For a Drink of Water

By Dale Jacobson

Dave wakes from a vivid and strange dream that challenges our usual understanding of time and space, which may be a sequel of one he had years earlier. Upon waking, he lets the dream subside without concern, and seeing that the morning is pleasant, he decides to go for a walk from his cabin in the woods down a country road, but events take him further on a hitchhiking odyssey to his childhood hometown. In the past he has experienced unwanted visitations from books of the Bible that appear as apparitions. As the day progresses he has more hallucinations as well as PTSD flashbacks from his experience in the Viet Nam War. He hopes to reconnect with a childhood friend he served with in the Vietnam War. Along his journey he is confronted with his past, his war experiences, his strict religious upbringing and the absence of his father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Jacobson
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005370213

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FOR A DRINK OF WATER

Dale Jacobson

Copyright © 2022 by Dale Jacobson

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts intended for educational purposes, or brief quotes for reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission of the author.

All characters in this book are fictional creations. Any resemblance of characters to real people is coincidental.

For Therese, my beloved wife

Chapter 1

Stray Cat

    He dreamed he was being lifted through blue water into sky, his arms open, accepting everything. He dreamed he had died perhaps.   He was lifted above a lake where he once swam as a boy.   He noted an occasional glint of sand from the beach and surmised that his position in the sky shifted a little. Perhaps he was moving through the day.   He felt that he had dreamed this lake long ago as a child. He felt a nostalgia for his childhood.

    Then he wondered if that earlier dream, if it had actually happened, had somehow created the one he was in. Was it possible that this present dream, in some strange shuffle of time, was a fabrication of an earlier one, and he was in only one dream? Time was a strange device, especially in dreams. Time could be very confusing, like going through a revolving glass door in which you saw your reflection and then became the reflection. Then he remembered in his earlier dream he had disappeared beneath the lake and waved goodbye to all the people standing on the shore. They were all his ancestors, shadowy even in the sunlight, kindly though he didn't think he knew any of them personally. How odd that strangers could feel like family!

    In his earlier dream everyone was unconcerned as he waved goodbye and disappeared under the water. A few waved back. But he didn ’ t really go under, only his body went under since he was observing his own disappearance from above. Then he realized that he was watching from his suspension in the sky. It was one dream!

    He knew the darkness of drowning would be unequaled terror, but from his conscious position in the sky, his disappearance was merely a body going under the surface.

    A blade of light skimmed over the still water   after his hand slipped underneath. It was a pure, pristine blaze, so thin it could pass through trees and buildings without bothering them, a force that did not cause anything to shiver as it cut through. It left no shadows as it passed.   It was as though everything people called world was made of bubbles and the blade traversed the bubbles without popping them.

      The husk of himself drowning felt like an empty solitude falling away. As the husk sank and filled with darkness, it became a part of an underground current that connected with every other death in the world, a huge ocean of dark mergings. Even from his position in the sky, he felt the heaviness of water pull on him and he was sad not only for himself but for all those who had died before . He even felt sad for the water. The people on the shore had disappeared.

    Time itself seemed to have fallen away as the two dreams became markers of his life. There really wasn’t a past or future any more and he felt all deaths of the past, present and future were the same. The form of the world did not matter because the blade of light was always the present.   The past and the future were equal parts of the present, which balanced them perfectly even as it shifted through them and he felt the past and future could be interchanged, and even changed. Whether the world was filled with weapons and armies that could obliterate cities and other armies, whether it was war in Viet Nam or Iraq, all that destruction, or merely a child gazing upon a glistening cool ice cream cone slightly melting, nothing could corrupt the always arriving edge of the blade that made the present the present.   It moved and didn ’ t move.   Time was a swift knife of light always arriving with nothing to cut.

    He was distracted as he felt clouds pass through his lungs.   He had become so ephemeral he was without lungs. His lungs had become the sky, blue, open, filled with the day. He breathed the day. He continued rising up through the afternoon sky in the warmth of the sun and felt an increasing euphoria as more of the ground appeared beneath him like rising in a plane .   Tree tops, elm, poplar, oaks became an immense soft sweep, and the river that fed the lake meandered through them.

    Then, in a kind of omnivision, he could see himself far below in his home town, walking home from school as a young child, aged ten or so.   He could see the child of himself inside a great bubble.   This view of himself was a memory, or perhaps an amalgamation of memories , an experience remade out of the thin fabrics of time . No longer certain about the physics of dreams, he wondered if memories and dreams were really so different because both could exist in each other.

    This memory a s a child reminded him how much adults lose to age. Adults became misfits in the world of play and imagination! The possibility of the loss of childhood play was a horror! Most children saw adults as powerful beings with freedom, but he feared their world. Perhaps his mother's rigidity was the cause, but he was certain things would get worse and the light he loved so much, the brilliance of the world in its blaze of flowers and grass and colored agates, would be filled with little joy, a bleak horizon in all directions on this prairie that encompassed his small town.   His fear arose in proportion to the dulling eyes of those who were older. A world that allowed the holy fires of astonishment to disappear was one of doom. In Sunday school everyone described hell as the pain of perpetual burning like a smoldering garbage pit into which sinners were cast, but he thought it would be much worse to experience a world of mechanical emptiness , whose only light would be like that glow of fake electric fireplaces sold in stores.

