The First Principles of Dreaming Read online

  “Eunuchs?” asked Dee, glancing at her with a frown.

  “Y’know,” Mary-Eve said vaguely, not wanting to get into specifics. “Men who haven’t got them anymore. They used to do that to slaves.”

  Ignoring traffic, Dee gave her a long stare. “Gotcha,” she said. “Guys without dicks. What a completely useless world that would be.”

  “Would you like the official King James version on Jezebel?” Mary-Eve asked quickly. Without waiting for a response, she dug into her brain for the first phrase, then was off and running. “‘And he said, Throw her down,’” she recited with practiced ease. “‘So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot. And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king’s daughter. And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands. Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This is the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel: And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.’”

  Recitation completed, Mary-Eve sat staring intensely ahead. She had done well, she knew that—every word had been correct. In her Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle Sunday school class, her teacher and fellow students would have been murmuring in approval: Praise the Lord. Praise the holy HOLY God. Shame on Jezebel—shame, shame. Shame on the wanton woman sinner.

  From beside her came the sound of fingers tapping the steering wheel. “Nice story,” said Dee, her voice laconic. “That’s the fucking Bible, isn’t it?”

  “Second Kings chapter nine,” said Mary-Eve. “Verses thirty-three to thirty-seven.”

  “You’ve got the whole book memorized?” asked Dee.

  “Just the interesting parts,” said Mary-Eve.

  “Shit,” muttered Dee, shaking her head. “Ever read anything else?”

  “I started Carrie,” said Mary-Eve, “but the Bible’s more interesting.”

  Dee’s face twisted. “It is?” she demanded.

  “God’s a better writer than Stephen King,” said Mary-Eve. “Weirder. Think about it—why would wild dogs eat everything except Jezebel’s skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands?”

  Dee frowned, dragging on her cigarette. “That is weird,” she agreed.

  “Even the wild dogs wouldn’t shake her hand,” said Mary-Eve. “Even when she was dead.” Dragging on her own cigarette, she blew out her thoughts and watched them settle. “I mean, I know she was bad, but…”

  An intense moodiness came and went in Dee’s face. “Ever notice how all the interesting chicks end up on the rocks?” she asked. “All through history. Joan of Arc. Anne Boleyn. Marilyn.”

  “Marilyn who?” asked Mary-Eve.

  Braking in the middle of traffic, Dee stared at her. “Marilyn,” she intonated precisely, “Monroe.”

  For a long moment, the two girls assessed one another—Dee’s gaze openly scornful, Mary-Eve’s lips parting slightly as a flush rose in her cheeks. Then a car horn honked behind them, Dee floored the gas pedal, and they jerked onward into her silent disapproval. “Well,” she said, taking a deep breath. “That isn’t happening to me, I can tell you that.”

  “What isn’t?” asked Mary-Eve, still trapped in the heated dregs of her shame.

  “The rocks!” yelped Dee, hitting her own forehead with the heel of her hand. Certain she had been terminated, declared social refuse, Mary-Eve cringed, but then, without warning, Dee’s mood flipped and she asked, “What size jeans do you wear?”

  Confused, but willing to adjust to any topic of conversation, Mary-Eve pulled at the waistband of her dress. “How would I know?” she asked. “I’ve never worn hips.”

  Dee hooted, then grinned, “We’ll get you hips, Jez baby. Not today—I’ve got to be somewhere in five—but later this week. I bet we’re the same size. You can borrow some of my jeans.”

  Astounded, Mary-Eve tried to keep hope from flying off with her face. “No kidding?” she whispered.

  “No kidding,” Dee echoed softly. “No kidding, Watch-Me-Through-the-Window Jezzie-Jesus-girl.”

  She looked at Mary-Eve then, her lips slightly parted, a strand of dark hair blowing across her face, and Mary-Eve’s skin touched itself in wildly sweet, terrified places.

  “You want to come play Barbie dolls with me, Jez?” Dee asked.

