Part 4 - Fields of Iowa

~~~A troubled mind and an open door~~~

My focus was firmly on the fever dream figment of the familiar farm. With Duck fastidiously fastened to terra firma at my right flank, I floated directionlessly over the flowering fields, frozen in place, fraught with indecision. Within striking distance of me was a door with an unmistakable hue, a distinct golden sheen- The very thing I had until just recently assumed was the whole point of my opioid-induced side quest… The very thing I had just given up on. After countless fruitless searches through memories and space and time, there it was… so plain and clear it was almost mocking me. And yet, when you spend so long chasing something, the idea of finally catching it becomes terrifyingly...final. Dogs don’t want to catch cars for real, you know? And when they do try in earnest they usually get a tire to the head. Hence the trepidation.

My eyes bounced left to right contemplatively until my focus shifted sideways to my deep periphery where I was able to peek into my other concurrent state back in the hospital operating room. A clock on the wall showed seven hours had passed since I had been confined in that antiquated asylum.

White coats and other monochromatic characters in scrubs rolled my transient, wheeled, railed prison cell down bleached and bland hallways from the PACU to a more permanent room. An array of tubes and wires tethered me to the temporary twin bed. An annoyingly bright anomaly in the form of a neon yellow wristband on my right arm informed the healthcare professionals that I was a “fall risk.” Not nearly as fashionable as the friendship bracelets I had refused to take off on the left wrist. I focused on their threads and strands intently, studying the details of the plastic beads and intricately intertwined strings that were at one point woven with care and intention. It was the only way I could prove to my floating farm self that it was indeed me down there in that cell. Textile and alloy loops loosely binding my radius and ulna in their meat sack were very much the only tether to that reality I had.

Nurses and aids dragged me from the gurney to a more permanent hospital bed and I watched as an intense, instantaneous look of anguish contort my pale face. I seemed to scream in agony. It looked like I couldn't breathe. My left arm looked like a lifeless appendage, haphazardly flopping around. A bandage wrapped snugly across the abdomen concealed some great surgical mystery amidst the pumps, tubing, and yellow grippy socks. Dainty, deftly-skilled hands gathered around an IV tower to shoot me full of morphine, fentanyl and leave. From the look of things I was unsure if I was dying, preparing for death, or if I was fine, but I figured whatever the eventuality was- the outcome was looming, and the clock was ticking so I should get back to my mission.
As the sea of activity calmed and I was about to abandon my omniscient view of the scene, the faint silhouette of a fine-lined phantom formed in the chair next to my hospital bed after everyone left. Opaque as cemetery fog obscuring an autumnal full moon in a scary movie, smooth and still like the first winter ice on Wyoming's Marion Lake, Fabergé egg-fragile, sitting silently and staring directly up at me in the aether quite unmistakably were a pair of axinite eyes.
I blinked. It was all gone.

“Well, that was weird,” I thought internally.
“Well, that was weird.” Audible words, not my own, broke the silence. It was the squatty, semi-sullen goat. Amidst a field of budding wildflowers adjacent to a garden with Duck at my side, the simple sounds of summer cicadas filled the dusk as his words sauntered off into the black mystery beyond the steamy thicket of yaupon and pine. I stared in the direction of the glinting entryway debating whether I should bolt for it and follow the girl in the green dress or if I should leave it alone and do something…anything…else.
I looked at the stout brown and white ungulate, hoping for some sort of sign or silent guidance.
No sign. No nod. No words. Just unoscillating oval eyes that made me think if he thought twice about anything, it would be two more thoughts than he’d had all day.

How fitting of a moment, too, because in dreamland or otherwise, I cling too tightly to things. I’ve oft been accused of not knowing when to quit. Show me something that I’ve wanted and I can instantaneously point out the bruises and scratches and claw marks I left on it from trying to keep it from slipping away, and maybe more importantly I can show off the scars from lost battles that I've personally accumulated as various partings have left their litany of unceremoniously unsurgical holes inside of me.
I’ve been regularly known to stick heroics out long enough to become the villain. If I were a boat captain, I could show you a graveyard of ships at the bottom of the ocean where my ghost swims with the grouper and glides through the coral all because I don't know how to abandon ship. It’s a gift and a curse, I guess, but if they made a merit badge for it, I’d wear it proudly.
