They come to me in a dream.
It’s one of those dreams you’d expect to hear about in church—the kind of dream for which rationality demands dismissal while irrationality demands attention. The problem is you’re not sure what to pay attention to and you’re not sure what to dismiss. And yet, you can’t forget about it.
Right before the dream, I am stumbling into my professor’s office, collapsing into a self-pitying heap.
“Oh, honey,” my professor, Zina, says. “You look like you need chocolate.” She sifts through her desk drawers and pulls out a Snickers bar and tosses it to me. “I’m sorry about the scholarship.” She pauses, as if she wants to say or do something else. “I have to teach a class. But I’ll be back. Take a nap and wait for me if you want. You look tired.” She points to the lounge-like chair she keeps in her office—specifically for naps—and leaves.
I am tired.
My exhausted, twenty-year-old self must be a mess. Eyes all puffed and red. Un-washed hair frizzing. Shoulders sagged by the git-like crying I have done about my own failures. All I can think about is that I’ve lost the Rhodes scholarship and will, consequently, never go to England.
And going to England feels so much more important than it seems like it should.
As I sit in the nap-chair, I try to push all my self-pity into each bite of chocolate. But as I eat, I keep hearing the judges’ gritty questions.
“Don’t you feel a little naïve for having faith?”
“Missionary work is a form of imperialism. And imperialism is one of the greatest atrocities of the modern era. How do you feel about being part of the atrocity?”
“You’ve read Chaucer. You’ve read the ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ What makes you think it’s spun by God? How do you tell the difference between divinity and sheer chance?”
It was an unexpected line of questioning—one I felt completely unprepared for. I had been convinced that, irrational as I knew it was, my competing was of vital, eternity-laden importance.
So, I answered the best I could. And I thought I felt a power there with me as I was talking. I thought I saw one of the judges cry.
And then I lost.
I stood with the eleven finalists, waiting for the results. We’d all made it past state finals. This was the last level of the competition: four of us would go to Oxford. We were in the lobby of a Texas hospital where one of the judges was a doctor. Poorly-clad patients in wheelchairs, IVs attached to the handlebars, kept rolling by.
When the judges came out of their deliberation in the conference room, I knew it wasn’t a good sign that they wouldn’t look at me. But I was still unprepared for the empty place in my chest when they didn’t call my name. Why had it felt so important to come here? To lose? It didn’t make sense. And it kept not making sense even when I was back. Even when Steve—who I’d met at state finals—emailed me to ask me on a date. And especially when I knocked on Zina’s door and when she handed me the chocolate.
But at least when the last of the chocolate melts against my fingers, I feel some of my self-pity melt along with it.
Completely spent, I decide to try that nap.
Generally speaking, I don’t sleep very well. Especially during the day. But I drift quickly into a haze. And suddenly, everything around me is calm and fuzzy with light.
I’m dreaming.
There’s someone standing in front of me. He’s young and old in an ageless way. He’s got blonde hair and he looks like my dad.
I tilt my head to the side—silently asking him why he’s standing there.
He looks at me right in the face and he says, “You have to find us.” There’s an urgency in his voice and he doesn’t blink.
I look down to his left and notice a girl is sitting there next to him. Her hair is darker than his and she doesn’t say anything.
“But where are you?” I ask.
There’s a beat of silence before he answers.
“England,” he says.
And the dream is over.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been taught about dreams. About Lehi, dreaming of the Tree of Life. Joseph, interpreting the dream of the baker and the king. Joseph Smith listening to angels who spoke as he lay covered by his bed-quilts.
A lot of what I’d heard came from my grandmother. She lived with us when she had congestive heart failure and, even though she did eventually recover, at the time we all thought she was dying. She couldn’t lie flat and breathe, so she’d sit upright in a chaise—a crocheted blanket covering her newly thin legs (that she claimed she was far too old to shave).
Terrified she might die any minute, I would sit next to her every night until two or three in the morning. She’d hold my hand and tell me about my uncle who had visions. Her friend who heard voices. The way the ghost of her ancestors would speak to her and night when she was most afraid. The prophets of the Bible must have seemed maniacal, she’d said. But would be a little crazy, too, if I could see through the veil. Glimpses through the veil can terrify you with their violence.
