The Dream Catcher

“The Dream Catcher”
by Seth Pevey
Maybe I’d be better off dead.
Yesterday, as on most days, I spent the afternoon watching the sky behind my window.  That’s what the nurses call my ‘therapeutic routine’, but I'd never let that ruin it. The orderlies had given me all these odd instruments for measuring barometric pressure, wind speeds, the position of the North Star.  I wrote everything down on this little chart and looked to see if any patterns emerged, but none ever did. 
  Nimbus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, schizophrenic – if you say it in Latin it must be true.
  Normally I just stare out at the sky and don’t pay much attention to syntax. Normally I would never be able to recall the first thing about the weather of a particular evening, except that day I remember the clouds drifting the way they only do in deep winter – floating comfortably in that strange layer that’s right between light and dark.          
“Lucky bastards,” I said.
“crazy crakayass” the custodian muttered, glaring at me from over his mop handle, muttering cautiously in case someone else was listening; then he went back to his bucket.
  I remember being glad – at least he didn’t throw the DSM at me.
  The first thing little kids are afraid of is the dark. Well, I’m the opposite.  Electric, fluorescent, neon – those are the real things that brought me to the asylum.  That, and a big damn book called the DSM.
  I should explain about this big checklist that doctors call the DSM-IV-TR.  That’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to lay people like us.  In the dogma of abnormal psychology, it's the Bible.  When they first wheel a person in, head full of drugs, an explanation of the DSM is just the psychiatrist’s way of telling the patient, “God is on my side.” : an excuse the shrinks give themselves for splitting a person down to the lowest common denominator.
Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Troposphere; Assholes.
I didn’t really know just what the DSM-IV said about me because no one ever let me see a copy. 
Schizophrenia. That’s the word Doc Burns used every month at my consultation. I remember it was Burns because he was the one with the picture of his Ford Explorer framed right there on his office desk. 
“Axis one, chronic delusional schizophrenia,” he would say, shaking his head as only a doctor can. But, as far as I know, that’s just a fancy way of saying opposite.
“Your fear of light is your subconscious’ way of trying to express itself.” That’s how the doctor would put it. "A desire to return to the darkness of the womb due to your inability to cope with adult life.” 

