Slowly she climbs the wooden steps up to the back porch, then seems to gather her last reserves of energy to burst through the door into the kitchen, exalting in sweat. She doesn't move for a minute or two except to breathe. She scans the room. It is a small old white kitchen, with black borders on all the cabinets, and an unremovable layer of grime on the walls. There are old notes on the fridge, a microwave balanced on a crooked little end table, plants on the windowsill. There are remnants of someone's dinner on the counter, and shoes everywhere. She begins to make a pot of tea.
She is standing watching the blue flames underneath the kettle, crawling to the edge and spilling up the sides when something occurs to her and she marches suddenly into the bedroom. Clothes are strewn across the bed and floor and she steps on them with dirty sneakers in her haste to collect all the candles in the room. She finds eight, and some incense, and then sees a carton of bath salts on the back of a shelf that have been there waiting for this day for maybe a year and a half. When she reaches for it the bottom gives out and tiny orange crystals pour out and scatter across the carpet. Cursing quietly, she kneels down to gather them in her hands, bringing a palmful straight to the bathroom and tossing them in the empty bathtub. She begins setting out and lighting candles, meticulously spreading them evenly around the perimeter of the room. The incense she places by the sink, then on the shelf above the toilet paper, then finally on the windowsill. She hangs a towel on the door, then hears the charging train whistle sound the old kettle makes when the water's boiled and returns to pour the tea. She undresses hurriedly in the kitchen while it steeps. Her skin is red and clammy from the ride home, her clothes damp with sweat. She tosses them unceremoniously onto her bed from the doorway then stands at the dresser tying her hair up. She sees the pack of cigarettes there and hesitates for a moment, then slowly and deliberately she takes them into the bathroom and places them on the toilet seat, next to the lighter. She locks the door, turns off the light, and stands there naked, sipping tea and watching the water run. When the tub is full she turns off the taps and begins a gradual, incremental descent into the bath.
In this house a silence like this one is rare and she wonders where everyone is. Flickering candlelight exaggerates the shadows of goosebumps on her legs and arms. It is dark in this small room but through the open window she can see it is still light out, there is maybe an hour or so left. She moves slightly and the sound of the water reminds her of something from a long time ago that she can't quite place. She leans back dejectedly, her head cocked to one side against the cool tile. She reaches slowly for the pack of smokes and watches steam rising from the shining skin of her arm and water dripping from the tips of her fingers and feels like a strange animal, something dredged out of a swamp and unaccustomed to society. The air is moving less and less. It is pliable now, small motions leave indents in it. She lights a cigarette. The hiss and crackle are soothing sounds in the stillness and humidity of this room. She exhales a long stream of smoke through the rising steam towards her feet, then rests the dart lightly on her lower lip so as not to soak it through. The breeze coming in is just reaching the right side of her face and she begins to feel extraordinarily alone. It is strange to her that this feeling should be so tangible, she cannot know this now but it will not leave her for years to come. She is not crying, she can't remember right now what crying feels like. Smoke fills her head, and her limbs grow steadily heavier. To keep from drowning she attempts to count by feel the bath salts underneath her. She is so far away from everything in here. She can't remember her intent, the brass tacks. She can't remember anything. There is only the purity and holiness of smoking in the bath. Sometimes she ashes out the window, sometimes right into the water. When the cigarette burns out, she wants to be asleep. Still no one is home.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Nausea, Sparks.
I had this dream about a week before I was supposed to get an EEG at Rockyview Hospital. I had this appointment because I used to have seizures as a kid, not really seizures, I'd pass out and stop breathing and clench my jaw, eyes rolled back, face going blue, my poor parents. The strangest thing was right before they happened I'd always smell ham. Distinctly, like a baking ham in the oven, I still can't bring myself to eat it. Anyway doctors never figured it out, epileptics don't stop breathing, and the blackouts stopped around the time I turned 13, but then about a month ago I had another one. It was different, no ham, no warning. I was by the fridge chugging back a glass of water, crazy hungover, still wearing a tight little dress from the night before. Then suddenly I was waking up, disoriented, couldn't see, my mother's voice repeating something, something about the phone, I could swear she said it at least six times, she sounded so far away. By the time I was able to open my eyes there were paramedics leaning over me, and vomit on the floor beside me. That's new too, the vomit aspect. I hardly knew what was going on but suddenly I said to one of the paramedics, "Do I know you?" And then we figured out that her brother used to come in to Tops all the time, a bar up the street from my house where I worked years ago, he was my boss's best friend. Jeff. He used to kind of have a thing for me, a half joking, when we're married you won't have to bartend... kind of thing. The paramedic was Jeff's sister. I think I said something to her, half delirious, something like, "He was fond of me." I hope she told him. "How's she doing?" he says in my imagination. The sister hesitates before replying, "Well, um, gross, kind of, when I met her anyway." Great stuff. It was actually not a bad day in terms of comedy. Mum was supposed to grab me some clothes to go the hospital in, and she somehow, in her haste, decided on a floor length skirt with a slit up to mid-thigh level. To put overtop of the super-short, low-cut party dress. As well as a big baggy hoodie, of course. I was totally the funny young person at the hospital. Made a different joke to every nurse or porter I encountered. "Oh this old thing?" "I know, super inappropriate, I tried to tell my mum it was too much but she kept going on about cute male nurses." "I thought I'd just have my cleavage easily accessible for the stethoscope." "Oh, yeah, this, I have a tango competition later. Do you tango?" Fun day. Anyway they referred me to a neurologist, a serious man, tall, argyle socks, frequently rested his pen thoughtfully against his lip. He ordered the EEG, and suggested I refrain, for the time being, from driving. Also no heavy drinking. This last suggestion I took extremely seriously for a while, until the greys became too much to bear. And then I had this dream.
