Next to the old school, the one that was torn down the year after I graduated, the one that became a mini-mall, there is a graveyard. It is an old graveyard, and no one has been buried there in the last fifty years, when it was made a monument. To what, I don't know. Some nights, when I am too tired to drive home, I go there.

The entrance is at the top of a hill. The graves tumble down the steep slopes, not taken care of anymore, not taken care of for some time, ever since the money ran out and no one bothered to reinvest it. The oldest graves are just slices of rock, standing up out of the ground, the names weathered off in the three hundred years since their inhabitants were buried. These are the oldest structures still standing in this town. The only thing that comes close is a small white Anglican church, near the graveyard and covered in kudzu. Some of the rich kids I knew in high school used to get their coke from there, where no one adult went, mostly because they knew better.

At the very top of the hill, planted on the oldest grave (which it now covers), is a tree, a pine, I think, but I'm not sure. Beneath it, I used to come from school with my then girlfriend, and whisper and kiss and hug, lying in the needles. getting a poison ivy rash on more than one occasion. She was very pretty and very kind. At least, I thought so at the time, and I still do. She is a good person, even now. The tree hid us from the road, although my car was a big clue where we were (you can only park next to the gate, along the road, because the gate is only large enough for four pallbearers and a coffin). The tree at night is lit from below, it looks like, though I don't know how.

I know almost every name on every grave in this cemetery. Down there, the most recent one, the largest one, is the Eldred family crypt. The one with the cherub standing up, embracing the cross in an almost sexual manner, like a dog and a friend's leg. It's too small for anyone to be buried in. The cemetery was too full, which is why they closed it. So instead, they built the crypt, and every Eldred since has had their ashes scattered over it, blown away usually with the next storm. It is now covered with crow droppings. It has all sorts of perching places. All around it are Eldreds, back to the Civil War. Elsewhere in the city, downtown, I think, there is the grave of the Yank who killed that first Eldred in this cemetery. He's famous to some people. A lot of small, nameless graves in that family. I think the most. They were a very upstanding people, they were. Never would their children commit improprieties. A fine southern family. I went to school with one.

I'm not drunk. I'm just tired. I don't want to go to work tomorrow, I know I will, but I want to sleep here, beneath the tree. The way that my girlfriend and I were always going to do but never did, not that we could ever get out long enough to do it anyway. The sky here is always clear. Every time that I've been here, at least. Either pure, deep, mountain high blue or black and more stars than anywhere else, more stars than I've ever seen. I want to sleep here, beneath the stars. The ground is still soft, with pine needles and poison ivy, but I can avoid the ivy. It smells like winter, like burning Christmas trees in mid-January. The air isn't too muggy. It will be later, but now it is cool, in the sixties, I guess. I want to sleep with the cool needles pricking me everywhere. So I do.

Under the night sky, I think I am dreaming. I usually know, and my dreams are usually quite lucid. I feel more proactive in my dreams than in my life. Of course, in my dreams, well, I am able to work with the situation with abandon, where in life, I must be very, very careful not to harm anything. I think my plans are unfolding nicely. I don't know what they are, but what I do, it feels, not right, but close enough, like I'm just missing my target.

The sky pulls away from me, in my dream, and the tree grows taller and wider and encompasses me. It swallows up my body, turning it into part of first its bark, then its flesh, and then I am left alone in open space inside the tree, floating there, nothing around but a light brown void. I can't move, but I don't feel like moving. I want to stay prone, with nothing gripping me, gripping me tight. The part of my mind that is always rational, the part that never sleeps, always awake and analyzing, tells me I've entered REM sleep, and what I'm feeling is the psuedo rigor mortis that sleep induces so I don't harm myself. The other part of me, the part that is always dreaming, the part I've let be in control until I wake, can't understand that. Or maybe it just refuses to. In any case, a spot of blackness is growing in front of me, growing quite slowly, almost so I can't see it grow, but I notice it as bigger than before in jumps of observance, but there is no abruptness about it at all. The blackness covers half my vision, then it starts to advance towards me, with a presence that is like a thousand stars dancing on the heads of a pin. I fall into it, ripped in two by the tides it creates.

I am standing on a light blue gridded plane, facing myself. I recognize the plane, it is the grid from the drawing program I work with. Rocks made of wire edged polygons jut from the landscape, clouds that are conglomerations of spheres roll past a white ball that is the sun, that is no brighter than anything else, but casts light on everything beneath it. The other me is standing in front of me, waiting. I don't know which one he is, or which one I am. I know I am in the realm of the emotionless part of me, the passionless part. I hope I am that part, and have the home turf advantage, but I realize that I just hoped, and the other half, the half facing me, is the half which can't hope, is alien to hope. And I am afraid of him, because I don't understand him, not even in the abstract, because I can't empathize and that's all I can do right now, is empathize. The other me walks towards me, and he is moving slowly, carefully, planning each step with precision, his eyes always on me, his feet, landing square on the intersections of the grid beneath us, and I am looking from side to side, trying to find a way out. There is the tree, rising on the hill, behind and above me, but I can't reach it, and he, the me facing me, knows this. Of course. He knows that I am stuck here. I know that he wants to destroy me, even if want isn't something he can feel, he thinks that it is better if I am gone, more efficient to not have to deal with me, debate with me. And this is the forum he could do it in, could make himself my sole master. Or at least this is what I fear. He has both feet parallel to each other, his torso parallel to mine, and he is facing me, his hands spread, palms facing me. I look at him and he looks at me. He has no eyes, black pits where they should be. His head is completely bald. I always wondered what I'd look like if I shaved my head. He stands still and I don't want to talk with him. I don't want to see him. I just want to be alone. I don't want to go through this same struggle every night for the rest of my life. I want it to end now.

