DROWNING AGAIN IN THE OCEAN OF HER

Ken Scholes and Katie Cord

 

Haystack Rock is a massive geological formation that stands just offshore in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The rock is massive, rising 235 feet above the water. While the rock appears barren at first glance, it teems with life, particularly with intertidal species and with nesting birds. The rock is composed of basalt and was formed by lava flows millions of years ago. The rock may look mysterious, but its origins are fully explained…maybe!

 

Haystack Rock attracts marine life, tourists, and mysterious legends. Some believe that the rock originated in Brazil and was dropped off the coast of Oregon by Aliens. People all up and down the nearby coast talk about experiencing an unusual number of coincidences in their lives. To some people, the rock represents the immutability of time. To others, it's a symbol of time's fluidity—everything changes, even giant rocks. Authors Katie Cord and Ken Scholes were inspired in part by the Pleiadian mythos, which states that beings from the Pleiades, a constellation, travel time and space by drifting through human consciousness. In a universe in which time and space are fluid, and messages can travel through centuries and light years, what better anchor could there be than the lovely, massive, and mysterious Haystack Rock?

 

***

He is drowning again.

Water cold and salty in his mouth, eyes burning from it. Burning from the light of a yellow sun hanging in blue sky—those times his head is up long enough to see it. The skin he wears is not made for the environment he is in, and he is vaguely aware of his body temperature dropping even as the ocean swallows him.

Beneath the waves, beneath the water, he cannot hear her cries. But he knows she is drowning, too, somewhere nearby.

He kicks unfamiliar legs, waves sluggish arms through the water and rises long enough to see the massive rock and the waiting shore. He hears her calling his name. It sounds broken, impossible to pronounce correctly with these rudimentary throats. He calls back to her, gagging on water, before he’s pulled under again.

When the hand grabs him, he screams and pushes himself up out of sleep, his body slick with sweat, salty as the sea.

#

“Jeremiah?”

The name sounded wrong in his ears. The voice that repeated it was foreign in that foggy space between dreaming and waking. The hand on his shoulder shook him and Jeremiah forced his eyes open.

It was a darkened room that became familiar as he blinked at it.

“You were drowning again,” his wife whispered.

Jeremiah pushed the wet sheets down and away from him, pulled the sweat-soaked pillow from beneath his head. “Yes.”

“That’s three times this week.”

He sat up and looked at her, remembered her. Her name was Annie. “Yes,” he said again.

He reached over to the nightstand to pick up the notebook she’d bought him and the pen he’d left beside it the night before.

“Was it the same?”

Jeremiah opened the book to the next blank page, stared into it. The dream was fading fast. Was it the same?

“No,” he said. “There was a rock in the ocean. A big one.”

Annie sat up, her face a mix of curiosity and concern. “What did it look like?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it and put the tip of the pen to the paper. He closed his eyes to conjure images of the rock blurred by water and flashes of white light from the burning sun. Then, Jeremiah sketched his vague memory into the notebook.

She watched. “Have you seen this rock before?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Annie shifted in her pool of blankets. “I wonder if it’s a real place?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremiah said.

She leaned in closer, studying the drawing. “Was she there too?”

He swallowed. “Yes.”

“I wonder if she’s real, too?”

“I don’t know.” Jeremiah closed his eyes and thought about the drowning girl. He couldn’t remember her voice now, near and far all at once and calling for him. He couldn’t remember her name or even the name—his—that she cried out while they drowned together.

He only remembered the taste of the ocean.

#

They are alone in a large kitchen. The massive rock squats in the ocean beyond large bay windows. The cast iron skillet on the stove is hot and the butter bubbles and spits in it. He can feel the heat from the wood-fired stove radiate up and through them.

She is small and bright beside him and he marvels at how she makes those hands, those fingers, move so nimbly. They still confound him but so do the eyes, the throat, the ears, the tongue. The form she’s taken is barely adequate as bodies go. But he is fascinated by the glowing red hair and the pale skin. The tiny brown spots that freckle her nose make his heart race.

She moves like a dream, spearing the gray oysters on a fork, dipping them into the flour before dropping them into the pan. “They fry them this way.”

“How ridiculous,” he says. “And then?”