Opposite – that’s the scientific definition of insanity, no matter what Freud said about it.   
I can never explain it to people in a way that doesn’t at least sound a little crazy, but from as far back as I can remember I could never handle bright lights. I’ve never understood just why, but any time I find myself in the prescence of illumination, I go into a panic. That’s why my therapy was the weather report, what they called “systematic desensitization” to the natural light of the sun. I’d gotten by in my younger days. I’d even had a pretty normal life on the outside – my own house, complete with five hundred television channels, a dog and a subscription to the Picayune. That’s the long way of saying ‘not crazy.’  I kept pretty much to myself, wearing dark glasses, using low watt bulbs, living opposite- until one day, back before I was instituted, I woke up in my suburban home to the sound of a giant machine. I looked outside and saw this crew of bulldog-looking men in orange vests crowding around a hole in the ground.  Slowly, while one squat dog-man cursed “Left! LEFT you fucking idiot!” I saw them use the bucket of a backhoe to drive a 20-foot creosote pole into the earth over by my mailbox. The rest of that week, with every sinking of the sun, the singeing eye of the new lamppost they’d put in would open like some evil Egyptian Sun-God. It burnt through my windows, demanding to know why I was so afraid. No matter how I tried to block it out, it was there, sending long squares of orange light searing across my crappy shag carpet. Outside at night, when I tried to look up at the stars and wonder how far away they might be, there it was trying to outdo them, smothering them in fluorescence. As I tried to sleep, the streetlight was there to melt away my eyelids, to keep me from my dreams. I was awake for three days. The third day, I didn’t go to work. Instead, I spent a pleasant morning taking my 12-gauge to every lamppost on my block. I never meant any harm, after all. You’d think a guy has the right to be opposite.
That was when they brought me to the hospital. 
         After I snapped, the meds they put me on in the ward generally kept me in relative darkness.  Really, no one would have thought I belonged in there, at least until I was finished with my daily therapeutic observation of the weather. Afterwards, I pulled the windowshade every afternoon and went out into the common room. On my worst days, when the hot ceiling lights of the ward went bouncing off the linoleum floor and right into my eyes, I’d wrestle the orderlies to get to the off switch across the room. Routinely, that was when the nurse brought in the pills. 
She was late that morning; that’s how I remember it.
Because she was late, and because sober patients are considered a liability, that day she didn’t wait to make sure I swallowed the drugs. She handed out little blue shiny pills, red powdery ones, big oblong horse pills – all in a frenzy to cover up her mistake. I had been doped already earlier that morning as part of my therapy, so when she dumped six of the shiny ones into my outstretched palm, I put them in my pocket and winked at Adele who was sitting nearby.
Oh yeah, Adelé.
He’s a friend of mine. I think he is on my Axis, but it doesn’t really matter. I’d heard Doctor Burns refer to him a ‘Paraphilic Dementia.’  Of course, Latin never fooled me, so we were good friends. Cajun as hell, that's the best way to describe Adelé. He’s from the swamps a couple hours south of the hospital. I heard the tale his first week on the ward.
About three months ago, Adelé decided he was tired of his town – Cut Off, I think it was. Anyway, one night he left. I remember him telling it, and the way he rolled the words from his tounge in that strange, undulating, almost iambic way that a coon-ass will tell a story.
“Me, I just up and took all my clothes off, and there I was tunu as the day ma mere birthed me, I took my clothes and threw em in da Bayou La Fouché, and here I decide, mais, my best way to go is out into da black swamp.”
He never told me all the things that happened there or exactly why he went running bare ass into a swamp in the first place. Just about Lupinia. He was always talking about Lupinia. “c’est l’amour? c’est mon cher Lupinia, chien!” he would say before he told about her. In the swamp, when they found him, he was sleeping deep in her den. I still laugh to think about the tobacco-spitting search party finding Adelé butt naked and curled up warm in Lupinia’s fur. That’s when they brought him here. 
So the guy was in love with a wolf. Big deal. A wolf seems better than a lot of women I knew on the outside. Sometimes, in the sleeping room at night, I would wake up and hear him howling her name at the moon. You would think, even in a world run on rules, a man could choose what he wanted to love.  But no. Instead he’s a ‘zoophile with schitzoid personality disorder.’ His love is nothing but a label. I doubt Lupinia ever heard him howling nights, because the window in the sleeping room is two inches think and reinforced with steel wire.
Justice really is blind. 
Adelé swallowed his pills without even thinking about it yesterday on the ward. It had been so long since I’d gone sober though, I thought I might be missing something. That’s why I slipped them into my shirt pocket and winked at him.
“c’est la malde?” he asked.
  I nodded at him. We played checkers.

* * *

Adelé hated the Professor.
That day, he walked over just as Adelé and I were finishing our checker game. You could usually watch the Cajun’s face turn from brown to red whenever the Professor sat down for an argument, and today was no exception.
“Hello, colleagues”
The Professor emptied his mahogany pipe against the sole of his shoe. That’s how I could tell what was coming. The reason we called him Professor was because of a  rumor he had taught philosophy at a college upstate.
“So, my red-necked amigo,” he addressed Adelé, in his usual fashion. “I should inform you of the particularly-fine piece of canine I observed from my window this morning, an Australian Shepherd I think. Fine, fine animal. She was scrounging for food, the poor desperate bitch.  She appeared quite unspoken for. I might even be able to arrange a meeting between you two if you’re interested? Unless, of course, you’re worried about the old ball-and-chain finding out.”
“Gris-gris on you!” Adelé said, spitting on the floor.
By now Adelé knew the trap, and he held his tongue. He hadn’t really responded to the Professor’s taunts since his second week here. After all, the Professor was only trying to draw the Cajun into an argument, into a place where he could win. When that happened, there was nothing Adelé could hold on to, nothing he could just feel, without the Professor logically tearing it apart. A guy like Adelé couldn’t use reason to explain running naked into the swamp, or loving a wolf, so he stopped trying. Love, religion, the soul – believe in anything and it would become the Professor’s personal obsession to prove it wrong. That’s why he was instituted, or so I heard. During one of his lectures, a student had given a believable argument for the inexistence of ‘light.’  Rumor had it the professor had fried his mind in steady contemplation. That, and staring two hours into the noonday sun. As he told it, to prove something is real you first have to have the perception of it burned into your mind- even if, as in the case of the sun, it scrambles your brain like an egg in the process. That’s when they brought him here. .
To save Adelé from the crosshairs of reason, I spoke.
“Prof, I decided not to take my meds today.”
At this he began a heavy stroke of his chin stubble. I knew the calculations had begun.