I jump at him, Yelling loud, I miss him as he twists away, and I fall to the ground. I stand up again, angry, and the blue grid around me is becoming a roiling, red, formless mass, collecting around my feet. I smile and laugh, because I have broken through a little bit. And once he gives a little bit, then I can take as much as I can. And I can take a lot. He's pissed me off, this other me. He's taken my life over, waiting and calculating and biding his time, moving only at the right times, at least that's what he thinks. I can't let him continue to run my life, not the same way as he has been.

And I lunge again. This time I grab hold of him, and I don't let him go. I take hime, and I hold him in a tightening bear hug and I wrap him in the red formless mass. The blue grid gives way, swallowed by my red. I smile, I laugh, I bite at his throat. I know I'm not a vampire, but I feel like one now, and I try to suck the lifeblood out of this other half of me, I try to unify myself in my present persona by disintegrating the other one, until my essence isn't shared. The whir of gears and hum of electronics reaches my ears as I suck, and water is coming through his veins into my mouth, gushing forth like a dam burst open.

The water fills up my mouth, then spurts out of my mouth and down my throat, and I can't breathe. He looks at me and stands back, water gushing from his neck. Around his feet, the red is pulling back, the blue grid is coming back around his feet, welling up over his body. The red shrinks back from him and away from me, too. His eyes get bigger, wider, large enough for me to dive into the center of them. And I do, compelled in some way to do so, and I leave the chaos behind.

I dream like an oscilloscope, in sine waves and tangents intersecting to create space. The other me, the me that lost, is trying to change my dream, he's trying to add something that doesn't fit. I don't want anything that doesn't fit. It unnerves me, reminds me of the other. Think of one side as connotation, the other side as denotation. I am now denotation, solely denotation. I hope. The other side is responsible for the nightmares I used to have as a child. It's responsible for me wanting to put our hand down a running garbage disposal, or cut out our eyes. It is also responsible for love and hate and joy, but survival is far more important to me at this stage in my life. And I can not be irrational at work, not when they are in a permanent layoff cycle, not when I am not yet secure. My safety net is only partially strung up, only a triad of fibers that will hold me only if I fall directly onto it.

I feel another attack from the other me coming on. I feel him trying to weaken my grip on my mind. A wet dream, this time. He makes it flushed and breathless. I make it clinical. It becomes a mere panting and grunting, bodies everywhere, shown hypermagnified, down to the individual pores leaking sweat. I remove the faces of the people involved before I can even see them, leaving just face archetypes, no chance of creating sympathy with anyone else in the dream, just me going through the motions. And the wet dream isn't very wet at all. Then he twists it into horro, tentacles replacing eyes and knives replacing legs. This is the sort of unscrupulousness I have to�Рdeal with all the time, my other half going so far as to twist the emotions he's creating, to damage our psyche just to make sure that he wins. I decide to use his own methods against him, and replace phalli with guns and vaginas with vagina dentatas. I know the effect this will cause, Freudian imagery is so ludicrous that, while normally causing hysterics of laughter, which is not what I want, in this instance it balances out the horror, neutralizing it. He is starting to try something else, I know it, so I wake me up before the other half can make himself a presence.

I twist and open my yes. In front of my face, not more than a few inches away, is a branch of poison ivy. My clothes smell like sweat, like I haven't worn deodorant in a week. I roll onto my back, reach up and rub my middle fingers against the dust at the inside corners of my eyes. The sun is not up yet, but the sky is a bit lighter. There is a mist around the hill, reaching almost up to my feet. The base of the hill is completely obscured. I have needles twined into my hair. I feel bugs crawling in my clothes. I stand up and brush myself off, but the bugs are still there. Hopefully, they aren't ticks. There is always a rash of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, every summer, at least that's what the news always says. Not that I usually believe them. Who could believe a woman that blonde, with that much makeup?

My car is still there, right at the gate, where I parked it. I don't see a ticket, which is a pleasant surprise. I reach into my right pocket, to get my keys, but they aren't there, they're on the ground, next to the poison ivy. Carefully, mechanically, I retrieve them and walk to my car. I drive home and prepare for the day.

© 1996 Joseph Cadotte

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