The Falling Chronicles

I find my bed precariously balanced at the edge of the roof of a skyscraper.  I am still lying down, but as I look down on my side, I see a modern day canyon of high rises.  The bed, a four poster one that once belonged to my grandparents and on which my father was once born, is enclosed on three other sides with walls that have crept up to the bed itself.  I try to peek out,  and see walls running around the corner, so I cannot put my foot across the wall and creep up on the adjoining roof, because there is none.  The only way out of my bed is down, almost 40 or 50 stories down

 I panic at my own entrapment at such lofty heights.

 Momentarily I am engrossed by the streaks of lights way below caused by the headlights of cars, like a long-exposed photograph.  Everything is in slow motion, like the page of a surreal calendar on cityscapes.  I eventually resign to the inevitability of the situation, move towards to the center of the bed so I won’t accidentally roll over and decide to get some sleep.  Instead,  in one of those James Steward moments from the “The Rear Window’, I turn around and decide to check out the windows of the high rise across the canyon.  Now I am empowered with super vision, able to peek and peer without a telescope.

 I see a couple dressed in black and with flashlights breaking into a safe…

I see someone engaged in an intimate embrace on top of a desk, passionate and kinky…..

A child, a boy at that, holds a Barbie by it’s hair and threatens to drop it on the street below, while another girl, presumably the sister screams her head off behind him…..

A couple is sitting on a tattered sofa watching a rerun of Casablanca on TV….

My eyelids get heavy, I pull the duvet over and succumb to my sleep.

I wake up, momentarily gripped by panic as I begin the process of putting my feet down on the floor.  Instantly I am assured by terra firma below me and I go through the recollection process of the dream on the roof top.  I usually cannot remember the sequences later in the day.  This, however,  is not the first time I have found myself confined in my dreams.  This time, I have decided to go back to sleep, but usually I wake up, covered in beads of sweat, momentarily paralyzed, with my heart racing so fast, I would be afraid that it might stop.

The shrink makes me lie down on that uncomfortable divan of his and makes me go back and recount the dreams, most of which are sketchy.  Many of these consist of going back to places where I was relatively  happy, but surprisingly devoid of any populations……stark, surreal landscapes full of classical and modernist landscapes, almost like an actual version of DeCirrico landscape.  He is concerned that I am increasingly hiding into the fantasies of my head.  I tell him that I don’t mind.  They are much better than falling off tall buildings from my bed. 

He thinks I am an escapist.

 I concur.  Yes I am.

 Reality is stressful, full of coincidental situations, and uninteresting.  I jokingly tell him to hypnotize me so that I can go back to those surreal worlds and explore more.  I am a trained urban planner with no scope here, I tell him.  Let me go back to the perfectly built city of mine, so what it has no people?  They would have trashed it up, covered it with fumes, and the wear everything down.  The places I visit have perfect one point perspectives in every direction.  It has buildings with beautiful sand-stoned facades and hotel complexes that cover the entire length and breadth of the slope of a hill…the whole promenade is full of steps and escalators, boutiques and restaurants, and surprisingly, museums.  

This very morning, I tell him, I had gone back to the city of my graduate school.  I left the campus holding the hands of this Greek girl who I was very close to and walk off to the city center.  Instead of the chaos, we are greeted by a sunset that is stuck on the horizon, the city center has become a series of hillocks, each perched with a classical Palladian mansion, all surrounded by a park.  The two of us go up and discover a tree house that is connected with a walkway to the next hill.  My friend smiles and disappears somewhere, whereas I undertake the journey.  She turns out to be waiting to be next hill already and decides to go for some adventurous shopping.  We walk into a men’s boutique, and I ask this cocky girl with a long pony tail on top of his head to show me something for ‘a collage kid like me’.  She keeps chewing her gum, looks up and down. ‘You are surely not a college kid, but that is what you want to think of yourself, come this way’.  I am surprised at how I can be deflated in my own dreams.  What I remember next, I am on this huge patio surrounding on three sides by rolling plains, intersected by a highway.  The hustle and bustle of a busy residential district is behind it.  Somehow, I am singing the praises of this property to an ‘acquaintance’, a former friend, and now a recovering drug addict.  I show him the façade on the patio, a French style, with tail turrets on two ends.  Somehow I am still stuck in that permanent sunset and the lights coming out of the windows, the sheer curtains billowing on the breeze, with the dramatic sky of clouds illuminated in pinks and reds from the setting sun gives a enchanting outlook.  The building is owned by a Bangladeshi, who has obviously made it big in the west and the friend is sarcastic in his opinions of him. Yet there I was, defending and praising this nouveau riche monstrosity.

