Flying
By Martin Mundt
Sometimes a story comes along that carries the reader on such a wild ride it’s hard to get off before it comes to an end. It’s even more difficult when the author writes it in a way that his audience cannot help but “get into” the narrator’s mind. Of course, when the story is told from your viewpoint, it’s sometimes well-nigh impossible to figure out whether it’s only a dream.
You are flying. You glide, your arms outstretched like wings, a mile up in the sky. The air is a slipstream of silk against your naked skin. You dance with the clouds, a fiery salsa, which surprises you, since the best you ever imagined you would be able to manage might be a slightly saucy mashed potato. You gain altitude in rising currents of air, buoyant and barrel rolling in thermals. You soar higher and higher.
You have never before felt such effortless freedom. The feeling is so real that you can hardly believe it is all a dream.
You begin to feel cold. You force yourself higher still, toward the sun, toward warmth, but the cold increases, reaching into your bones. You squint into the high sky, but the sun offers neither warmth nor comfort. You cannot rise any higher.
You cannot credit that all these fantastic images and surreal experiences mean nothing. You speculate that this altitude, above which you cannot fly, represents the unattainability of your aspirations.
The cold grows worse—far below freezing, in fact—and your eyes begin to ice over. Your fingers turn blue. Your lips freeze and crack and bleed. Blood runs into your mouth and you cough. Your breathing becomes labored in the thin air. You attempt to force yourself higher one last time, but fail.
You think that this dream must represent a crisis in your life, a crisis symbolized in images. You do not understand the meaning behind the symbols, but you expect that everything will become clear before the dream ends.
You are struck in the chest by a bird. You do not know what kind of bird. All you see is a blur, then an explosion of feathers. All you hear is an agonized, truncated squawk. You feel as if you are being subjected to involuntary, open-heart surgery without anesthesia. You never imagined that a mere bird could cause such intense agony. Your wound is grotesque and feathered. You pluck a severed beak from your living heart. You decide that this is surely a metaphor fraught with meaning, but you cannot imagine what that meaning might be.
You dive, out of control, all thoughts of flying overwhelmed by pain. Your fingers are numb and stiff, turning from blue to black. The beak falls from your grasp. Your heart beats reluctantly, each lub exceeded in pain only by its succeeding dub. The wind is punishing, a drag on your body as heavy as the lead blanket used for x-rays at your dentist’s office. You wonder why thoughts of your dentist have entered your dream, although he is unquestionably a handsome and reassuring presence.
You feel that perhaps the diving, the wind, the pain, your dentist all might somehow represent your fears of latent homosexuality. This explanation makes some symbolic sense of your situation, but also leaves much else unexplained.
You cover your wounded heart with your right hand. You consequently roll to your right, and roll again, and again and again, entering into an accelerating spin, sky and earth somersaulting in your field of vision, and you fall, spinning, until you lose sight of the sky altogether, and only the circling, circling earth fills your sight.
You want to wake up now. You are impatient to wake up. The dream becomes increasingly agonizing, but still you do not wake up. You continue to spiral down, beckoned by gravity.
You see a town far below. You decide you must seek help. You force your right arm out again, out from its straitjacket of pain, out until you level off, until you regain control slowly, gradually, until bit by precious bit, you right yourself.
Your orientation is off, however, as is your sense of balance. The thought occurs to you that although flying itself seems to be quite a natural ability, the mechanics of landing seem significantly less self-evident. You panic. You misjudge your altitude, your speed, your rate of descent. You decide that instead of landing, you will instead merely read the name of the town off of a nearby water tower with one quick, graceful swoop.
You hit the tower a glancing blow with a deafening clang. Your head rings and echoes with excruciating pain. You are certain that your shoulder is dislocated, possibly even broken. A spray of your own blood streams behind you like red smoke from a crippled fighter plane in a World War II movie.
You wonder if maybe all this could represent your decision not to have children, and not your various fears after all, but you are ambivalent about the accuracy of this insight. In any event, you find that you care less and less about psychological meaning, simply because the sheer physical pain is overwhelming.
You know that you will not die in your dream. You know that one always wakes up before one dies, and, indeed, you want more than ever to wake up, but still you do not. You conclude that the dream must still have something to teach you.
You struggle with understanding, but you quickly realize that you cannot win the struggle. Understanding has evidently been working out every day in a gym, as well as taking karate lessons, and so easily kicks your ass. You remain trapped in a morass of confusion. You realize belatedly that, although confusion has always been more than generous with his time, understanding has consistently been something of an asshole toward you.
You begin to feel woozy from the collision with the water tower and your subsequent loss of blood. What does a water tower represent anyway, you wonder, losing sight of your more immediate predicament. Your mind wanders. You come to no firm conclusions before blood runs into your eyes and burns them terribly.
Your vision blurs. What can pain and blood and water and flying represent, you wonder, continuing to avoid dealing with the here and now; until you suddenly realize that you are wondering far more than you are flying.
You blink the blurriness from your eyes and focus on flying again just in time to smash headlong into a roadside sign advertising the Ho-Chunk Casino in Wisconsin. You crash all the way through the painted plywood word “Chunk” with a sound incredibly similar to the word “Chunk” itself, only much louder and with many more needlelike splinters.
The pain is astonishing. Your face feels as if it has been crumpled like tinfoil. Blood is again everywhere. You feel bones break. You are nearly certain that your spine has been crushed, but you do not care. You only want the pain to stop.
You beg to wake up. You once again neglect your flying. You no longer care what any of this represents. You continue to beg to wake up, because you hope that, by waking up, the pain will blissfully cease.
You finally land by hitting the wall of a building. You do not know what kind of building, but you do know that the building is made of very hard bricks. You do not fly through this wall. You stop abruptly with a sickening, mushy, THWACK! and slide down the wall to the ground, your path greased by your own blood.
You cannot move. One hundred ninety-seven of your bones are broken. You try to move your hand, but break a finger instead. One hundred ninety-eight of your bones are now broken. You do not try to move again. Your body has lost more blood than it retains. The pain is incomprehensible. You are still alive, but you have ceased to believe in God. You consider that you have good reason for this change of heart. God, you are convinced, would not allow this horrible dream to continue, but continue it does. You conclude that God, if he exists, is simply being an insufferable prick.
The dream is merciless. Your face is shattered. Your breath is a foam of bubbling blood. Your throat is clogged with the jagged pieces of your broken teeth. Your eyes are lacerated by plywood splinters. Your heart dangles out of your chest by half-severed arteries. You whimper. You twitch. Your only hope, the nearly non-existent one to which you desperately cling, is that a million long years of hellish pain is the price you must pay to finally wake up.
Only slowly do you realize, too late, that none of this means anything at all. You realize that you are dying, but it is, after all, not a welcome realization, because you know that you are dying while still ignorant and confused and afraid and in indescribable pain, because you were wrong from the start. You are not dreaming after all.
