Robert W. Walker

Who I'd like to meet:

Quantico, Virginia northeast woods

Children at play in the shadow of a wrecking ball that beats a rhythm with jackhammer screams, all amid squalor and trash and discarded bottles, broken pyramids of brick in dusky red and gray yards like a red bone factory. It's a dream. Just a recurring dream, part of Aurelia's brain tells her, but the other part sees the images. Discards mixed with dull brown adobe crumbling to dirt…all visited by and bathed in a blinding blue light that transforms the brickyard of destroyed buildings into a lush green-carpeted park filled with stylized, rigid trees in a land where no wind blows, where even the leaves resist change, and sadly, no birds flirt among the unbending branches.

Within this eerie stillness, a verdant Gauguin-like green hue is cast overall, replacing all that is dirty red brick and dull with a warm, glowing still life. In this painting, children are now angels in stiff-winged pose, lifting up on tiptoe to embrace one another, some floating in the thralls of their embrace like Chagall lovers. However, the overall effect lacks beauty and flowing life, as the angels, like the trees, rigidly pose like cutouts placed against a canvas not wanting them, or painted with hesitation, perhaps trepidation. Fear of a wrong rendering? A separate backdrop overall in this oil on canvass world comes now again–a pair of curious childlike eyes framed in a rectangle opening in the sky, looking on in curious wonder.

Eyes looking on. The eyes of God? Those of an angel, a cherub? No, Aurelia recognizes the questioning orbs as her own, at perhaps age five or six. Yes, they are her innocent eyes. She is like the artist Dali, who painted himself into his own canvass, depicting himself as a child dressed in a sailor suit, holding a balloon and observing the strange life created from his own mind, curiously wondering at its existence, purpose, and meaning–and wondering if perhaps it came via some supernatural filter or challenge or channel.

Like Dali, Aurelia often felt the same way while looking on at her own visions. What did it mean, and why the dark horn-rimmed edges of a frame around her eyes, like seeing herself in a rearview mirror? Only the bridge of her nose showed with her symmetrical black eyebrows. A penetrating, searching black Asian eye on the left, and a cerulean blue eye on the right. One eye stamped her Japanese, the other indelibly her mother's Irish child.

It was as if she looked in from out of a box, some kind of trap. Caged perhaps. Only able to see from a tiny barred window in the corner of the universe the size of a wheelbarrow…relegated to the point of view of a single restraining portion of a canvass too vast to contemplate at once.

Painting, art–it was at the heart of this mystery: To all who enter this garden of children beware. Beware its lull, its lure, its peace, as mere illusion within illusion; some powerful message, some thematic counterpart, some echo of whispers, some inherent warning as when Aurelia's mother so often said, "A curse can be wrapped in a compliment."

Some warnings go up like red flags, but the moment was shattered again by the strange mantra of metallic noise: Ba-Kerrrack! Ba-kerrrack! Ba-kerrrack!

The new environment is a dream within a dream, from some far away place on a distant dimension; Aurelia's Irish Wiccan mother might decipher it in her unique way, her Buddhist father quite another. She could hear her mother's reassuring voice now: Dear one, it's just a dream. Dreams can't hurt you.

How wrong could a mother be?

Aurelia's deceased mother kindly lied. You can put your mind at ease; find pleasing sleep, if you put effort into it.

"But Mother, shouldn't pleasing sleep come effortlessly?" she'd asked at age four.

"The darkness within that tells you to embrace your fears can make you strong in a dangerous world," had been her mother's reply.

Now this 'harmless' adult dream had come repeatedly, had evolved as a series of screenings now for over a month. The children had not at first had angel wings; now they did, and they kissed one another in less rigid manner with each visit. Loosening up. They held hands and hugged and chased butterflies and sparrows streaming now through the greenery, when in the early versions there were no birds. Now even, the stylized trees and leaves had begun to show signs of life, taking on the sheen of full-blown chlorophyll-filled life.

And there was the oddly angelic blue light bathing the scene.

The angel children played lovely music. They splashed in the fountain, giving vent to gaiety and mirth, when suddenly a sinister darkness obliterated the blues and greens, until an inky blackness covered all. Then a red glow filled the sky like an angry single Cyclops' eye, blotting out even her window on the scene for a flashing, blinding, explosive second.

The devastated landscape returned with added horror, bodies now buried in the rubble that had been the brickyard.