* * *
         
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
Without my medicine, every little bit of synthetic light seared into my brain. From my bed, the nurses’ station pulsed as bright as a thousand lampposts, roasting me. Even amongst the rows of sleeping patients, tiny electric night-lights burned through the darkness and ate into my eyes. 
Lying there in silence, I felt sobriety slowly creep up over me.  As my mind gradually escaped the cloud of drugs and my eyes opened to the world again, my panic grew intense with the luminescence of the room. The smallest flicker became slowly acidic and more brilliant.  I tossed and turned, violently trying to smother my face in my pillow. Somehow, the clearer my head became, the more confused I became, the more the illuminations of the room filled me with a death-like dread. As the night went on, questions crowded my mind. I took the pills from my shirt pocket and stared at them for a long while.  I decide it to put them away and began struggling with the sheets as I tried to force sleep. Soon I was sopping with sweat, and I tossed until I fell from my bed onto the cold floor.
The professor was the man for questions; When I stood up, I woke him in a frenzy “Prof, without my meds these fucking lights are killing me! I’m blind! I can’t breathe! I can’t see! I don’t understand! What the fuck is wrong with me!”
“Fucking nut job honkeys,” I heard the custodian say from over by the nurses’ station. His newspaper rustled. He muttered and turned up the radio to drown out my agony.
“Relax,” the professor said in a whisper, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “As I’ve told you, there is nothing ‘wrong with you.’ Unlike my own, your brain is free from organic defect. You are simply an illogical mess.”
In a shaky voice, I pleaded with him, as – thoughout the world around us – the lights grew ever brighter and brighter.
“I’m sober, Prof. And I understand. Just tell me how to be well.”
That’s when the professor came up with a plan to find the DSM.
“Are you familiar with the words cogito ergo sum?” he asked me.
As he sat up suddenly from his bed, I could see the cogs turning inside the professor’s well-done brain. What he came up with was what he called the ‘cogito.’ It's something a dead Frenchman named Rene had once said. The Professor told me what it meant. If I thought I was sane, I would be sane. And for that, he reasoned, you have to know what the word ‘insanity’ really means.
"We must find the DSM," he exclaimed.
We snuck past the window of the nurses' station, blocked by the orderlies Morning Inquisitor. I could see smoke rising from the grumbling silhouette behind his paper. “jes cause they don’t have no jobs, they gota be breakin the workin mans balls all night, fucking crackers, I wish I’s havin it so good.”
The light was unbearable. When we got to Doc Burn’s office door, I used the fire extinguisher to break the lock. I could already see his desk through the glass window where ‘DR. BURNS PHD’ was written in big bold print. The Professor entered the room first. 
He immediately went for the bookshelf on the far wall. I walked in behind and began shuffling through the magazines cluttering the Dr.’s office desk – SUV Enthusiast, TV guide, Entertainment Weekly. That was when I noticed a filing cabinet in the corner. I walked over to it as the Professor pulled a book off the shelf and scratched his chin while examining the title. When I pulled the cabinet open, there was the file. It stuck out at me with my name in big red permanent marker. I pulled it out and stood there in the corner looking at it, considering just how much I really wanted to know.
“Eureka!” the Professor exclaimed, I slipped the file into the back of my pants.
When the Professor found the DSM-IV, bound in black leather, he held it up high in triumph. While he thumbed through the pages to find the answer, I studied Dr. Burn's diploma – his master’s degree in psychology from Mississippi State. It was hung on the highest part of the wall, higher than the pictures of his family, higher even than his little wooden crucifix.
“I’ve found it!” the Professor said ecstatically. When he lit a match to examine the words, I covered my eyes in fear of the igniting sulfur.
“Axis I – all diagnostic categories except personality disorders and mental retardation.” There he paused to make a joke about Adele before reading on. “There is no working definition for Axis One disorders.” When he said this, the professor’s voice suddenly grew grim. “Because there are no clearly distinct symptoms, the study of this Axis, as in all of Abnormal Psychology, is defined by the ‘type’ of questions asked rather than the specific answers to these questions.”
The professor stood still. The reflection of the match’s flame in his glasses made him look like a man possessed.  “why that is the most illogical thing ive ever heard” he said hesitantly.  There was no joking left in him. “That makes no sense,” he began speaking in a rising, shaky voice. “How can you prove someone’s wrong when you have no argument.”
  There was a stagnancy in the room as he looked at me, an emptiness on his face. 
“They lock people up, tell them they are wrong, fill them up with drugs, and these pissants don’t have any answers!” The Professor said, his anger rising like storm.
“Fuck this place!” he roared, suddenly shattering the stillness of the room. With that, the Professor was no longer a man. He threw his lit match into a trashcan and went on a rampage through the room. First, he knocked Dr. Burn's PhD off the wall and began urinating on it. Then, he took the books off their shelves and used them to fuel the rising flame in the bin. As the fire grew larger, its blinding light filled me with the urge to run. All at once the room was engulfed, but the professor could not be made to leave. Soon, my legs were no longer strong enough to battle the panic in my brain. I took a last look at the professor who had now pulled a baseball bat from above the mantle to smash anything he could find. I bolted.
  I ran down the stairwell into the sleeping room. I had to find Adele. I woke him right when the fire alarms began to sound.
“You shit, mu dee!” he said covering his face with his sheets. “I’s in a dream de Lupinia.”
“Wake up!” I said, shaking him in a violent panic. “The professor lost his mind and set the building on fire. He is probably dead. And there are no answers.”
When he heard the alarms, it was almost as if Adele himself turned suddenly into a wolf.  There was a smirk on his face as he threw off the covers and ran for the nurse’s station. When he came back, he had a black eye, and a set of keys.
“Rapidement!” he said with a strange jubilation in his voice, and with that we began the long wind of stairs down towards the lobby. We quickly came flying out of the stairwell and into the ground floor entryway. I struggled to push forward towards the exit, my legs becoming more leaden with every step. The fluorescent lights of the corridor blinded me. The flashing strophic emergency bulbs and whining alarm siren sent me into a frenzied state of terror. Three feet from the front door of the hospital, I collapsed to my knees – the fear and panic weighing me down like a sack of wet flour. I told Adele to go out without me. I told him that I would rather burn.
“There aren’t any answers Adele!” I cried out to him from where my horror had me pinned on the linoleum tiles. “And out there, there are so many more questions!”
“Not if you know places as dark as I, vieux!” he screamed, his face alight with a frightening passion. Once he had unlocked the door, Adele grabbed my arms and dragged me forward out into the moonless night.

