Change Through Chaos

I remake the world while I dream. Well, my world at least. I see through the chaos. I change what I need to change. You see, it’s like…. Well…. Hold on, let me back up.

When I was a kid, I had a rough time of it. My brother was in jail. Actually, Charlie’s still in jail. Yeesh, I’m doing this wrong. Anyway, just try to follow along. I’m going in fits and starts I know, but it will make sense. Trust me.

Anyway, my big brother was in jail back then for carjacking. My mom worked as a nurse at the old folks home down Tunner Lane and she worked the early morning shift at Pete’s Donuts too. Both places were close enough so she walked everywhere and so did I. My dad, well, I remember a scratchy jaw, cigarettes, his name embroidered on his shirt, the Old Spice, but not much else. He’d been gone already a year when this all began and he’s not really part of the story. Although in a way, he’s the whole story. Because what else was I really looking for but him…and Charlie and…well…

I was six when Charlie was arrested and I remember holding my bear (also named Charles), by one dirty paw and running down the pavement after him as he rode away from us in the cop car. He didn’t look out the back. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see me crying, a sad sack of a younger brother, snot rolling down his dirty face, clutching his only friend left in the world. In any case, Charlie going off to prison hit me hard and I guess something broke loose inside. Something giant and unknown. And it swept me up. But not in a good way.

Sometime that summer, I was out in the back trying to get thru brackle to the blackberries hidden there. I was getting pecked by birds, stung by bees and eaten alive by mosquitos. But I was also getting loads of tart-sweet berries into my face. I didn’t get lunch back then cause Mom was at work and I was on my own. Don’t judge. That’s just how it was. And besides, I had an elderly neighbor, Ms. Jenkins, I could go to if shit went south.

So, back to the berries. I was shoving them in when I remembered that Auntie Lorie told me there was another, much larger, patch of berries in the way back, beyond Old Christ Farm. By then I was sweating and thirsty and in no mood to go traipsing through the underbrush, getting lost in the process. I was a boy without a dog and I knew, sort of, that staying close to home was a good idea. So, instead I lie down, back to the long itchy grass, gnats buzzing my ears and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine where the patch was, believing in fantasy and flight and all at once, I was there. It was about a quarter mile away, past the chicken coops and hidden behind the tractor graveyard. Just a tangle of wild berries sitting in sunlight, hemmed in on three sides by high brush.

My eyes sprang open with an audible click and I sat up, dehydrated and dizzy. I hadn’t had anything to drink since the OJ that morning and I could tell by the sun that it was early afternoon. Whatever had happened just now was a dream, brought on by a lazy summer day, unquenched thirst and more than a little wishful thinking. That night, when Mom was scrubbing my ankles and clucking at the rivulets of dirty water streaming off of me, I asked her if she would take me on her day off to the big berry patch. She smiled in that toothy way she had and nodded yes. My mom wasn’t perfect, but she never broke a promise. Sure enough, two days later, we were weaving through the forest, crossing the small stream by the smelly coops and coming out behind three abandoned tractors. The patch was exactly where I’d seen it. Where I’d dreamed it was. I never told her of course. A child keeps secrets he knows must be kept.

As I grew, my ability to find things in dreams grew with me. Mom only had one pair of gloves and when one glove went missing in late January, she was upset. After a quick sweep of the house, she flamed red and then pulled a sock over the empty hand for the long walk to the donut shop. After she left, I simply lay down, closed my eyes and let random clips of the day flash under my lids. When no glove came into view, I pulled glimpses of the week and when still nothing happened, I pushed deeper in.

This sometimes got scary. I had the vague impression that if I wasn’t careful (and who knew how to be careful with this thing), I might get lost in the enormity of it all. I could pull from within a series of messy fleeting snapshots, that had weight and volume and seemed more somehow that what I knew, what I had actually seen, myself. So, when I pushed into this new wealth of knowledge, grasping bits, turning them in my mind, and sorted them, I saw it. Mom had dropped the glove bringing in the groceries from the back door. It had fallen down under the step and been tucked in by snow that fell that night. I placed it in the center of the kitchen table for her when she got back from work, late though it was. She made me hot chocolate from scratch (rare in my house) and gave me two kisses, one on each cheek.

The thing I couldn’t find, though, was money. I had looked and looked, but we were surrounded on all sides by folks at least as poor as us. No-one was sitting on a stack of cash. Well, almost no-one. Sometimes at the end of the month especially I could hear Mom at the kitchen table crying. Also, we got calls all the time. I was pretty sure we were going to get kicked out of the house.

It was then that I thought again of visiting Charlie. Now, Mom visited him once a month. She begged a ride from the Minister’s wife and down they would go in her best dress, the navy one, an hour and a half, into Cranston. But I wasn’t allowed. When pressed, Mom had said, “I love your brother with all my heart. Just as much as I love you. But he’s made some bad choices, Conner. And he might never come back and be your big brother again, the way he was. I don’t want you to see what he is now, just in case that’s all he will ever be.” I didn’t understand that then, but I do now.

