Long Hard Road Out of Hell (36 page)

the reflecting god

[DREAMS]

A
S
I
WALKED THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF THE WORLD,
I
LIGHTED ON A CERTAIN PLACE, WHERE WAS A DEN; AND
I
LAID ME DOWN IN THAT PLACE TO SLEEP: AND AS
I
SLEPT
I
DREAMED A DREAM.
I
DREAMED, AND BEHOLD
I
SAW A MAN CLOTHED WITH RAGS, STANDING IN A CERTAIN PLACE, WITH HIS FACE FROM HIS OWN HOUSE, A BOOK IN HIS HAND, AND A GREAT BURDEN UPON HIS BACK.
I
LOOKED, AND SAW HIM OPEN THE BOOK, AND READ THEREIN; AND AS HE READ, HE WEPT AND TREMBLED: AND NOT BEING ABLE LONGER TO CONTAIN, HE BRAKE OUT WITH A LAMENTABLE CRY; SAYING,
“W
HAT SHALL
I
DO?”

–John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

T
HIS ISN’T ME!
I
’M SOMEONE ELSE!
T
HIS ISN’T ME!

–Marilyn Manson to his bodyguard, Aaron Dilks, during an alcohol blackout en route from Leipzig to Berlin

T
HERE’S
something I’ve never told anyone. I didn’t even remember it until recently, when I went to the chiropractor and he snapped my neck, causing me to black out for less than a second. In that time, I traveled back in my mind to Canton, Ohio. I was speeding down Thirty-fifth Street in my old neighborhood and there were hundreds of decaying corpses in the road trying to stop me. Their skin was yellow, and the wind was blowing their loose, nacreous teeth back and forth in their mouths. I kept plowing into them, and the instant the car touched them, they disintegrated into dust. Missi was in the car, and I was trying to save her because the corpses were trying to pull her away from me. I stopped the car and stepped out to try and help her, but there were large, mottled, sinewy dogs everywhere, jumping at me in slow motion with bared fangs. At the end of the street, I saw a group moving toward me, like a tribe. Their leader was Traci Lords. Her skin was even more yellowed than those of the corpses and she had a neon pink cross painted across her face. Her motions seemed animatronic. Her eyes were moving mechanically back and forth in their sockets and her mouth kept snapping open and shut like she was a ventriloquist’s dummy.

In my dreams, I always return to Canton, Ohio. Usually I am in my bedroom in the basement, which, like my grandfather’s basement, terrified me. Except the horror was not in anything tangible, but in my mind. As a child, I used to get scared down there for no specific reason and run upstairs, not just at night but also in the middle of the day. I never felt comfortable alone in my room and always slept with the television on to cover up the sounds I imagined hearing. If there is one ghost in my past, one skeleton still in a closet I’ve never been able to unlock, it involves that old basement. At night my mind struggles desperately to take me back there, to make me feel as if I’ve never left there, as if my whole life has unfolded in that basement. It places people I’ve met since then and will meet in the future in that room, and once there, they twist and contort, become monstrous and malevolent. Then my mind blocks the exit, making the crooked wooden staircase impassable. I try to run up the stairs but never make it to the top because hands are grabbing my legs through the slats between steps.

In another recurring dream, I can’t leave the basement because some kind of invisible force or person keeps pushing me back against the wall and trying to trap me there. Or because my cat, O.J., an orange tabby I found on the steps of Christian school, attacks me whenever I make a move to escape. There’s another dream I often have in which the lightbulb in the basement burns out and I try to change it as quickly as possible because I’m afraid to be alone there in the dark. But each new lightbulb I screw in burns out, and I’m stuck perpetually running to change it to keep the room from going dark forever.

There are simple psychological explanations for these dreams, but none of them ever satisfies me. In only one dream can I remember making it to the top of the stairs. This time the basement floor isn’t carpeted, as it usually is, with the motley green scraps my father brought home from work. It’s cement, and I walk to the side I was always afraid of as a kid, where the washer and dryer sit in the shadow of the low ceiling. I’m rifling through mildewed, cobweb-covered boxes that contain my old belongings, and I’m nervous that some kind of animal—a spider, a rat, a snake, or even a lion, because it seems like anything can happen—is going to bite me. In one small box, I find a Curious George doll. But as I try to pick it up, something moves across the room—an indescribable, incorporeal warm weight that feels white for some reason. It pins me against the wall as the Curious George doll comes to life and runs around, knocking things off shelves and lighting one of the boxes on fire. I try to put it out and, when I can’t, I run. I try to escape up the stairs, but the weight is holding me back. I push harder and harder, and finally get to the top. I tear the door open, and there’s a woman at the top. She looks partly like my mom and partly like the girl who gave me crabs in high school. She has things written all over her arms in lipstick or paint or Magic Marker, and I try to read them but I can’t.

In another dream, I’m in the basement with my mother and we find a box and pry the lid open. Inside are dozens of different types of bugs, but I can’t make out what kind most of them are. We remove the lid completely and a praying mantis jumps out, flying into the rafters over my head. We look inside the box again and see a spider made of crystal. It is completely transparent: Its legs are like icicles and its organs are all visible. I ask my mother to get some bug spray to kill it before it jumps out and attacks me. But as I spray it, it turns into a woman. She is wearing all black, and she chases me through the basement to a beach covered with rocks. Inside each rock there is a different spider trying to escape.

That same night—I often have long strings of nightmares in a row, which I dread as much as I look forward to—I find my grandmother, on my mother’s side, in my room. She is lying on a hospital bed covered with tubes that stick out of nearly every part of her body, which is crisscrossed with wires held in place by duct tape. A round flexible canister on the side of the bed is pumping air into her and the equipment keeping her alive is making whirring noises and electronic pulses. I hear a crash in the closet, and the door opens to reveal my dad lying in a bed. He’s only thirty, his hair is messed up, and he seems to have gone mad. I talk to my grandmother, and she keeps reassuring me that everything is okay, that I did good in life, and that she isn’t mad at me. She has a big bandage over her eye, and it falls open. Inside is yellow pus, which runs over her face and soaks into the pillow, staining it yellow. I bend over her to find out that she has no eye.