Friday, February 12, 2010

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

On my knees!
Paul rose and tried to concentrate.
How long?
He forced his straining eyes to focus on the microwave clock.
Five eleven.
Only a minute.
He looked absently at his diminishing erection.
"I've acted out!"
He shuddered, released his shriveled penis.
“If I'd been in a public place. . . . My God. Gotta tell Josh.”
Tell him what?
The professor's disappointed face flashed by. All Paul had were vague longings, tight muscles and a dry throat. Without recall, they were nowhere.
He willed his shaking hands to reach for the steaming mug.
Easy, Boy-o! Easy.
He took a sip. The hot liquid felt good.
Gotta remember.
Sure you do, and you will. Just lighten up a bit. Why not put some music on?
A muscle twisted in Paul's belly.
Music? Now?
Hey, what happened to that melody? Almost had it the other night at Josh’s didn’t ya?
"More important stuff to do. . . ."
Paul put the mug on the counter and went to the CD cabinet in the living room.
That’s it. But you want to finish that song don’t you. . . ?
He loaded a David Arkenstone disk and returned to the kitchen. As he saw his undershorts on the floor, a fragment of the dream flashed by. He shut his eyes and grabbed for it.
"Yesss! Thank you, God!”
The content was hazy, but it felt like the first dream, the one he and Josh had dated to Paul’s tenth birthday. Finally, another pay-off for the struggling and constant, “would the dreamwork ever be more than a hobby,” doubts.
The full scholarship from Miami International University’s Psychology Department including graduate courses, room and board at MIU's South Campus in Miami and a part time job at Eckerd's Drug Store had been the first pay-off .
Now this memory, nearly three years later, as the first draft of the Master's Thesis on dream communication was nearly complete, might be equally important.
Paul gulped the coffee and went to get his gear from the hall closet. He started suiting-up for his daily run. As the jock grabbed the tender flesh of his buttocks, another piece of the dream surfaced.
It was lewd. Lewd? Yeah, you know, dirty, scummy, disgusting.
Peaceful, too, though. O.K. Sexy and peaceful at the same time.
Themes. Josh says go for the themes.
Lewd-sexy and peaceful.
Sharp contrasts! But not in the dream alone. South Florida was full of them.
The power was contrasts. The dream wanted him to open to the contrasts.
Very difficult. The contrasts were so extreme they were already pulling Paul apart. It would be hard to open any more, and stay sane. Canals dynamited out of rare coral. Endangered Keys deer. Wounded manatees. New Florida Turnpike extensions slashed through virgin mangrove and saw grass. And tall coconut palms swaying elegantly above it all.
The boosterism and bluster, the man-made and God-made, collided head-on here. But for the threat of a hurricane, which neither Paul nor three quarters of the two million people here ever experienced, it seemed as if the man-made was winning. There was nothing but contrasts!
So what did it mean, getting pulled apart? What was the theme?
Letting go. It means, if you're holding on and being pulled apart, the only way to survive -- hold on -- is to let go. It's a paradox. A Zen thing.
Like the clouds.
Paul sighed remembering late afternoons on the Tamiami Trail, driving to school those first weeks in South Florida, with the cumulus clouds, majestic, high in the blue sky. They’d seemed above it all, disinterested observers, beyond the confused tangle on the ground.
But they hadn’t been, and it hurt Paul even now, to accept that.
The clouds were a part of it, not at all what they appeared. They too made a contribution to the nagging discomfort -- the perpetually clinging warmth and the pervasively frigid air conditioning, the bright glaring sunlight and the $90.00 sunglasses.
Paul shook his head and pulled on the jogging shorts.
The schools here taught in thirty-seven different languages! Imagine! People from Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Haiti, Thailand and Vietnam plus every Caribbean Island and every nation in South America were here. Sounds of so many different languages and vistas of so many different human features, hues, shapes and sizes, made even a casual walk an adventure.
But there was a scary side, too.
A sibilant presence hissed in the city’s aggressive urban hustle, trains, tall buildings and traffic jams; gnawing inaudibly but for the sudden violence, at the low-key touristy ambiance. Some coiled power slithered beneath the year-round school summer-vacation atmosphere. Vague and misshapen, it gave Miami-Dade county and its 30 cities a Graham Greene novel feel, like one of those provincial capitals in a Latin republic perpetually under a partial state of siege.
Of course, the power was everywhere, not just in the Magic City, but Paul thought it was closer to the surface here than in Pennsylvania. He’d even glimpsed its restless motion in the laid-back art-deco hotels on South Beach. Like a play within a play, the really good stuff happened behind the carefully managed scenes, just below the surface. Especially with the local politics.
Silence hung heavy, pregnant. The David Arkenstone disk had stopped. Paul's mind raced on.
Josh called that power the Life Force and said the ancient alchemists' injunction, "What is, isn't; and what isn't, is" -- best described how it operated.
"That means watch out for me, your habits, and most especially, your own thoughts,” Josh had said. “Take nothing for granted. This place especially. Miami's like an incubator for premature babies -- artificial but life giving. It takes things that would die if left alone, weak premature aspects of the Life Force -- fragile hopes, twisted dreams, lost causes -- and not only sustains them, but helps them thrive.
"The dream you're working on, the sexy one you can't remember, that's an example. You had that dream in Dundeen, right? But not as frequently or as intensely as here? It's this place. The same thing happened to me, when I first got here from Boston."
It was true. Paul pulled the sweat shirt on.
He was being seduced by geography; by the way this place ceaselessly offered itself and by the easy opportunities to experience the different in the familiar. This tropical place with its lurking potential and fecund otherness was incubating something in him. Had been for months. Now it was being born. He was in labor. His white, male, middle class consciousness, his major theme Josh would call it, the music, jogs, dream work, discipline and sex, was changing.
Paul stood. The jock relaxed its grip on his scrotum. Then, as he stooped to lace the other shoe, it grabbed the tender flesh of his buttocks.
Someone had done that to him in the dream. Disciplined him. He’d had to maintain a rigid, ritual posture on his knees.
Maybe it was time to skip the run and work this through. Acting out was . . . . No. Better to keep going. For some reason, this routine stuff is working.
Opening the CD cabinet, Paul clipped the Walkman to his belt, slipped the headset around his neck and stared at the neat stacks of self-improvement and music tapes. Dearth Vader’s theme seemed right. He slid the Empire tape into the player, adjusted the headset and left the apartment.

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