  Reaching through her open window, Jez flicked the accumulated ash off the end of her cigarette and took a deep, steadying breath. “Yeah, sure,” she said calmly, “maybe later this week,” and smiled at a gloriously wide and windy world.

  Two

  When I was eight, my father was transferred to the city of Eleusis, population 65,000, one hour northwest of Toronto. The city’s core was redbrick Victorian, but expanding rapidly into suburbs of split-levels and apartment blocks, and my father initially started looking at houses in the outskirts, which was where a family like ours belonged. Soon into the search, however, my mother’s prayers guided our car toward the university area, then onto a street where a handwritten FOR SALE sign was posted in the window of 59 Quance Crescent—a three-story redbrick house that had been built at the end of the previous century and was almost as old as the woman selling it. Taking one look at my carefully rag-curled ringlets, polished patent-leather shoes, and the Sunday school paper I clutched in my right hand, she agreed to sell her house for the first offer my father made, at one-fifth its market value.

  The house had hardwood floors, beige flame-shaped lightbulbs, and radiators with clawed feet. We arrived early one July morning to take up residence, an hour ahead of the moving van. My father led us up the white porch steps, where we stood outside the front door for a long flowering moment, surrounded by hanging pots of geraniums and petunias, the old woman’s garden rooted in wind. Then my father unlocked the door, and we stepped over the threshold and separated into a vast emptiness. Leaving my parents, I walked alone into the gloom, where each room led into the next, a series of echoing caverns. For some reason, the old woman had left several antique mirrors hanging on the second-floor walls, and they kept catching me at odd angles, so that I found myself suddenly doubled and walking toward myself from across an empty room or twinned at the opposite end of a hall. Transfixed, I stared at reflections that seemed to be stepping through glass veils, coming and going through layered mystery, while from the ground floor came the sound of my father pushing up kitchen windows and opening the house to subtle breezes, a chorus of cicadas, the rustling innuendos of maple and oak.

  To either side of our new home, Quance Crescent unrolled—a tidy sequence of several-story stone and brick houses inhabited by professors, architects, a former mayor, and the wisdom of maple trees; my father was the only salesman, my mother the only housewife-for-Jesus, and we constituted the only Waiting for the Rapture family on our block. Century-old gray stone churches inhabited nearby street corners—Anglican, Presbyterian, United, and Roman Catholic. Most of our neighbors attended these services, and over the years, my mother allowed me to accept invitations to accompany friends and their families so I could learn about “other faiths,” though it was assumed that these congregations did not hold a true understanding, would not be included among the Waiting for the Rapture 144,000, and did not stand among the chosen as the Hamilton family did.

  So I never revealed to my mother the way I felt these churches rise out of the earth, solid as heartbeat. I never spoke of the spirits I saw soaring through the great stone arches, how I would sit on dark pews staring upward, a roaring in my ears, until the shimmering, quivering air appeared about to split open onto some other place of color and light. Soundless singing filled my head—singing that I sensed like vibration
s, calling voices that I knew could be heard with just a little more faith. These aged churches seemed to resonate with doorways that would become visible on the other side of knowing. Whatever the mystery was, it never revealed itself, though I watched beady-eyed as a robed man mounted an iron staircase to a pulpit where secrets were carved deep into the wood, a Bible splayed open like a huge dead bird, candles gusted and smoked, and stone walls opened into glorious stained-glass windows that intoned scarlet, royal blue, and forest green in all the silences of the heart. Seated in churches that had been built out of the very thoughts of God, I knew I had found the Rapture, but since it belonged to “other faiths,” I never told my mother of its mysteries, of the way my thoughts ascended that vaulted air, tiny insect wings riding sacred waves of shadow and light.