She smiles. “They eat them.” She flips one of the first in the pan again; it is brown and he isn’t sure if the smell of it cooking arouses or repulses him. Her eyes are golden like they used to be for just a moment, uncharted stars, as she stabs the oyster, pops it into her mouth. “They taste like the ocean,” she says.

When she says that, he feels terror rising within him and doesn’t know why. But then she grabs him, pulls his face down to hers, and kisses him hard. He feels every inch of the herringbone corset underneath her dress. He grabs her tighter.

“Now,” she says, “you taste like the ocean, too.”

He is drowning again only now she is the sea and he abandons himself to the flood of her.

#

“Haystack Rock?” Annie asked again as if to be sure.

Jeremiah nodded and pointed to the monitor. “That’s it there.” He’d called in sick, spent the day surfing thousands of pictures of it. Haystack Rock at sunset, at night, by day, in the rain, at low tide, at high tide.

She leaned over his shoulder and he closed his eyes against the smell of her hair. “It’s in Oregon,” she said.

“Yes.”

He’d drowned twice more now in as many nights but it was the waking dream, the one about the oysters, that finally drove him to action. He posted his sketch to his online friends, passed it around his co-workers at the office, and it had only taken a day and a night to get a solid lead. An online friend in the Bay Area pointed him to the coastal town of Canon Beach, Oregon, and its famous rock.

“So,” his wife said, “when are you going?”

Jeremiah blinked at her. “Going?”

She nodded. “You’re going, right?”

He stared at the rock. “I don’t know.”

Annie shook her head. “You’re going.”

Jeremiah ran a hand through hair that felt suddenly alien to his touch. “Maybe I should talk to someone about this.”

Annie smiled. “If the rock is real, it stands to reason that the girl is real too. You need to go see.” Then she kissed him on the cheek, quickly, as if punctuating her sentence.

Jeremiah blinked at the screen and the brief softness of her lips. “You want me to find her?”

“Jeremiah,” she said, “you’re dreaming about a place you’ve never been and here it is. You’re dreaming about a person you’ve never met. You need to go find her. There’s magic afoot in this.” She stood. “I’m getting the cards. We’ll do a reading and see what it says.” She paused. “If you want to.”

Jeremiah wanted to chuckle but couldn’t. It was one of many differences between them. She lived in the sky in a universe populated by magic and angels and purpose and destiny; he lived on the ground in a universe with natural laws and made his own purposes and meanings. Only his purposes had gone out of him years ago and the meanings he’d found were sketchy at best.

He felt his brow furrowing. “I don’t know, Annie. Maybe I should call Dr. Feltzman and schedule a session.”

She shrugged. “It’s up to you. I’m not sure psychology and magic will play nice together.”

Jeremiah sighed. “Get the cards then.”

But he already knew what they would tell him. And so he already started the checklist: book a flight, arrange a room, pack a bag, rent a car.

Find the rock, he thought, and find the drowning girl.

#

The pain shoots upward, the muscles in his legs contract involuntarily, beads of sweat roll down his face. He instinctively reaches to wipe his brow. Something tugs at his arm, keeping him from it. He looks down. Long metal sticks strapped to both of his arms; legs held by metal braces stretched out on a cheap hotel mattress. He feels himself start to pant. Then she is with him. She steps from the shadows and a familiar glow surrounds him as she comes closer. Light from a nearby lamp shines into the galaxy of her brown eyes. Her skin is a dark rich tan conjuring a memory of fertile soil some place far away, some place that birthed them both.

She smiles with full lips.

“They’re just braces,” she says looking at his legs. “They won’t be forever.” She pauses. “Epidemics are a part of life here.” She squeezes his thigh; the pain is gone.

He leans back on the headboard of the hotel mattress. Relieved. She delicately, expertly unstraps his legs and arms.

Her smile widens. “You won’t need these for the rest of the night.”

She leans in. He runs his fingers through the large fat curls in the front of her thick coarse chestnut hair. She starts to unbutton her fitted shirt. He looks down at the embroidered patch. Abrams Metal Works. She kisses him and turns out the lamp.

The room is quiet except for the silent soft lyrics of Les Brown singing, Till The End of Time.