So, that night in September, when my Mom had returned with Mrs. Daughtery from Cranston, I’d lain in my bed and tried to find Charlie. I sorted for him. First I sorted our town, a hodgepodge of single story houses and failing businesses. I pulled out towards the outskirts, throwing out a drunk man crashing through his screen door, a pack of deer sipping at the stream and the abandoned train tracks, focusing instead on the old logging road, which cut West into the forest.

Coming out the other side of the trees, I sorted the next town, Briar Mills, picking up only the new gas station. It was mostly deserted, but there was a trucker napping in a red cab out behind the pumps, near the weigh station. Dead-ending there, I realized I had lost the scent. Where was Charlie? I relaxed inside and let the night come alive under my eyelids, hovering above the sleeping trucker.

Conversations, flashes of booze, women and loud music, flowed in and through my mind. A jumble. A mess. I held tight to what I was looking for. And then it came. Above the ridge to the West, just barely visible was a tower and a blinking yellow light. To me, in my bed, it looked like a Lighthouse, shining through a storm. But the storm was inside of me and the Lighthouse was a prison tower. I had found Charlie.

On I went, sorting through sleeping prisoners, all the same in orange. Picking up one in my mind and then tossing him back into the sea. At last, in the eighth wing, I found him. He’d grown a bit and he no longer fit on a twin bunk. His hair stuck up in all directions, and I laughed when I saw that he still slept like that, two hands pressed together at his chest, knees pulled up. Like an angel in prayer.

Now, I had found lots of things by then. Had seen lots of places. But I’d never touched anything. This time I dropped. And it hit my stomach hard to do that. My balls shriveled as I suddenly “became”. If I could have seen myself back in my bed, I would have still been there, asleep. Nothing had changed. But in reality, well, everything had. Because now I was split. And I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I could get trapped out here in the open.

I watched him sleep for a minute more. Gosh, I missed my big brother back then. And then I leaned down, with arms that weren’t really there and I touched his shoulder. Even now, I can remember that electric shock feeling. Like my finger had fallen asleep and touching him woke it up all at once. And maybe it had. Of course it had.

Charlie sat up at once and looked right at me. No bleary eyes, no shrugging off the sandman. He just sat up, backbone straighter than it had ever been in real life, and turned his head to mine. One soul talking to the next. “Hi Charlie,” I’d said, for lack of anything better. He didn’t smile or even smirk, but instead he reached out his hand with the long fingers and tousled my head that wasn’t really there. “What’s up Connie?” he asked. It was an old joke. Charlie liked to call me a girl’s name because he knew it made me mad. But I wasn’t mad now. Wasn’t capable maybe. For a long moment, we just stared at each other.

And then, “Charlie, we need money.” My voice sounded older than I was. I could feel something at the back of my mind, pulling me. It was gentle, like a warm breeze, but it felt like time. And it was running. Some internal atomic clock was ticking down. Charlie didn’t say anything, but he took his hand back and let it fall in his lap. It was then that I noticed only half of him sat up in bed. There was a sleeping form lying supine below the Charlie I was talking to and he popped out of the middle, like a Charlie in a Box.

No trickery, no argument. Just, “I have some, Connie, but it’s not going to be easy to get.” I nodded. Now, the feeling was of a tearing at the back of my brain, no longer gentle. It was time to go. “Charlie, it’s…” “Yeah,” he responded, “I can feel it too.” He told me then, who had the money and where it was. As he was finishing the where and the how, I started moving, swimming almost, backwards. I could see him staring after me, but like a rubberband pulled too tight, I was snapping back into place. Just before I was pulled back through the cell wall, I saw him turn away from me and lay back down in bed. Lay back into himself. I wondered then whether he would remember.

But he hadn’t. It was my ability, not his. Voluntary or not (and I know it was not), Charlie had given up his whole life for us right then and there. When Charlie got out of prison, the money was missing. The rumor was that he thought Ace Farber had stolen it, and of course I knew why. He’d beaten Ace almost to death and gone right back in.

But he had actually given it away. To us. Or had I stolen it? You know, Charlie could have come clean. Maybe he would’ve left prison, dug up the money and saved all of us. That troubles me. Often. Maybe I’m the bad brother after all. Maybe I’m the real thief. I stole Charlie’s life. Because I could.

Mom never asked where it came from. Instead, when she came home and saw the stack of money piled high on the kitchen table, dirt still dribbling from some of the bills, she’d collapsed into a chair and stared, mouth open, at the present I’d given her. And she’d kissed me. Once on either cheek. I guess I stole that from Charlie too.