“Did I tell you about my dream?” she said.
Ray glanced out the window, figuring to view gold rimed clouds of dawn (or maybe the muggy, bruised purple thunderheads of dawn, either one was good enough). “Did I tell you that you have to be at work this afternoon?”
He heard her stick a fat raspberry tongue out at him. It made a dry click-click sound in his ear as she licked the mouthpiece.
“Are you going to listen to me?”
“Okay.”
She was, she believed, ragingly psychic, at least when she was asleep. Ray supposed that if there were degrees of paranormal talent in terms of usefulness or even legitimate conversation piece value, the psychic dreamer would be the squished fat bird at the base of the proverbial totem pole.
He rolled his eyes (which she, of course, did not know as she was at least reportedly awake).
“It’s very Gnostic,” she explained.
“Everything is Gnostic these days,” he said. “It’s a fad.”
“You’ve read the Nag Hammadi manuscripts?”
“I liked the dots. Better than a picture.” She was silent on the line. He prompted. “A thousand words…you know, the ellipses they used to indicate the missing or untranslatable stuff. It seems to me that what isn’t said is much more interesting than what is actually there. I’ve spent much more time thinking about that.” The explanation was simply not worth it. “I was being sardonic.”
“Sarcastic.”
“Anyway, go ahead. How was your dream Gnostic—as opposed to, say, Coptic?”
“You mean like Egyptian?”
He shook his head. “Nevermind. Let’s just call it firmly eastern mediterranean philosophico-religious and be done with it.”
“You’re cranky, Ray. Drink some coffee.”
The cup, halfway to his mouth, smiled at him, or seemed to. Ray set it down. Spooky.
“You know all about the Gnostic hierarchy as it pertains to the pleroma, right? The hypostasis of the archons and all that?”
Ray shrugged. “Who doesn’t?”
“You’re just teasing me.”
“Samael the fool or god of the blind or whatever you want to call him. That hypostasis.”
“And the world as we know it was created from chaos by this chick named Sophia, who decided she didn’t need the Big Kahuna God to do some creating. So she popped into the plastic void and seeded it with divine light just by looking at it and made Yaldabaoth who mistook himself for God.”
“Your interpretation sounds so very non-feminist. Your gender should be ashamed.” Ray laughed. “Everything was fine when a man was running the show.” She did not laugh. He said, “Keep going.”
“So I had this dream—”
“When exactly was this?”
“Tonight.”
“You’ve been up all night.”
“No, I dozed between calls. Before the whole cop scene, and while I was sleeping, I had a dream.” She was beginning to sound angry, or defensive, Ray could not say for certain. He decided to lighten up. “Once, I used to date this really heavy crack hound—he was a dealer, fairly big time. He’d come south from Detroit and was really just getting started when we were hooked up, but it was still some shit. He made a lot of money, screened it through this lame occult bookstore. You know, laundered it, but the store itself was just a front. Nobody worked there but him and me sometimes, or some stoner he could scam into it when we wanted to take a few days off for snorting or fucking or whatever.
“This store…He would never sell anything out of because of the paperwork and re-ordering and shit. The aggravation, you understand. One lady came in and offered him six hundred bucks for this dragon etched table he used to hold his ashtray, and he still said no. It was crazy.
“Anyway, one day he gets this wild hair to go to England. No destination, no ideas, no plan. Just up and went. The only reason he took me was because I was there the day he decided to split, and he hated to fly by himself. Besides, I was less of a crack whore than some of his other betties. Kept costs down.”
Ray said, “This is a very uplifting story.”
“Just outside of London, we stayed in this run down hotel. I mean, it was one of those places that gave you the impression it had been nice like a few hundred years ago, but somewhere in the Middle Ages somebody decided that upkeep was just too much of a hassle.”
“Ah, kind of like this place.”
“Only worse. Much. It was a creepy old place. The walls were almost gangrened. The must or mold or whatever actually woke you up sneezing. We’d been there about a week when this lady who was a maid or cook or something stopped us as we were going out for dinner and told us their ghost story.
“You have to understand, everybody over there has a ghost story. It’s as much as a fixture of any given house as the coat of arms. There are the murdered ladies, the drowned virgins, the knights that took a knife in the back while they were schtooping the lord of the manor’s wife. It’s generally some pretty gruesome stuff. But the place where we stayed had a pretty tame specter, at least by comparison. Something about some old colonel from the Indian wars who had kicked off in the room we were staying in. He’d show up, sit in a chair by the fireplace. Maybe smoke a cheroot.
“We told the lady we weren’t planning on using the fireplace, anyway, so we went on out and didn’t think much of it. But about two that morning when we got back and went to bed, it got really creepy. Max had this gold cigarette case he’d carried with him for like forever. He’d gone to bed and put it on the bedside table just like always. About three or so, he got up and decided to have a smoke, which he did. Then he goes to the bathroom. When he got done, he comes back out and his damned smoke box is sitting in this puddle of water. He picked it up, opened it, and it’s just full of water. His cigarettes were all soggy.