* * *

Together, Adele and I made it to the treeline behind the institute just as we heard the fire trucks begin to wail.
I stood there a moment beneath the cusp of the forest and watched the glow of the burning hospital. Looking up at the stars for the first time in three years, the tears began dripping off my chin.
“We’ve no time for that, mon amis. They will look for us soon,” Adele said as I watched him deftly climb a tree and peer towards the hospital to find out if we were being pursued. In that instant I knew this was not the same man I’d played checkers with back on the ward. Now that Adele was free and had made it to the wild, he was a wolf first and a man second. This was his domain, the place where the wolf rules. I wondered if the Professor was alive. I thought about him trying to beat Adele in a place like this. In the woods, reason will never save you from a wolf.  So when Adele climbed down from his oak watchtower and told me we’d best go on, I stifled my tears and went without another word.
Following the Cajun as best I could, together we ran deeper and deeper into the darkness of the woods. When Adele thought we were far enough away, he sat down on a stump and began rolling a cigarette. I waited until I had caught my breath before deciding to tell him the story of the Professor and the DSM.
“So what’s the answer?”  I asked him once he had heard everything, my eyes squinting as a firefly lit in front of my face.
He took a drag of his cigarette and looked at me,  “The Professor is gone, Cher. He was a fool, a coyuon. You must understand, mon ami, that life is not a question, and without a question there can be no answers.”
I thought about this for a moment. The woods were loud with the drone of crickets.
“You would suggest I always live in fear then?” I flung the question at him in a fury. “I must forever be opposite and afraid of the smallest light!”
  The Cajun’s eyes suddenly took on a glaze before he spoke. “We will go to the swamp and find Lupinia. Her den is the darkest place of all. You will see then there is nothing in a question, and you will be at peace.”
    After Adele had finished his smoke, he caught a bullfrog and cooked its legs on a small fire. “C’est Bon?” he asked as I chewed the rubbery meat. I nodded, and with that we left for the swamp. 
As we wove through the blackness, the land became gradually lower.  Soon the moisture in every piece of cotton made it cling to our skin like a lover. The deeper we went, the darker the swamp became save only the stars, which glowed ever deeper.  The pine trees were quickly replaced with cypress, the knees tripping me as I tried to keep up. Soon, Adele grew wild with excitement as we neared the place where he’d last seen Lupinia, yelling “aw cher de bête!” when he thought we were almost there.
When we got there, we found something much different.
As we approached the spot, we saw a luminescence of a sort that had no business in a cypress swamp. When Adele saw the glow, he ran forward, seized by a passion mixed with fear.  When I caught up, I found him weeping on his knees in the glow of a 300-foot electric tower.
“Mon Cher Lupinia Chein!” he cried. “Here on the site of our love they build their damn power station.” He raised an angry fist towards the tower screaming  “peke-vous!”
As I tried to console him, I glanced up at the aluminum tower. Shining down from the very top was the brightest light I’d ever seen. I could feel its fluorescent beams eroding my skin from three hundred feet in the air. Adele cried louder.
“I can see the little pups under the bulldozer’s blade! I can see my Lupinia crushed by a giant machine! Why here! Why now! Pourquoi!”
Life isn’t a question, and there aren’t really any answers; but that didn’t stop Adele; it didn’t bring her back.  He suddenly stopped crying, and that’s when it happened. He looked up at the tower light first and then at me. Adele said nothing. He pulled a pocketknife out of his back pocket.  Before I knew what he was doing, Adele opened the knife and drove it deep into each of his open eyes. He didn’t even scream. In fact, I never heard him make another sound. The blood ran down from both of his sockets, covering his brown face and glowing crimson in the light of the tower. Panic seized me, and I sank to the ground. In a dream I watched as Adele, blinded and bloody, walked slowly and deliberately away from me – gone forever out into the swamp. I stayed frozen where I fell on the wet ground. For several hours, I lay face up towards the taunting light of the tower, unable to move.

