Notes on a Dream: No. 9
by Pearl Prynne

 

There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.
-from Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung

 

I am a young woman. I am a thousand years old. Only in a dream can both be true. That is what I pray every time the blood flows. Only in a dream.

I am falling into the moon again tonight, sweet embrace, to make snow angels on her powdery surface, where there never alit an angel.

Tell me, young lady, is it true that all lycanthropes are misanthropes?
Not in my experience. Most of us relish you.

To be fouled in iconic representation by Lon Chaney, Jr., is a singular piece of hilarity. Did he have breasts like these? A winning (though admittedly somewhat toothy) smile of pearly whites? Hair like billowing wheat, eyes deep violet, a secret mystery (this I was told once in the hour before the kill, Luna¹s phase arriving as I looked up at Her over his shoulder). We can dispense with the old gypsy woman mouthing sonorous coos of ancient wisdom through her pursed and broken lips, as well. PleaseŠ that¹s all so backlot.

And who¹s afraid of the big bad me? A girl could get a complex.

Hearts bursting from fear. And one heart calcifying from solitude.

My foster family gave me the name I still carry today, Grace Landis. Grace. (How far I have fallen from myself.) Thus, christening me, not knowing what I was, speaks to an irony in which you can¹t but scent the presence of some kind of god or other. (gods¹re all nothing if not ironical.); if they christened knowingly, speaks to an unspeakable cruelty and arrogance ­ which they did, in fact, possess regardless. It¹s of little consequence now. They¹re all dead, among the first, recompense for the beatings with belts and hangers and hoses and, once, an Oscar-sized statue of the Virgin. They were all good, religious people, though they were a little weak on their Proverbs: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." Personally, I¹ve always loved that one.

I caught my image once in a picture window spattered in gore. Powerful, four-legged monster. Thrilling. Yuck.

The change is something to behold, something of a cross between an exercise in xenomorphology and an inverse cosmetic hair removal. It is painful to describe because it is painful to endure. Bones wrench themselves into new and wondrous angles; sinews stretch and sometimes tear, tendons scream, muscles sing and howl, flesh contracts and then explodes in liquid heat. Not to be salacious about it, nor put a different countenance on it than belongs, but there is the nature of an orgasm in it, and if you can stand the agony, it spoils you for the so-called real thing.

The desert is in us all. So, too, what lies beneath it. That is a part of the curse (or, in the vernacular, let¹s just say I have issues, all right?) that never finds its way into the popular celluloid mentality, never emerges from the crusty and musty pages of the old books, either: I am fated to love each one, man or woman (never a child ­ I am spared at least that much), love them with a depth and profundity that makes my bones cold, even as I am shedding their blood, ensuring my isolation over and over and over again.

All is not lost. Don¹t believe it. All is lost.

Barren, barrenŠ Chasing across the world¹s desolation, aflight from all desire, all need, all promise. Pursued by the children I will never bear, the love never mine to own, the fear that reaches beyond protection, a fear that one night in the dark primordial forest, they will know the blasting terror of meeting someone, some thing, some ItŠ like me. Like their mother. Spare them from me ­ perhaps, after all, a not uncommon supplication among parents. It¹s just as well. I would have set a terrible example on that five servings of vegetables daily thing.

Once, the moon was covered by vast oceans, teeming with life. Then one creature rose up on his two rear appendages, staggered to a tiny hillock of land, spoke three words, received no reply, fell back down on four stumps of flesh, and slunk back into the sea; in a billion years, the desert and the moon as we know it appeared. The three words are comprised of one of the following combinations: Who am I? Vini, vidi, vici. I love you. Looks like rain.

This should kill you; it kills me: the garment I most love to wear is an oversized sweater of softest, warm-buttery wool. So I howl: Baaaaaaaaaa!

Do androids dream of electric sheep? And of something even more alien loose in the fold? My, what big eyes I have.

In the middle of the desert on the moon lies, of all things, Plato¹s cave. I curl up there sometimes, and fall into a semblance of sleep; it is the one place I feel welcome. The world of shadows. Of sad enigmas. Where form, if it exists at all, does so only as an illusion, and nothing survives close scrutiny. Scrutinize me ­ I beg you.

They say that during a plane crash, something in the mind, the chemical blob of brains, shuts off, so that a passenger no longer is aware of the actual reality of what is happening to them, and the end is supposedly more easeful that way, no longer bound up in horrors that stretch seconds into eons. (How "they" attain those findings is anyone¹s guess. Do they exhume the corpses part by part, reassemble them, and interview what¹s left as to how they were feeling at the time? What a nice job for Anderson Cooper in his next go-round.) With me, it¹s different. With me, it¹s all about the eyes. You look into mine in those last moments, and your body doesn¹t go limp nor numb, but rather galvanizes like steel, the molecules contracting, spinning faster, solidifying in ways that defy human physiology, coalescing into a consciousness beyond this world, a super-knowledge that finds its home all the way back in the stellar gas. That¹s the favor I do for you before I tear your throat out. Now, can you blame me for feeling just a bit under-appreciated?

Enough. The dream ends now. Now, awaken. Awake now. Awake now. Awake now
Š Yes, I am awake now. I recognize the desert, though I cannot see it. And this really is who and what I am. And, what I am, is sorry. So sorry. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Crossing a vast desert at night, without scope nor depth. The overarching solitude, the world without form, and void. What¹s sad is this: I am aware of but can¹t recall in any detail a time before. It has been washed away, swept aside in the desert like so much inessential, inconsequential silt, a nothingness translated afresh each time I am presented with a person with a past. Where did I begin? And, you¹d say, more to the point: why?

Strung here and there across the centuries, pell-mell, a random web through time, history without consequence, without pattern or meaning.

All knowing, all demanding, all pursuing, all devouringŠ god.

And you¹re walking this all alone (two legs or four, it makes not a cosmic bit of difference), not alone in the sense of loneliness, not in the sense of feeling the presence of other beings out there with whom you simply do not or cannot connect, but a solitariness that tells you all is lost. No love, though you may love. No echo, though you may speak, or scream. Like turning over a deck of cards one by one, each one with no markings, no value, not even any face, you simply turn and turn and turn, and never realize that the game is not really fixed, it simply doesn¹t exist at all. Oh, sometimes, I do ACHE. Ache with the knowledge of it, and long for the week of hell, when though it comes, it comes unawares.

Talk about hating "that time of the monthŠ" S¹fine by me. You have no idea what PMS is for the rest of us.

How long do I go on? Exist? If I could remember being born, I could at least imagine my own death. And how many others would be spared? And how much of me would be saved?

Nothing, nothing scents like fear ­ except, perhaps, loneliness.

The music besotted, and don¹t look back, seven pillars of salt, and don¹t look back.

And, in this, at least, I am not alone: a howling into the void, and all that bounces back to us is the sound of our own voice, distorted beyond all recognition.

The silver bullet is a strange conceit, another cute hollywood device, when the only actual release comes in the admission of your own damnation, and the moment of release opens up into the eternity of burning.

Will I go out tonight? Will you be there? Both have a certain animalistic inevitability about them, don¹t you think?

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