The next day, the adult me felt bruised—emotionally. I walked around feeling as if some part of me had been beaten. Inside, I felt like I was limping and making my bruised mind keep working when what it needed was a rest. Resting had no relief for me, though, as it only enabled me to relive the dream and that awful certainty afterwards.
I felt that I had no place to put it. How could something like that have happened and no one know? What could it have been? Who could it have been? I could rationalize it away but the intensity of the feelings after the dream would come back. “Whatever is true or isn’t true, Joceile, this part is as true as it gets,” my mind would say to me. It would not back off.
Work was a welcome relief. I busily distracted myself and only occasionally remembered the issue. I felt like a wounded bird that couldn’t fly. Because all of the birds were walking around instead of flying, no one else knew it. It gave me little comfort to be able to keep it a secret. I felt that keeping secrets like that shouldn’t be possible.
I told Rahne about the dream and BJ. I told them that I thought I had seen something like that. But the notion of murder stayed carefully tucked away until about a week later when I had another dream…
It started off innocently enough about my dog, Sasha. He was older in the dream and was playing with Rahne’s dog, Zud. Somehow I had them back at what I thought was the house where I grew up. Zud and Sasha were very old. Suddenly, there were two puppies playing around with them. I knew they were ghost puppies from when Sasha and Zud were younger.
In that convoluted way that dreams have, it made me think of the dog I had as a kid. Which made me think of other pets that I’d had as a kid that were buried in the back yard. Which made me think if my brother and I had ever dug up any of the dead pets. Which took me to a place where my brother was.
Jack was pretty relaxed and talkative. I asked him if he remembered them burying any animals in the backyard. He smiled and nodded. “Any any people?” I asked tentatively. Jack smiled sadly and nodded his head. “No, Jack, not really.”
Jack stepped back and looked off in the distance and began reciting: “He was a drifter. He had no ties. They had had a conflict. It was an accident. No one cared or knew…”
I woke up in the still of the night. My worst fear confirmed. I wished I could make it just a dream, but it didn’t feel like it. A sick picture materialized in my mind—the completion of Jack’s story. My father and this man had a fight privately. The man had died. My father had cut off his head and hands believing that it kept the man from ever affecting my dad’s life. He buried him in the back yard.
“Oh yeah, where J?” Sasifraz intoned, “like you can just bury a body and no one will notice.”
The answer came to I as clear as if I stood there now. When you want to dig a hole, fill it, and cover it so no one can see, you move the children’s play house over it for some ostensible reason. Like magic, the freshly dug hole vanishes.
(And the kids don’t play in the playhouse much anymore. NO THEY DON’T. HOW’D YOU GUESS?)
* * * * * * *
After that, the worse part for me was telling BJ. Rahne listened and told me that she believed me—no matter how much I said it couldn’t be true.
I felt really bad telling BJ after telling Rahne. I was thinking that certainly two people couldn’t buy a story like that. I thought I really was crazy.
* * * * * * *
“I feel really bad. I’m really disappointed in myself. I’m afraid we’ll have to renegotiate our contract.” I went to BJ feeling hopeless. “I’m afraid our partnership is in jeopardy.”
“Why?”
“I’m really crazy. What I feel like happened couldn’t possibly have happened. But, I feel it absolutely, so I must be crazy. Here we’ve done all this work. You’ve been patient with me, and now it comes out that I’m really crazy. Would you still keep liking me if I’m really crazy? Will you still keep working with me? Will we find a way to do something with me?” I was really torn up inside. I thought that I had hit rock bottom. The worst was out, and it was impossible.
BJ assured me that she would still be willing to work with me. She wrote her words down on paper and signed it. “Joceile, I would still keep liking you if you were crazy, and I would still keep working with you. BJ 2-22-88”
I felt like I had the best deal possible with BJ at that point. I choked out the dream and what I believed to have happened.
We had a discussion about craziness that gave something for me to hold onto. “Joceile, I believe that either something really bad happened. Or if you’re crazy something really intolerable still happened—because people don’t go crazy for no reason. People aren’t born crazy.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I could see the logic in it. It was something to hold onto. I just wished that the specifics of what I remembered would leave me. I wanted to discover whatever that other thing was that triggered my craziness. I was sure it wouldn’t be as bad as pictures of dead body parts. I couldn’t shed the murder notion. “It seems highly improbable statistically.”
“I think you have to balance what’s improbable statistically with what you know about your family and how they were.”
I wasn’t sure what the answer to that was, but it seemed to open the door a crack to it being true. “With these pictures in my mind, you can imagine why arm cutting seems like nothing.”
The room was quiet. “Yes, I can,” BJ replied. I wished there was something else to say, but I knew all the words in the world wouldn’t make it go away.
(BJ ALWAYS WANTS TO KNOW WHAT THE “IT”s STAND FOR. And? FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS SECTION “IT” EQUALS MURDER. Thank you very much for that clarification. ANY TIME.)