< Back	By Category Adult Drama :: By Title F-J :: By Author A-E
	TITLE: I Dream Of AUTHOR: Cris RATING: R. SUMMARY: Life, the universe, and everything. Not really. Trinity's PoV, her name, and her thoughts on life. CATEGORY: Adult. Drama. AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'm blaming Chocolat and Poisonwood Bible for this one. Also, not sure how the Bible is copyrighted, but there's a passage from Genesis in here. Not that anyone here is dense enough to think it's mine. I Dream Of     I cannot do this alone.     To be three-in-one is to be alone.     Perhaps my namesake, fathersonandholyghost, hasn't the ability to be lonely. To feel inadequate in all His magnificent solitude. Perhaps He cannot conceive loneliness because there truly are three people inside Him and not simply a triple manifestation of the same soul. Perhaps he carries three beautiful, wonderful souls, perfect souls, instead of these shattered shards of mirror that constantly pierce my heart. I bleed soundlessly, bleed rivers of broken glass.     Then again, perhaps it is merely because He is male. Perhaps women, slogging through the filth thrown on us by our fathers, our brothers, our sons and husbands…perhaps we have this need for human interaction because of that thing wrong within us which we cannot name. Perhaps we, like the houses and towns in which we live, are merely vessels in need of habitation. Perhaps we crave that habitation from the men that live around us and cover us deeper and deeper in traps of our mothers' weaving.     I used to think drowning would not be so very bad.     This was back before I knew what the real world was, back when I groveled in the shadow of my father and he was larger than life, larger even than Our Father In Heaven who watched us with an all-seeing eye so dread and awful that for years I could not even bathe naked. I could feel that eye upon me, could feel the cold fire in the pit of my stomach that meant I was measured and found lacking.     During that time I often dreamed of the ocean. Thick, cold, erotic dreams with images and sounds so deep that when I woke my lips and toes would be blue and damp with the imagined truth of them. I can still remember them in fragmented words, pieces of image that dredge up smell and texture, rough, cold, unyielding.     They were not warm, pleasant dreams. But they were real, my rocks, my steadiness, when my throat was bruised so that I could not swallow even bouillon and I convinced myself that my father was right in punishing me for crimes I could not imagine. The dreams themselves I knew to be a crime, a crime against God, who would not approve of a twelve-year-old dreaming the things I dreamt, but I clung to these with all the strength in my bruised soul.     I knew, in the way children will, without rationale or proof, that my ocean dreams meant I was mad. Crazy, insane, utterly and completely beyond help or reason. I accepted this, and welcomed the dreams.     I knew the other little girls at Sunday school did not dream of hard, cold arms clamping around their bellies, of salty lips touching their throats and shoulders. I had never seen such things in life—we did not own a television or attend the movies—and I could not guess why I should dream of them.     The body knows its secrets, even if we cannot fathom them.     Midnight, and the sound of the ocean. Wind—so cold, cold like ice down the throat, cold enough to pierce bone and marrow, cold enough to knife between toes and fingers, cold enough to fur the top ridge of ears. Not cold enough to numb, but cold enough to crack skin—taste of sand and salt and blood on lips beyond the help of balm.     But magic, too, liquid moonlight smoothing coarse sand, shadows turning flatlands rough. Gusts of wind, and the sting of tiny grains of sand somehow finding skin. Bite the wind, don’t drink it straight; like rough whiskey it bites back, crunches between molars.     I know a secret.     They say that Eve was seduced by a serpent and thereby broke the law of God and tasted fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The Good Book my father used to pour down my throat and inject into my veins says so. I drank its words like smooth bourbon, beautiful words like deep cathedral bells, before I could understand the serpent’s tongue behind them. By the time enlightenment dawned on my sleek dark head, I was like an addict and I needed the Word of God just like a streetwalker needs her smack, just as I knew it was poison to my soul.     Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.     Now I know, as I suffer every day the withdrawal from the sound of my father’s voice reciting the familiar words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the utter and complete lies in the cathedral-bell poetry of the Good Book.     Don’t speak. Don’t do it; don’t ruin this silent sanctity.     We who do not believe in God come here to worship. Running now, dropping our belongings and we can’t care about the cold, can’t care about the wind, can’t care about anything except the rush of sucking ocean waves and the flat stretch of cold silk-sand between us and the water. Can’t care about forbidden, can’t care about not-supposed-to. Can’t.     