FAST Fiction: Fall Classic Dream State #13

• Posted — February 2023

What happens to a dream deferred?
— Langston Hughes

Somewhere out there someone’s saying a prayer
That we’ll find one another in that big somewhere out there
… Somewhere out there, if love can see us through
Then we’ll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true
— Linda Ronstadt & James Ingram — Somewhere Out There

Synchronized with the rising moon
Even with the evening star
They were true love written in stone
…Oh, yes, other hearts were broken and other dreams ran dry…
— James Taylor — Never Die Young

• Fall Classic Dream State:
Part 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12

Once upon a couch, I was home watching the pregame show before the decisive game of the 2000 World Series — the Mets-Yankees Subway Series — but I fell asleep just before the first pitch, and soon I began to dream…

In this surreal yet seems-so-real dream — paradoxically haunting-and-hopeful and lucid-and-confusing and real-life-and-trance-like — I’ve been whisked from one location to another in an astounding narrative…

…from my couch in a Connecticut Cape-Cod-style home to New York City, from the pinnacle of the Empire State Building to a strange parade in the Canyon of Heroes along Broadway, from the Bronx to the 9/11 crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in western Pennsylvania close to Shanksville — indeed, a shank to human hearts, uniting everyone on board in the spasm of death and the chasm between a seemingly unknown afterlife and the aspiration of a hoped-for and dreamed-of new creation destination.

9/11, you ask? Yes, my whisking dream-induced journey has included time travel — when I fell asleep, I was watching the 2000 World Series on Fox TV and listening to broadcasters Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, but in the proverbial twinkling of an eye I witnessed the Twin Towers implode on September 11, 2001 and then watched the plummeting and exploding of Flight 93.

The time travel continues, for after being present on 9/11, I was taken to Yankee Stadium during Game 7 of the 2004 American League Championship Series — and according to the prophetic headline at the NYC Canyon-of-Heroes parade, the Red Sox routed the Yankees in Game 7 in the Bronx to complete a historic comeback from a 3-0 series deficit, the first time in Major League Baseball history that a team accomplished this feat.

How on earth could this have happened, I wonder, shaking my head — speaking of surreal dreams, how can we be sure this Red Sox resurrection actually occurred?

And now, suddenly, I’ve been transported from the 2004 ALCS Bronx massacre to a farm-and-barn converted into a church in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley — on my wedding day, of all blazing-amazing summer days, at a breathtaking outdoor sanctuary adjacent to a sure-flowing stream and woodland wonderland.

However, in a paparazzi flash my bride and I have disappeared and the temperature has plummeted to sub-freezing. The woodland has instantly turned into a winter wonderland — except for a glaring issue: I’ve never seen a winter wonderland that resembles a crime scene. Where my bride and I were standing on that distant summer’s day, three dark-blue baseball caps lay where our feet had trod … a Boston Red Sox cap with the classic red B and a New York Yankees cap with the interconnected white N-and-Y — and a third cap in-between with the NY and the B interlocked as three joined superimposed letters.

Why is this an apparent crime scene? Underneath the three caps, a blood-red mark in the shape of a heart stains the virgin snow near the bottom of the gentle slope where the seats and witnesses at this outdoor sanctuary rise and fall.

At the top of the slope, the tallest woman I’ve ever seen begins to descend the stairway toward where I stand hard by the heart-shaped stain — clearly, she would be the most imposing center in the WNBA. She somehow resembles a larger version of my bride, but besides the gargantuan size, another off-putting anomaly betrays that this isn’t my better half but rather an impostor.

As I try to pinpoint the anomaly, in my peripheral vision I see ancient Miracle Max of “The Princess Bride” — he’s back again, and now he’s running in circles in the snow on the outdoor podium, chased by an equally ancient woman.

Max cries out to her, “Get away, witch” — but she replies, “I’m not a witch, I’m your wife!”

When I look back at the WNBA-sized giant lady descending the stairs, I see more clearly not only her beauty but also her terrifying cruel bearing and her royal scarlet robe and her lily-white skin, which jars me to recognition — indeed, this must be Queen Jadis of Narnia, the infamous White Witch. Then I faintly hear a woman’s cold words in my mind, though the Witch’s lips remain motionless, intoning in a mocking sing-song voice: “Always winter, but never Christmas — always winter, but never Christmas — always winter, but never Christmas!”

Miracle Max has stopped running from his wife and instead is staring — no, glaring — at the White Witch, and he says:
“Kid, be careful — this broad is bad news through and through.”

Then, in a moment that seems simultaneously like eons and a sneeze’s swift expulsion-propulsion, I’m transported to an indoor auditorium in New Jersey — I can somehow sense that I’m in the Garden State, even though Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” isn’t being piped over the intercom. Instead, Mrs. C is announcing my name over a loudspeaker. I pick up a mimeographed program from a banquet table and peer at the header — An Evening With the English Classes of The Covenant Master’s School • Fanfield, New Jersey — and I see my name next to: “Dreams” by Langston Hughes.

Mrs. C calls my name once … twice … three times — but no dice. I try to reply and say “I’m here” but that disconcerting and disturbing dream-turned-to-nightmare phenomenon is occurring as we speak, so to speak — namely, try as I might, I can’t speak at all. Against my will, I’m muzzled and mute.

So instead of me reciting the fabled Langston Hughes poem, an unidentified young man steps to the microphone — my gut conveys an unsettling sensation to my heart as his quasi-blondish locks glisten in the artificial inside light — and he reads these lines in a certain calculated way:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Why was I unable to voice the poet’s dream lines?

Earlier that day, after the Covenant baseball game where I played center field and batted leadoff, my Dad took my alter ego to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Plainwood, my hometown and Fanfield’s neighboring city, and we lost track of time — or time lost track of us — or we simply ignored the ticking onslaught of time.

Instantaneously, Miracle Max transports me back to the frozen outdoor wedding venue — in-between bites of a fortune cookie — at least, I believe Max was the human conductor.

The White Witch is now standing beside me, towering over me, and when Max turns his gaze toward me, his face contorts in shock and horror and he shouts: “Hey kid, what happened to you — you’re looking beastly!”

Glancing at my hands, instead of human appendages I see hideous fur-covered paws featuring claws rather than fingernails. The immediate association that springs into my mind and memory is unmistakable — beastly, indeed — I’ve evidently become the antagonist-protagonist fusion from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

+++

By the way, momentarily returning to the summer scene, blazing is surely an accurate description of that mid-90s August wedding day — mid-90s not in years but in degrees. Indeed, no wedding would be complete without the Murphy’s Law factor coming into play — when the bride and groom selected tuxedos the winter before, the tux salesman failed to illuminate that the tux they chose was intended for a freezing-cold day as opposed to a sweltering summertime day.

Can you guess the seasonal fashion gaffe this soon-to-be bride and groom inadvertently made?

Here’s a hint: sheep-shearing.

Given this hint and your innate human power of deduction, if you surmise that this nuptial-planning couple picked out wool tuxedos, you are correct — yes, wool tuxedos that five groomsman and two Dads and the groom wore by necessity in the midst of the dog days of summer.

At day’s end, the groom’s Dad — who would sweat buckets sitting stationary in a T-shirt in humid heat — took off an utterly drenched and soaked-through tuxedo. It appeared he had worn the tux while swimming in the Sanchiz’s pool back home in Plainwood … or so he wished, by George!

Meanwhile, back at the frigid outside sanctuary, my true bride and my true self are still nowhere in sight.

To be continued

© Bruce William Deckert 2023