No Apotheosis For the Anxious

originally drafted Tuesday 19/September/2017 

I was in a bunker built into a mountain, we had been made to take shelter there. It was a vast and unforgiving desert outside and it was getting cold, our ship had crashed. We went into this cave because there was nothing else around, and we found that it had been recently occupied. Along the left wall there were boxes of guns, I picked one up casually, without noticing, thinking it was something else, and removed the plastic packaging. It had been wrapped in thin vacuum sealed plastic, like a new record. Down the hall there was an elevator that went up and down, we were on a middle floor. To the right there was a bigger room. It was all very clearly a cave, the walls were stone and curved. The boxes stacked around were made of slatted wood, like a photo of an expedition into the jungle at the turn of the century. 

I was about to go up in the elevator when a group of people approached from the mouth of the cave. I hailed them in English and then Italian, neither worked. The leader, a woman, just looked at me. I went up and tried to touch her, but my hand just passed through like she was an illusion. A horrible and overpowering dread emanated from the group, I panicked and swung the butt of my rifle at her but it also passed through. She just looked at me confused. I tried to shoot her, I felt this horrible panic and my gun only shot a cork. It was a pop gun. This was getting nowhere. 

I tried to talk to her and her crew, but nothing worked. After a little bit  I realized that she understood when I spoke Italian (and I felt very proud of myself for remembering as much Italian as I did) but it was still very broken. None of the crew spoke, I gathered that they understood my words from their reactions but even those were muted. At one point one of the men very casually walked through the wall as if it didn’t exist and it all clicked. In that horrible moment I saw that they were ghosts, even though they seemed as real as any of us. Usually in films ghosts are shown glowing, or semi-transparent, but here there was no special effect, they looked like normal people standing there, emanating dread and walking through walls. 

We were four, one who went upstairs, a man, a woman, and myself.  The woman was my friend but she was not K, it was like she was an actress. I felt no sexual attraction to anyone.

I felt I had to warn my group so I said something like “They don’t understand us” even though there was a flicker of understanding in the ghost woman's eyes when I spoke english, I kept this secret between the two of us, “and nothing we have is effective against them.” I didn’t say that they were specters, but it was understood among my group. We had seen the man earlier walk through the wall. I asked the ghost woman, the leader, some questions in broken guttural Italian, deep and growly, and she didn’t respond but I understood. Angry, I turned on my teammate who was a woman “You brought them here with your dread.” That’s what I said, ‘your dread’. My teammate who was a woman had felt very anxious this whole time and it was felt by all. This was understandable as we had crashed on an unfamiliar planet and were hiding in a cave, but her dread (it seemed clear to me) had attracted these demons. Standing near them all bunched together in the entryway of this cave I could barely stand the physical and overpowering anxiety that these ghosts emanated in waves, so it was clear enough to me that they would be attracted to my stressed colleague. Maybe they could taste her fear, maybe they thought they could be friends, maybe they wanted to eat her. I didn’t know. I was mad.

This next part isn’t clear, it comes it bursts. I remember very clearly downloading something on my colleagues computer (It had to be hers for this to work) and waiting impatiently for a bar to fill, one of those old Windows ones. To my right there was a small table that was rocking, like a table on a ship at sea, and on the table was a car, and as the car passed a particular spot and as brief as a flash I could see piloting the toy car the ghost woman, the leader of the intruders. 

If I could time it all right, I could get the download to finish when the ghost was in the car, and then I could trap her inside the computer or a flash drive and hand her back to herself. I wasn’t trapping the ghost herself but some aspect of her personality who was stuck (or loose) in a small wind up 1960’s Volkswagen bus that swung in and out of my grasp. Once all this was accomplished, I remember, then I could ascend the elevator and continue.  I had it within my grasp, but then I woke up. I was so close I could taste it, but when I went back to sleep a scary man was singing a scary song and then he stole my two twin daughters. Dreams are like that, they give you a tantalizing taste of truth, of ascension to peace but dash it from you at the last moment. Peace can only be achieved in waking hours, dreams hold a mirror to life, and cannot be the vehicle of change.