    He watched the child he once was walk home from school, and felt again the sun bright on his face as he marveled at the rivulets trickling into the small runnel of the street from the melting March snow. So now he was in another season, the advent of spring.   He wondered how a memory, or dream of a memory, could be so real!   The release of water from the frozen crystals of snow and ice gave him a feeling of freedom and exuberance. Time seemed to cease as he observed the water gleam in the sunlight! He felt at home on earth. That was a long time ago. The banked snow along the berms glistened in the sun, and he imagined the tiny dagger-eyes of crystal people who resided in the snow. He thought the crystal people might be able to tell him a secret if he could hear the subtlety of their thoughts. Perhaps the world was more subtle than anyone could know!

    His dream returned him to floating in the sky and all the crystals that glistened in the snow became stars shining beyond the wide blaze of afternoon!   They opened before him like interwoven stairs rising above the bubble of the sky itself. The child of himself was gone, and he felt a pang of loss.   Why had the joyous present abandoned him even as the heavens opened before him?

    The crystals of the stars glistened like the intersection of distant crosses. Now the clouds moved freely through his diaphanous chest, his arms again extended in open acceptance. His hands went out to the horizons.   All the tiny crosses of the stars shone through the sky of himself, swirling on and on in their vast fields as he floated with arms outspread, the earth far beneath. He felt everything was an intersection, and distance did not matter in this interwoven place.   He now felt content where he was because everything was an intersection of everything else. All stars flowed to other stars and he felt like one of them, part of a radiant community! And yet, he was separated from the other stars by his thoughts, which kept weighing on him like all his dead days since his lost innocence of childhood.

    He couldn't stop wondering when or if his thoughts would stop bothering him. If he could stop thinking he would feel a lot lighter.   He thought about the absence of judgment in the placid sky and wanted its serenity .

    If he could stop thinking entirely he would no longer worry about being misunderstood, or offenses from or to others since there would no longer be anything to mull over. He considered :   this thinking is really a waste of time and he tried to pause it.   It occurred to him that the reason he went for solitary walks as a child was to slow time down by escaping people, whose chatter sounded like a cacophony of mad crows.

    A thought drifted darkly across the sky, like a thin stroke of gray on the horizon, a developing storm cloud.   It whirled together, folding in and out of itself to become the memory of a cat he once saw in the cold evening autumnal rain, hunched down under a tree, shivering and alone, and he felt a terrible cool darkness fill him. He was overcome by compassion as if he had entered a yawning valley of a weeping sky. Waves of sadness floated through him with storms of lightning flashing from within their dark nests as he looked down upon the earth where the lonely cat shivered beneath a tree. He remembered how his uncle had once remarked that he hated cats. How could anyone hate a species, as if it were a choice to become any form of life?

    What was the point of dreaming about the sky when a cat could suffer so terribly in the rain, even in a dream?   What was the point of a cat being miserable in any universe that held an immensity of stars, none of which seemed to care about or be aware of any suffering ?   No doubt by this time the cat he remembered was a long time dead.   Everything seemed an ineluctable transformation like a wave that left nothing but corpses in its wake...

    He awoke to a lovely morning and saw a giant June bug on the window pane.   The sun poured in the window and left a bright rectangle on the tiled bedroom floor.   He was in his own cabin that he had built. He closed his eyes against the light and saw in a flash a floating ghost image of the window.

Chapter 2

Dave’s Name

Sometimes he felt like a cave trying to step out of itself. He often felt hollow compared to the outside world filled with knowledge he could not grasp, as if the entire world conspired to keep him ignorant. Virtually everyone else understood so much more! He could not recall his beginning, no one could, but in his beginning he believed that knowledge did not consider him a worthy receptacle. His mother had told him that he had been a sickly child and she seemed to believe that condition had determined his life-time fate. He felt preordained to ignorant inferiority.

      He knew ancient trails existed between the houses, short cuts that his companions, older, more experienced, and wiser, had worn into the earth, even previous generations of kids whom he glorified as legendary because that is what time did with those who created trails. These trails had existed since before the beginning of his life and he imagined that even the ghosts of Indians walked them secretly at night.

    His mother had an authoritative book with inexhaustible knowledge about how and why the world existed, with lots of stories about people so old and so dead they were either in heaven or hell. They were so old they came from places with strange names like some kid making up sounds, but these names were sacred. Some were normal names, like John or Luke, but others were like a baby's babbling, like Beelzebob. The original home for everyone, two people, was Eden, which had a garden, but no one knew where it was anymore, or exactly what was raised in it except apples and figs. It was certainly beyond the city limits, way beyond Skunk Hollow, which was a place the older boys talked about where Dave guessed they had a lot of fun.

