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Marilyn Jack Dann I was fourteen, and she was stone white and naked and blond.  She was hazed in the
pale cold light pouring in from the frost-shrouded windows of my bedroom,
and I remember the dustmotes floating in the mid-afternoon sunshine, I
remember the luminous living clouds of dust swirling around her great
diaphanous wings, which seemed to shudder as she stepped toward the bed .
. . my bed.Those wings were white
as tissue and seemed as fragile, as if they would break or crack or tear
with the merest motion or gust of wind, and I remember her green-flecked
eyes staring at me as she moved across my bedroom, which was filled with
books and magazines and forty-five rpm records and pre-cut balsa models of
World War II fighter planes (including a British Supermarine Spitfire MK
XII that would be fitted with radio control) in various stages of
completion, and I couldn't help myself, I looked at her breasts and at her
naturally dark mat of pubic hair, and I was so terrified that I closed my
eyes.I remember, as if it
had happened last month, rather than forty years ago.It was the
year that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens were killed in a
plane crash in Iowa. Alaska became the 49th State, which brought Texas
down a peg, and Hawaii became the 50th. Rio Bravo and Ben
Hur came out that year; Navy beat Army 43-12, and Mafia boss Joseph
Barbara and forty of his "delegates" got busted at his house in
Appalachian, which was about fifteen miles away from my home town in
upstate New York.I found the old book after my father died in 1987. I was searching through
the bedroom closet that he had always locked, and I was lost in the smells
of cedar and old clothes—there were old leather key rings and wallets, a
lifetime member Playboy card, a stiletto knife that he had taken away from
me when I was sixteen, a taped envelope that contained an old black and
white Polaroid photograph of a dark haired buxom woman—certainly not my
mother—wearing the skimpy outfit of a belly dancer, and there were tuxedo
studs and cufflinks and silver pens and penknives, playing cards backed
with photographs of nude women, white plastic collar stays of varied size,
check registers, an old will in a manila envelope, letters tied with a
black ribbon, expired insurance policies, a woman's red silk handkerchief,
and my paperback edition of The Fundamentals of Self-Hypnosis and Yoga:
Theory, Practice, and Application by Julian Rammurti, MA, MD. Its
spine was broken and pages fell out as I held it open in my palm.Dad
had never told me he had taken the book. Nor had he ever told me that he
had taken the stiletto.I remember how keenly I
had felt the loss of the book at the time, But that was only because it
was mine . . . because it was the first book I'd found on the subject . .
. and because it worked. I could find other books on yoga and hypnotism,
which I did. I lived in libraries and learned clinical theories and models
and techniques, and I'd even developed a flair for stage hypnotism, which
was the antithesis of the careful, quiet clinical process. For an
instant—standing there in my father's closet, a grown man discovering the
secrets of his youth, savouring the presence of the living past—I saw
myself, as if in a mirror: a thin, gangly, pimply-faced boy of fourteen
once again, straight brown hair greased back with pomade, red button-down
shirt, collar raised, leather jacket, black pegged pants. The boy sneered
into those books, indeed, as if he were looking into a mirror. A poor
reflection of Elvis.Reading . . . reading
about posthypnotic suggestion and methods for creating the state of
yoganidra. The powers of tratakam. Lucid Dreaming. The state
of somnambulism. Hypermnesia. Prana and Pranayama. The story
of the man and the bear.I've often remembered
that story of the man and the bear. It went something like this: There was
a psychiatrist who was wounded in France during the Second World War. As
he recuperated in a military hospital in Cornwall, he grew bored and
occupied himself with a posthypnotic suggestion. He'd hypnotised himself
and conjured up a great bear to provide some comic relief from the day to
day boredom. All he had to do was say "Bear" and count to five and
miraculously, a huge white polar bear with a long, flexible neck would
stroll upright into the ward, leap about in the aisles, try to mount the
nurses, frolic around the other patients, or hunch against the
psychiatrist's bed and allow himself to be petted. So the bear cavorted in
the mornings and afternoon, and likewise all the psychiatrist had to do
was count to five and the bear would disappear. The bear had no weight,
made no noise, could somersault in the air, walk on the ceiling, deftly
unbutton nurses' blouses with its curved yellow claws, remove bras, and
dance with any of the variously undressed doctors, nurses, patients, and
visitors, who were never the wiser. The psychiatrist also conjured up the
bear every night as an antidote to counting sheep, but the apparition soon
began to take on a different, more ominous aspect in the dark. It became