I was seven when I lost my implicit faith in the mighty Almighty my father so adored. But there's yet another lie—losing faith doesn’t mean losing guilt. I still feel guilt, just as deep and just as strong as before. It’s worse now. I don’t have the luxury of even feeling the slightest bit of righteousness; I am not of the chosen; I do not believe and God has never smiled down upon me.     Catholicism is all about forgiveness.     I used to ask the priests at church and the nuns at school—how far? How much can I get away with? If I do this thing, will I be forgiven? Hail, Mary and Our Father dictated my life.     Never did I think to ask my father these things. Nor did I confess to him but when he absolutely forced confessions out of me. Questions to the man of the house were not tolerated. I can only remember asking once—in an effort to understand and not, as he supposed, in insolence—where Cain’s wife came from. I didn’t have time to flinch; it was immediate reflex, a huge male hand connecting with the side of my throat.     In the Matrix I learned to carry my head listing to the left to hide my father’s decorations of purple and blue in the shadow of my midnight hair. From him I inherited Irish skin, from my mother Italian hair, and from them both an unhealthy preoccupation with life after death. Never did I think much about life before death, save for my thick dreams of making love amidst a savage ocean. Sometimes I cried for the loss of a father’s love, though whether earthly or heavenly I would not have been able to say. Other times I reveled in knowing I was headed straight for the Devil’s right hand, reveled in this secret sin.     Shoes disappear—big hiking boots we lose as easily as feathers, molting these talon-husks, yearning feet meeting yielding ground. Panting breath, squeaking sand, and nothing else for miles. Tiny boat-lights in the distance; from here the trawlers might be burning and we would laugh if it were true.     The tide is out—far, far out and we run a long way to meet it. Though high summer, it is too cold to swim. We do anyway.     A serpent did not trick Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge. That’s the big lie of Genesis. In reality, there was no serpent at all. Or, rather, Eve was the serpent. All women are, more or less, and I believe I am more rather than less. Like the previous knowledge that I was headed straight to hell, I revel in this. Snakelike, venomous, with fangs, and cold, cold blood. Sometimes I am not entirely sure that I should cast a shadow, I feel so cold. Were it not the fact that my flesh is too solid, I would believe I could evaporate if left in the truth of sunlight for too long. I suppose, with such thoughts in my head, that it’s good I’ve never really seen the sun.     Watch out for those rips. Tide’ll suck you away faster than you can scream, and it won’t bring you back. Sharks, too, at the estuary mouth. Orcas in the deep water—can’t always tell you’re not a seal in the dark. Jellyfish. Submerged logs. Spiny rocks, and barnacles so sharp a surgeon won’t be able to sew you up again.     Such is our ocean.     We are a harsh people living in a harsh land. What do we know of gentle life? Even in summer we can’t breathe at night for the cold that squeezes lungs together and stops the beating heart.     I wouldn’t necessarily call it fear, the way I feel about male hands. Not fear, not revulsion, but something hovering between the two. They’re too large, even the long sweet hands of artists and musicians. Too coarse, as if they do not really feel what it is they touch. It is not fear. Not fear, but something else. Something more sinister.     For the longest time after I was pulled, nobody could touch me. The fact that the medic aboard my first hovercraft was female saved my life; I would have resisted even a male medic. Even in the face of death. Especially in the face of death. At that point I was ready to die.     My search for Morpheus was a desperate cry for help from a child with no faith and no sense of self. I searched for him with a furious dedication I myself could not explain, thinking that he could give to me everything I needed. I thought the truth could save me, as all the televangelists kept telling me. I thought the truth could set me free.     It did, in a way.     By the time Morpheus found me I was, as I said, ready to die. The dreams, the ocean dreams of strong phantom arms and hard cold flesh, were getting stronger and more frequent. Like a hallucinogen dissolved on my tongue, I could taste salt when I woke. I didn’t know why or how, but every time I awoke alone in my tiny bedroom with the wooden crucifix and dangling rosary invading my vision it was like dying another death. Tearing myself away from the wet, cold dreams tore large pieces out of me that I could not spare. I tasted salt in my mouth most mornings, but it could have been the tears that stained my cheeks. My skin was scored with raw red lines, but it could have been my own nails that put those marks there.     I accepted the red pill because I thought he was feeding me a line. I didn’t know what he wanted—kinky sex, maybe, of which I was forming a vague idea in my head. Or just to kill me—that had occurred to me also. I didn’t trust the man, though I had been searching for him for the better part of three years. I also didn’t care.     A wave smacks Adam in the chest and he goes down. Somebody grabs him before the rip does, anchors her ankles in the liquefied sand and pulls. He returns to the surface.     