FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The Sun Bleeds In My Dreams

When Frank Straw came to, he had for several long moments forgotten that he was back in the land of the free, E Pluribus Unum. His thoughts had jumped back to that dark and tiny room beneath a steel manufactory somewhere in Germany, a single flickering light above to show that the darkness wasn't eternal, being worked over by a group of thugs barely old enough to know the difference between a firing pin and their dinks. Once his eyes had adjusted to the shadows, stabbed by bars of golden dusky sunlight, his ears picked up the rasping of wood on wood, and the scrape of metal on metal. The brown bear swiveled his ears around toward the sounds, tilting his head to try and see the thing that was making them. His head could only move so far, and, looking down, he realized that he was tied to a chair with thick line, knotted at the most unreachable points, immobilized.

He looked around, noting the tiny, shed-like space, comfortably warm and bitterly cold at the same time. There was a simple wooden table some feet in front of him with another chair beside it. The wood was worm-eaten and black with years of moisture, surviving summers and winters, accruing layers of dust.

A shadow curled along the wall to his left preceding its owner, a short and rather thin vixen, looking like she had neither eaten nor slept in a week. She walked over to the table, grabbing a chair and pulling it over to him. Her white-and-orange fur was matted and stuck out in jagged clumps, her body mostly hidden by Levi jeans, a white shirt, and a dark brown suede short coat, all dirt-stained and thorny. She had a China Doll haircut and dark brown eyes, under which hung weighty bags--he thought he could see the veins in her cheeks beneath her fur. He spoke German to her, asking where he was and why he was here.

"Speak English," she said, her voice quiet and soft, making him think, rather abstractly, of black satin. "You're in New England, we speak English here."

His memory of the last twenty-two years returned as she finished, one war passing and another coming back, assassinations of beloved figures, anxiety, social upheaval, the weight of two decades pushing down on his mind. The fox sat down in the chair opposite him, her eyes dim and exhausted.

"Who are you?" he asked.

The question had no effect on her; she only stared at him with eyes like mugs filled with undiluted coffee. She glanced into a corner of the room for a mere moment, a flash of inattention, before staring back at him silently. Frank felt a dull ache growing in the back of his head, pushing against his skull.

"Not much of a conversationalist, are you?"

She shook her head slowly, like the merest action required more action than she was willing to give. He wondered if she was a red spy, but he doubted the Russians would have an operative as out of it as this one. As he struggled in his bonds, he wondered if she was strung out on something. She seemed like a hippie, or at least what he had read about hippies from TIME and the tabloids. The beatniks and the peaceniks, he remembered saying once, were as different as they were similar.

"Try not to move too much, Mr. Straw," she said. "What I need you for is very important, far more important than you might think. Just because I made sure that the ropes were tied perfectly doesn't make it inescapable, but you don't want to do that."

"And why not?"

"Do you dream, Mr. Straw?"

Frank looked at her, at the expressionless on her face; it felt like he was looking at one of his granddaughter's dolls, something fake and plastic and devoid of feeling. He looked around, searching the tiny room for a clue of where he could be, recognizing nothing. He was aboveground, judging from the fading light coming from the window, the smells of dirt and pine trees faint and stitched roughly into the scent of gasoline. She said New England?

"How do you know my name?"

"I know quite a few things, Mr. Straw. Mostly, I know only what they tell me, and they tell me a lot. For example, they told me where to find you, what time exactly you would be stepping out of your office over on Bernice Boulevard, when you would be getting into your inconspicuous green Winnebago with the wood siding to head back home to see your family, whom you haven't been in contact with for three months--congratulations on the grandchild, by the way. That makes, what, three?"

Frank stared at the vixen, giving her a hard and demanding look and receiving nothing in return. How long have they been spying on him? And who? He had some idea; an intelligence specialist doesn't live to be sixty and expect to not make some enemies along the way, but there was no way to be sure. The woman had employers, and they kept her well informed--Zoe hadn't had the baby more than four days ago. He wondered what they, whoever they were, wanted him for, and whether or not they had more people than this one virtually unalive vixen.

"Who are you?" he asked again.

"My name used to be Margaret Mather, but I don't recognize that name as my own anymore."

Frank nodded as if understanding her strange answer. Certified whacko, he thought, wondering with a little trace of embarrassment what that made the man whom she had kidnapped.

"And who are you now?"

The vixen shrugged, blinking slowly. "Like everybody else, a nameless person. Names are meaningless labels, Mr. Straw. We use them to dissociate ourselves from the masses, attempting to give ourselves significance in an insignificant universe, but it doesn't matter. Names, ages, actions, nothing matters."

"That's a very depressing view on life, miss."

"Do you dream, Mr. Straw?"