more aggressive, would not always obey commands, and when it leered, a
feat the psychiatrist was certain no other bear could manage, its fangs
seemed much longer than they had been during the day. So the psychiatrist
mumbled "Bear", counted to five, and disappeared his ill-conceived
creation.But the bear was not so
easily dismissed.It appeared the next
night, unbidden, and the next day it snapped at the nurses and bit the
psychiatrist on the forearm. A warning. Although it left no marks, of
course, the psychiatrist was in excruciating pain for hours.The
psychiatrist had to hypnotise himself three times to get rid of
it.Nor did that work . . . entirely; and years later, the bear would
oftimes appear—a vague, threatening form in the distance—and follow the
psychiatrist, who developed the disconcerting habit of always looking
behind him.So I lay on top of the prickly wool blankets of my neatly made bed and waited for Marilyn Monroe to come to me, to change me completely—change me from an awkward, pimply-faced adolescent into a full-blooded man who knew the moist secrets of women, who'd actually and really been laid, even if through the devices and snares of an altered state of consciousness known only to hypnotists and young dabblers in the arcane such as myself. It didn't matter how I
did it. What mattered was that I did it.I had floated, fallen,
drifted, breathed myself into the deepest, most profound state of
hypnosis. I had imagined myself rowing a boat on a calm, shallow, infinite
sea, every breath took me farther out upon the placid ocean, breathing in,
breathing out, skiffing in smooth clockwork motion, each breath out, each
breath in taking me farther, farther into a calm azure place without
depth, without horizon; yet I could feel everything around me: the wool of
the blanket itching my neck, the cold smoothness of the pillow case as I
moved my head, the cold chill seeping in through the windows, and I saw
her in that instant as I blinked open my eyes and shut them tight again.
The woman who inhabited every adolescent male's dream. Walking toward me,
a look of blond rapture on her painted full-lipped face—six shades of
lipstick, I knew about that, Marilyn I love you, and I waited for her,
waited in the dark bosom of my self-directed dream, waited for her to come
upon me, slip beside me, touch me, guide me, sail me across the sea of my
quickening breathing, sail me out of my virginity.I would lose
my cherry to an apparition, a ghost, a hallucination, but at thirteen, in
North Leistershire, New York, population 16,000, in 1959, that was the
best I could hope for.With my eyes closed—I
do believe they were closed, but perhaps they were not—I could feel her
walking toward me, past the built-in, beige-painted bookshelves that
housed my father's mystery collection, which he'd always kept in my room,
past the door that connected to my parents' bedroom . . . walking under
all the mobiles and models that floated just below the ceiling and defied
gravity by mere threads; and then she was standing over me, standing
beside the bed, standing beside my slippers and sneakers and cordovan
dress shoes, and I knew that she was leaning, leaning over me now—I
could hear her shallow, patient breathing and the rustling whispering of
her wings, smell her overly sweet perfume mixed with a more acrid, damp
odour—and all I would have to do was take her in my arms, she would fall
into my arms like pillows and soft toys and cushions; and all I had to do
was open my eyes to see her breasts and I could raise my hands to touch
them.All I had to do was
open my eyes.I tried. I had
to see her. I had memorised her from a hundred photographs: the mole above
her swelled lips, the eyelashes heavy as cardboard, the eyelids white as
chalk, the earings dangling, everything about her swollen and curved and
fleshy and full of promises—But in that instant, in
that terrible instant of realisation or proffered possibility, I felt
everything change. I know it was my own fault, my own perverse nature, but
somehow I suddenly changed the rules. Much as I desired to bring Marilyn's
warm body close to my own, to enter her and lose everything I hated and
instantly gain my manhood, I imagined something else instead.In
that terrifying, transforming instant I imagined that whatever I was most
afraid of now stood in Marilyn's place, and I dared not open my eyes for
fear of what I would see, yet I was afraid to keep them closed because it
was unbearable not to see what was looming over me, suffocating me,
watching me; and I remember the slow-motion tossing and turning and
shaking, as the sea I had drifted too far upon began to rage and rise;
and, in fact, I was caught between fear and desire. I could not tell how
long the convulsion lasted, but once I awakened to the world of slanting
sunlight and the familiar smell of bedsheets and air-freshener, I vowed
never to hypnotise myself again.After that Marilyn never came to me in my dreams, but the dark thing that I had conjured in her place shadowed me. Like the
psychiatrist who kept looking over his shoulder to check whether his great
white bear was tailing him, so did I feel the presence of my apparition.
