Three
The bed was still poised impossibly atop the monstrous fang of rock, teetering menacingly when the touch of the wind lifted up or pushed down from above. Willie was a fluff of misery in the heat. The sweat ran from his every pore and his throat was a dry river bed. He felt like a sacrificial offering under that unflinching yellow scrutiny, as it incinerated all things with equal indifference. The desert sun had arced past its apex, and had begun a long decline to the Western horizon. After his understanding of place and predicament was thoroughly absorbed, the necessity of winged flight began to well up inside him. The need to fly became perceptible at first as a dull aching in the arms, as from an involuntary tension, that the stout upward gusts of wind seemed to relieve. He became aware of the distant strips of green growth as appealing in the most elemental way. But only when the chastising of the sun, the sheerness of the spire, and the teetering of the bed produced a form of madness in him, was he able to crawl himself to the edge and leap toward the tumbled rocks a thousand feet below.
But he did not fall. And as if there had never been any question of his ability, Willie found himself aloft in air, flying by his own power. It was sky, open and limitless, and all the consuming sensations of flight roared in his mind. For a delirious moment there was no up or down, only a uniform brightness without boundary. Then out of the dazzle, darker patches coalesced and became the vast stretch of land below, a tone of reddish-brown already familiar and agreeable to him. And not far away at all now, were the trees, and that glorious carpet of grass with a sparser border that braved into the desert for several miles. The green areas seemed to reach a thinned and weakened hand out to him specifically, beckoning him into the impenetrably lush and living center of wildness.
To some casual observer entering his dark bedroom, where the light of the gathering dawn over Corona entered only in little slices between the spinning fan blades, Willie would have appeared a helpless tangle of sweaty limbs. He was like an embryo swathed in translucent tissue. He slept with the sheet pulled over his face, morgue-style. His restless limbs made angular, impermanent tents of the white fabric that hung heavy against him with perspiration. Every few minutes, when the air underneath grew too-hot and unbreathable, he gasped and his body made a fidget of survival that rearranged the tents and gusted out the hot, spent air. But despite his bed-bound gasping and straining, in his dream Willie had become a god over the plains of Africa.
He soared over the veldt without effort or thought, tracing a lazy orbit in the deepening sky. The slightest cerebral flexion could turn the aimless spiral into the purposeful swoop of predation, then, in as brief a blink, gently back again. Beneath his predatory strafing, a herd of zebras parted and scattered, kicking a vast dust cloud into the air. Everywhere, beasts he could name, and many that were to him only hazy symbols of this place, gave the land a blanket of movement and wildness. Some of the animals were visibly beaten down by the heat of the day. Presently, these made smaller and more slowly their circles of animal intent, casting long their shadows across the grassland. Others, seemed to only stir alive with the night’s looming arrival. Over this great diversity of animals, Willie felt himself to lord, with the ease of the wind, and with the finality of the day’s surrender to night.
Suddenly, and with a singularity traceable only to design, the vectors of time and space, like threads, came apart slightly, briefly making a porous fabric, then re-raveled, differently. And Willie was, without warning, accelerated in his flight to the impossible moment of fatigue’s first caress. The sun lay in a squat, red sliver at the horizon, all but extinguished by the darkness pressing from above. And as quickly as rolling in his sleep, Willie’s presiding affiliation had shifted from one of air and lightness to one with the earth and weight. As the tree-tops drew nearer, the heat of the baked earth engulfed him, carrying with it the musk of the restless beasts, and the smells of blackened blood and festering meat.
The nausea of rapidly changing altitude and direction began to flood over him. Blue and green luminous blobs filled his vision and stole away his ability to navigate the deepening shadows. Then the panic began and condemned the boy to an irreversible descent through the darkness. Ounce by ounce, the weight of his body began to burden down. The once effortless flight was collapsing into lower and lower orbits. He realized then that the same over-mastering evil presence had returned, not to lift him from the prison of his bed with a world of water, but now to draw him down, to drown him in the blackness of the African veldt. He could hear, as well as feel himself falling. The wind hissed in his ears like tiny demons clutching the hair over his temples. Oh God! Oh God…!, Willie wanted to cry out, but the air rushed into his mouth, choking the sounds.
The struggle to keep from falling, to stay above that unseen, wild and reaching presence, drained the strength and the hope from him. He despaired. He wondered madly at the nature of what wanted him. The trees themselves became great groping hands, that lent their shadowy limbs to that dark, pulling will. They meant to bat him from the sky and send him tumbling to the ground. With all its lurking life and movement cloaked in night, the savanna seethed like an inky sea beneath him, choked in terror. The sounds of the beasts mounted into a single awful roar. The groans of bloated-belly satiation, the rip of hides, the wet spill and slap of violent evisceration, the buzzing of flies, and the piercing shrieks of surprise death, all merged together into the din of madness. Willie added his own scream to the din, as he fell through into the blackness.
The moment of impact, the moment when he penetrated the darkness, insane with the expectation of certain and unspeakably dreadful death, startled him awake. Once awake, that moment eluded his recollection like a butterfly in the brain. Although the dream had ended abruptly, this time Willie had brought it back with him; he remembered it. He played it again, and again in his mind, like a school thing that must be memorized. Only when he seemed to have it in its entirety, did he turn his thoughts back to the dream’s final second. Right before he had hit the ground, something had revealed itself, a thing of horror so pure and intense that it made Willie leap from his bed presently, for fear it might still reach him.
Willie stood panting by his bedroom window. His eyes desperately sought the undeniable hyper-reality of the street. Even with curtains fully parted, the light that squeezed through the spinning, rusted fan blades was insufficient to give the lines and features of his bedroom enough visual impact. Not the tentative brown of the rug, nor the muted gray of the walls, nor the use-faded colors of the stacked clothing on a chair, imposed themselves sufficiently on his vision to displace the lingering images of his dream. So, like sating a manic thirst, he strained to look out at the world through the fan blades. He drank in the gaudy blueness of the sky, he supped wildly at the impossibly-yellow streak of a passing taxi. The need subsided as his slender fingers dabbed the sweat from his temples and upper lip. Slowly, the shafts of sunlight on the street and buildings, and the gentle green writhing of the trees below, unwrapped fear’s grip on him. One by one, the simple truths of his young life began to glow dimly, assembled from the meanings coded into the things he saw through his window. But these truths were only barely able to bleach out the awful pictures of the dream.
Out on the other side of the spinning fan blades a perfect day was waiting, and already offering up its bounty of boy adventure. With July just begun, the Summer still stretched ahead like a small lifetime. September and the fifth grade were so far off that they were only visible to Willie as if through a hot haze rising off the street-tar at noon. Thinking on all those days ahead made them seem to waver and lengthen in the middle, like heat-mirages that might or might not prove real. He wanted to devour them all in a string, finding a tasty morsel of substance in each, a yummy something for the senses.
As always, dressing was the daily sleeve-and-pant-leg grief, and was done with a mixture of resignation to some external sense of order, and an eagerness to feel the new-day sizzle on his back. Sneakers fitted feet, but weighed heavy on the soul, useless. Ultimately, time pushed Willie out, in boy uniform. A digital clock presence on his dresser glowed greenly: “10:13″, then “10:14″, then “Move it Willie!”. For a moment, he imagined arresting that advance by stripping naked and staying at home. Willie wondered, how could his life, and time itself move forward if he opposed it with all the strength his will, and refused any place in the world outside his room. But the thought was exploded into oblivion by the sounds of other boys already playing outside.