The only light comes from the Bakelite Tabletop Radio.

#

Jeremiah drove through evergreen forests speckled occasionally with the orange and yellow leaves of late autumn. He’d landed in Portland the evening before and spent a night tossing and turning in the Red Lion. The dreams were lingering and he’d already stopped writing them down. They drove him like his rental, focused and fast, toward something he could not comprehend. Still, he needed it. Whatever it was that waited ahead.

What had the song said? “Long as stars are in the blue,” he whispered and then jumped when his phone rang.

“Are you there yet?” Annie asked when he answered.

“Almost,” he said.

Jeremiah could hear her shuffling papers on her desk. “Good.” She paused. “You’re remembering more, aren’t you?”

He swallowed. “I think I should’ve seen Feltzman.”

Annie laughed. “There’s time for that later. Give the magic a chance. You saw the cards.”

No, he saw pieces of paper and characters drawn with swords and wands and cups. She saw something bigger, some vast conspiracy of epic love and heroic measures. This card was something ancient returning. This other was a present reality that could sustain that return. This one meant a journey longer than any he’d undertaken before and the last, the only one he truly believed, was a wife that loved him enough to send him off to Oregon pursuing a dream. They’d all become a blur as she’d enthusiastically spelled them out. He smiled at the memory of how she told that story with her hands, her eyes bright and level as she did.

“Yes,” he finally said. “I saw the cards.”

“I’m way better than Feltzman.”

Jeremiah chuckled. “You’re cheaper.”

“Follow the dreams, Jeremiah. Let them take you where you need to go.” More shuffling. “I think you need this and I’m proud of you for you going.”

He sighed, glancing at his GPS. “Thirty-eight miles.”

“Good. Call me when you get settled.”

The silence after her voice was oppressive and he turned on the radio, settling into a classic rock station out of Astoria. When Maroon 5 came on, he rolled down the windows and tried to sing with them about fire burning in her eyes and chaos controlling his mind, about saying goodbye too many times before. He felt the lyrics washing through him, over him, and wondered at their sudden power over him.

The sky answered Jeremiah with the first sprinkles of November rain and he pressed on.

He drove into Canon Beach as the rain picked up and when he turned the corner and saw the rock looming up in the surf, he pulled over. He thought his first sight of it would fulfill a longing that had built in him since the dreams began but instead, it deepened and twisted it into an ache. He heard what he thought was a quiet cough and realized it was his own sudden sob.

I’ve lost something here. Lost and forgotten, leaking back into him with each dream.

Blinking back tears, Jeremiah climbed back into the car and eased slowly back onto the road. He knew the motel as soon as he saw it and checked into a room remembered from his most recent dream. He unpacked, folding his clothes into the bureau carefully, then slipped down to the grocery store to stock his kitchenette. Peanut butter, jelly, bread, instant coffee, frozen dinners and orange juice. Easy food and drink.

Still, when he reached the seafood section, he bought fresh oysters, too, along with corn starch and butter. He’d never eaten them before and had no idea how to cook them but he tucked them into the refrigerator all the same.

Annie would say that the magic told him to do it and he listened. She would be proud and say it with her hands.

Feltzman would say that Annie was crazier than Jeremiah but he would say it more politely than that and reach for his calendar to schedule their next session.

“What do you say?” Jeremiah asked the giant rock beyond his balcony.

Then he went out into the rain to walk the empty shore.

#

He is drowning again.

He cannot breathe. Did he need air before? He cannot remember. Did he need anything before?

He needed her. Needs her still. He screams her name as cold salt water fills inadequate lungs.

Then something tugs at him and he is pulled out of the dark abyss, dragged floundering onto the shore by three strong beings that his body already mimics. They have long dark hair and tan skin, glistening wet in the afternoon sun. They are careful to examine him with their eyes only. They keep him in the net.

Across the rolling waves, he sees her. She still shines even in their newfound darkness.

She calls for him as another net and group of young men is sent out into the water.

The sound of her voice feels like home to him but the natives of this place cannot bear it; they cover their ears and mutter. When she struggles, screaming on the shore, two of the female beings grab her and hold her down, soothe her. Her voice is gone wrong now. Her light dims as incarnation takes root and she absorbs the building blocks needed for life here. He looks down at himself and doesn’t recognize what he has become.