But unlike the psychiatrist, who at least knew his enemy, I could only
sense this manifestation of my fears. In my teens I thought of it as a
monster shaped something like a bear, and I imagined its claws tapping on
macadam or sidewalks, and I would turn quickly, just to check, and, of
course, there would never be anything there, at least not anything
untoward. Over the years, I gave up on monsters, for they, too, ceased to
inhabit my dreams. My dreams had one recurrent element, and that was more
an experience of synthesthesia: they would all, at one stage or another,
take on the colour of deep purple, yet the colour would be more like damp
mist, which felt thick and ominous and signalled danger, but the mist was
the stuff of the world in my dreams, and it would bleed out of the sky and
buildings and people—just as it would bleed out of myself—dying my
monochrome dreams with purple fear and anxiety and uncertainty.But
I wasn't the beast entirely. Only part of it.The dreams coalesced into reality one numbingly cold dark morning in Vietnam. It was January 1969.
We'd been stuffed into a deuce-and-a-half, one of three trucks going out
of Phu Bai down south where the fighting was supposed to be heating up.
Everybody was shivering, and I remember sitting perfectly still because it
was warmer that way, and Joey Mantaneo was pushed against me like four
o'clock on the D-train going to Brooklyn, and even in the cold he smelled
like cordite and rot and piss (and that cordite smell should have alerted
me that something bad was crawling toward me), and he had his war name
SCARED SHITLESS painted across his flack jacket and stencilled on his
helmet like he was military police, and I knew the story about how he got
his name—but he was the only one in Bravo who'd never been wounded or
sick, not even an infection when he cut his finger. He claimed he was a
street-fighter and his gang was called "The Road Gents," even though
nobody in the gang had a car, and he said he knew as much about killing
before he came out here as he did after, but he always looked scared—he
just had that kind of a face—and when he was green somebody said he was
scared shitless and so he took that name for himself. The guy who named
him was dead, but SCARED SHITLESS wasn't. Neither was BURNT COP and CALL
ME WHITE, and they'd been brought up in a black bopping gang in
Philadelphia called "The Flicks," whatever the hell that meant, and the
rest of the guys were farmers or factory workers or mechanics—I was the
only college boy, and they called me "Professor"—and they named themselves
BORN TO DIE, BORN TO KILL, KILL OR BE KILLED, KILLER ANGEL, and if you
believed everybody, every one of them was a stoned killer street-fighter
and a drug-dealer and a hustler and a pussy-magnet, but we were all just
kids. Full of piss and vinegar eight months ago, but now exhausted and
sick with the shits and fungus and getting bald and everything else. And
while the goddamn truck rocked and jittered in the muddy craters that was
supposed to be the convoy route—I was black and blue from being thrown
around in that can—everybody was singing and whistling "Reach Out, I'll be
There," and then "Mellow Yellow," and Cop and Manteno and Sammy Chitester
were singing in falsetto, so it sounded like we had women in the chorus,
and then everybody did Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,"
and they were pretty good.We sounded like a rock
band without microphones coming through the storm that had kept up for
days, and it seemed like the world was going to stay dark and moonlit
forever; and everything was covered with leaves that blew all over like
home in October, but nothing else was like home: the houses along the way
that were still standing were burned and pitted from shells, and there
were refugees that looked like they ought to be dead and buried walking
along the road; some were wounded, and although the old people didn't seem
to pay any attention to us, the rest looked at us like we were the enemy;
they hated us, even though they were too afraid to say word one; and we
just crashed and bounced and sang and whistled through the dark, through
the rain and fog, and you would have thought you were at the south pole or
something where it was twilight all the time, and then we blew out our
transmission, and although a few of the guys got on the other two trucks,
the rest of us marched.We went twenty clicks
before we finally bivouacked in a deserted village that wasn't far from
the Citadel of Hue.It was cold and wet and
dark and I couldn't stop shivering.Viet Cong could have