  At the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle, the shape of God’s thinking was different—held no inner spaces, no silences, no slowed-down places to watch your own wings. Instead, the air seemed to tense against itself, arguing and whimpering as if it carried secret voices that wailed like babies, crying to be let in. I never got the sense that anyone else heard these voices; the faces of this congregation shone like fierce closed flames—careful, prearranged shapes like the candle-flame lightbulbs in our house on Quance Crescent. Calling each other Brother and Sister, members cried out and hugged in the church lobby like prodigals returning from enemy territory; with each embrace, the secret baby voices grew more frenzied; Sunday after Sunday, the congregation’s faith shone brighter, their faces sealed more tightly shut. This Waiting for the Rapture congregation was composed of crusaders, the Bible their sword and faith their shield; they sang choruses projected from overheads onto the white sanctuary wall, clapped and performed dance steps, and often crowded the aisles, raising their hands and speaking in tongues.

  My mother received the gift of tongues the first Sunday we attended the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle. Before this, she had always stood calmly in church—holding her hymnal like a duty and singing in a markedly resigned marching rhythm. That Sunday, however, something seized her as we entered the sanctuary; her nostrils flared and she seemed almost to be sniffing the air, touching it with her skin. When, partway into the service, the congregation began to moan and lift up their hands, she raised hers too, crying out in a voice no one could turn His back upon. As if in response, the very air split open above her head and a white glowing tunnel appeared. Inside its rapidly rotating form, a bird of fire in swift descent was observed by everyone present. Touching down on my mother’s head, it hovered a moment—a flickering opalescent vision the size of a small dove. Then, spreading its wings, it laid a single pearl-white flame upon her crown. Briefly, its fiery beak opened, but if the iridescent bird cried out, its sound was so high and otherworldly that it could not be heard by human ears. Abruptly, the apparition launched itself upward, re-entered the tunnel, and disappeared from view. Once it was gone, the spinning tunnel also vanished, but the white flame continued to glow atop my mother’s head, and her voice, like a parallel visitation, also took on the shape of fire—burning with the inexpressible, the unattainable, that lovely heat.

  For some years after that day, Pentecost visited her anew every Sunday. With an ecstasy the rest of us could only imagine, my mother saw visions, called out to angels, foamed at the mouth, and fell down rigid. Each time she collapsed, the congregation retreated behind rows of fanning bulletins, a silent wall of flesh and faith that watched, narrow-eyed, as Pastor Playle approached her rigid, foam-flecked form, went down on his knees, and waited. In spite of my mother’s strange suffering, or perhaps because of it, God answered her call—converting her grating gut-punch sounds into a drifting petallike loveliness, an unintelligible rush of liquid syllables only Pastor Playle seemed able to understand; unfailingly, the good pastor translated for the rest of us, his voice rising and falling with hers so they seemed joined in parallel ecstasy, riding vibrations above our heads.

  Sometimes my mother spoke of the heavens—not a single place, but many connected worlds, seemingly formed from crystal and jewels, the prismatic thoughts of God. Other times she warned of apocalypse and global catastrophe, the evil that lurked both as potential and realized action. But what most caught the congregation’s attention were her more personal references. Often, pointing at individual members or visiting strangers, she was able to give uncannily accurate descriptions of crises they were experiencing, and she could successfully diagnose illness and predict pending death in the family, spousal infidelity, or financial calamity. Word spread quickly about this extraordinary prophet, and attendance at the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle soared as people flocked to hear her testify. Soon Pastor Playle began meeting with my mother privately for midweek prayer and praise sessions, and within a year, she was anointed the Divine Sister—a position created to recognize her unique gift that also granted her the privilege of offering up praise at important church functions, even national Waiting for the Rapture conferences.

  Through every stage in her rise to celebrity, Pastor Playle was at Rachel Hamilton’s side, appearing with her on stage to introduce her to other congregations, then kneeling in humble devotion to translate her enraptured visions for the lesser, uncomprehending elect. But however the euphoria joined them, it left Pastor Playle and my mother differently—the good pastor striding vigorously to the podium as if reborn while the pearl-white flame faded from my mother’s head and she collapsed into a trembling heap. After particularly intense sessions with the Spirit, deacons had to be summoned to carry her from the sanctuary, and it could be days before she recovered from the seizures and headaches that ecstasy left in its wake.