Inadequate and awkward, these beings wrapped in darkness.

Later, the natives of this place feed them bits of meat roasted in sharp shells over fires on the beach near the massive rock. They taste like the ocean he fell into and it makes him gag. She laughs and eats another.

He is hollow and in the morning, when he awakens to the cries of unfamiliar birds, she is gone and he cannot remember her name.

A day passes and he can’t remember her at all.

#

Muscles sore from three days of walking, Jeremiah found a driftwood log facing Haystack Rock and sat, slowly chewing the sandwich he’d brought. There was a beauty in that pillar of stone but there was a sorrow in it, too, and it called to him. He’d started out onto the low rocks that led up to it a dozen times over the last few days, turning back at the warning signs. Climbing out on the rock was a steep fine and people had died doing it, snatched by waves and incoming tides.

But yesterday’s dream had seized him here in the shadow of the rock, dropping him to the sand, and for a moment November was gone and summer bathed his naked skin as he dried beneath a sun that burned eyes still unaccustomed to it.

Jeremiah finished his lunch, sipped his water, and climbed to his feet. A few kite-fliers were winding in as the wind rose and the sky darkened. It had rained off and on but now, a storm was coming.

I am part of that storm, he thought. And somewhere, if she were as real as this rock, she was part of the storm as well.

He looked up and down the shore and asked the magic once again to show her to him.

The tide was out and the beach was empty when he finally slipped down to the base of the rock. Jeremiah glanced over his shoulder and then stepped tentatively onto a stone. Moving from rock to rock, he passed the signs and slipped deeper into the shadows. He moved along a wide crack in the stone, wet and smelling of salt and seaweed and as he climbed up into the light, he thought he heard distant voices shouting somewhere behind him.

Jeremiah didn’t listen. He kept climbing until he could climb no more, his feet and hands suddenly sure of themselves. When he could go no further, he saw the slight depression in the stone above him and when he placed his hand into it, it fit him. It had fit him all of these forgotten times before, since the day they first fell. Beside and just below it, he saw the smaller depression, the one made for her hand.

“Where are you?”

Then, he climbed back down and returned to his log to watch and wait for her.

#

The orange polyester curtains flap in the night wind. The moon illuminates silver strands woven into it. His eyes burn from the salt, the light, and the wind. The ocean roars and the cold air runs through him as he remembers. Her shivering beside him awakens the rest of his senses and he glances at her. Her hair is long, down to her waist. She smells of the earth, the sea, and of unknown herbs. He looks down at the cigarette in his hand, puts it to his mouth and takes a long drag. He thinks about the draft notice in his pocket.

She lifts her head up to look at him. “What?”

“One of their wars.” He stomps the butt out on the carpeted balcony and throws it over the edge. “It’s better than polio,” he says.

She frowns and he touches her face. He can’t see her eyes as they should be, sees them only as they are in this place. But he yearns to see the stars in them, the map homeward buried there for him to follow.

He leans close. There’s a flower behind her ear and it tickles his nose. “What’s your name?”

She holds her hand up to his face and strokes it with delicate fingers. They are long this time. When he remembers her from before, she is stretching for eternity. Her inner light the length of the sky.

She smiles and the brightness pushes through. Her voice is low, husky with the strongest sense longing these bodies can provide. “I’ll show you my name.”

She rises from her chair, opens the wool blanket she’s covered herself with, and reveals her shape to him. He stares at her softness. He pulls her down onto him. He strokes the sides of her soft supple legs. She is ready for him. It is as though they’d fit this way forever.

Inside the hotel room, The Doors quietly sing, “Do you think you’ll be the guy who makes the queen of the angels sigh?”

With each push, each tug, each kiss the music grows louder until it is so loud neither can hear the ocean or the moans of passion blending into their own ancient, forgotten hymn.

When they come together, the deejay announces, “Number Fourteen on the Billboard top charts for 1968,” and they giggle as he cradles her in his lap.

After, they run to the ocean unafraid.

He still doesn’t know her name. But he knows now with certainty that even if he learned it, he would forget it tomorrow like so many times before.