been all around us, for all we could tell, even though we'd caught up with
our trucks and guards were posted and the place was secured, but I didn't
care about anything. None of us who'd done the marching copped guard duty,
and I would have fallen asleep if I had; it was as if someone had pushed a
button and all the life just went out of me. I couldn't even eat or
relieve myself. I just wrapped myself up in my poncho liner and fell
asleep in an empty hooch. There were bits of glass all over the floor that
would sometimes catch the light like little green and yellow and orange
and blue gems, the kind sold in the hobby stores along with crystals and
beads, but I didn't dream about that . . . I didn't dream about jewels and
beads and velvet and cold empty darkness.I didn't dream at
all.But dreams or no dreams, we were up before first light; and our
orders were to go the rest of the way, wherever that was going to be, on
foot because they needed the trucks up north (where it was safe), and so
we watched the deuces drive off and then we walked to paradise. That's
what it looked like, anyway, and before we realised what was happening,
most of us were dead. Only Joey Mantaneo and I survived, and Joey, of
course, didn't even get a scratch, but he suffered later, went half-crazy
with recurring nightmares; at least that was what I heard, only I can't to
this day remember who I heard that from.I didn't suffer any
nightmares . . . after that I couldn't remember my dreams.We
were approaching the south bank of the Perfume River, and there were the
smashed walls of what had once been beautiful French-style villas of the
southern sector of Hue; and spread out before us was lush grass and fog
swirling like we were walking on a carpet through clouds—the grass was
deep green from all the rain, but there was a metal smell to the air; and
although that mist didn't look purple, like in my childhood dreams, I
sensed that this place was wrong, that it was hazy and purple and that the
purple was about to bleed out from the sky and me and everyone else, but I
just couldn't quite see it yet.For all that I just
said, this place was picture-perfect: a lone sampan on the river, an old
man riding a bicycle up the avenue that ran along the park, for we were
walking through a park. I remember breathing in and looking around, and
then I saw a flash and heard an explosion, and Mantaneo screamed
"Motherfuckers!" or maybe that was me, but it didn't matter because there
was another explosion and I realised that I was lying flat on the ground
and looking up at the sky and watching watching watching for the purple,
watching waiting for the change, please God make this just a dream, and I
heard a gurgling noise and a wheezing noise, and I remembered the training
film I'd seen on sucking chest wounds, and I just figured my chest had
been blown out and I was dying, but I didn't think "Oh my God I'm dying"
or "Mamma."Everything was still
and cold and quiet as a winter morning, and Marilyn came to me, just like
she did the first time.I could smell her damp
perfume and then I could feel her coming toward me and studying me like
she was a doctor and I was a patient, and then she lay down on top of me,
straddling me; her pale face pressed against my neck, her stiff blond hair
tickling my chin and lips; and I could feel her body moving against mine,
and her wings, feathered white, layers and layers of down, covered us,
sheltered us, and I felt myself inside her, felt the cold ether wetness,
felt myself being drawn into her, into down, into feathers, into the
swirling mists of cloud, drawn into a silent, cold heaven.Mantaneo saved my ass that day by pulling me into one of the VC's tunnels, and we hid in a dark, damp, earthy room. By all rights, we should have met up with its owner; but, as I said earlier, Mantaneo always had the right luck and never got hurt. The way I heard it later, he just waited until the VC left and somehow managed to keep me alive. I
never saw him again to thank him.And, of course, I don't
remember what happened.After I came back to the World, as we called coming home in those days, I waited for Marilyn. I liked to think that she came to me every night in my dreams. But since I couldn't remember dreaming, it was moot. My shrink told me that
once I'd worked everything out and regained my health, I'd remember my
dreams again. The shrink, of course, attributed everything to
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, which had become the fashionable diagnosis
for everything that had happened to every grunt in 'Nam. I argued that I