The dream was about the appointment, very realistic in it's beginnings. I was supposed to not have eaten or drank anything in the 12 hours previous to the appointment, and to not have slept for the previous 24. So in the dream, I'm in that beautiful hyperreal state that comes with insomnia, something I know about from a year or so ago in a tiny apartment, and the time I filled with midnight bike rides and cigarettes. My mother is driving me, in the dream, and No One is Watching You Now by 'Til Tuesday is on the radio, (that's a nice detail, isn't that a nice detail?) while she talks about a family dinner coming up, what should she cook and will Grandma be able to come. Then suddenly I'm in the room, and a cloudy figure is putting the electrodes on my head and there is some sort of powerpoint presentation being shown and it is very dark, and then I'm laying down. And because there is a soundtrack to this dream there is Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart playing when I feel it start. Of course in real life you don't feel anything, I know this vaguely from having one as a child when the blackouts were more common, and solidly because I have since been to the actual appointment, recently, in real life. But in the beautiful Donnie Darko soundtrack dream, there is a feeling, a soft buzz hum feeling that is seeping into me from each individual electrode on my skull and spreading downward. It is a feeling like electricity and honey had a baby, and it is slowly moving through me, charging my blood, turning up some switch in my head so that I feel more, more alive and more angry and more prepared. Sparks are shooting out of my eyes now, my muscles are beginning to twitch and tense, the current from the electrodes which is now impossibly intense, sped-up, rushing at light speed, makes everything before the EEG feel distant and senseless like I'm being delivered to some version of myself who is irrefutably stronger and who has been waiting and it's absolutely wonderful. All the while I'm just barely aware of the cloudy figure, in the background, reading my brainwaves as they pass across a computer screen, checking settings, making notes.
When it is over I don't know how to feel and honestly this part of the dream has lost it's vivid colour so I don't remember it's atmospheric qualities or if there was anything sad from the eighties playing in the background. I can't even remember if this part actually happened, maybe I just assumed it did because the next scene, if you will, is in the car again, on the way home, and I'm telling my mother what the diagnosis was. This of course is another entirely unrealistic aspect to the dream, having since had the EEG I know they don't tell you anything right away. Mum actually asked, but the technician, whose name was Danielle and who was very normal and not at all cloudy and who did NOT laugh at my jokes, said she wasn't at liberty to comment on the results, and that I'd be hearing from my neurologist if anything was amiss, or not hearing anything, if nothing was. I don't expect anyone will call, I feel oddly certain about this. I went to this appointment mostly to put my mother's mind at ease, because I genuinely believe there is nothing to be found, and that the thing that happened was just a thing that happened, maybe my body is slightly too prone to shock, maybe nothing, maybe it is just a weird life thing that I may or may not have to deal with occasionally in years to come. Maybe this is because I have that "I'm invincible" complex that people over 60 with social service jobs tell young people they all have, or maybe it's just instinct, or maybe I'm wrong, but anyway, in the dream, it was different. Back in the car, I'm telling Mum what they said. It's something like, "Well what they found, it's not really affecting me. Not yet. It's just in there, taking up space. It's unclear whether it's causing the seizures, I think that's what they said, but they're connected. I'm on a kind of precipice, I guess, it's apparently sort of phenomenal that this thing, they started calling it a pocket, this pocket hasn't, um, hasn't burst or something. Because it's unstable, the pocket, it's edges are fragile and if I keep having seizures, maybe even the next one, if it's intense enough, this pocket could break open in my brain, and then it's contents will spill out and change things. They said my brain would be on, like another level, of brainyness. The stuff inside this pocket would heighten my brain function in every way. I would be able to retain exponentially larger amounts of information, even the creative parts would be just on fire, essentially, neurons firing faster, everything kind of, just heightened. They said I could be a genius. There's no way to know when I'll have another seizure, whether it will be enough to spark this thing off, they also aren't sure how my brain would handle this kind of event, but, I mean, they know it's possible. I could be something incredible. I'm on the fucking precipice.