#

“It’s you,” she said and Jeremiah opened his eyes.

She stood over him, wet from the rain, and he stood up from the log. This time, she was petite, her blond hair spilling out beneath a knit Hello Kitty hat. Her eyes were blue.

“It’s you,” he answered.

She nodded. “Here we are again.”

Jeremiah sighed. “I don’t remember it all. But these dreams….”

“Hello, I love you,” she said. “Won’t you tell me your name?”

“Yes,” he said, blushing at the memory of her hands, different then, upon him. “Jeremiah.” He extended his hand, then dropped it.

She took it up and squeezed it between both of hers. Her grip was strong. “Imogene.” Her eyes went serious. “Do you know why we’re here?”

He shook his head. “Not exactly. Maybe to remember something.” It sounded weak and he reached for something else. “Maybe magic.”

She laughed. “I’m a biochemist,” she said. “I don’t believe in magic.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Hopefully something more Jungian than Freudian. But I’m here and I know you. I’ve known you….”

“For a long time,” he said, finishing her sentence. He looked to the tide, measured it against the rock. “I think I know what we do next.”

He led her out to the rock, her own feet and hands finding themselves as his did. She was younger than him this time, certainly more athletic, and his ragged breathing made him blush. When they had climbed as far as they could, their hands touched briefly just above the space they’d been made to fill.

“Are you ready, Jeremiah?” she asked.

“I’m ready, Imogene.”

Each holding breath, they laid their hands upon the stone and listened as the ocean’s roar around them became an eternal heartbeat they had forgotten, percussion to a hymn drowned in the darkness they’d fallen into.

#

He is light.

She is light.

They are a thousand tiny particles pulled downward faster and faster. Speeding across time. Racing across galaxies, across universes. More than he can comprehend and it makes him want to sing a song only his throat can find. She is singing beside him, out of reach, and their songs blend and crescendo. And as he builds speed something in him slows and blurs. The light of him changes, meets resistance, breaks through into something new, something other than. Her light, too, from the corner of his rudimentary eyes. What was once bright is gone dark, and below them in the distance something shines. They are no longer a part of what was above.

They are no longer light.

They are less than. They are dark on light. And he cannot hear their song.

Another ocean swallows him whole and he is drowning again. Pain cuts him like a million shards of glass.

Cold and wet, weighed down by what he’s lost, Jeremiah opens his eyes upon what he’s found.

They stand within a large room carved from unfamiliar stone, walls veined in light that pulse and take shape, becoming figures. Beings sent out, two by two, dropped into oceans in search of life, their stories played out upon the wall.

“It’s us,” Jeremiah whispers. He wants to trace the images with his finger but can’t let go of the girl’s hand beside him. It steadies and stills him.

“It’s all of us,” she says. And he sees the truth in it. Two by two across universes and galaxies, through vast reaches of time, they travelled and explored and learned.

Light lifts from their bare skin and twists into something braided and harmonious overhead before drifting slowly to the wall. It moves over the stone to find blank space, then adds the most recent images to an ongoing story, a glorious hymn to the emergence and experience of life.

Jeremiah remembers a movie from his childhood and the simplicity of it makes him laugh loudly in this place. “We are ET phoning home,” he says.

“Yes,” Imogene answers. “And remembering briefly who we are.”

He feels an ache in his chest. “I don’t want to forget anymore.”

She squeezes his hand tighter. “I don’t think we get to choose.”

He opens his mouth to reply but stops when the lights dim and then brighten, dim and then brighten like a theater coming back from intermission. He holds his breath, waits and listens.

Then the wall of story sings and they sing with it, their throats no longer rudimentary, their voices no longer caged in the darkness of their flesh. They sing of love and loss and war and disease and hope and faith and disbelief. They sing of life crawling up from oceans and adapting as it goes. They sing of the bond between travelling companions separated and brought together again and again to add their story to the song. Reminders of home in a faraway, frightening place.

Then they are light drowning in light, drowning in each other, until the rain and wind are cold upon them once again.

“I have oysters in my room,” he tells her as they climb down.

“I’ve not had them this time around,” she says. “But I found a recipe online.”

