The Inner Workings of My Breakdown (a Dream)

Shortly before bedtime on a day the monkeys in my mind wreck havoc in my frontal lobes, I tell my wife –

I’m just saying that, for some people, suicide sometimes feels like the only way out. Fortunately for you, I’m a coward, so you don’t have to worry, but when wave after wave of depression hits, and you continue to get back up, and another wave almost drowns you, there comes a point in time you understand tide is an unstoppable.

Expecting her standard extraordinary compassion, she picks up a flashlight we just used to fix something together, and throws it at me.

With shocking force, it hits me on my upper left thigh, and I limp in circles like Jacob after wrestling with the Angel of the Lord.

What the hell?, I ask the most gentle woman I know.

I don’t want to hear the s-word, she hisses at me as I gently explore the wound with my fingertips, which turn pink and cause my monkeys to go full apeshit, speeding along neural interstates with very alarming news.

This might be construed as an act of domestic violence, I complain pathetically.

You have a wife and children who love you, Melanie tells me with firm conviction, and we are in a season of suffering, as well as many others we know. We need each other more than ever right now.

When the pain recedes after 10 seconds or so, I walk with an over-the-top limp and hug my wife of 37 years.

I tell her I’m sorry and that I won’t file any charges.

Melanie laughs and take my cheeks between her hands, like a grandma does with a grand baby, and says what she always says —

I LOVE YOU, Rob Wilkins, you crazy man!

When we hug, I confess to her the fear of my breakdown.

•

In the transition between reality and dream, I hear my wife whisper – I’m here for you, Rob – just before I resurrect, sitting on water next to Anna Grace.

Both of us in Blue Lotus pose, we meditate on an ash gray Monolith rising out of a phosphorescent blue sea directly in front of us.

Anna Grace, my former boss, turns her head toward me and says, Delighted to see you again, Rob.

Back at ya, Anna Grace. It is so good to work with you again.

During a long silence, we contemplate the static drab symmetry of a monolith 8 stories high, shaped like a too-tall rubik’s cube without colors.

After an uncertain period of time, I ask my former boss –

What’s the job?

With a bright red lipstick smile, she turns and says to me –

To write about the inner workings of your breakdown.

Befuddled in a dream, I shake my head and Anna Grace reassures me –

Don’t worry, the money is good.

When do we start? I ask nervously.

Just then, we hear a terrible screech of metal on metal, and see a hammerhead crane rise on the Monolith’s roof, race to a back wall, pivot, and drop some kind of a cage out of our sight. Silhouetted against a Carolina blue sky, the crane stops and we hear the machine idle, the purr of a mechanical beast awaiting orders.

What’s that? I ask Anna Grace, pointing at the mammoth crane.

She smiles and says, Your next ride.

After the crane raises the cage with a lanky steel arm, it pivots, racing rapidly toward a V intersection of the front two walls, the closest point for striking distance.

Before I can even stand on the water, the arm drops the cage on the water directly in front of us without even a splash.

Care to enter, kind sir? Anna Grace asks me as she opens the steel bar cage door.

With a double take, I notice her change of clothes, instantly sporting a 50s elevator operator uniform with matching red jacket and hat, yellow stripes and white gloves.

Hesitating to enter, I ask Anna Grace –

Why does the elevator look like a cage they put you in when you want to see sharks … I say before she sternly interrupts.

Please, you must enter quickly, she pleads, the Crane is precisely scheduled.

As I jump aboard, we rocket into the sky and the crane moves with great speed to a V, the intersection of back walls. After a quick pivot, the crane drops us 7 stories to Door#27 CYA. Lying akimbo to the floor, bleeding a little from my nose, I rise to see Anna Grace coolly apply more red lipstick. Looking up and around through the bars of the cage, I notice a series of symmetrical doors – 1 for each of 64 cubes, 128 doors all embedded in the back of the back 2 walls.

If you struggle with math, imagine a massive set of the old Hollywood Squares gameshow, each identical and symmetrical cube embedded with a door not a celebrity.

Happy with her makeup, Anna Grace opens the elevator cage door.

At each door you arrive, Anna Grace says, knock three times; some doors will open, and others will not.

I walk 4 steps to the front of the door and knock 3 times.

Quickly, the door opens, a man with a large facial wart, smoking a cigar, and dressed in a paramilitary uniform appears to greet me.

Dmitri Volkov, he says, blowing smoke in my face, at your service.

Anna Grace spins on her heel and says, I’ll be back to pick you up for your next visit, Rob.

Just as I begin to ask for a precise time, Dmitri pulls me to his chest, wart touching my nose, and gives me a testosterone hug so hard I pass out. When I return to consciousness a short time later, he welcomes me to the 247th annual meeting of the Global Peace Convention.

Fearing to tell him it didn’t ring a bell for me, I ask for details about the event.

It’s sponsored by the Mercenary Paramilitary Coalition, over which I serve as commandant, Dmitri beams with obvious pride. With a raise of his arm, the convention expands into a gilded ballroom floor filled with thousands of banquet tables aligned in Germanic precision, each army with its own shade of olive uniform and laser printed map.

With more curiosity than courage, I ask him –

Doesn’t a peace convention created by mercenaries strike you as a bit of an oxymoron? He laughs so hard that spittle and smoke cover my face.

The path to peace, Dmitri says, ends with the last man standing. It never fails. It’s up to armies of mercenaries to fight it out and see the matter to its bloody evolutionary conclusion.

Horrified, I stammer with outrage –

How can that be peace?

He smiles at me with Kentucky toothless vibe and blows more smoke up my nose, which begins to bleed again.

It’s peace for the last man standing, he says without a hint of irony.

Until the gathering of the 248th Peace Convention, I say.