The shrink is not impressed.

You are regressing, he insists.  I have no problem with that, I counter.  I have not shied away from the responsibilities of the daily world.  But, he argues, the shocks of your business and family life has pushed you to the brink, like you on that edge of the bed, and one of these days, you will fall off.  He makes it sound like he is putting a curse on me.  I think you are  supposed to listen, not pass judgments on my predicament. 

The session ends .  He keeps telling me to keep a dream journal.  I am supposed to write down and note the vision of the night before they disappear in the course of the first few hours of the morning.  The last thing I want to do is to scribble right after I wake up.  I wake up at 5:00 am on the dot every day, yet don’t leave the bed till it is almost 7, forcing myself to go back to sleep so that I can re-enter the world in my head.  And every day, that endeavour fails miserably, and I finally leave the bed more tired than the night before, with every edifice in my body crying out to be let go.

Then that day, it was the worst of days, my behind glued to various seats, benches, and stools of multitudes  of government offices and companies waiting for various signatures to happen, and they don’t.  The MD of this have been ‘on his way’ for more than two hours, but he never does.  That lofty civil servant goes off to lunch at noon and does not get back till three, but conveniently gets a call from his minister in his chamber.  The bank calls and lets me know that one of my client’s cheques have failed to clear and as a result, a whole series of cheques that I have written against it will now bounce too.

I need a drink, desperately.

The path to my nocturnal hours is also frought with land mines of the familial kind.  An SMS arrives from the MidEast, where this rich uncle lives and have earned million apparently.  He is asking for a loan to salvage his father’s estate.  My grand-uncle, a property magnate in his days, have traces of grandeur and wealth all over the city to be squabbled over among his 8 siblings.  No one has taken charge and the choicest pieces are up for auction thanks to the failure of paying taxes on time over the years.  Why me?  What happened to his swiss account?  Another uncle arrives, bringing in news of the squabbles over properties of a demented uncle and his ex Slovanian wife.  Mother dearest wants to go on a pilgrimage of family shrines and estates of distant satellites of the southern sea-boards, preferably the next day, which is not going to happen.  I have three cards waiting. More wedding s of the mass feeding frenzy, I realize.  I just have to make sure I am photographed by the society photographer-cum ex-banker-cum restaurateur to be published  in Facebook to have my presence verified for eternity and move on to the next event, eventually to end up in my room, curled up with either a book or my IPad and pretend the world outside does not exist except through the screen of the pad.   To make a perfect ending to my sarcastically perfect day, the cook burns the pot pies and still has the audacity to put them on the table calling them ‘Cajun Style’.

 Cajun my foot, burnt is burnt. I opt for some home- made pasta instead.

This time, I am sitting on the perch of my bed, dangling my calloused feet on the edge of the canyon.  The confined four-poster is no longer intimidating.  I know I won’t end up as road kill down below, I will simply glide though.  I am actually surprised at my own audacity of courage and the lack of fear.   My phobia of heights is not prevalent whatsoever.   I am looking at the crimson sky at the horizon, which gradually darkens to pitch black, but speckled with stardust and the iridescent green  trails of jets crisscrossing the vastness of that blackness.   I am whistling a tune, which to my own disgust, turns out to be Justine Beiber’s ‘Babe, babe..yeah’.  I stop right away, embarrassed.  Even in this surreal alternate reality, Justin Beiber is not supposed to be in my radar.  Then of course I realize that my niece earlier was wearing a Beiber t-shirt and belting out in her whiney pre-teen voice till my mother had earlier told her literally to shut up.  I try to focus on one of the windows and I am delighted to see that I have developed zoom vision, just like a digital camera more pronounced than before.  I look into the window right across the canyon from my bed and zoom in.

