The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [91]
Then she would ask him about the very things which drew her husband into the eye of this enigmatic hurricane, of the things that attracted him so and into his obsessive pursuit of its answers, of luminous female beasts and of a little boy named Nigel lost within the void of circumstance and time.
24.
A Rude Awakening for William Behn
Drifting...
....drifting.
Sleeping.....
You see bright lights, said the glossy-eyed man with the tick-tocking pendulum, staring straight through the eyes of the man who now sleeps...
...of the man who now dreams; the man who now dreams of repressions stripped naked, exposed and uninhibited by the pendulum’s spell and the commands of the glossy-eyed man.
Numerous sessions went this way, for William...and some times, even now, he dreams of them as he lies drifting to sleep.
He dreams of the
bright...
...lights.
Bright lights from the lacey-thin fabric of curtains midway drawn; bright lights from the sliding glass doors slid open in a foot-length yawn to the welcomed cool breeze from the broken showers of post-sunset.
Drifting...
It was a rotation of lights, bright as they were but in intervals of brightness, which blinded and then became tolerable again in the outer abyss of nighttime sky. It was as if something from above and beyond the second-story outer balcony of the Behn residence descended and dangled and swung by an umbilical cord to the heavens, like a massive and curious spider with luminous eyes teeter-tottering from a strand of starlit web, like an aerial militia in spotlit pursuit of a dodging renegade.
Sleeping...
The bright lights played upon the statue garden of the balcony patio, its canvassing radiance calling gargoyles forth from shadow, war-ready knights and trolls and toadstool elves from their unlighted sanctuaries. They caressed a stone maiden whose frozen gaze backwards always reminded William Behn of the pillar of salt Lot’s wife turned into, when she looked back upon the world she left behind.
William Behn’s world remained mute, and he viewed the spectacle from the confines of his bedroom as though viewing with a tense numbness a silent movie he was about to step into and over through the rectangular movie screen of the balcony’s glass double doors.
The lights called out to him within this silence, rendered him vulnerable to his own primal fears yet at the same time helpless against the lights’ irrepressible summons.
If he were indeed dreaming this, it occurred to him that this was one of those dreams, which deprived the dreamer of control, the kind of dream in which you have no choice but to let it take you out to its sea like a tide’s powerful undertow, to make you drift in its currents until it runs its course and until you awaken.
He had told the glossy-eyed man this once, maybe more than once, during a questionable number of sessions of drifting and sleeping to a pendulum’s lullaby.
Perhaps this wasn’t a dream at all, but in fact was one of those sessions....
William Behn sat alone at his bedside, alone but for his slumbering wife nestled beneath the bedcovers they shared. But Agatha was unaware of all this, wasn’t even a part of it really, and in their isolated positions there was a plainly ironic symbolism to the isolated positions they held within their marriage. In fact, they both were aware of the other’s unspoken yearning to separate from nine years of their decaying union. They would get around to discussing it if only there were enough words spoken between them to strike a conversation in the first place. They each had developed daily routines and held separate occupations, one avoiding a bitter confrontation with the other by staying out of the other’s way, uniting only as glorified roommates for the routine responsibilities of bill payments and sugar-coated family gatherings.
William had two sons from a previous marriage, Agatha one son and two daughters, all of them married successfully and faithfully, all of them ignorant to their parents’