didn't exhibit any of the other symptoms of PTSD: diminished interest in
activities, feelings of detachment from others, exaggerated startle
responses, sleep disturbances, survivor guilt, memory impairment,
recurrent dreams of a traumatic event, or trouble concentrating. I'd put
myself through law school—memorised the Uniform Commercial Code and fifty
cases a night, and I won't believe you can do that without
concentration and a good memory. But he was not to be dissuaded. He
figured that I was having nightly traumas; I just couldn't remember
them.I couldn't argue that
kind of logic, so I stopped seeing him.Eventually, of course,
I started dreaming again, and I was, indeed, having recurrent dreams, but
whether or not they were traumatic, I couldn't tell you because all I
could remember was that they were about wings—gauzy, translucent wings
that sometimes looked like feathers, sometimes like down, and sometimes
like the surface of a soap bubble. I suppose I became obsessed by the very
idea, obsessed with flying frogs and flying dragons and flying fish, with
horseshoe bats and redwings and griffon vultures and hummingbirds, with
hawk moths and wasps and hovel flies . . . and with those who like me
couldn't fly. I spent hours at the botanical gardens watching the swans
and remembering Marilyn's wings fanning and spreading; and I wondered, I
tried to remember: were they white and feathery or were they gossamer
rainbows settling around me like silken sheets, billowing, as alive as the
surface of the sea?I usually remembered
them as white and feathery.The wings of
angels.I started dating blond women—how I yearned for pale skin and white-bleached hair—and then I married a petite, dark haired woman, may she rest in peace, and we had children and lay in bed every night, and some nights she knew I wasn't with her. I would dream pretend that she was someone else, and then for an instant the sheets would become wings. Josiane died of ovarian
cancer under cool white sheets.I had always thought that the next time—if there were ever to be a next time—I would find myself looking at the monster that was unseen but terrifyingly present when I'd first conjured Marilyn out of an old book about hypnosis. Every night I lived
with the anticipation, with the desire and the fear—waiting for Marilyn,
or the monster, Marilyn, monster; and my bones grew, my hormones changed,
as did the colour of my hair—from blond to brown to grey, as the years
passed me through Binghamton Central High School, Broome Community
College, Vietnam with its smells of cordite and damp familiar colours of
fear, Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, where I drove a Buick
Le Sabre and wore tie-dyed t-shirts, Brooklyn Law School, clerking for
Bernstein, Haversham, Lunquist, Esqs—from associate to junior to senior
partner, from Brooklyn to Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan to Connecticut;
marriage, children, vacations, fourteen-hour days, weekends on Fire
Island, divorce, reconciliation, death, Josiane's dead, say it, admit it,
there, fact, and through it all, through all the empty and disconnected
nights, all that was left were desire and fear. My whole life a moment
wrapped around anticipations of dreams . . . or nightmares.Marilyn or the monster.I did finally find them. I'd received an
invitation from my old unit to attend a reunion. It had been thirty years.
I looked for Joey Mantaneo in the columns of names and addresses between
the grainy photographs, but he wasn't mentioned. I was listed
alphabetically, home address, home phone, business phone, just like all
the other officers and noncoms and grunts. There I was, a ghost in black
letter type, but Joey had disappeared.That night I dreamed
about him.While the little black
and white television blinked ghostly light into my bedroom I allowed
myself to follow him, skipping around time like it was an old
neighbourhood, and I found him in Bayone, New Jersey, where he was working
as an electrician for the building firm of Calley & La Cross, or so I
dreamed; and Joey's wife was named Louise, and he had three daughters,
Marsha, Missie, and Mave, and in that dream I'd forgotten the names of my
own daughters, but didn't follow that trail, lest I dwell upon how I'd
failed my children and my wife, and how I—but that wasn't important; I was
following Joey. I'd always be safe with Joey because he was a survivor; he
survived, survived the bopping gangs and the drugs and everything else and
I wouldn't let myself drift back into Vietnam, but Joey led me right back.