“You need to remember,” she said to me once, “when the veil between the worlds is open… it’s dangerous. Spirits flow both ways: life meeting death. If you’re not careful, you could fall back through.”
If I had been older, or more cynical, maybe I would have rolled my eyes.
But I wasn’t old, and I wasn’t (yet) cynical. All I knew was the clocks in the room seemed to whirl their arms around too fast. And that every minute, every second, I could spend with my grandmother was terribly important.
So when I have the dream… when I feel how important it seems… it’s not terribly hard to ignore every bit of my rational self. Dreams can matter, I decide. Especially when they seem like they matter.
But there is still something so baffling about it all. The urgency—the pleading. The call to a quest. The best I can figure is the people in my dream are ancestors. And ancestors are important, I think. That’s why we’re sealed—one generation to the next—in a line back through time and forward into an eternal round. Our connection to both the people before us and the people who come after us is sacred. Maybe, I figure, maybe I’ll still get to England. Because my ancestors are calling me to find them. The spirit of Elijah finally speaking to me the way my grandmother said it might someday.
“How are you doing?” Zina asks when she comes back from teaching.
“Good,” I say. But even though I try, I can’t elaborate any more than that. It all feels too important somehow. Even the nap-chair and chocolate have started to feel like holy space and sacred communion. “The chocolate was magical.”
When I go home, I sit on my twin-sized bed—surrounded, as it is, by piles and books and notepads full of my scratchings. I watch the curtain to my bedroom window blow in and out, as if it’s breathing.
The last time my curtain breathed that way was on the morning I decided to apply for the Rhodes scholarship. I had been eating oatmeal and when the urge hit, I called it the ghost of Cecil Rhodes calling. But it was just a feeling. If I’d had another grandmother, I might have called it something besides a ghost. The only other sources of the feeling I could think of were God and the devil. I did not want God to tell me to do something so annoying. And the devil seemed an unlikely visitor at dawn, when I was eating oatmeal.
Today I hold a notebook in my lap, wanting to write the dream about my ancestors down. But I can’t even do that. The words don’t come because every time I think of them, they’re pushed out of my head by waves of calm.
It’s six years before I can write it down.
And it’s three years before it ever occurs to me the messengers of my dream could be anything other than ancestors.
Because it’s not until three years later—when I am married to Steve, who I met competing for that Rhodes scholarship—that I find out we can’t have babies.
And it’s not until the same three years later that a professor—who is practically a stranger to me—walks up and asks me to come teach a study abroad class with him. It’s a hiking trip, he says. More than two hundred miles over seven mountains.
And it’s in England.
•
We’re en-route to Milton Abbey, hiking through a muddy forest. The light is dim—twilight in the midday. There is no sign there might be wild animals, but the thick trees that surround the footpath are the kind you’d expect to look into and see multitudes of glowing eyes looking back. Ancient England had lions, but today is the first time I really believe in them.
My feet are leaden with mud, and I am so exhausted I feel almost as if my spirit isn’t fully connected to my body. It’s hovering just outside the space of my body, connected only to my toes. I’m embarrassed to be so exhausted. Embarrassed the injections have made everything so dark and fuzzy feeling.
I should be grateful, I think. Here, in England, IVF is so much less expensive than it is at home that even we—on our grad-student budget—can afford it. This is our only shot at having a baby for years. The only shot at making that dream I had unfold. The fact I have to hike two hundred miles on IVF hormone injections shouldn’t be an undue sacrifice. Even though my reaction to the hormones has been… extreme. I’ve been seeing things, hearing things. At night I dream of dismembered body parts and demons who eat the rancid carcasses of cats. When I wake up in the morning, I can almost feel fur caught between my teeth. My head will pound, I will vomit, and then I’ll start to cry. I keep a record of it all for the clinic. They have never had a patient as young as I am, they tell me. They don’t know what will happen. “None of this is normal,” they tell me. “But it isn’t abnormal either. Sometimes people experience homicidal urges. Sometimes they get violent. The injections are literally changing the function of your brain. No one really knows what is going to happen when you start interfering with a person’s brain.”