He takes her hand, remembering a thousand other worlds with her, millions of lives explored by full immersion. The careful rinse and repeat to capture every aspect, every essence, every bit of light that can be added to the hymn.

“I’ve not had them either,” he says as they splash through pools of water up onto a moonlit beach.

She smiles at him. “I’ll bet they taste like the ocean.”

#

Jeremiah slept without dreams and awakened to a dry pillow. He reached for Annie but she wasn’t there beside him. When he sat up, he felt the panic rising.

This was not his house. This was not his bed. It was a motel room that smelled of seafood and sex and saltwater. He reached for his phone.

“Did you find her?” Annie asked as she picked up.

“Find who?” He could hear the fear in his voice.

Annie heard it, too. “The girl. You found the rock. Did you find the girl?”

Jeremiah closed his eyes. “Where am I, Annie? What the fuck is going on?” The fear was quickly becoming something bigger, something closer to terror. He’d had his share of problems, a long struggle with depression especially, but missing time and waking up in a strange place had not been one of those problems.

Her tone became soothing. “Jeremiah,” she said, “you’re panicking. Breathe.” She paused. “Focus.”

He listened to her and heard the sound of waves in the distance. Jeremiah climbed out of bed, still naked, and pushed open the curtains to take in the ocean and the massive stone that rose up from it.

“I’m on the coast somewhere,” he said.

“You’re in Oregon,” she said. “You were having dreams. Look at your journal.”

He glanced around the room and saw nothing that looked like a journal. There were dirty dishes in the sink and a box of corn starch tipped over on the table. There were clothes on the floor, along with a blanket, and a fireplace gone cold, its ashes gray and lifeless. “What does it look like?”

“It’s a sketch pad,” she said.

He sat on the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. “When did I start keeping a journal?”

Now Annie hesitated and he heard the uncertainty in her voice. “You know, I can’t remember. You were keeping a journal?”

“Yes. I was dreaming about a rock and a girl.”

She sounded surprised. “You were?”

“You told me that just now.”

Annie was quiet. “Where are you, Jeremiah? When did you leave?”

She is forgetting too. His head hurt; his stomach ached. “You said I was in Oregon when I called.”

“You’re in Oregon?” He heard the beginning of frustration in her tone. When she was frustrated, she never talked with her hands, she held them still and he could imagine her posture through the phone. “Why are you in Oregon?”

He closed his eyes against the spinning of the room. “Ask the cards,” he said.

“When did you start trusting the cards?”

He tried to remember and couldn’t. Still, she found her deck and he packed while she read them. Something about a journey, something about carrying an important message. It made no sense to him. Still, he wanted to write it down.

He found a pen that wasn’t his—it was from some laboratory in San Francisco—but all of the paper in the room was gone and he suspected the fireplace was the culprit. He wrote it on the side of the empty box of corn starch.

“Does it mean anything to you?” Annie asked.

“Not really,” he said. He looked down at the spilled white powder and did not recognize the handwriting, though the words were clear in block print. They made him blink, unsure of what he read.

I don’t want to forget anymore, either.

“Annie,” he said, “I have to go. I’ll call you back.”

He hung up before she could answer and looked at the pen in his hand.

“Imogene,” he told the empty room.

Then Jeremiah loaded his car and turned south on Highway 101, setting his GPS up with the address on the pen. He did not know why; he did not need to know why anymore. And he did not know what he would tell Annie when he called her back but he knew she would tell him that magic was afoot and that he should follow it until he found what he was searching for.

Jeremiah paused as he left town and took in that great looming rock and the waves that pushed against it. He felt something stirring beneath his skin as his mouth flooded with the taste of saltwater.

As he drove, Jeremiah left off the radio because he knew it could not satisfy him. He longed for a song it could never play; he ached for a voice he was made to sing with. And that longing—that aching—was an ocean he could drown in, deep in the dark, beneath a light he could not reach with his rudimentary limbs.

He said the name again in the quiet of the car, only now it was her true name, the one not made for this throat or these ears. And though it sounded like a sob torn from someone lost in despair, for Jeremiah it was a cry of triumph louder than the pounding of his heart, louder than the waves that pummeled Haystack Rock somewhere miles behind him.