“Well, he slapped me on the ass and wanted to know what the hell I had been doing, and why I thought it was funny. But I’d been asleep. Knew nothing about it at all. He didn’t believe me at first because I’d been trying to get him to quit for his health.”
Ray grinned at the phone. He couldn’t help himself. “Because cigarettes and coke are just too much, right? One vice to a customer.”
She ignored him. “We yelled at each other for about fifteen minutes, and he finally realized that I wasn’t joking. I really didn’t do it. We were so creeped out, we threw on our clothes and checked out right then. Middle of the night. We grabbed the first flight out of Heathrow, which sent us to some dive in South America, and came straight back to Indy from there. It was weird.”
Ray said, “That’s it? That’s not very creepy. I’ve seen creepier shit here.”
“Says you. It was bizarre.”
“Or it was LSD. How exactly is that Gnostic?”
“That’s not Gnostic, you dope. My dream was Gnostic. That was true.”
“I thought you were telling me about a dream.”
“I’m getting there. I told you about the hotel, because that’s where the dream was. The story was only marginally relevant.”
“You were trying to establish the context,” Ray said. “I understand. Go on.”
“I was at this same hotel in the dream. And I was talking to that same lady, the maid. She was telling me this story about the dead colonel again, and in the dream, I’m thinking, ‘Christ, now I’m going to have to leave and fuck up my vacation’. It was kind of scary in that way that dreams sometimes are when you know that everything works out in the end, but if you don’t do things just so, they could get really screwed up. The potentiality is scary, the idea that you could go messing up a future that has already, it seems to you, been written. The opposite of Sartre’s leap of faith.”
“The question stands. How is that Gnostic?”
“Well, I got to thinking about that old lady. See, while I was in London, I was giving serious brain time to the idea of sobering up. I’d been hooking for Max and for myself on the side for about six months. I was feeling degraded, having one of those moments of clarity, but I’d talked to enough people in the business to know that that feeling eventually went away. The problem was, I didn’t want it to go away. The going away, the getting used to it was terrifying. It was a path from which there would be no return for me. I could see that.
“It occurred to me that nobody knew me in England. It was like an opportunity for a fresh start. I could ditch Max, ditch my past, check into a rehab center. It was a chance to get back on line with my life. I was thinking about that all evening while Max and I were out. That was the first night in two or three years that I didn’t use anything. Nothing at all. I was testing my resolve.
“And then the cigarette case happened. Now I tell you, if I hadn’t heard that old lady talking about ghosts and shit, I would’ve just assumed that Max was so fucked up he had done it and not realized it. But she had planted this creepy idea in my head, and Max and I took it and ran with it.
“Back in the states, I fell right back into the old scene, the familiar scene with its lack of exits. It took me another two years to get that moment of clarity back. I burned up two years of my life, and sometimes even awake I blame that old lady for it. Sometimes I hate the fuck out of her, even though it is totally irrational, because I have two years of memories of things I did that I am to this day ashamed of when I let myself think about it.
“But you know what? She was just being nice. That batty old broad was just trying to make our stay more interesting, more exciting. Maybe she was just trying to make up for the collapsing shithole she worked in by adding a little charm with their very own ghost story. She probably made it all up on the spot, wrapped it up in a little bow like a gift to Max and me. She didn’t know that she was fucking up my life for another two years. She didn’t know that maybe her little amusement was the reason Max coked himself right into a heart attack seven months later. She thought she was doing something good, something precious.”
She paused, and Ray finished her thought. “Like Sophia. She thought she was doing something okay, too. Bringing order to chaos, doing something constructive with the void. She was just being nice.”
“And look what the hell it got her. Look at what the hell it did to the rest of us.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I thought about you when I woke up. The dream reminded me of you. You and the suicide kid.”
Ray put his teeth together. “How is that?”
“Sometimes bad things happen, even when motivated by the best of intentions. Sometimes, very good people trying to do the right thing only manage to make a big mess, to really fuck somebody else up. But just like that old lady, it’s not anybody’s fault. In an imperfect universe, bad things happen.”
“But even Yaldabaoth thought he was doing an okay thing. When he was created from the material of chaos, he thought he was the Creator, the true God, because he was alone. God had shut the gates of heaven against him. He just didn’t know any better. In some ways, he was deceived rather than evil and doing the best he could with a fucked up system somebody else had handed him. That, of course, does not change the fact that the Gnostics and Sophia herself still regarded him as the embodiment of evil.”
“I was trying to make you feel better, Ray,” she said. He was aware that her voice had grown thick, brittle. She was about to cry.
He put his head on his hand. “Did it ever occur to you that I don’t feel bad in the first place.”
“You did your job.”
“Just that.”
His confirmation seemed to only make her more sad. She was quiet for awhile. Ray thought about transferring her to the phone closer to the door so he could smoke.