Noctiluka in the water—tiny twinkles of phosphorescent phytoplankton. We dance, and everywhere the ocean lights with green and blue. Green like witchfire, like the stuff of Disney nightmares, like translucent jade held under florescent light and backwashed with black. And blue, too, blue like unnatural swimming pools, and cold blue—the blue of light through ice, through miles and miles of glacier caverns. Cold light, wet light—light humans cannot reproduce. We swim in light.     Somebody finds a jellyfish washed up on shore. She runs it down her arm, the gelatinous flesh full of noctiluka. Her skin glows.     Fear of Our Father In Heaven had been such a part of my life that I didn’t much realize it anymore. Only the fact that I had ulcers by the time I was thirteen, that I suffered migraines so acute that they made me ill and I couldn’t open my eyes, that I couldn’t eat without being sick and I swallowed aspirin like candy to control the lancing pain behind my eyes. Only that I never menstruated in my life, though I was nearly sixteen by the time I was unplugged.     The body understands fear, even if the mind no longer registers it.     I couldn’t live like that anymore. I was flunking school despite the fact that I had been declared a genius. My father didn’t much care, so long as I could read the Bible. What other education did I need, if I were simply to marry and bear another man’s children? My mother, a good Christian wife, closed her lips and said nothing.     Some men do not know any way to have daughters but to own them like cattle and houses. These men, unfortunately, are often the ones to have the most children. We follow in their wake, backhanded at every stride, kissing their shoes in the shadow of their falling hands, crawling back to them, begging for that spark of approval which we know that we will never see. I was addicted to my father like opium, and I chased him as men once chased the dragon. I wanted to be like him. I was tired of being female.     We are too cold to feel anymore, and too cold to care. So cold it is almost warm, so cold that the water is a comfort as it draws us further out toward the sea. We want to be lost.     We aren’t, of course. Something pulls us back, and we throw ourselves on the dry sand. It prickles; it hurts. But we roll and roll, sand drawing the water away from our skin. And warming, no longer silk, but needles as blood returns to frozen limbs.     I thought I could sink no lower in the eyes of God. I thought my madness, my knowledge of the body through dreams that left me cold and abandoned, had driven me farther from His light than anyone had ever been before. I thought there was nothing else I could do, having abandoned His Word in my heart. I thought my sins were all before me and accounted for.     And then something rocked that surety, that foundation to which I had clung.     One night, the dreams changed. The ambiguous arms that had always latched around me, that I had latched onto, were no longer ambiguous. They had solidified…and were most definitely female.     I thought about this for a long time. I was fifteen, had had no lovers, no casual dating friends, nothing. Mostly I was too sick to care about other people, but also I didn’t know how to relate to them. Men or women, boys or girls. I had never thought about myself as a sexual being except for in my dreams, and in my dreams and the rushing tide of the ocean everything was ambiguous—my flesh was not always my flesh, and neither was anybody else’s.     I did not love females.     I didn’t love males, either.     I didn’t even love myself. Not when I was awake, anyway. I didn’t know how.     Blood. Molly has skinned her knee and she sits on the sand, straggles of end-wet hair blowing in her eyes, to lick it clean. Nobody tells her this is dirty.     And then my body is around her, my legs on either side, and we are sitting on the strand. The sand hurts, it hurts, when she grinds her back to my front and twists her head around to see me. Others are stealing away.     There is sand in places I don’t want to think about, and yet I do. I want to think, want to know the pain of sex in such an uncomfortable place. Rocks, sand, ocean, salt, cold. Cold like hypothermia. Cold so bad we could die.     Molly wants it too, and she lifts a finger and places it in my mouth. Blood, salt, sand. One of her arms still glows from the dead jellyfish, and smells of something rotting. I pick her up and carry her to a tidepool.     I have been unplugged for half a lifetime. In all that time I have not been submerged in water, and yet I remember it. From inside the Matrix, I remember the feeling of being submerged in a shallow bathtub, the water lapping at my temples and my short hair swirling like seaweed around my jawline. I remember how the porcelain tub rested against my buttocks and the jutting blades of my shoulders but did not touch any flesh in the between. The spine of a woman, the spine of a serpent, so flexible, so curved and graceful. I remember crossing my arms along that secret lower dip in my back, my skin cold, so cold, arching my back and stretching as far as I could. I remember thinking that if I just pushed hard enough against the tub I could bend in two and look down my nose at the back of my heels.     