Of screaming monsters, lovers like water, & ice hauntings

A few nights ago, The Quiet Place (Part II) terrified me. I screamed inside. You know, the way tears can roll down your cheeks on the inside sometimes. I came out hearing the popcorn crackle in the back of my head, hyper-aware of sounds of all kinds. The clink of glassware later. Heavy breathing a long while after.

I’m much more comfortable with monsters than sex. Monsters are a definite other, unless you invite them to tea and make friends. Sex is the muddy liminality of the intermediate, the blur. The wet sand of seashores, with everyone an unexpected islet. Washed ashore, we wonder where we are at first.

At least, I do.

Marshes. That’s another liminal space. Half water, half plant, all bog. (And a little bit of crocodile.) I certainly have had some experiences that were more crocodile-infested marsh and less beach at sunset.

But what if you haven’t been swimming in awhile? What if the idea of a new beach or the risk of a new marsh is a helpless thought-creature on your arm? What if it’s crawling and sliding, slithering up and over your shoulder, looking for a way in? The nostril? The ear? Snuffle snuffle. And you want to let it in, give it a home in your brain, but you’re afraid, because you’ve been living on your safe small islet and watching people die for a year and ideas like that can kill.

Perhaps half the number of people who died in the Javanese killings of 1965 died in the United States this past year. Meanwhile, India has turned back and walked into the kingdom of Hades. I do not know when it will emerge, when friends of mine with family there will be able to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the corners of their eyes.

Corona is silent. Just like the monsters of The Quiet Place. There’s suspicion and dark obscurity about the origin of both the monsters in the film and the virus in this time strand. In both cases, it doesn’t really matter for the point of the story: trauma happens. It doesn’t need a proximate cause. When a coconut killed a man in our village, it was fruitless to ask why. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.

From the point of view of grief, these statements of bare tragedy feel like the only true way to say the truth. Bitter as walnut shells.

But, but but. But before. Let’s rewind the film just a bit. In the moment before you lose, in the moment before the father in the film (Part I now) screams and sacrifices himself to the hearing monsters, in that moment there is a choice. Before someone dies of corona, there is a choice involved. Usually a chain of them. In the film, Krasinski’s character chooses to die because that’s what fathers do. As a father, it’s a choice that feels sour and familiar after a year of pandemic.

What I am saying is we have got used to making choices with enormous consequence over the last year. We have got used to not knowing if a choice would kill a friend or not, and having to make our guesses and live with the consequences. And just maybe after that the idea of choosing a new (so to speak) beach to explore feels—somehow inconsequential and overly significant at once. What I am saying is really that decision fatigue, trauma, and exhaustion make monsters of us all. Cowardly monsters.

Maybe I’ll feel more like walking new beaches when I can see new ones. When Iceland is no longer just a dream. When Germany is a ticket rather than a hope.

Yes, this is privilege speaking. Most of us humans won’t have what we need to recover from this. At least not fully. I am (and always have been) one of the lucky ones.

Yet. Yet. We are resilient. In my privilege I can speak of tickets. But we all have our hopes. We all have the things we have been putting off this past year. Dreams banked, cups of bitterness drained. We have hopes. And humans don’t trade in their hope chips easily. We’re always gamblers, and we know when to hang onto our little all and wait out the Casino of Death when She’s running good.

Re-reading, I notice water has woven its way into this narrative. I pause. So easy to reach for metaphor for here. So tempting. If water is a being, it’s not a human being, not at all. It simply doesn’t care for the edges, the sharp corners of the binary. It revels in liminality. I notice in the film (Part I, again) that the only father-son conversation in the entire script takes place just behind the protective curtain of falling water.

Here in the mess of water, we are safe. We are human. We can exercise love. We can express. We can scream. We are (just for a moment) not afraid.

In my simplicity, I think there might be a lesson in that movie setting for me. Perhaps I need more waterfalls (literal and otherwise) in my life.