The dream was about the appointment, very realistic in it's beginnings. I was supposed to not have eaten or drank anything in the 12 hours previous to the appointment, and to not have slept for the previous 24. So in the dream, I'm in that beautiful hyperreal state that comes with insomnia, something I know about from a year or so ago in a tiny apartment, and the time I filled with midnight bike rides and cigarettes. My mother is driving me, in the dream, and No One is Watching You Now by 'Til Tuesday is on the radio, (that's a nice detail, isn't that a nice detail?) while she talks about a family dinner coming up, what should she cook and will Grandma be able to come. Then suddenly I'm in the room, and a cloudy figure is putting the electrodes on my head and there is some sort of powerpoint presentation being shown and it is very dark, and then I'm laying down. And because there is a soundtrack to this dream there is Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart playing when I feel it start. Of course in real life you don't feel anything, I know this vaguely from having one as a child when the blackouts were more common, and solidly because I have since been to the actual appointment, recently, in real life. But in the beautiful Donnie Darko soundtrack dream, there is a feeling, a soft buzz hum feeling that is seeping into me from each individual electrode on my skull and spreading downward. It is a feeling like electricity and honey had a baby, and it is slowly moving through me, charging my blood, turning up some switch in my head so that I feel more, more alive and more angry and more prepared. Sparks are shooting out of my eyes now, my muscles are beginning to twitch and tense, the current from the electrodes which is now impossibly intense, sped-up, rushing at light speed, makes everything before the EEG feel distant and senseless like I'm being delivered to some version of myself who is irrefutably stronger and who has been waiting and it's absolutely wonderful. All the while I'm just barely aware of the cloudy figure, in the background, reading my brainwaves as they pass across a computer screen, checking settings, making notes.
When it is over I don't know how to feel and honestly this part of the dream has lost it's vivid colour so I don't remember it's atmospheric qualities or if there was anything sad from the eighties playing in the background. I can't even remember if this part actually happened, maybe I just assumed it did because the next scene, if you will, is in the car again, on the way home, and I'm telling my mother what the diagnosis was. This of course is another entirely unrealistic aspect to the dream, having since had the EEG I know they don't tell you anything right away. Mum actually asked, but the technician, whose name was Danielle and who was very normal and not at all cloudy and who did NOT laugh at my jokes, said she wasn't at liberty to comment on the results, and that I'd be hearing from my neurologist if anything was amiss, or not hearing anything, if nothing was. I don't expect anyone will call, I feel oddly certain about this. I went to this appointment mostly to put my mother's mind at ease, because I genuinely believe there is nothing to be found, and that the thing that happened was just a thing that happened, maybe my body is slightly too prone to shock, maybe nothing, maybe it is just a weird life thing that I may or may not have to deal with occasionally in years to come. Maybe this is because I have that "I'm invincible" complex that people over 60 with social service jobs tell young people they all have, or maybe it's just instinct, or maybe I'm wrong, but anyway, in the dream, it was different. Back in the car, I'm telling Mum what they said. It's something like, "Well what they found, it's not really affecting me. Not yet. It's just in there, taking up space. It's unclear whether it's causing the seizures, I think that's what they said, but they're connected. I'm on a kind of precipice, I guess, it's apparently sort of phenomenal that this thing, they started calling it a pocket, this pocket hasn't, um, hasn't burst or something. Because it's unstable, the pocket, it's edges are fragile and if I keep having seizures, maybe even the next one, if it's intense enough, this pocket could break open in my brain, and then it's contents will spill out and change things. They said my brain would be on, like another level, of brainyness. The stuff inside this pocket would heighten my brain function in every way. I would be able to retain exponentially larger amounts of information, even the creative parts would be just on fire, essentially, neurons firing faster, everything kind of, just heightened. They said I could be a genius. There's no way to know when I'll have another seizure, whether it will be enough to spark this thing off, they also aren't sure how my brain would handle this kind of event, but, I mean, they know it's possible. I could be something incredible. I'm on the fucking precipice.
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