Razing the Forest

The old man staring at me through the mirror looked like he’d seen a few things in his time. I almost laughed at him as the exhaustion brought on by another night’s sleep told me of dreams undreamt and hope long dashed. As I washed my face and then looked up again the water dripping from his wild whiteness of beard accused me of having abandoned him to a fate from long ago. To be lost forever in an emotionless wasteland devoid of any human feeling; love, hate, joy, despair…

I’d always felt that was too good a fate for the Grabbers, thieves who left their victims with nothing but a wall of endless despair with no hope of relief beyond self-annihilation. In the end it wasn’t up to me to determine their fate. If it had been I’d have left them in the same state in which they’d left their victims, bereft of hope and physically drained into a distillation of fatigued darkness. Whatever gain the Grabbers achieved from their actions I still don’t know how they could have ethically justified what they did to their victims.

I mean, I saw the ecstasy they achieved in draining their victims of all common feeling. In thrall to their addictions the Grabbers seemed less like monsters in people suits and more like practitioners of some profound and all-encompassing religious bliss the rest of us could never grasp. Yet the carnage they left in their wake was no bliss.

Sighing, I looked more closely than usual at the old man in the reflection; a definite mistake. There was a time when I wondered if the lines there counted the dreamers from whom I’d suffered sleep invasions, the rude queue jumpers who took over my sleep and dumped their own emotional baggage at the front door of my harried psyche. I knew better though. To the second point I’d long ago learned that the dream projections I intercepted were involuntary on the part of those distant dreamers and to the first point I knew without a doubt that I’d been the unwilling recipient of vastly more ‘outsider’ dreams than could be represented in the lines of that face.

The beard was more ragged than I’d allowed it to become for several years now, hiding something, I didn’t know what, beneath the white thin wires of hair beginning to take on a mind of their own after months of neglect. I’d let grooming falter since seeing a brief cable news network program that brought me back to a time I’d tried otherwise to brush aside like old magazines on a coffee table.

There was a time when I’d dared to hope that the Grabbers were genuinely alien, another form of human maybe or invaders from some distant other world; creatures out of a science fiction fantasy, though perhaps with a touch of creative finesse in their driving need to consume others’ emotions. When I was located by the Hunters and told that the Grabbers were true Homo sapiens, pure Ozzy and Harriet with a long hidden ‘talent’, I recall wanting to rage, to scream or maybe to barf. They were us in the mirror with distinct abilities and peculiar hungers, just like the rest of us.

All I ever wanted was the chance to finish my own dreams instead of having foreign ones thrust upon me every night. The Hunters, Grabbers themselves but with morals and a code of ethics, were fascinated by me and very quickly realized how my apparently unique curse could make their goal of one day cornering the Grabbers a reality. I was irresistible bait. Dreams are an almost purely emotional landscape and I was an antenna for the dreams of many different people from all over the world.

Puberty initiated my talent as a dream receiver, adding the confounding bitter confusion of outsiders’ dreams to my already hormone addled psyche. Without my beloved dog to ground me in some sense of reality these foreign dreams, often in languages I didn’t understand and seething with intense feelings for which I had no anchor point, would surely have killed me. Thanks largely to a border collie appropriately named Yogi I somehow survived a befuddled adolescence long enough to sink into a semi-hidden adult life. A lifetime of avoiding people left me ill-prepared for the very real emotional and physical battle I would face eventually. I can’t imagine what might have become of me had the Hunters not found me and prepared me for the onslaught of the Grabbers they knew were seeking me.

My reverie was snapped by the sound of Jaxon coming into the bathroom through the open door behind me. I continued to stare in the mirror and told him that I intended to get rid of the beard. As expected, he didn’t respond. I turned to him sitting on the back of the toilet. He continued his habitual calico behaviour, the behaviour which had given him his last name- Pawlick. “I’m serious Jax, I’m gonna take the whole thing off and find out what’s underneath!” Jax blinked up at me and carried on with his cleaning regimen, not a mrrrp, not even a soft purr.

“What, you dare me do you? Wait’ll you see what us upright cats can do to our whiskers.” Jaxon paused and glanced at me as I pulled the scissors from the cupboard above his porcelain perch. I genuflected at him with the scissors in a non-threatening yet emphatic manner. I seemed to have gained his slit-eyed attention. Turning back to the mirror over the sink I paused and looked once more at the old man. It occurred to me that it wasn’t the lines in the face which counted all those hijacked and atomized dreams. No, it was the hairs, wire of endless nights fighting others’ emotional wars, living their loves and hates rather than any of my own. At that moment each hair on the old man’s face became a representative, a symbol, for each dream of my own displaced by the psychic cacophony from uncountable distant strangers. Suddenly, I no longer felt any hesitancy to denude that ancient landscape in the mirror. The most amoral, voracious timber baron became my momentary kin. I would raze the forest on that aging chin.

At the first globbing pass of the scissors my cat protested, breaking his silence too late. For the next five swipes of the scissors Jax continued his alarmed mrrrps and throat gurgles of surprise, his upright cat was incongruously attacking his own face with silent silver claws. Rather than risk clogging the sink I turned with the clumps of white, wiry tightropes, now disconnected from both the old face and the moments of dream invasion they signified and dumped them in the toilet bowl in front of and beneath Jaxon Pawlick. He had quietened and settled into appalled regard of my self-mutilating behaviour. I can’t pretend to know just how genuine was his concern for his roommate. Blessedly, animals cannot project their psychic baggage at me. I have as much inside scoop on the mental processes of my cat as anyone does. I swear he looked more and more horrified with each clout of hair though. I continued methodically working from right to left and then along my throat. Occasionally I flushed the toilet. Except for the mustache the remaining landscape in the mirror was reminiscent of the remnants I’d once seen of an old growth forest on Vancouver Island after it had been devastated by industrial harvesting machines. It wasn’t so much stubble as small chunks of forever lost health and vitality.