They say you should carefully choose the hills you wish to die on. It’s good advice, which is probably why I never heard the phrase from Duck, although he did say at previous points that I was “too early” and that the door was not there “presently.” Maybe the right time had come, but too, maybe it was another trap. Either way, I knew time was running out. My inaction and indecision stemmed from the internal struggle of trying to decide if it was a hill I would be willing to die on.
There are the molehills of idiocy: the trite, pedantic, annoying, inconsequential, infinitely infantile idiosyncrasies of life. Things that are genuinely not worth the breath spent on the debate, but people seem to stake their flag in the ground and make their stand on them all the time, all the same, shouting senselessly from their soapbox to capture the interest of no one.
Then you also have your metaphorical Mount Moriahs: the hallowed ground of the saving grace salvation or, as others would argue from that same promontory- a storybook tale of unsubstantiabilities, but either way a much more important and prominent peak than the low relief mounds that are the finer points of politics or the frailty of the human ego, for example.

Knowing that every topographical rise can't be a place where you make your stand, I crunched the numbers in my head on the whole door situation. Mole hill, or mountain. Mole hill…Moutain. When the spinning slot machine reels of thought stopped, I whispered ever so faintly aloud to myself “Moriah”, nodding my head ever so slightly in affirmation that this one was in the category of things that are worth the effort and time to chase down regardless of what answers may or may not be beyond that threshold. It could be the empty room I had been disappointed in long ago. Might be the gateway to the other side itself. May be a portal beyond normal life and understanding that no one had ever seen, or it could all amount to an iceberg to my boat; another schooner resting on the sea floor. But even if it was oblivion itself which lay beyond the door, I resolved I would knowingly and willingly march through it relentlessly, pressing this search to the bitter end just to figure out what was on the other side, fueled by equal parts curiosity and the sheer blind inability to quit. They say that sort of thing kills people. And cats.

I looked over at the goat to find those idle oval eyes. He knew I had made up my mind.
“You won't be able to stay in this place forever, but you don't have to go back to the place you came from. You always have a choice.”
Not really what I needed to hear. I rolled my eyes and filed it under “general goat-prophecy riddle-limerick” and made a note to come back and revisit that tidbit of wisdom later. There was no time. I fixed my rolling eyes, fixed the insolent look on my face, and flashed a facsimile of the finest smile I could fake to Duck. With a flick of my feet I glided nervously to the shimmering door casing knowing full well that I was most likely a monarch attracted to a bug zapper, floating over a sea of grass and justifiable fear to the soft electric glow of a sizzling death. The winged insects probably don’t know that the blue light is going to turn them into a light show and well-done meal all at once; I don’t think they have that advanced thought capability. I, however, took every iota of time to to bask in the impending inevitability that if this actually was THE door that I had been searching for in this druggy dream, I wouldn't be ready for what was inside, or it would be underwhelming, or that it would be the end of everything.

I stopped shy and took a moment to linger in the vestibule to contemple one last time what could be on the other side- pot of gold, ransacked ruins of emptiness, confetti, that giant stone death boulder from Indiana Jones. The Scooby-Doo caliber mystery was about to come to an end, but for the moment I felt like I was more at home than in foreign land. There was a vague familiarity to the shape, sheen, and subtleties. Something about it felt right.

Gently I eased up as close to the door as I could get. I reached my hand out to touch the handle. I’d know brushed 304 stainless steel in any life, alternate reality or dream. It has a certain texture and hand-feel, a muted sheen that gives away its tactile characteristics. The grasping surface was warm from bathing in the long, perpetual glow of evening light and worn smooth by the history of what must have been thousands of hands wanting entry. The air had an electric touch similar to burgeoning atmospheric static before lightning erupts above your head and smites you down indiscriminately then starts a forest fire with your charred remains. But it still felt right.

Fingers firmly coiled, I pushed.

Nothing happened.

My heart sank.

I looked around to catch a glimpse of an engraving on the door. “Pull."

I pulled.

The door was heavy as it silently and willingly hinged open.

My heart floated.

There were no squeaks, catches, or spooky noises.

I pulled until it was just us two; an open door and a troubled mind.