When Dmitri says, That’s a given, I detect an edge of anger.

Arriving on roller skates behind me, Anna Grace, wearing a 30s red-and-white polka-dotted waitress dress, asks me if I would care for a drink.

When she arrives with my Whiskey Sour, Dmitri speaks from the podium stage with detailed instructions to collected armies of paramilitary mercenaries for a violent solution to the problem of peace.

Time to go, Anna Grace urges, hurrying me down with the speed of her skates. The crane operates with great precision on a tight schedule.

Side-by-side, we step through a door labeled #27CYA, only inversed.

Anna Grace opens the steel bar cage door, once again, barefoot in her elevator operator uniform.

Upon entry, the Hammerhead Crane lifts us 7 stories up, 5 doors to the right, 2 doors down to #2BU, which fails to open after 3 knocks. For no reason I can think of, the same holds true for the next four visits to seemingly random doors.

•

After 3 knocks on Door #123ABC, a gaunt man wearing purple robes extends his arm in greeting and I see his silver Rolex glow like it's in the dark.

My name’s True Believer, he says matter-of-factly.

Rob, I say, shaking his hand.

Leading me through the door, True Believer pretends confusion.

What time is it? he asks.

In a dream, I respond, you never can be certain.

True Believer snaps his fingers and exclaims without a doubt —

It’s the end times, a hair short of Armaggeon.

I sigh deeply, a child of fundamentalists, having been taught all my life to believe the same thing.

Frightening news, I respond, a tragic tale of man’s self destruction.

True Believer looks at me with icy eyes and a big smile.

Consider another take on that same theme, Rob. What if God is pouring out his wrath on all infidels?

Instinctively, I respond –

Jesus said all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments - love God and love others.

True Believer whistles like a steaming tea kettle and tells me at the Second Coming, we’re facing an altogether different Jesus – a warrior soaked in blood who is all in on executing God’s wrath.

With a deep voice like James Earl Jones, he quotes Revelation 19:13 of the second coming of Jesus —

He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.

I scratch my head, and ask if a sharp sword coming out of the savior’s mouth might indicate metaphor.

It’s all a matter of perspective, my friend, True Believer says to me. If I see destruction as an act of God’s wrath, executed by Jesus, who am I to stand in the way? It frees true believers to not to love others, our enemies, justice for all, and a planet we share, the essential teachings of Jesus his first time around. Instead of end times dread, you have exclusive privilege to cheer on Armgaddeon.

Scratching my head, I ask –

What if not loving brings about the end of the world?

True Believer laughs out loud.

A really true believer gets comfortable with paradox.

Operating on precise schedule of the hammerhead crane, Anna Grace roller skates into me.

Would you like another Whiskey Sour? she asks.

Make it two, I say.

•

In my dream, for who can say how long, the hammerhead crane moves me up, down, and across, mechanically acting on precise coordinates, randomly dropping me off at the entrance to all 128 doors, 60 that do not open, 68 others expanding in conventions of madness, including – opera singers with third degree burns, politicians with Picasso faces with heads spinning 360 degrees, thousands of businessmen typing on thousands of computers to find great riches in short term profit, innumerable meltings of Dali Doomsday clocks, entomologists breeding insects without legs or wings for the fun of it, athletes lost in Escher angles, legions of Humpty Dumpties falling and drowning in raging rivers … an seemingly endless tour of humanity distorted in various funhouse mirrors.

Counting in my dream the number of doors visited, at long last I arrive at my final one, which fails to open after knocking 3 times.

In the elevator cage, I turn to ask Anna Grace –

What’s up with all the conventions featuring the weird, insane, divisive, and violent? Why can’t I dream of something good in this world?

Stepping off the elevator, Anna Grace looks at me with tears in her eyes –

The doors that did not open for you are the ones where you will find what really matters, she says.

How do I enter those doors? I ask Anna Grace just as the hammerhead crane rises up, pivots, and drops the elevator cage into a blue sea teeming with sharks and my nose bleeding again.

Drenched in sweat, nearly delirious, I wake with a bolt in my bed next to my wife snoring deep into a rainy night.

•

In the darkness of our bedroom, the dream stays with me, a haunting hangover of Hippocamus and Amygdala. I wake my wife and tell her my nightmare.

I’m here, she says, and I’m real. Your dream is not. To get your mind out of the dream’s lock, focus on things that are real.

I rise, drink a glass of water, watch angelfish swim in my home office aquarium, play a few games on the iPhone, recovering slowly my 5 senses in a 3 dimensional world.

Suddenly, my phone buzzes with a news alert.

New Jersey lawmaker says dead people personally told him they voted fraudulently.

After reading one alert,, the monkeys in my mind awake from a drugged sleep, screeching at me to browse some previous notifications.

California Democrats approve redistricting plan after Texas House approves GOP maps.

Erin gains Category 5 speed in spectacular time.

US suicide rate resumes its upward trend.

Significant cuts proposed to U.S. climate change funding.

When Melanie wakes to check on me, I hand her the phone and encourage her to browse these tragedies.

When she finishes she says —

The times we live in are enough to make anyone go crazy, Rob.

I tell her that’s not to mention Jose’s criminal court case, financial stress, our daughter’s ceaseless trauma, Hurricane Helene, and a global pandemic..

Melanie sighs because she feels the exhaustion as well, along with so many of our dear friends.

“How many times have you told me that evil eventually implodes? Melanie asks. “Because a shadow does not exist without light, the dark shadows of our times will eventually pass as we follow the light, what’s really real, loving God and the good of others.. So, let’s continue to do that and celebrate the fact we get to watch the shitshow together.”

As is her loving habit, Melanie pulls me up from the deep funk of nightmare, one of the many loved ones in my life who is kind enough to open doors that make room for what truly matters.