all except a dusty floor and a small iron hearth partially heaped with ashes which are both dry and moist. The fire is gone, the ashes have stood so long that here and there they have become crystalline, I see a few bones and feathers embedded like Norse relics in the dead ashes. Now I realize that I had hoped for more, had expected more, and yet in the midst of such silence and immobility I also realize that my disappointment is nothing compared with the journey I have just taken and the barren actuality I have at last discovered.

When I reported this dream in meticulous detail to Ursula, insisting that it was central to my life, since few men are privileged and courageous enough to undertake this journey, her only reply was that it was obviously someone else’s womb, not hers, that had become so inhospitable to my regressive drives. Her own womb, she answered me, was warm and receptive always, as I surely knew.

“But I disagree with your cesspool metaphor,” I said, waiting for her to face me in the leather chair. “It’s simply that I am in love with Psyche. I have always been in love with Psyche. And I happen to know that whenever I express the need I can trust my Psyche to send me up a fresh bucket of slime. Unlike you,” I said, studying the level of water in my clear glass, “I am not afraid of Psyche’s slime. I do not find it distasteful. As a matter of fact, without my periodic buckets, I could not survive. Now tell me,” I said, feeling the cigar swimming toward my fingers through the semidarkness, “isn’t my metaphor preferable to yours? It is truer, Ursula, more just, more compassionate.”

“Allert,” she said, “have you ever realized that you have the face of a fetus? The eyes, the jowls, the florid complexion are all deceiving. If you look closely enough you’ll see, as I have just seen, that actually you have the face of a fetus. Perhaps that is why you dream rather than live your life.”

In my dream it is nighttime on the grounds of Peter’s hospital. My impression is that I have never seen this place before yet I know it well. Acres Wild, as it is called, extends without limit through the night, but also is carefully tended by capped and muffled gardeners and, sooner or later, stops at the perimeter of the high serpentine brick wall. All this I know somehow and even without letting the words come silently to mind. But now through the tall trees the rain is falling, in each of the small white cabins a single naked bulb is burning. And I am mobilized, I am worried, I have an urgent task requiring Peter’s help.

“Peter,” I say in the dream, “I must talk with you.”

We are in the main building and Peter, wearing his white coat, is surrounded by a group of young men and women. My face and clothes are wet, he does not wish to give me his attention. The young men and women are too attractive, too interested in what he is telling them in his musical and confidential tones.

“Peter,” I say, and at last he stares at me over the shoulder of a slender blonde young woman. “Why is she here? She has no business here. She is different from all the rest, she is quite special. If you don’t help me, Peter, who knows what harm they may do her under the mistaken thought that she too is one of your patients?”