Frank narrowed his eyes at her. He was hoping through constant conversation that she would expose something about the people she worked for, but he didn't have the patience for it. She gave her name, but that could have been false, and even if it was real it didn't ring any bells upstairs, only the dull, throbbing ache.

"Yeah, sure I dream," he rumbled. He knew what her next answer was going to be, and he tried to come up with a convincing answer. He didn't have an imagination, or so his wife had always told him, and so he grabbed an idea from that which was both the best and the worst box.

"What do you dream about?"

He gave her a hard and vicious look. "You want to know what I dream about, miss? I dream about the men and boy-men that I killed in Normandy. My dreams are memories of death; whether I'm making it, seeing it, or smelling it, they're all about death. I see their bullet-torn faces and their hands grasping for salvation that'll never come. Sometimes my friends are in there with them, and sometimes they're not, but they're always there, and I'm always there, wading in their blood."

He had hoped that his description would ruffle her feathers, make her sicken slightly, but her stomach was stronger than he had anticipated--she didn't even bat an eye at it. It made a charge of anger sweep through his limbs, to see that the memories and nightmares he had kept within for the past twenty-two years did not even affect some people. She only looked at him, and when she moved her head in a deliberate nod, he almost had to squint to see it in its slowness.

"I guess you have some idea of what my dreams entail, then," she muttered, sounding a little bemused.

"How's that?"

"I dream about people dying, too, Mr. Straw, but the numbers are much more than what you'd seen in Normandy. I dream about people no longer caring about whether or not their country is the strongest, the bravest, or the smartest--no more subterfuge or mind-games or witch hunts, no more fighting for voting rights or even living rights--I dream about millions of lives fighting for survival in a dark and thirsty world. The sun bleeds in my dreams, Mr. Straw, slowly hemorrhaging energy out into the blackness between the stars, where, like any other kind of blood, it is consumed. The sun is just a little candleflame in a vast ocean of blackness, and candles don't last very long in oceans. It will go out, eventually, whether by one way or another. Do you know what we will be when that time comes, Mr. Straw? Do you know just what we will be when the sun is finally bled dry and darkness becomes the new way of life?"

Frank listened to all of this, assured in his earlier and unexpressed opinion of her.

"Can't say that I do, miss, but I do know one thing; that's an awful grim vision for anyone to be having, even someone young as you."

That elicited a thin smile from the vixen. She glanced into the dark corner behind him again and shook her head.

"I was a geologist for some time, Mr. Straw. I had attended Berkeley for a few years, achieving my spot on the dean's list and keeping it there until I received my diploma. Geologists are the ultimate nihilists, you know...they don't view existence in such tiny mayfly windows as a year, a decade, or a century. They see the world through the scope of aeons, of millions and billions of years. Generations live and die, civilizations rise and fall, buildings are erected and turn to dust atop the same rock. Everything just seems so trivial when you're a geologist."

The vixen stared off into the corner beside him, looking into the dark. The humorless smile remained on her face for a few moments before fading, and her face regained its blank look. As Frank was about to say something her voice cut through the shadows between them like a silk needle.

"Things like death, Mr. Straw, or individual death, become irrelevant and inadmissible when you realize that time is a fabricated concept. Why should I ponder over the death of one man when an incalculable number of lives have passed throughout the years? Kennedy died three years ago today, and everyone still weeps and says that 'it seemed like only yesterday.'"

"What does Kennedy have to do with anything?"

The vixen turned her eyes to him, and for one split second he thought he could see some emotion in those twin pools of murky mud, but if there was anything it was fleeting and febrile.

"You work for the CIA, Mr. Straw, but you're not a field agent. You haven't been involved in wet ops in ten years. I know that because of your rising age, you had been relegated to the role of desk jockey, a keeper and purveyor of files and papers. Some men might grab at feeble and flimsy dreams of glory being spies or assassins, but you have the most important job in your field, Mr. Straw. You're a keeper of secrets, just like me."

The bear slowly began painting a picture in his mind, gradually beginning to see why he had been kidnapped. Her superiors wanted information, but he wasn't inclined to give them anything. If they were planning on working him over, they'd have to pull out all the stops, balls out. With half of the information he knew, the Russians or the Chinese would be sitting pretty and living large. He decided to go on the offensive.

"What does Kennedy have to do with this?" he asked her again. She gave him a polite smile, glancing back into the corner.

"'We stand today on the edge of a new frontier'...I wonder if he really knew what he was talking about when he said that, or if the writers who drafted his speech had any inkling of what they were doing. My employers weren't fazed by that dilemma with Cuba, but when that little ginger bugshit set down a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, then they started to get a little antsy. They decided he was too dangerous for their equity, and they had him removed."