Finally, she said, “Ray.”
“Yes?”
“When you get off work, why don’t you come over.”
He thought he would fall out of his chair. “Why do you say that? You need your apartment painted or something?”
“I thought we’d have sex.”
There was nothing he could say to that which would not sound stupid.
He said, “Did you ever feel like you’ve been in this business for too long?”
“Because I want to have sex with co-workers?”
That flustered him. “Because it leaves you feeling hollow inside. Or rather, unfeeling. The awareness of not doing anybody any good, but showing up every day to maintain the illusion.”
“No. I never feel like it’s been too long. I felt like I was an addict for too long.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“That place is like a daily meeting for me, a beginner’s group. All those people looking just the way I used to look, to think, to feel. It’s an object lesson, a reminder to me.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“What?”
“You use them to stay sober. They use you to get sober. Seems like a lousy recovery plan, despite the fact that it seems to work for you and everybody else around here. It’s parasitic, Makes you look weaker than even these people.”
She hissed at him. “This is the way you flatter a girl who just said she’d go to bed with you?”
“No. I’ve just been thinking about what you said earlier. The part about good intentions. I’m just wondering if there’s a connection there for these two dots.” I’m wondering why the hell you’re propositioning me, was what he was really thinking, but he was sane enough to not ask that question.
“You think my offer of sex will be some kind of therapy for me?”
“You get to be nice to one guy after being really catty to another guy. It restores your image of yourself. At the same time, you get to give me the tools to deal with feelings that I don’t seem to realize I have. That seemed to be the trajectory of the conversation.”
He expected her to get angry with him this time. He deserved for her to get angry with him. Ray wondered briefly if he was manipulating her into a rejection to pay himself back for the penetration of her psyche he had practiced earlier. Since he did not have letters after his name, he realized, he would never have an answer.
“Did you ever notice,” she said, “that ministers seem to be the best Christians? Sure, you’ve got your Jimmy Swaggert’s and Jim Bakker’s, but they’re big news precisely because they don’t fit the norm. In general, ministers are exactly as sincere as they seem to be. Why do you think that is?”
“Practice.”
“Practice every day. They have to walk it constantly. They have to pay attention to where they go, what they do, what they say all the time. They have to be constantly focused on the appearance of their Christianity, because if they screw up, it’s going to be big news. People are going to notice. One slip and they can destroy an entire career, an entire lifetime’s worth of reputation.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it is very hard. Probably as hard as getting sober and staying that way. But at the same time, they have an advantage over the average joe. They’re human just like the rest of us. They have the same urges, the same drive to have fun. I read once that something like thirty percent of men are really into pornography. I mean, like almost pathologically into pornography. If you took a cross section of ministers, I’d bet you would find that thirty percent of them struggle with pornography, too, even though they perceive it as a sin.”
“Sure.”
“Their advantage is that they have a job that is only peripherally in the world the rest of us have to live in. They can do some serious reality creation to exclude frequent contact with all the temptations the rest of us face. They have a control over their spiritual access environment that the rest of us don’t have. They only have to get distracted from the capital-w walk if they want to. Point is, I don’t think they’d be any better than the rest of us if they were plumbers rather than pulpiteers, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Every Sunday they get to see the same pathetic, lazy pseudo poser Christians they saw drunk on Saturday night or slapping their kids around on Tuesday in the grocery store. They must look out at their congregations and realize what a joke it all is. That all those pious faces are stupid sacks of shit.
“But at the same time, the preacher also has to realize that they must want something better. They must want to have some control over their base impulses or they wouldn’t be there in the pew. Consequently, he gets to look at them and think that he’s both really glad he’s not in their sorry state, and that he needs to remind himself a little more often to stay on the straight and narrow.
“Meanwhile, they’re looking at him and thinking that they just wish they could get their God package as together as he’s got it. In the process, the preacher and the preachees are motivating one another toward a higher plane.
“It’s the same relationship in places like this between the old post-addicts and the wannabes. You call it parasitic, I call it symbiotic.
“One of us is reaching down into the muck to perform a rescue and the other is reaching up out of the quicksand. If we can keep it up, if our twin strength doesn’t give out before it’s all over, everything works out fine. Sure, we both get a little dirty. Some of the shit clings to you, but in that moment, you realize how close you came to the edge. You were right there with your toes planted on the edge of the morass. It would have been easy to give up, let them drown in the mud. But you didn’t. You stayed and pulled, and in the process of pulling, you tumble further back from the pit than you would have been otherwise. You are cognizant of the morass in a way you might not have been before. You see it, smell it, feel it.
“Without that awareness, you might go toodling through the jungle and fall into another hole because you thought the only one was the one behind you.”
Ray said, “That is very deep. You should be doing this for a living.”
This time, she did laugh.
*
After they had said goodbye, Ray realized he had an erection. It made him feel ashamed.