~~~Wardenclyffe Lodge~~~

Beyond the rectangle of darkness was the most spectacular, cavernous, elaborate space that exuded a type of character that only comes with generations of carefully curated memories. Lit by dozens of points of soft flickering flame light, massive pillars made from entire debarked pine tree trunks held an ornately decorated vaulted roof that was supported by intricately carved hand-hewn wooden rafters that were as massive in width as the lintels of Stone Henge but many more times as long. Gnarled branches in unique shapes formed a network of railings on the upper balcony. At the far end of the room was a grand fireplace encased in massive blocks of red-orange aeolian sandstone. Dutiful flames rolled and crackled from the hearth filling the room with a record-player static sound, echoing the clicks and pops and white noise throughout. The light sweet smells of camp fire, sun-soaked pine, and elementary school-steeped memories; like crayons and little blue plastic chairs with chrome legs, sat gently in the air. It was a building any architect would marvel at.

To my left was a giant elevated stage framed with heavy velvet curtains. The thick white oak planks hinted at their age with light chips and gouges from use and a yellowing of the varnish that only comes with time. The stage was devoid of all decoration and adornment save for a shadowy figure with a long, slender, flowing outline. As if called by a siren’s song, I drifted over and up the 4 steps with a slow uncertainty, not knowing if it was a figment in this dream or part of the plot of my farmville/goat hallucination. Or death. It could always be death. As a moth goes to a flame though, I was helpless. There was no alternative even if I wanted one. And I did not want one. Slowly I closed the distance between us to finally face what it was I’d been chasing down since the first moment when i accidently stumbled upon it.
She possessed a piercing perspicacity that melded shrewdly with palpable sense and sensibility. The most exquisite and rare energy radiated from her like the wild purple tendrils from a tesla coil; It was an invisible, inimitable, irrevocable presence that was undeniable and familiar. Her aura and silhouette were so distinctive that I was certain I had known her before that moment ever manifested and I was sure beyond all doubt that I would be able to instantaneously distinguish her in any life or reality after that instant in time. She was the embodiment of timelessness.

With a warmness that matched the light and unspeakable natural grace she extended her long, well-toned arms which were tanned golden from the summer sun and reached towards me to invite a dance. There was no beat, no melody. And even if there had been, dancing is not something I would say that I know how to do. But since it was the obvious thing, I reticently obliged.

Any attempt to try to explain how the nanosecond felt when we first joined hands would be an embarrassment to the English language. When our fingers interlaced, the energy instantly amplified. Flames became brighter, the air hummed and buzzed with a flurry of electrons. I could see sounds and hear colors and see sparks fly. It was not a thing that can be conveyed with words.

It was the vanguard of chilling air ahead of a cumulonimbus cloud wall that ushers in an early fall Texas hill country cold front.
It was the wild inconceivability the Nauset felt when they saw a huge ship landing on their shore in 1620.
It was the moment you hear a rattlesnake near you but can’t find it.
It was when your mother would toss a bunch of warm, soft towels and sheets fresh out of the dryer on you in the middle of February when you were home from school on a fake sick day.
It was the wonder of seeing a magic trick for the first time back when you believed in it.
It was the shock you feel the instant your body hits the icy water of a snowmelt stream you were dared to jump into.
It was the revolution and awe of seeing the very first electric lights turning on in Wabash, Indiana in 1880.
It was the moment you glance over your shoulder and realize your dad isn't holding your bike up anymore and you’re actually riding.

Up to that point I had only sensed her, but between the spinning I took the opportunity to see her. In the warmly lit silence her dark, deep, narrow eyes of green and grey and tawny would have looked intimidating were it not for her thin lips fighting to hold back a wild smile.

Whisping around in a waltz her cotton dress of viridescent aurora borealis green rippled and rolled like the late July corn fields of Iowa that drape the Driftless Area. The clover color accentuated her lightly bronzed chlorine-kissed summer skin. Straight, shoulder-length blonde hair bleached by the beaming light of the dog days of Texas swished carelessly in a blur. The strands were almost iridescent, glowing the color of yellow lightning from the fleeting golden rays of the dying evening light that whispered in through wavy glass in the wood framed windows.

Not a word was said, just an autonomous knowing and jointly understood coordination of movement through moment and milieu together in a flurry of green and gold gracefully gliding over worn, well-loved, quietly creaking oak.

As we floated around I instinctively closed my eyes for an infinitesimally small iota of time to be met with visions of Roman Candles cutting across a Texas summer sky, the soft thuds of hooves on red rodeo dirt, sparkling downtown city lights, a car lit by the soft glow of the stereo, the roar of a cruel summer crowd at a stadium concert. Hysterical laughter in a hotel room, closing out a hill country ice house. It was a beautifully bright and brief explosion of technicolor. It was enchanting, enrapturing. It was good.

I could have stayed there until the entirety of the sun-soaked season was swallowed by a supernova. Though I willingly and knowingly closed my eyes, I almost immediately regretted it because I knew that when I opened them again I would not be in the place. My arms would be empty. The room and everything in it would all be gone, not to return: the emerald dress, the sounds, the smells, the golden light, the Atlantic eyes, the yellow lightning hair. The flames would dim, the leaves would turn to rust, all of the greens would turn to golds and then to dust. It was a thing as ephemeral as bluebonnets in the spring. No closing ceremony, fanfare or explanation. One day here and the next day gone.

