MEETING OF THE MINDS

 

For the cursed Major Richard Blaine there is no surcease in sleep.

MEETING OF THE MINDS

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”

- Carl Jung

 

I never remember my dreams. I only know that when I awaken, I am shivering and clammy with sweat.

But I remember my Vision Quests … each and every terrible one.

I didn’t even know what they were called until Mr. Morton in his eerie New Orleans mansion told me what I had been having. 

He even offered to tell me what Indian tribe was in my ancestry … which was varied he mocked.

I politely declined his offer. Mr. Morton never gave anything away for free.

He reminded me of what I had read of the Fae whose offers always took more than they gave. That went double for Mr. Morton.

With the thought of him, my Vision Quest took form. As always, I could not quite picture what transpired before I closed my eyes.

Only that I was smiling when I closed them, and an image of a startled boy in a gleaming Spartan helmet filled my mind.

I was in what appeared to be a medieval fantasy Inn. Many tables, few candles, and no occupants.

No. I take that back.

Mr. Morton slowly, slowly took his mocking, handsome shape in front of me in a shimmer of ice rain.

He smiled and spoke in the voice of Orson Welles. “Miss me?”

“No.”

“You wound me.”

“If only I could.”

He smiled only with his lips. His eyes remained sharp chips of diamonds. 

“If God is omnipotent, why does He not stop my little gambits?”

He chuckled and the sound did not reach down into his broad chest. 

“Can He not see them? Then, He is not omniscient, is He?”

He ran his longer than human fingers through his thick hair that was no longer blond as it had been in New Orleans but deepest black.

“But if He is both, then He is hardly kind much less the paragon of benevolence that His tattered collection of parchment fairy tales makes Him out to be."

His laugh was the sound of breaking bones. 

"But if he is benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, why do I still exist?  What do you think?”

“I believe the healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”

He sighed, and frosted clouds of icy breath billowed from thin lips. “Whoever said I was a man?”

And he was gone, but the shivers he gave me stayed.

For a moment, nothing was in front of me. Then, the nothing became a man.

In Mr. Morton’s place was an oblivious Eisenhower in his West Point cadet uniform. He fiercely cut the juicy steak on the plate in front of him as if it were an enemy.

He glared at the people who now sat at all the tables, eating, drinking, and tittering empty laughter.

“They think they know but they are simpletons. Blind morons! Cows like the one I am eating.”

He put the bit of steak at the end of his fork into his mouth. His face screwed up as if it were covered in brine. 

He spat it out on the plate and threw down the fork which clinked against the other silverware.

“Flavorless! Like all of life. Like all of my life!”

He looked up into the misty black billows of fog above us.

“God! Why did you let me be shunted into the sidelines all during the Great War, all through the ignominy of the years that followed?”

He buried his face in his hands. “And when I finally had it all in my hands, why did You take it all away?”

“Why?!”

I wanted to tell him that he did it to himself. But being told that myself never had helped … only hurt.

And after Mr. Morton’s visit, I decided not to be a torturer.

Eisenhower suddenly saw me sitting in front of him. “You! It’s all your fault!”

I sighed. “Yes, but not in the way you think.”

His eyes became deader than usual … which was very. “Lady Churchill called me King Saul and you David! King Saul!”

He blew his breath out of his thin lips.

“I have you know I may not be hobbled to any denomination, but I am a very religious man! Very!”

“If you have to keep telling that to someone, then, you aren’t.”

Harsh, brittle laughter to my left. I turned. Oh, why the hell not?

General George Marshall … but in the uniform of a colonel he wore in France in 1919. I didn’t know whose face was more dour, his or Eisenhower’s.

I would have hated to have to live off the difference.

“Looks like you’ve been demoted, General.”

He flicked dead eyes to his sleeves and harumphed, “This is the oddest dream I have ever had.”

“No dream, George,” said Eisenhower, nodding to me. “He is a spawn of Satan!”

Marshall studied me as if I were some knotty strategic problem he had to solve.

“I have read Cloverfield’s report on you. He regards you as a sorcerer of sorts.”

“That’s a better term for me than Eisenhower’s.”

“I do not believe in magic … or you. Whatever you may be.”

Eisenhower glared at me. 

“You were raised from a baby in an orphanage, weren’t you? Well, I guess that makes you a bastard, right?  A bastard!”

As “Colonel” Marshall studied us both, I nodded sadly. 

“Yes, I suppose it does. What I am, sir, is an accident of birth. But you, General, are a self-made man.”

Eisenhower lunged at me over the table, knocking his plate off the table in a loud clatter. Marshall grabbed the man’s right arm.

“Ike. Ike! Get a hold of yourself, man. This demotion is not forever. As soon as the psychiatrists deem you fit for duty, you will be again the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.”

Eisenhower glared at Marshall. “And when do you think that will be? You’ve lusted for my position this whole time.”

Marshall nodded.

“Yes, I have, and I intend to do what I can with it while it is mine. But I know Roosevelt. He won’t be able to bear me not being across the hall from him to reassure his doubts and insecurities. I won’t be Supreme Commander for long.”

I shivered, for a chill breeze caressed me, feeling as if it had come from my grave yet to be ... waiting impatiently for my body.

A tall willowy woman sat next to me. wrapped in living shadows.  They lightly touched all along her supple body as if they were her lovers. 

She held up a long forefinger to where her lips would have been had I been able to see her face.

But I knew who she was.

Sentient.

Here in my Vision Quest, Sentient could apparently manifest herself.

Her voice was as if a tuning fork of ice had been given eerie life. “Gentlemen … and I use the term for you two very, very lightly.”

She waved her hand, and frost layered their faces.

As they squirmed and squealed, Sentient murmured, 

“You have both insulted my champion. That must cease … or you will cease … to exist.”

She sighed, and her breath smelled of pineapple and cedar.

“My Blaine is more than you could possibly comprehend. He gave up his hands to save his motley crew and the survivors of that wretched doomed Operation  Tiger, whom I would have gladly sacrificed to spare my champion.”

She softly touched my right hand. 

“Each heartbeat he suffers such pain in those artificial hands the like of which you do not know ….”

Sentient cocked her shadowed head. 

“Until now. Each of you will now bear a full third of that pain, so that my champion may find some small measure of peace.”’

Eisenhower and Marshall suddenly stiffened and began to howl in agony. I looked hard at them. The pain had been bad, but not that bad.

But my hands did feel a lot better.

Sentient murmured in my mind. ‘Unlike you, they were not raised in the hell of St. Marok’s.’

Marshall groaned, "How long will this agony go on?"

Sentient shrugged. "Oh, eventually, you will age and die. So, until then."

They howled louder at that.

She turned as an ice queen to them. “Hush! Or I will give you a full half of his pain.”

I was hoping they would keep on, but they shut up. Very, very quickly.

Sentient shook her head. 

“As far as I can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Though I could not see her eyes for the shadows masking them, I could tell she was appraising the generals.

“Perhaps, I was mistaken. No matter. I will prevail.”

With that, I awoke. Unlike a dream, this vision would stay with me.

For my whole life.

In the words of Nurse Reynolds, “Brilliant.”