Slabs Under the Surface
My father was in my dreams, and he was alive, but the rest of the family was dying. We were talking about this in his apartment unit. It was a space I had never been to before, but it felt familiar. The walls were bare of things. They were slabs of concrete coming together in corners, everything looking the same. It wasn’t somber, though it should have been. The entry room was the largest, and it had their bed with his wife in it, and she had passed on. My sister was going to die next. It was as if this was the way it was supposed to be. He didn’t feel good about any of this, but we were able to have a pleasant conversation anyway. I wonder now if he were trying to tell me something.
When I came to this morning, it would be back to the opposite way of things, how he was the one that was dead and all the others still alive. This is the first time I remember dreaming of my father in recent years. It might be the first time since his death. I don’t remember a single other thing that happened. I was struck by the layout of the place. That bed in the first room was strange and yet I knew it once, when we were small and getting picked up by him on Sundays to spend our allotted time with him. Diagonal to this first space was another one that was filled out like a dining room. The kitchen was around the corner of the wall, and when you turned that corner, a couple of smaller rooms followed, likely a bathroom and some manner of closet.
So, this is what my sleeping mind identifies as a studio, but it was not my grandmother’s, which is what reason would have told me it was. In my woken mind, I remember the layout of the earliest efficiency, and it was just a room with a place for kitchen appliances next to a tiny bathroom. The second space was after my dad had married his third wife, with whom he would have his second family with. For some reason, I remember the high windows, as if we were halfway underground. It was like a bunker, and he would lay in my grandmother’s cot and watch Mexican wrestling. Getting suddenly inspired, he would start twisting and pinning us to the bed, too rough for a five- and three-year-old. Actually, he hadn’t been remarried yet, but that was coming soon. And this was something that I had mentioned to my daughter the other day, how rough my father was when he was playing around, sending me surges of energy that stayed with me through the nights to finally visit me in this incantation of made-up situations around loved ones. How much charge did it get from memories, and how much is it charging the train of my thoughts for the remainder of the day?