But let’s pause and turn again. Zoom the camera out. What is that above the waterfall? An eagle? An eagle, turning with the seasons. One of those mythic eagles who can flap its wings and drop a feather and bring the snow. And ice. As the eagle turns in the widening gyre of the mind, so ice clouds the metaphor. Edges form. Crystals creep in. Separateness appears. What was water is stone now, however temporarily, and in however hallucinatory a shape.

Perhaps this is relevant: 34 years ago the dead spoke to me in glacier form. Two nights ago, the same glacier returned to my dreams. All of the years in between I have treasured the memory of the night the glacier made me afraid. Afraid with ice. Afraid with deadly longing, lusting for cold I’d never known in the midst of the tropical heat. At four, I fled down the long corridor to my bed after reading a book of ice ages. I did not and did want to be ravaged by the ice. I needed the ice to come like I’d never needed anything else in this world.

And I never forgot that fear.

Running down the corridor that night a third of a hundred years ago, I knew I needed bed. Outside the scrappy walls of the little wooden bedroom, the ghosts of dead fish floated past, green and smelly. They were tessellated like the best Escher prints, running through and around and between the silent halls in silver and blue and gold flickering streams, eyes never changing in the dead dark.

The waters had deserted them.

You see, we lived on prime fishing grounds for the illegal Japanese trawlers in the 80’s. Out there at night, all night. Harvesting the last of the fish of these seas by the light of dead Pacific stars. Electrified by the fluorescent lures of the fishermen, the fish are stunned and fall easy prey. The ice came to me differently, simply, cleanly. Not a lure, but a song. I just knew in my bones (even then) it would come for me again.

And after 34 trips on a little rock around a small forgotten star, the glacier did indeed come back to my dreams. I do not know why. But the sense of breath in your chest when you are not forgotten by a Being the size of Manhattan is like no other in this world.

You might not believe. You might say the dream and the book and the intervening 34 years are a cheap narrative run for effect and (perhaps) for processing the traumatic emotions that have cascaded from my serotonin-starved brain this past year.

You might be right, I suppose.

Yet. Yet, yet, yet. First causes are hard to pin down at the chemical level. An atom is a tricky thing (let alone a quark). Narratives are sticky. Narratives endure.

The being that is me has assembled itself from random atoms and replaces those atoms every so many years. But there are stories circulating today older than the pyramids. Surely, this is suggestive, no? At least of a human way of being? To me, admitting the magic of the world seems a much healthier way of staying in touch with Things Generally.

So I will ask you this, human to human: have you dreamed of ice like a blessing? Do you know the balm of the lips so blue on your forehead? I feel I do now.

My Visitant (and this feels important to say) was utterly and completely unafraid of the small god of fire and smoke and dry heat whom we burn so much petroleum to honor. Unafraid of the Big Melt that has terrified me all my known life. The glacial lakes may ebb and fall away into a thousand, a million, a billion glittering diamonds on the valley floor. Sea levels may rise. Welcome. Come. Come up and breathe. And still, and wait, and breathe—others will form. We will come again. In our time.

That, substantially, is what I heard. Not that the point was or is a particular channeled message. The point (at least for me) is this: if Ice can also love me, and if what is binary is not worried about becoming transient and utterly muddied and mixed, perhaps there is a way for me to thaw and flow after pandemic also.

Perhaps I can believe in miracles, too.

A final reflection: In the dream I remember my Visitant also took a sacrifice. A disrespectful hiker. I remember feeling the goodness of the death from my Visitant’s point of view. As I have felt the goodness of the death of a mosquito in the dark. A good death. A death that adjusts the balances.

A gift, in a sense, however unwillingly offered.

And that frame of death, of the swallowing of the ice, has stayed with me. In a way I cannot explain, watching the hiker disappear beneath tons of pure blue ice—fractured, crumpled, crushed—feels comforting.

Reminds me of the gift that is also living and loving in the choppy beginnings of the wake of what will probably be greatest disease of our time.

Slip. Slop. Splash. Safe noises. Play. Melt. Remember. Return. Slide ashore, perhaps.