“Anymore audiences with the Almighty?” Melissa asked first thing when she woke up. She checked the bandage on my hand and got up to look at my ankle. The swelling had gone down, and there was a bit of bruising. “How does it feel?”
“Much better today.”
“It’s not a bad sprain. I think you were more frightened than anything else.”
I creased my brow. “Surely that’s not good enough. Not after a fall like that.”
Melissa smiled. “Don’t worry. Your hand was sufficiently gory.”
“Was it really?” I asked with some excitement.
“Oh, yes,” Melissa assured me, “I nearly fainted.” She leaned down and kissed the top of my head. It was a friendly kiss, the kind she always gave me. I hoped I wasn’t giving off too much of a lesbian vibe. Not that there was anything wrong with my vibe, but I didn’t want her to think I was asking more from her than she could give. I liked our physical closeness and wanted her to continue to feel comfortable being affectionate with me.
That night, I had a follow-up dream. I was in a tribe of people flooding out of the Garden of Eden. Only John Lennon and I remained separate. Everyone else joined one big group that dressed the same and gave arm salutes in a scene that looked like the Nuremberg rally. I said, “When they can choose to be anything at all, why do they choose to be sheep? And they’re not just sheep. They’re evil sheep.”
John Lennon said, “Only an evil leader wants to make over the world in his own image.”
Suddenly I was alone in the middle of a mystery. I picked up a ring lying at my feet, and its inscription said I was a detective and had the same ability to seek the truth as anyone else. I had a notebook and wrote my name: Detective!
The only place I could go was a library with very limited space that the FBI had taken over. Entering, I realized I had wandered into hell. People were sitting on a bench suffering. They had been shrunken down to one thing, the behavior that had brought them here. This behavior now defined them. Then I noticed that not all of the people on the bench were suffering. Some people were in heaven, some in hell, but they were all on the same bench. Heaven and hell were a state of mind, not a specific location.
Then the sentence “The images of childhood are so easily explained” came to me, and I was suddenly surrounded by bright colors. Curtains hanging in a window were two stripes of pink and purple. I was in Israel. The colors seemed mysterious and familiar at the same time. The answer was simple. The curtains were the colors of the bathing suit I had worn as a child. I’d seen it in old photographs.
As I stood in the hot Israeli sun, an olive-skinned girl went around kissing everyone. She said, “We take things for granted. We say ‘no’ to living people!” We were in Jerusalem, Al-Quds, looking down at the Wailing Wall and across to the golden Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sakhra, standing near a beautiful, brunette soldier sitting in the grass with her Uzi. The girl continued to go from person to person, kissing each one and saying, “Good Shabbat.” She said that the message was simple: include everyone. Notice everyone. There is no great mystery to life, but we run around endlessly searching for meaning.