It was in the bathtub that I realized I would not mind drowning.     In a bathtub, that is. I think, even with my dreams, I am still afraid of being lost at sea.     We don’t wonder about what might be lurking in the foot-deep pool. We know this place too well to wonder. I cup water and run it down her arm, glowing plankton rinsing away like faerie dust. I never believed in faeries.     Against the rock we sit, cliffs crackling around us as the cold makes sandstone shatter and fall. It is dangerous here; always dangerous. But what better way to live? Our fingers never warm, nipples stiff with cold more than lust, but our mouths and the insides of our bodies are too hot to describe. And cold fingers wonderful.     I loved Neo almost from the first moment I saw him, pale as death, asleep in front of his computer. He looked like a corpse; perhaps the thought that he was not alive stopped my fear and automatic revulsion. He looked like a corpse pressed and painted for his funeral. His hands, too, were small for a man’s. This I noticed almost instantly.     Then he moved, blinked, and opened his eyes. In Matrix code they were interpreted as black, though since that first glimpse I’ve been able to differentiate the black of his pupils from the darkness of his irises. But that first sleepy glance at his screen did it for me. I was lost.     I didn’t jump—make a leap of faith, they call it—just then. In fact, though Neo will deny this, I don’t think I ever did. Oh, he’s touched me. And, Jesus, I love him. And I told him so. Brought him back to life—brought him back to this freezing place that is hell to him—and I still feel guilt for that—but I can’t say that I made any real leap of faith. I lost my faith a long time ago, kneeling in a corner reciting passages from the Bible and wondering just how this was supposed to make me love God. Loving Neo didn’t bring that faith back.     It is impossible to sleep exposed without dying, and death is not in our plans. So we return, return to our abandoned sleeping bags where some people already lounge. We unzip them, lay them out, and crawl under this warm pile. Nobody sleeps alone, or even in twos. By twos and threes we return to the communal pile, add more polar fleece and synthetic down. We lie curled around each other, on top of other people, arms wedged tightly against backs and bellies. Nobody asks for his clothes back. No one complains of cold feet.     I couldn’t ever love God, though I feared Him. I told myself that if I ever married, back in the Matrix, it would be with a passive man who did not mind being dominated. I told myself that I could never live with a strong man, a man like my father, a man like my vision of the Holy Father. Yes, I needed someone strong in my life. But after being unplugged and seeing a world that needed me, a world that was nearly without hope, I decided something very important that has stayed with me for the rest of my days. I would be the strong person in my life.     Sometimes I wonder if this is what the dreams meant, when I held a girl in my arms. Not that I would love women, but that I would live in a man’s world as one of them. That the strong part of my personality, the part that had been strangled near to death by my father’s world, would be the part needed most in my new world.     And now here I am, not married—there is no marriage here in the real world—but caught up in the heart and fate of the One. My own personal Jesus Christ. Savior of mankind.     And yet he does not mind that I cannot look upon him as my mother looked upon my father. He loves me. Loves me.     I wonder, sometimes, at three o’clock in the morning when the Neb is silent and I am staring at endless lines of code, whether this is how the Magdalene felt. She abandoned her profession for her love of Jesus, something I could never do, and yet in the end all she got for her troubles was friendship. She didn’t get half the things I have with Neo, not sex, not this strange symbiotic relationship and understanding. I wonder if she died happy, if she felt her sacrifice had been worth it.     Neo doesn’t ask any of this from me. I am older than he, in the reckoning of the real world, and he knows it. Asking me to abandon my place on the Nebuchadnezzar would be to him like asking Morpheus to resign as captain. He is uncomfortable when I tell him, plainly, that I would die for him. He does not yet understand that my devotion is to the resistance first and then to my heart. The two priorities simply happen to coincide on the matter of his safety. I could live without him—I could. I just would prefer not to.     Even so there are some things I cannot give him. He accepts this, though I know he longs for some things I cannot give. I can touch him, I can let him touch me, but I cannot sleep in the same bunk, in the same cabin. He may be my life partner, but after sex I leave his bunk and return to mine across the hall. I’m sure Morpheus knows this, but he doesn’t say anything. I am known to be extremely volatile when my privacy is breached. My flesh I will share—I need to share—but my sleep is my own.     And my dreams.     Molly’s hand rests against my stomach. Her knee is still bleeding; I can feel it warm and sticky pressed tightly against the back of my own. It must hurt, but she says nothing.     We say nothing.     The tide ebbs, moon wanes.     END