2004-03-10 - 3:27 p.m.
I have an awful recurring dream. And it goes a little something like this:
I heard her first. A cacophony of sound � screaming, crying, pleading, cajoling. My eyes opened at the first ring and there I was, clutching the phone, silently praying to a merciful God who did not or would not hear me.
My body felt her cry, this unnamed caller, and smelled her fear. It smelled dank and musky, filling the space between dream and sleep. I pressed my ear against the phone, making it hurt. I wanted to hurt the way that my sisters did.
�Carla?� I asked, unsure of the caller, though my soul knew it was her.
�Charlotte,� she cried.
�What�s wrong? What happened?�
�It�s Michelle,� she said in a wail. �She�s out of control and we don�t know what to do.�
In the background I heard yelling, screaming, unintelligible sounds.
�Where�s Mom?� I asked, feeling my hysteria rising.
�She hit her. Mom�s in the corner, shaking. She won�t move or talk.�
Now fear had me in its grip. The guilt and the shame claimed parts of my psyche and vowed never to give them up again. I should be there to save them. It was my fault that things were out of control. I had been the keeper of the balance, the equilibrium. I knew that when I left things would change for the worst, leaving them to fight against each other and defend themselves from the life threatening wounds our mother had been known to inflict.
And knowing this, I�d left anyway. It was a choice between life and death, and I�d chosen life.
Now they would destroy each other, and I would not be there to help them. I would listen to the destruction from the other end of the phone, impotent, helpless, riddled with the guilt of the survivor. The family unit was sacred, written in stone and I had seen fit to break its hallowed tablets, as Moses had once done himself. They�d been too young to help me keep the family together, but they were also too young to come with me.
�Put Michelle on the phone,� I told Carla.
I heard a scuffle, then breathing; the rhythm was different before.
�Michelle?�
I heard a roar, an awful sound, a verbal slaughter. With my dream eye, I saw a black sludge of vomit rip itself from her mouth. It was filled with flies, blood, carcass, lies, neglect, abuse and manipulation. The stench was of rotted carrion, six weeks old, along the side of the road and half eaten by scavenger birds. In that one scream, I heard all of the blame, confusion, hurt and anger that she had been unable to express. I heard her ask me why I left them, why I didn�t take her and Carla with me, why didn�t I do a better job of looking out for them? I had no answer. The fact that I was alive and thriving was my answer, but it wasn�t the one that they wanted to hear.
I heard blame placed on me for the lack of quality in her life today. I heard that I shouldn�t have wanted to live because there wasn�t life without them. Although the sound issued from her mouth, I knew the words originated in our mother. Through some sort of fucked up ventriloquism, this tirade was being presented as Michelle�s pain, but it was really my mother�s.
The screaming stopped.
�And now, we all die,� said a disembodied voice. The line disconnected.
I hung up the phone. They would not die in vain, and they would not die alone. In a daze, like a zombie, I reached for the book of matches. I struck the match against the back of the book. My hands trembled so much that only a spark was brought forth. I struck another match. This one lit and the smell of sulfur assaulted my nose. I dropped it on my bed. I threw two more into the closet. Another in the old wooden dresser. One in the bookcase for good measure.
I pulled my ruined wooden rocking chair into the center of the room and waited to die. The smoke choked me. I felt I deserved to be choked, suffocated, as they must have felt, alone with my mother. The heat began to burn my skin. Good. I wanted to feel the burn, to feel the hurt they must have experienced at my desertion.
Fire was cleansing. As the flames licked at my feet, I hoped it would burn away my sins. Sins against the mother, sins against the self, sins against the family, sins against God. I had forsaken the sanctity of the mother figure by leaving and seeking the love and safety of my patriarch, and ultimately living on my own. Now, the time had come to pay.
As I felt my body burn and my mind slow down, inching closer to death, I knew that this was what I needed to do. For here, as I sat dying, flames licking my skin like a dog lapping up water, I found what I had been searching for � the absence of fear, guilt, and shame.
Those near-death experience books lied. There is no white light, only heat, fire and death.
I returned to that from which God had created me.
Dust.
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