Eyes shut tightly, I embraced her like I would never have the opportunity to do so again because I knew that for a multitude of reasons it could very well be the last time I was in that room, in that reality, in that world, in that moment, as I was most likely just passing through as the benefactor of good timing and good luck. The words of Robert Frost rolled gently through my mind- “...So dawn goes to day. Nothing gold can stay.”

Hoping against everything I knew was true, I slowly relaxed my face and peeked through my parting eyelids to let the faintest, finest photons begin to paint the picture on my retinas. A silvery opaque orange light flooded in. Then came the greens. Then came the smell of pine. Then the blades of grass. Then the colorful blurb from a smattering of flowers. Then a fluffy, furry, brown and white goat.

I was back outside where I started, just me and Duck.

~~~Outsiders~~~

“It was a lie when they smiled and said, ‘You won’t feel a thing.’” He said with a semblance of a goat smile.

I stared off past the horizon in a mental state of shock. Everything good had gone away. None of the things I searched for could I actually obtain and keep. There was no pattern to what I could find and when. And the stupid blinking…close the eyes and everything goes away not to return as it was. It was all frustrating, confusing, and disheartening. I languished outside in the small field of wildflowers for what felt like eons with Duck silently by my side. Under chrome-colored clouds that scattered the majestic sherbet-orange evening rays into the most spectacular radiant beams of dying light, I contemplated the meaning of life and other existential theorems in drug dream world. Duck crunched on the flowers next to me. Savage animal.

Finally I replied. “I hate the ending, myself. But it started with an alright scene.” I said as I nodded in agreement, silently grieving the loss of whatever it was I had just witnessed. I had been fixated on four walls beyond campfire-colored doors for what seemed like a fortnight, so much so that I had driven myself 3/4ths crazy wondering if the glint was real or manifested in my mind. Yet there we were after it all, and I had nothing but questions. Was the glittering even gold or was it just a certain shade of foolish pride that fueled the churning wheels of a fool’s errand in the pursuit of fool’s gold? It felt real, but it also felt real gone.

"Was any of it true?” I asked Duck.

“All of it. You will see that room again, but you have no time to mourn. You must prepare a speech.” he nonchalantly said with a mouth full of flowers.

I was further annoyed that even in my drug-induced dreams, I somehow had homework. The goat’s assignment was ill received news to me, especially since there was no audience where we were, and I had nothing to speak on. I took more time to wallow in my own self-pity and lament that not even that weird ghost dared to haunt me anymore.

“Goat, I can give you a disjointed, poorly written Memoir of scars suffered at the hands of the irreverent harshness of life but I have no speech. And even if I did, there is no one here to tell this story to. Why are you telling me this?”

“They're coming. Just tell them what you know.”

Just then I had an epiphany. I began to consider the possibility that this whole place was death and I was just slightly ahead of the events in the hospital; that this farm was nothing but reprobates and degenerates and the horses were kelpies and the girl in the green dress was a harpy, a harbinger of the impending storm of demise and that I was simply a floating balloon in a black parade. Nothing mattered, everything was made up, and there was no order or sense to be had anywhere. Besides, in what conceivable reality is a goat the paragon of virtue?
Dismayed, disgruntled and in a fit of insubordination, I decided to exercise my free will. I got up with the intent to walk away. I decided the dream wasn't fun or good anymore, and I didn’t like it, so I picked a direction and started to step.

Duck looked toward but not at me.

"Do you want to get well?" He asked.

Up until that question I had never considered that I was unwell, even though I was watching myself in surgery land. I had lost the plot a little. Obviously the answer in my mind was yes, but I also knew based on all my experiences of being alive that pain was the price of admission for these sorts of things. I cringed and ran the numbers in my head, contemplating the cost.
“Close your eyes.” He said.

A lightning bolt burst of bright white light exploded and the hospital timeline flashed into view. I watched a team of nameless, faceless people scurry around me in a time-lapse. They ran tests. Removed tubes. Walked with me around a room. I saw myself being driven home. I saw myself in an empty house. I was clutching an abdomen wound, sitting slumped sideways in a brown leather chair, but I was alive when I’m sure I could have also easily ended up dead.
Slightly shocked I survived, I kept my eyes closed tightly but asked the goat-

“What did it cost?”

Another burst of white light but this time a different scene in black and white.

On a balcony terrace overlooking a small lake a pair of eyes, moody and slow to forgive like the wistful Winter Harbor waves that wax and wane from tawny to emerald, scanned a document in bemusement and ingested words at a feverish pace.