    Sometimes Dave thought of himself with another name, one of the biblical names like Deuteronomy , which had lots of syllables to sound more significant, but too complicated to sound like a baby babbling. The world started out of one or two syllables, God, Adam, Eve, Eden, but later on it got more complicated. Someone named Deuteronomy would know lots of things and would be picked to play first base. Of course, he would need a nickname, perhaps Deut, which might not sound the best. He imagined Deuteronomy walking the trails and he was sometimes jealous that he was only Dave, just one syllable, even though God had only one syllable also. He was only a Dave, had always been Dave, just like the essence of water was liquid or stone was hard, dense, and contained, or stars distant and mysterious.  Dave was the key that opened the door between himself and the universe and he couldn't change that key.   It was both his essence, which the adults called soul, and his mortal life.   That his life was mortal seemed odd, because he couldn't imagine existing without his life and yet couldn't imagine not existing. He thought he would devote the rest of his life to figuring out how he could avoid dying. Maybe then he could become someone other than Dave.

    His mother spoke as though she knew the secrets of justice , which always came back to God, very simple .   God was the only father Dave really knew because his earthly father existed only beyond the horizons somewhere, pretty much like God himself. His mother would say only that his father had left. God wasn’t so much a father who had left as one who had always lived elsewhere, in a bigger country beyond the sky, and lacked good transportation to visit. Maybe he was poor. He had to assume that God had a good reason for never visiting, because everyone regarded God as more important than any other name. His father was important too, but Dave always felt his absence and he would rarely say his father’s name out loud, which was Thomas, two syllables. At least God had created the world. Then he realized that his father had created him and so both fathers came to be pretty undependable in his eyes. This was the beginning of his questions about God being such a good guy.

    Dave was now eight. This day, Wednesday, he and two   friends were exploring beyond the town limits .   He had the nagging thought that he was probably on a mission of sin, but his two friends encouraged him persuasively despite his worry about his mother's judgment.

    In the bright bathing warmth of the summer sun, he could not overcome his need of acceptance by his friends.   Something told him he needed to explore beyond the sign that stated the population of the town, 8,932. He didn’t really know how many people that was, but the town was his world.   When he and his friends pressed forward on the path into the wooded area that extended along the county road, the sharp edges of the afternoon shadows of the trees against the overgrown grass made him think he was entering an ancient place and when the wind filled the trees and made the shadows sway, he felt a power move through him older than his mother’s b ook , which she claimed was the first book published. He felt exhilarated.   A mourning dove pronounced its watery vowels out of a distant hollowness like longing.   It frightened him a little.    The quietude in the shadows of trees was serene and eerie simultaneously, unbroken beneath all talk and sound.

    They came upon a small abandoned country church, not much larger than a house, with a slanted cross at the top of the front gable.   A dozen gravestones marked one side of the yard as solemn but ignored ground.   A partially broken-down crab apple tree, some of its branches cracked, presided wearily over spoiled and scattered apples. Some thin branches were white with dry wood.

    Dave was not a leader.   He assumed that his two companions knew more than he and exerted their greater knowledge to make the decisions.

    The larger and slightly chubby and older companion, who was good at issuing simple directives, grabbed two overripe apples and flung them at the church door. He liked to be assertive. One apple fell short but the second throw landed dead center and exploded in a brown gooey mess.   Splat! said the apple, and splat the boy answered with satisfaction . The second boy, also a bit older than Dave, confirmed that the splat was a good one. Splat, he said definitively, a great satisfaction on his face though the splat was not his.

    Come on, the first kid said.   Both the older kids began launching apples at the door in rapid fire.   There was plenty of ammunition on the ground.   Come on, Dave, you slow poke! The door was becoming a gruesome mess of dripping rotten apple meat.

    Dave was reluctant.   After all, this was a church and though it wasn’t used anymore, he thought it might be inhabited by that holy ghost he’d heard about !   He was sure that even this weathered ancient structure, with its cracked, torn shingles and white paint peeling from the siding, must hold some remnant of divine presence, the presence of the absent God just as his own mind housed the absence of his own father.   The cross alone must mean something!   Its small cemetery, despite the encroaching weeds and hazel brush, made him nervous about throwing apples. What if the dead took umbrage? Sure, they were all in heaven, that loft in the sky, but he’d seen creeping hands come out of graves on television. Or God himself might still watch over the shell of his house even if his worshippers had allowed it to deteriorate. Who knows what might spark the wrath of God? He seemed absent but he was also sneaky, from everything he'd heard. Even unfair. One guy who had helpfully tried to keep God's arc from tipping to the ground God killed. God killed a lot of innocent people.

    But something else frightened Dave about a pathetic structure isolated in the midst of the wilderness and he instinctively felt he should not contribute to the victory of the weeds, the disorderly heathens of nature .   He envisioned the church disappeared for the briefest moment, leaving only an empty hole of air that the wilderness was poised to fill.   Even in its dilapidated state, it provided assurance that adults were near.   It was a force against the rampant untamed overgrowth. The church meant that he and his friends were not alone in this timeless lush vegetable tumult that swirled immensely around him.   The vegetation, thick and swelling, even though punctuated by sweet sparrows, waited to devour him, obeying nothing but its