"So Oswald worked for you guys, too, then?"

The vixen smiled at him, and he watched as her eyes became bright with memory. "No, there was only me, Mr. Straw. I took the shot, Kennedy took the bullet, and Oswald took the fall. It was as simple as that."

"Uh-huh. I suppose it's been difficult for your people to test your secret weapons with his treaty in place."

The vixen shook her head, her smile fading with the light in her eyes. "You still have no idea what's going on. You really think that I've given myself to a particular country or political group? My people are your people, I just no longer care for anyone or any material thing, not anymore. And besides, the treaty didn't stop anything, Mr. Straw; if anything, it has catalyzed it. My employers don't care if a few nations are atomized into radioactive vapor because of some childish bickering, or if a group of protestors is harassed by the authorities. They don't seek to weaponize atomic energy, they want to centralize it, to convert it into one goal."

Frank tried to ignore the pain in his head, but it was growing too great to evade. Nothing she was saying was making any sense. "What goal is that?"

The fox looked at him blankly for another long moment, then, with gradual, exhausted movements she stood up out of her chair and walked to the table. She stared out through the window between two slats, the sunlight making a wide stripe of deep gold across her eyes. Her fingers were playing with a manilla folder, one not unlike the thousands he'd had to file away and cart around from one office that didn't exist to another. It was somewhat faded and grubby, thick with hidden contents.

"Sometimes my dreams bleed out into the real world. I can see the sun, Mr. Straw, and it's already dying, rivers of heat trailing out and away from it like thick, varicose veins. I can already see the future, and it's darkness. Can you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Frank's voice was almost like a whisper in his ears, unintentionally stricken by the woman's quiet madness. She didn't answer at first, just tilted her head and made her ears twist toward around. He couldn't hear a thing, and he doubted he ever would. The manilla folder slid between her fingers and she clutched it to her breast like a child's diary.

"Them, the whisperers. They don't speak like us, they have to use what's available to them, like the wind, the leaves, the dust at our feet. They've been speaking to me since I left Kouathia, Massachusetts. You won't find it on any map--it was a little logging town erected in 1804, but it was abandoned for this or that reason in the early thirties. The woods have grown around it and claimed it as their own, the trees and fens and brush populating the buildings, a tractor trailer or two left to rust and fade. There's a little circle of stones at the center of town. They're all black, but the sunlight reflects colors off their surfaces like abalone or ammolite, colors from a spectrum you won't find in any book. I remember just looking at them, the light rising and falling in the sky, the moon chasing it, the sun rising again in a long and tiring dance."

The vixen stared out into whatever lay beyond the dusty glass, her eyes blinking in the light. Frank struggled against the ropes as the silence drove on. He knew that the vixen could hear him and the groaning of the line, but she didn't make any suggestion of it, didn't even acknowledge him. She continued, the emotionlessness on her face echoing in her voice.

"They dream as I dream, or maybe it's the other way around. They want us to go up there into the black infinite, to put all of our energies into space travel so that we might reach them. I don't know why they want us to meet them, and I guess it really doesn't matter. Whatever will happen will happen, regardless of whether or not someone tries to stop it or invoke it. It's inevitable what will happen to us, Mr. Straw, whatever that will be."

Frank listened to her, watching her eyes dart back and forth in their sockets. She turned to him, looking directly into his face and he felt once more that he was looking at a hollow shell.

"Men can rattle their sabers for as long as they want, thinking up different nightmares to send down on each other while they weave their webs above us. NATO and Warsaw, democracy and communism, it's all so fucking stupid and meaningless. We're just bleeding ourselves, and there're worse things than nuclear fire, Mr. Straw. We have to find an escape route to our future; we have to keep them happy."

The vixen sat back down in her chair, the buckle of her coat giving one tired jingle. She showed him the folder, holding it up in her lap--he read the name on the front, wondering why it was called ABSENTIA.

"Inside this folder," she said, not giving him a chance to speak, "is a very special list. Names, occupations, addresses, family members; whatever needs to be known about them is known and written down. They're all important people, even though they don't know it. The Central Intelligence Agency have...forcibly extracted other people before, I'm sure they're willing to do it again, over and over again."

"What?" Frank had managed to say. "What are you driving at?"

Passion flared in the vixen's eyes, a bright and burning fire. She bared her teeth, slapping the folder down onto her knees. "Rockets, you idiot! Space-flight! Weren't you paying attention!? Open your ears, you fucking shit! I'm not going to repeat myself, so you better fucking listen! This isn't one of your goddamn wargames!"

Frank noticed the pruning shears on the table, and he nodded obediently in compliance. "Alright, okay," he said, trying to soothe her temper. In the back of his mind, he wondered what his wife was doing now.