I see a cadaver, grey in colour, wrinkled from old age and dehydration, with its stomach slit open and its entrails wrapped around the body whole, as if demarcated.  The person overlooking the body is dressed in a black overcoat, with intoxicating kohl lined pitch black eyes, intense, passionate, oozing sexuality, fluorescent crimson lipstick covered lips, translucent skin, pale to the point where I can see the minute veins crisscrossing her cheeks, giving them the rosy colours of a distance.  The head of the corpse turns towards her and says in an extremely husky and hoarse voice, ‘I am ready now.’ ‘Not yet’, the lady replies in a voice that gives away the fact that she is a woman in her prime.  The heavy gold chain that cascades around her bosom slightly glints from the light of one the stars.  She gently puts her right hand inside the cadaver and starts caressing the area where the heart is supposed to be.  The cadaver lets out a subtle ‘aaaaahhh’.

I subconsciously clutch at my own chest and find a black thread dangling to the fabric of my t-shirt.  I look up again and see that the rim of the fabric that woman has wrapped around her face,  is frayed and that black thread on my chest is connected across that concrete canyon to her face. 

My own heart skips a beat.

I close my eyes, squint really hard and open my eyes again.  It works.  Like a TV set, I have changed the scene of the window.   I see my own father, lounging on an easy chair, a old hookah set next to it, dressed in linens like a prophet and yet clean shaven, making gurgling sounds as he puffs on the end of the tube.  The tube itself has the texture and colour of a python.  A bridge table with a set of cards is his scene, not this, I tell myself.  Spying on my own father, I zoom in.  I see a dark gypsy woman with wrinkled skin with a bandana and bright red skirt sitting on a chair next to him.  She reminds of an aged Frida Kahlo.  Next to her is a sprightly Rottweiler, young, full grown, vicious, with bared fangs and hazel eyes looking straight into me.  The lady and my father give me a synchronized wink.

I am disgusted, appalled, and angry. 

I squint again, and this time I see a grand cityscape unrolled before me.  The skyline is interspersed with mountain peaks topped with pagodas and spires of splendid skyscrapers with croens like that of Chrysler and the Empire State.  A full moon, very large and very close to earth it seems, washes the entire landscape with a golden hue.  In a distant,  there is the backdrop on an ocean, where mammoth waves are raging and the crests of which catch the moon rays and create a glittery effect.   I am looking at the perfect city laid out in front of me, with bits and pieces of laughter, music, clinking of glasses, and Ella Fitzgerald wafting up the streets.

I feel ecstatic at the sight of this magnificent cityscape, a mixture of Hong Kong, San Francisco and New York put together in a grander scale.  I start scratching and look at my right arm.  It is flaking like a severe case of Psoriasis, but more intently.  I realize I am disintegrating in the air in a thousand million specs of dust, as if I am being removed for interloping at this visual feast.

I squint again, but this time I keep my eyes shut for almost a minute to purge the previous moments of my own disintegration. 
It works.  The black skies speckled with stardust areback.  However all the windows are dark.  Zooming in, they all reveal empty rooms.  Eventually I am bored at the lack of any activities or any sign of life.  I also realize that the crimson sky is slowly surrendering to the blackness.  Restless, I decide to explore the canyon and push myself from the perch of my bed into the void ahead.

To my horror, instead of that dreamy ability to glide through and be a voyeur, I am plunging downwards, till my hands make contact with water and my entire body feels compressed with the weight of a thousand gravities.  I think I am on the threshold of crossing some kind of a physical reality, with every part of my body screaming to explode into a thousand million atoms.

I have finally landed on the street below.

That building across looks awfully familiar, like the door of that old almirah in my room.

I see the water on my hand turn yellow, then orange, then blood red.

I realize I a m actually bleeding profusely through my nose and my body is an absurd angle on the floor.

I have broken free from the confines of the four-poster, drenched in my own sweat and blood……

I have woken up.