There is a part of me that loves thim, a part of me that has seen thir soul and craves thir touch. There is a part of me that wants to move on, a part of me that believes in what the Tawnin have to offer. And I, the unified, illusory I, am filled with pity for them.
I turn around and begin to run. The men in front of me wait patiently. There’s nowhere for me to go.
I press the trigger in my hand. Lauren had given it to me before I left. A last gift from my old self, from me to me.
I imagine my spine exploding into a million little pieces a moment before it does. I imagine all the pieces of me, atoms struggling to hold a pattern for a second, to be a coherent illusion.
Space Ballet
by Judith Moffett
“I’m in outer space,” Josh Russell reported to the circle of intent listeners. “I’m wearing this skin-tight, like, pressure suit that’s tethered to this spaceship or space station or something—I don’t know just what it is. What it looks like is kind of like a big metal hat with a brim, with a light shining out of a hole in the top. Like, you know, a World War I army helmet, only with a hole in the top? Not what you picture when you think of a spaceship, anyway. It’s got this vague structure like fixed underneath it; I can’t see what that is. And my brother’s with me, and we’re both wearing these suits attached by these long tethers to the mothership. And we’re doing like underwater ballet moves or gymnastics, very graceful, all in slow motion.” Josh smiled. “I gotta say, it feels just fantastic, I’ve never been any good at stuff like that but in this dream I’m powerful, I’m in total control of my body, I’m like a world-class dancer or gymnast or something. And then all of a sudden,” he said, “this black shuttlecraft thing shoots out from under the hat brim of the ship, and it’s coming straight at Tim and me. It’s got these yellow headlights like eyes, kind of like a jack-o’-lantern, and it’s coming right at us, and I’m absolutely petrified with terror, and then I wake up.”
He sat back. The class waited, expectant. Several glanced at the instructor, who said, “All right, let’s see the painting.”
Josh always painted his dreams, and the paintings were always interesting and sometimes very good. He was minoring in art. The other kids did sketches and dramatizations to fill out their class presentations, but their professor, Bob Christian, tried to work it so that Josh went last on the days his class reports were due. His act was too hard for the others to follow; it wasn’t fair. Now he opened the portfolio on the table in front of him, pulled out a picture mounted on a piece of cardboard, and stood it in front of him. “This one’s me,” he said, pointing to an upside-down human figure in the lower right corner.
A murmur went round the table. Josh had outdone himself today; the painting was more sophisticated, and more finished, than anything they’d seen from him all semester. No one spoke, because silence was the rule in the moment before beginning the interpretation exercise, but their expressions showed how impressed they were.
Bob waited half a minute to let the class absorb the image of the dream. Then he started the ritual of questions. “What’s your title?”
“‘Space Ballet.’”
“You already told us how you felt inside the dream. How’d you feel when you woke up?”
Josh made a face. “Scared out of my mind. My heart was pounding like I’d been running.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What that shuttlecraft thing is, and why it seemed so menacing!”
And so on. When they’d finished going through the list, Bob asked Yancey Cox, a junior, to open the circle.
“Russell, that is one cool painting,” Yancey said. “Okay: if this were my dream, I would call it ‘Spider-Men in Space.’ Those outfits you and your brother are wearing look exactly like Spider-Man suits, except for not being red. So, what’s your personal history with Spider-Man?”
Josh looked surprised. “I haven’t got one.” He turned the picture around and looked at it. “No, I see what you mean, but I didn’t think of that. I barely know who Spider-Man is. These are skin-tight pressure suits, or that’s what it felt like to wear one.”
Bob said, “Anything else?” Yancey shook his head. “Emily?”
Emily swept back her long, brown, gold-glitter-streaked hair, a preening gesture. Her power-animal tattoo, a jackrabbit done in gold, twinkled on the soft inside of her wrist. She held the pose for an instant before letting the hair fall. “If this were my dream, I would wonder whether outer space might be a metaphor for underwater. I actually can’t tell, from looking at the painting, whether we’re out in space or deep in the ocean. And really the ‘ship’ could be either a spaceship or a sort of funky submarine.” Bob smiled at Emily. She could be annoying—the business with the hair, for instance, got old as the weeks wore on—but he thought this a very good point. “And also,” she said, “you described what you were doing as ‘underwater ballet.’”
“You’re right, I did! I did! Thanks, that’s really helpful.”
“Good, Emily,” Bob said. “David?”
“That’s a good insight about it being underwater,” David said. “Because I was thinking, if this were my dream, I would see that ship thing as a jellyfish that had caught the two human figures in its tentacles. And what’s that stuff like fog around the ship? The ship and the figures. It’s just around them, it doesn’t fill up the frame of the picture—the corners are black.”
One excellent thing about Josh’s paintings, that the less artistically gifted students usually couldn’t manage when they attempted to draw their dreams, was that he often included things he didn’t consciously realize he was putting in—things that frequently turned out to be critical to the interpretation. Looking at Josh’s artwork every second week, Bob always thought the same thing: Freud should have said that dreams are a royal road to the unconscious, and that creative work of a high enough caliber is another. Bob’s own daughter, Hadley, said that when she got into the zone while working on a play, her characters started telling each other things she hadn’t even known they knew.
Today the kids were doing well. Josh usually got a lot of useful stuff to take home and think about, but then, they all did. Bob was especially pleased with this class, a very bright bunch. Also motivated; they knew their grades would depend largely on what they contributed to these sessions.
Josh was saying, “Well, but I wasn’t scared of the ship itself. The shuttle’s coming out of it, but so are the tethers, and I need those, they’re like safety lines. It doesn’t feel like they’ve grabbed us.” David considered this. Bob said, “Anything more? Okay, Jen.”
“If this were my dream,” Jennifer said in her dead-serious way, “I would think about it more symbolically. Josh, you said the ship looked to you like a helmet? Or a hat?”
“Yeah.”
“What I thought as soon as I saw the picture was, this is a head, and the objects underneath it, or at least the ones you can see properly, represent an oversimplified form of right and left brain dominance. The right-brain images are the dancers. The left-brain images are, well, dark thoughts, calculations, that menace the dancers’ happy feelings. I can’t really say ‘if this were my dream’ about it, because I wouldn’t have the same response, but that could be why you felt so afraid—you’re an artist, a right-brain type, so analytical thinking is your enemy.”