"Some of these people are the very apex of their fields, some are clever students who study under them, under known organizations, or under their own solitary research. All of these people are key points in Their ultimate goal, whether they want to be or not. They all of them will be instrumental in our future's survival."

"You're telling me that you want a secret American agency to kidnap a bunch of eggheads around the world, get them all in one room, and get them to work on the same project?"

"Quite an undertaking, isn't it? But it'll be worth it, if you enjoy the idea of your grandchildren living without fear of death or destruction."

Frank shook his head, almost wanting to break out in mad laughter. This was the reason he had been shanghaied and tied up in some New England shed? If it had been done by a red spy, he would have understood it, would have even complimented his adversary, but that clearly wasn't the case. She truly was just a madwoman--she must have been following him and gathering information for years, a schizophrenic fixated on one topic and nothing else, settling on and figuring out every single angle, setting it somewhere in her mind to give her insanity a purpose.

"You're crazy," he said finally. He expected her to get mad, maybe smack him across the face or grab the shears on the table. She only looked at him with a dead look.

"It doesn't matter what you think, Mr. Straw, even less what you think of me. In the bigger picture, our thoughts and conceptions do. Not. Matter. I think of the future a lot, every second of every day, in fact--it's a habit that comes with studying most of the earth sciences. Now, I'll be leaving the country for several months, Mr. Straw. They want me to get some things ready for them, something to do in the Middle East. I'm leaving the folder here on the table, and if you're smart and have even a spoonful of respect and love for the rest of the world, you'll take it when you get out."

The vixen slowly stood back up, the buckle on her coat jangling, and walked to the table. The folder slapped down on the wood surface and Frank watched as a cloud of dust flowed up into the traffic of sunlight. She grabbed the pruning shears, testing its spring by squeezing it a couple times. She walked over to him, her eyes dead and staring. She stepped behind him, out of view, and Frank expected to feel the cold steel somewhere on his body, but there was nothing. He heard the sound of the shears clipping through rope, and he felt his bonds loosen slightly. A warm air tickled the fur on the back of his ear, the smell of meat and fruit washing over his nose.

"Think about it, Mr. Straw. I've been thinking about it for eight years, you can take a few minutes out of your life to think about the world's future."

The vixen who probably at one time in her life had been Margaret Mather walked past him, jabbing the shears deep into the table beside the folder. She didn't look back at him as she opened the door, hinges screeching, and walked out of the shed, letting the ancient smell of earthy forest flood inside.

As Frank began shifting himself out of the ropes, he heard the rumble of an engine outside, mechanical growl of a recognizably heavy truck outside, wheels crushing dirt and sticks. He untied the rest of the knots and slipped out of the chair, wondering what that crazy bitch was up to. He stood up and listened to his joints popping angrily, thinking that none of this was worth it. How the hell was he going to explain this to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the secretary of state, or to anybody? Nobody would believe it, and he had to admit that all of this felt like an echo of a dream. He rubbed at the rope-sore furrows on his wrists and hoping that the dull pounding in his head would subside with some quickness.

The bear stepped slowly to the table, sparing a slight glance at the manilla folder, ABSENTIA glaring up in thick black font. He grabbed the shears, looking out the window through the wood boards, wondering if she had left him or if she was just waiting outside.

He stepped outside, his shoes falling on orange-brown leaves, dried and dead, autumn detritus. He saw all around him tall and browned trees, their heads bowing as a wind came down from the north and making the fire-hued leaves murmur and hiss. The shed looked like a cadaver from an old logging town, laying at the top of a barren and bumpy hill of dirt and brambly tree roots, surrounded on all sides by muttering trees. A path curved down the hill, winding serpentine along the rough plain and into a corridor of trees, some ten miles away. He watched as a weather-worn pickup truck, snub-nosed and grey like an old service revolver, sped away down the path, bouncing dangerously over the uneven track, kicking up heavy dust that fell quickly back down to the ground or carried on the wind.

_ Where the hell am I?_

He clutched at the shears, looking around him at the treeline and the faded, distant mountains beyond them to the west. The sky was a god's bruise of purple and dark orange, fire and the damage it had caused. The sun had already begun its interment into the mountains, half-buried between twin peaks of dark granite.

Frank was about to begin his descent down the path when he noticed something curious about the sun, or rather with the sky around the sun. He blinked his eyes, rubbed at them with the back of his hand, instantly filled with worry that whatever the vixen had done to incapacitate him had some residual effect, either with his eyes or with his brain. It looked to Frank Straw as if tendrils of light were reaching far and away from the golden sphere, seeming to ripple as they radiated outward, like ropey flowing rivers.

Like open veins, slicking the universe.