  No tongue of fire ever touched my scalp, though I cut orange flames out of construction paper and held them above my head, imitating the sounds I heard coming from my mother’s mouth. Sunday mornings I stood beside her, raised my hands and swayed, and sometimes a sweet white fire seemed to descend onto me and a new voice to sing from my mouth, but it always sang in English, always “Just as I Am” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” For several years after my mother’s first visitation, I was certain a nurse had accidentally switched me with another infant after my birth, and somewhere a poor, confused, truly Christian girl—one of the 144,000—was fervently speaking in tongues while her Anglican, Presbyterian, or United parents whipped her with chains and locked her in a dark basement until she learned to speak good, solid, plain old English.

  My mother assured me that it didn’t matter, God heard my words as clearly as hers, but there was a line of satisfaction around her mouth as I begged her to sound out Heaven’s words slowly so I could learn them one by one. “It’s a gift, Mary-Eve,” she told me flatly. “You get given it or you don’t. You can’t ask to become one of the chosen few.”

  “But what if I’m not a chosen one?” I asked fearfully. “What if God chose you and He didn’t choose me? What if only people who speak in tongues get into Heaven?”

  “Nonsense!” snapped my mother, turning to leave the room. “You’re my daughter and you’ll go to Heaven. That’s all there is to it.”

  Approximately one year after our move to Eleusis, I retreated into a game I called The Chosen Ones. The game always started with the pulling down of my bedroom window blind, and then, midmorning or in the afternoon, I would be standing in a curved shadowy realm—a place I thought of as the catacombs into which the early Christians had fled to worship. Closing my eyes, I imagined them—the truest Chosen Ones—and gradually I would begin to hear the rustle of robes and soft chanting. Then, if I continued to concentrate, they appeared to me—a long line of robed figures materializing into clearly defined form. Concealed within the openings of their hoods, their faces remained a mystery, but, pulling my bathrobe over my head, I fantasized that I was one of them—one of The Chosen Ones gathered deep in the bowels of the earth where death stood all around, the walls were crowded with tombs, and the bones of the poor had been piled h
igh in a vast pit. If the odd spirit came drifting past, it did not frighten me; I felt comfortable in this place between the living and the dead, whispering code words like agape and making the secret sign of the fish.

  The Chosen Ones had the gift of tongues and conversed frequently with the Spirit—an entity that revealed itself through glowing flames scattered across their heads and arms—and they knew how to speak to the tall transparent shapes of the dead. Each robed figure carried a bone-handled knife in the left hand, which was raised in song or chant. Deep in the shadows of my mind, I watched candlelight glint off curved blades as knives arced through the air then sank into the folds of The Chosen Ones’ robes like a kind of mysterious speech, a retelling of old stories—Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, the ancient temple sacrifices. Familiar with these myths, I thought I understood the holy requirements of this secret priesthood; obviously, there were rituals to be obeyed, and The Chosen Ones were waiting for me to prove myself worthy. If I had no fatted calf, my toy box was packed with dolls, my mother kept a large can of tomato juice in the fridge, and the sharp knives were stored in a drawer beside the kitchen sink. Having collected the necessary ingredients for a good sacrifice, I pulled down my window blind, laid one of my dolls on my bedroom chair, and made the secret sign of the fish. The robes of The Chosen Ones made anticipatory rustles; I felt their watching eyes as I sliced open the doll’s cloth belly, poured tomato juice onto the cotton stuffing, and offered up her soul to the Lord.

  Nothing changed. As before, The Chosen Ones continued their unfathomable chants and dancing but did not speak to me, did not draw me in. Somehow I had displeased them; the sacrifice of the doll had not been enough, for it had not allowed me to break the code that would have granted me entry into their ranks. For days I was stymied; then intense cogitation brought my error to me—God, of course, required the sacrifice of something alive, real blood. One of the truly chosen ones would not sacrifice a mere doll, nor would she flinch from the holiness of the task set before her.