A Window on Heaven

Had a swell time at the party, but now I’m tired and it’s time to leave. And so I leave, and try to find my way out (“Oh no, please don’t bother to show me out, I can find the way”)—but of course can’t find my way anywhere: it’s a rat’s maze of hallways and rooms, and closets … and closets-within-closets … and rooms-within-closets … and rooms and rooms and more rooms, all teeming with people … and on and on, till at last …

I open a door onto a small square concrete room, where two soldiers in gray camouflage are torturing a young dark-skinned man. They’ve rigged it so he’s seated on the floor balancing backwards on his tailbone, legs and arms outstretched, unable to move forward or back, because if he does (even so much as an inch) he’ll trip the wire that will cause a pistol mounted on the floor behind him to fire … his legs and arms tremble, but otherwise he does not move …

I turn away, ashamed … and open another door, this one leading outside to a suburban American backyard surrounded by a cyclone fence … hot dogs on the grill … children playing … and my father walks into the yard and sets up a movie screen …

He presses a button, causing the screen to grow larger and larger, till it wraps around the yard Cinerama-like, and starts playing a home movie ... I’m amazed: the scene is life-size and 3-D … and as life-like as if I were looking through glass onto something real … but I don’t recognize the home movie …

“It’s a family reunion,” says my father … “Which one?” I ask, mystified, though the scene strikes me as vaguely familiar …

It is the backyard of a white-frame country house at sunset surrounded by tall trees. A wind swirls through the trees … and the rush of air in the leaves makes lovely music … and every leaf and every blade of grass glows from within, golden and imbued with a numinous energy … and I am struck (it reminds me of Acid) how everything, even the most mundane object, seems possessed of an Eternal quality: the country house, though not great in size, somehow also has the aspect of a Palace … and the People: they are seated in lawn chairs … I recognize a few: people I thought lost to time (my grandmothers, my father, and friends), now alive again and seated on the lawn chairs, happily greeting the new arrivals …

“This is a window on Heaven,” I say … my father smiles, and placing his hand on my shoulder, says, “Always keep a clean work space, my son …” (?)

Then I am back in the torture room, where the young dark-skinned man is still seated on the floor (not one detail has changed, unlike most dreams which continually morph)—yes, still seated on the floor, the gun behind him, legs and arms trembling, suspended on the razor’s edge between Life and Death, Heaven and Hell … his face fixed into an eternal rigor mortis-mask of smiling horror … and again I turn away, ashamed … (yet all the while, still hearing the music rushing through the trees, and knowing every leaf as well as I know my dearest friend).