When the Grabbers caught me, they’d intended to use me as their essentially inexhaustible food source. With me they could latch onto and drain the emotional energies of any dream jumper who unwittingly connected with me in sleep. They had been delighted to find that, though their particular process left me exhausted and deeply saddened, it didn’t have the same effect on me as it had on the dreamers they were draining through me. I remained able to cope with my fettered existence, sometimes literally tied up in a small windowless room in a basement in west Ottawa.

The Grabbers were pleased and supremely confident that they’d permanently solved their cravings by organizing themselves into a coherent group of twelve. They’d been a loose association of twenty-one mind-hackers but the Hunters had dealt with seven of them and in desperation I’d killed two. This made me a murderer I realized, but if I could ever establish the evidence I could surely plead self-defense. The Hunters were somewhat less drastic in their response to the Grabbers, feeling sympathetically akin. Instead of death they permanently disabled the individual Grabbers they could locate by a joint blast of reverse invasion from at least six Hunters at a time located near the target Grabber. Their process left the target emotionally and psychically ‘lobotomized’, a semi-functional shell of a person, but at least the Grabber was no longer able to feed off of the emotions of innocent people.

While I stuck with my long familiar label- Grabbers- the vigilante Hunters called the Grabbers “Emotion Vampires”. I thought that label had an accurate ring to it. That the Grabbers’ innocent victims were left with only blinding despair, an impenetrable wall of melancholy which inevitably led them to self-destruction, only served to emphasize the murderous implications of the label “vampires”. The cold-bloodedness of the Grabbers’ behaviour seemed to underline the appropriateness of the term also. The twelve remaining Grabbers had gathered in Ontario in order to corral me and make me their enslaved conduit into the exposed psyches of the dream jumpers who unwittingly latched onto me in their sleep. But I’d been prepared by their enemies, our allies, and was ready for them.

Jaxon’s look of alarm had morphed to one of amusement and subtle derision as I looked at the mess I’d made of the old face in the reflection. Fair enough, I’d mocked the cat mercilessly in my time. The old man was a complete mess with almost bald patches occasionally interspersed by various lengths of stubble and short patches on the ground between ears, chin and forehead. I almost laughed myself. I pulled aside the mirror and reached into the medicine cabinet, way into the back where my razor and shaving cream languished. To my relief the can felt heavy, still mostly full of the white foam I needed. A vigorous shake and a push of the button and the billowing foam made its magical appearance in the palm of my left hand. Steamy hot water with a faint smell of rust was already running out of the tap in a stream and drowning the razor in the sink.

Jax mrrrped yet again when I lathered the old face, he seemed to have forgotten all about this particular ritual. He raised his right paw and meowed aloud at me as I took the razor from its puddle in the sink and began to remove the foam with it, taking along the revenants of my links to each dreamer who’d pushed upon me her or his most powerful feelings. With each stroke I felt lighter, less encumbered. I knew it wouldn’t work to stop the dreams from invading my own but somehow, I felt just a little more buoyant, a bit less fettered by the demands of the many.

I was still the Dreamcatcher. There were still thousands of senders out there in line to jostle their way through the throngs and find their own small ambiguous relief by sharing their truest self with an anonymous other. I knew I would always remain haunted in sleep. But taking the beard off of that old face somehow unburdened me of the weight of the long years of struggle. For whatever reason I felt my own relief, as if I’d emptied the clothes from a load of luggage I carried and was now lifting only the unencumbered cases.

Before I finished, Jaxon gave one more horrified glance at the emerging landscape of my barren face and then leapt from his perch to the floor, mumbling in disbelief on his way out the bathroom door. I rinsed the flotsam of foam and shorn hair from the old man’s face and then stared long and critically at the stranger in the image. I couldn’t recognize him. I couldn’t even decide if he looked younger than the bearded old guy. Any trace of the handsome young man of my inner imagination was certainly absent. The many lines were now joined by bags and sags, fatty cells and age spots. The lips in the image were apparently the only thing which had thinned, excepting the merciless hairline of course. The lips’ curious purple colour was emphasized by the fish-belly white of the flesh around them. Unsurprisingly rheumy eyes continued to stare at me through the glass.

But then the mouth opened, and a charged belly laugh roared out at me. “What did you expect dopey, Errol Flynn would be behind all the fur?” The eyes lightened and a smile crossed the face. Somehow, against all sense, my heart felt a little less weighty. I actually felt like going out into the world!

The Hunters left the ‘emotion vampires’ utterly disabled, never again to seek what they stole from their many victims. Worldwide suicide statistics diminished a few points the year after that, a worthy if temporary respite in that grim tally. The Hunters came and released me from the prison I’d allowed myself to be locked into and they even tended to the needs of the now institutionalized ‘vampires’. They’d then dispersed to their average, normal lives, keeping a watch for any new Grabbers and keeping in intermittent touch with me, the potential bait with which to lure any new emotion-eaters. None has ever emerged.

I’ve tried to live a quiet life since those days. Exhaustion, emotional and often physical, is still my constant companion. Yet I’ve usually found a little solace in the other creatures with which we humans share our lives. It is a blessing to me that animals remain emotionally alien. Jaxon Pawlick may seem to be laughing at the new and even older looking bare-faced dude walking around his apartment, but I have no way of knowing what he actually feels about the change. I think this is a good thing.