* * *

Maybe I’d be better off dead.
Right now, I’m up in the tower. After Adele blinded himself, and after I could move my legs, I put a rock in my pocket and made the climb up three hundred and twenty aluminum rungs to the top of the tower.  A few minutes ago, I used every sinew of my arm to hurl the stone into the searing face of the tower light, shattering it. I couldn’t say why.
Sitting here up high in the darkness, even after running through the whole story in my mind, I still don’t know the answer. I don’t even know the question. All I know now is that maybe I’d be better off dead. Looking down at the swamp three hundred feet below, I’m trying to talk myself into jumping. Before I do, I remember I still have my file from Dr. Burn's office stuck down in the back of my pants, the pages all soft and wet with perspiration and fog. It doesn’t make a difference now that I’m resigned to death, but the file says a lot of the things that just happened were made up in my mind. On the one hand I really did stop taking my pills, really did burn the hospital and beat up that smart-ass orderly. And I really used his keys to escape into the wild. But the Professor and Adele? The file says they are part of my ‘disassociative dilusion’, and those are just fancy words for made-up. It’s all here in this folder with my name in big red ink. In Dr. Burn's handwriting. I’m reading all the details. I’m reading about ‘an imaginary zoophilic Cajun named Adele’ and about  ‘a constructed Cartesian philosophy professor’ – about them not being real people except in my head. Somehow, all that dosn’t bother me now.
Yeah, so I really am crazy. That’s beside the point. Up here in the tower, question-less, answer-less, and insane as they come, I decide just to die.
I decide, but you already know I don’t jump. Everyone knows how stories like this end, if only because I’m here to tell it. But then, even someone with no head for that kind of logic has probably watched the sun rise, and so they already know the reason I’m not going to jump.
I’m sitting here on top of a six story electric tower.
Yeah... I’m crazy. 
It doesn’t make a difference. Crazy, normal, those are really just words. The sun is peeking over the horizon, and from here I can see that past the swamp there is ocean below it.  As it grows brighter and brighter, I notice the thousand different colors and shades it casts on the clouds and back down onto the sea. I look right into the sun, right into the brightest light there ever was, and I realize for the first time there is no need to be afraid. After all, how could I have ever known there were so many colors in the world, so many shades of black and white, until I saw how they can come together to make such beauty appear all at once. 
Watching this, I realize that running naked into a dark swamp for no reason might be a little crazy. On the other hand, try and reason everything out to the smallest detail and you might set some fires too. Truth isn’t in the blackness of a wolf den, and it’s not in any philosophical argument either. 
There are just too many shades of gray to live in total darkness, or in blinding light. 
Life’s not a question. There are no answers.
But like this sunrise, beautiful things come in between.
When you figure that out, it just might save your life.