“By the time you read this, I’ll not be as whole as I once was…you were a supernova…”
The glyphs of the letter entered narrow eyes through dilating pupils. Thousands of words from the same hand had broached that hazel iris portal previously; well-versed, poised and crudely elegant words, if a touch too hyperbolic and flowery.

“…In that moment everyone was gone. Nothing was wrong. There was a fire. And you. And music. That moment encapsulated everything I wanted and showed me I made the right choice…”.
The words slowly turned acrid by the time they migrated through the synapses of her mind. Thin, well-defined eyebrows furled ever so slightly, and eyes grew stormy.

“…I hope this story is not done and I hope you’re in the end of the book, but if it all ended right now…I'd do it all again if it was the road that led to you…”
A heretic heart hammered in her pericardium, an involuntary reaction to the flood of adrenaline the brain had already sent as an alarm. The words were received as a virus as they snaked through the burgundy brooks of her veins.

“...it's likely that now…we drift apart as before. Whatever the circumstance… if you said you needed me or help or anything, I would get to you or I'd die running…”
The thin, straight line of her mouth morphed into a frown. Brow furled. Small nose scrunched. The page of smattered sans-serif hieroglyphics burned away in maroon flames and mica smoke.

The scene faded to my post hospital recovery slumped husk in the brown chair, one hand clutching his abdomen, one hand holding onto the phone, reading indiscernible words from a text message as I watched sallow complexion turn pallid.

“The letter.” I said to duck.

Of all the possibilities in the calculus of probable responses to a correspondence of the ilk, rage, anger, hatred, and disgust of that magnitude didn't compute. They were never even considered as part of the equation. An elegy is not meant to incite anger but I watched it as plain as the day just as I watched everything around that broken, scarred, gaunt, drugged, surgically repaired man in the chair incinerate in hot summer scarlet flames and smoke as black as a cat. I opened my eyes.

“Pain is always the price of admission…” I mockingly reiterated to myself as I let out an audible, singular laugh at how badly that went. “Hmm…maybe I do die afterall,” I thought. Because this definitely was not better. Maybe I was not out of the woods yet. Surely if all was well in hospital land, I would not be floating around free-form in farm land watching myself languish.

“What was that you mentioned about getting well, goat?” I asked. Because what I had just witnessed was not outwardly an improvement of any circumstances.

“Sometimes before it gets better, the darkness gets bigger.”

Duck had trotted over closer to where I was, only about five steps from where I had been sitting earlier, to give me that little tidbit of ungulate wisdom. He knew when I got up earlier that I was not actually going to leave. I think he knew I had a problem quitting anything and immediately called my bluff, but I was no less frustrated.

“I’m getting tired of your riddles and games, Goat. Why can’t you speak in plain English and just make sense of all of this madness?”

I didn’t yell at him necessarily, but I spoke to him with a tone that would probably make other goats tilt their heads down, squint their beady eyes, and ram my shins.

“Sometimes the person you’d take a bullet for is the one who is behind the trigger.”

Nonsensical. But I didn’t want to argue with an anthropomorphized animal any longer, and to be fair, it was a pretty cool line. Prophetic, perhaps.
“So what do I do now then?” I asked. Because I was at a loss.

“Write like you're running out of time.”

I began to walk around and try to figure out where to even begin. Having no advice, story, dream, or otherwise made things a real challenge. After what must have been minutes of pacing in a circle, out of the corner of my eye in the shadows of the forest, I caught an almost translucent pair of fawn eyes floating like a phantom, gently illuminating the darkness within the sweltering loblolly pines. Quiet. Stern. Kind. Soft. Familiar. The sight brought me some solace; maybe the ghosts were still haunting me. Maybe there was a better ending to this weird story and it wasn't all death, loss, and destruction. Maybe it was not a ghost, maybe it was an Angel all along…what’s the difference between ghosts and angels save for opacity and intention, anyway?

I got the courage to peer deeper into the forest and meet those eyes only to watch them melt into the darkness and disappear as soon as I made a move. I cautiously walked even closer to face the woodlands where those fleeting eyes had just been. There were no sounds. No movement. Just a sea of emerald and black, and the burned in memory of cinematic cinnamon eyes that disintegrated and disappeared into the atmosphere like Americano steam.

I should have been distraught, and I did have a horrible foreboding sense of loss, but also I had the urge to chase the ghost; to track it down; to find where it went. So I decided that’s what I would do- I’d chase the ghost. I had to write a speech for the goat anyway, and I was quite ready for another adventure.

As I stared at the empty space where something once was, in agreement with the wraith that was, I slowly closed my eyes.