Then the brickyard became fluid, the red bricks dissolving into clay, then mud, and next morphing into a red ocean. In this flaming ocean lay, naked and helpless, the angels joined by humans, male, female, child and adult alike. Now in a writhing river of one another's bodies, the features and limbs of the child angels all coalesced, as if mixing colors in a jar–bodies spiraling fluidly–blood dropped into water.

They all hung below the surface of the red ocean current that had engulfed and obliterated the greenery and the blue light. They lay caught in a tangle of coral wreath that cut and bled them. Like a dancer with graceful moves, straddling the children as a giant, a Lucifer creature with a dragon's tale like an external backbone thrashed as he stood dominating the helpless, writhing masses below him.

Nothing of kindness or caring, nothing but horror and mutilation filled the mind of the Hellion as he stabbed children with his scorpion's tail, paralyzing each with its stinger. Then the red demon in the red sea devoured each helplessly paralyzed blood-orange-red child with a glee beyond joy. Repeatedly, the small angelic life of each prisoner in this strange coral nest disappeared into the demon as if swallowed whole.

Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa awoke in her night slip, nestled in her bed, her wide Oriental eye jade black, her Celtic eye blue in the darkness–both searching the room even as her brain searched the horrible dream for useful clues, images, symbols that might make sense. But nothing of the sort readily leapt to fill in the blanks of what this extraordinarily powerful vision might portend.

"Does it ever?" she audibly reminded herself.

She realized now that shivers shot through her. The images had been so cartoonish–surreal; yet real beyond mere dream to what Jung called the Big Dream–the life-altering dream. On the order of the one that'd sent her to a divorce lawyer to alter her real life accordingly, else live in a perpetual state of suffocation.

Aurelia's best friend, Etta, scoffed once, "Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa, you are the only person I know who ever divorced a man on the say-so of a little bad dream."

"It was no little dream; it was a big-assed nightmare! A whopping compensatory one at that, and Carl Jung would've run screaming from that marriage long before I did."

Now this dream. So real. So much so that she prophetically guessed it related to one of her cases at FBI headquarters, but which one and how? So large, this dream, that her thin frame had shaken and perspired from the heat of Satan's coral reef! A fiery bubbling cauldron amid a reef that burned with far-reaching fingers below the unnatural waters of Satan's domain until you looked closer and realized the bloody reef was made up of bloody bodies.

"Silly," she told herself and the silent room. "I don't even believe in freakin' Satan or a place called Hell." Aside from learning self-protection in the form of Jujitsu from her Buddhist father, Aurelia had learned that Hell was the negative life some people chose.

Her kindly father had told her once that in a sense, planet Earth was the asylum for the universe and that's why mankind was placed here. That the human race was a child, and in need of much therapy. And that heaven and hell existed only in the mind. "We control the controls in perception. Perceiving the world and ourselves positively is up to us." He would smile and add, "One day science will catch up to mysticism and prove it right."

In any event, Hell was not a physical location where demons and devils and agents of Satan sat about contemplating attacks on mankind. Much as the egocentric child called mankind wanted to believe–but such symbolism floated about in the minds and genetic wiring of countless generations of Christians and other religious followers. So the symbolism and the sum of all such fears could certainly be counted on to have meaningful resonance.

But what were these recurrent images and sounds and that stifling, choking air filled with odors of earth and vermin and metal and decay and sweetness like the mix of flowers left too long at a gravesite mingling with oils and canvass and blood?

Why did such things assail her now with these odd night sweats? Something wicked just over her horizon–coming at her with such force as to have sound and odor? And from what mysterious source?

Who had repeatedly sent these signals that held her telepathic mind in such rapt embrace? No answer came.

Who seemed bent on her receiving such horrid snapshots from the ether of an astral plane as busy and as populated with thoughts as conscious life populated with the babble of tongues? No ready reply.

Who created the PSI world that set sub-atomic nano-images adrift on a psychic wind, which bombarded every sentient creature on the planet? A wind invisible to, and ignored by, all save a few? Still no answer.

Who were the angels…the children? What time frame was it? Past, present, future? Where might the greenest ever park bathed in bluest ever sky be? Was it a real place or a figurative one? A billboard sign on I-95 or a rural Georgia road, or along a road that was the actual metaphor? What did these colors signify beyond hope and courage and honor and honesty? And what of the giant watery Satan and his coral hell so filled with vibrant, living fires of every shade of red? Was it an event long over or one approaching? Or was it ongoing...in the now?

She stared across at her image in the mirror. She saw a beautiful woman with a mix of Asian and Caucasian features in a blue chemise nightgown alone in bed, seemingly destined to be alone for the rest of her life.