He took me through his father's candy store and showed me how he'd grown
up. He took me to Larry's Bar, which was across the street from his three
bedroom apartment on Stadler Avenue, and we sat at the bar, which had a
brass rail to rest your feet on, and we drank boilermakers, dropping the
shot-glasses filled with Johnny Red right into the beer mugs—all the
regulars had their own personal mug at Larry's. We drank three shots and
beers, and I felt an overwhelming sadness as I looked at Joey, an
overwhelming longing. He had lost most of his hair, had put on weight,
which changed the shape of his face—took out the definition and sharp,
clean good looks and replaced them with a softness that was somehow
repellent; and Joey smelled bad; he was dressed in jeans and a faded
shirt, and he leaned over and told me that he was still in Hue, still in
Vietnam—that we were still in Hue—and that's when the dream broke
apart.It had been so real, as
not to be a dream, although I knew that bits and pieces were wrong, that
there was no company called Calley & La Cross; those were just names
from the war, but Joey leaned toward me, then grabbed me by the shoulders
and—We tumbled into the VC's tunnel, back into that cold, damp morning
near the Perfume River, and I was lying against the dirt wall, sitting up,
while Joey pressed his hand against my chest and said, "Jesus Christ,
Jesus Christ," and there were a few rays of light coming in from the
entrance above, and they were golden and seemed as solid as the blades of
ancient bronze swords, and I watched the dust swirling through them,
swirling swirling and I remembered my room in Leistershire, remembered
lying on the bed and counting myself into a hypnotic trance, into a deep
state of somnambulism, and I was fourteen and about to conjure up Marilyn
out of my adolescent desires and the light pouring in through my windows,
light filled with dustmotes dancing swirling, promise, everything filled
with promise and—Then Joey stopped
fussing with me, and we could hear someone scraping around above. Somebody
shouted "Chew hoi, chew hoi, " which meant surrender, but we could
tell it was our own boys; we were all taught Chew hoi, Yuh tie len, lie
day—surrender, come out with your hands up, and then concussion,
blinding light, the cracking of thunder, and then silence as my ears
popped, and I felt sudden wetness all over me, sonovabitch whoever was up
there couldn't wait to take prisoners, or find out who the hell we were,
and I wiped my face, everything smeared with blood, Joey, Joey was all
over me. I looked around, light now pouring in from the entrance that was
forward and above, pouring in like mist, which swirled, turning everything
to blood, and I was holding Joey's torso, but his arms and legs and head
had been blown off, and I was a liar, he wasn't lucky, or maybe he
was.I closed my eyes, but the blood and light and mist could not be
closed out; rather everything slowly darkened to purple, and I could feel
myself tossing and shaking in slow-motion, and I remembered having
convulsions before, but now it didn't matter if I closed my eyes or opened
them, I'd found the monster—Joey, Joey, goddamn it, and I screamed and
opened my eyes and the mist the fog cleared and I could see her, standing
in the entrance that was flooded with light, pure blazing sunlight, cold
winter morning light. She was moonlight white, and naked, and her eyes
were drawn in black and her lips were smeared with blood and as she
reached toward me, coaxing me out of the earth, her wings spread out
reflexively; they were butterfly blue fans, deep azure, darkening,
darkening into purple black, and they quivered, trembling to the meter of
her perfectly measured pulse, and I rememberI rememberI
whispered "Mamma"Just like every other
grunt who thought he was about to die.
Originally appeared pp33-41, Eidolon Issue 29/30, April 2000. Copyright © Jack Dann, 2000. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
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