But is it really the injections making me feel this way?
The emotions feel real. The disorientation and darkness feel real. Every bit of anxiousness has a real cause. Can I blame drugs for that?
I try to keep my eyes wide open, and a smile pasted on my face. But the view ahead is obscured by a misty haze and the squishy path underneath our feet punctuated by sharp rocks you can’t always see. I’m not hiding much of anything very well.
I slow my pace and look around. The trees are tall.
And then my spirit, still hovering in front of me, looks at me.
“Someday you’ll be rich,” she says.
I have never cared about being rich. But in that moment—surreal as it is with the living shadows of trees hovering—it seems like a really, really wonderful idea.
There are two people nearby talking about their boyfriends. They must know I can hear them, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to pretend I can’t or if I’m supposed to join the conversation.
The spirit who looks like me speaks again.
“And when you’re rich, people will want to hear you speak. They’ll cry and applaud and the very sound of your voice.”
The connection between me and my spirit loosens. It’s elastic now and stretching away from me.
Steve is far ahead of me, smiling, as he talks to someone in the group. I think, “He is such a good guy.” A bird squawks above me. I look up at it.
The spirit who looks like me says, “He’ll probably be an apostle someday. You’ll have to travel the entire globe and everywhere you go people will fawn.”
Someone in the line of hikers bumps into me, and I let myself fall farther back in line.
Says the spirit, “When you’re rich and powerful no one will bump into you. Or if they do, they’ll be sorry. They’ll rue the day they bumped into you.”
My guts start filling with… a yearning. It’s a completely unfamiliar sensation. A mix of greed and bloodlust.
“You can make it happen you know. It’s easy. Watch.”
In the sky in front of me, I see a cliff. I see the cliff and I see the person who just bumped into me. I see them falling down the cliff and then I see myself. Pushing arms out. Standing at the edge of the cliff. Smiling.
I stop.
The hikers keep moving forward, like a moving body of water. I look around, trying desperately to snap my spirit back into my body, but I can’t.
“Who are you?” I ask the spirit. “Because you are not me.”
She smiles once more, fading into the shadows of the trees.
I quicken my pace and try to find someone to talk to, to pull myself out of the fogginess of my IVF addled brain.
For a while, I almost feel like myself again.
When we get to the Abbey, Steve hands me a pamphlet about its founder—King Athelstan. He was king a long, long time ago—somewhere around 900 AD. I read the pamphlet with a tired sort of disinterestedness. I’m hot and cold and the same time and so exhausted I approach the grandeur of the Abbey with something like boredom.
I leave my heavy-with-mud shoes at the entrance and walk around in my wet wool socks.
A tour guide is talking. “He used to walk in those hills,” I hear him say. I assume he is talking about Athelstan, but I am only vaguely listening. “He had visions of glory. He would do anything for the glory. Some people think he killed his brother. The abbey is dedicated to him.”
The Abbey looks like every other cathedral we’ve been to so far. Ceilings so tall you feel like you’re outside when you’re in. Stone walls that echo against a quiet so present it seems to force reverence. Walls of graves etched with the names of noble patrons, whose lifetime of money earned them a hollow carving in rock.
I read through the pamphlet as I walk—the cold, hard of the floor such a contrast to the muddy path.
The pamphlet traces the bloody history of the Abbey.
It’s strange to read of ghosts who might have walked the same path I just walked. I wonder how heavy with mud their shoes were. How tired they were as they came out of the woods.
The pamphlet moves from one owner to the next, all of them merging together in my mind, into a singular king. A singular entity.
In the 18th century, a man named Damer became obsessed with his status, and the abbey’s ability to boost it. He thought the land should be grander. He had visions of himself as great. The ghost of his dead wife haunted him. He was worthy of her. He was better than her.
And I saw it play out in his head, the way I had watched myself. It was simple, he would have told himself, stomach churning with something like greed and bloodlust. Just a few things to do first. Watch.
There is a bench next to me and I sit down on it.
I can still feel it in my gut, too—that unfamiliar yearning.
But he did more than just feel it.
He was so swayed by his visions he went to the town that stood at the edge of the forested hills. He razed it to the ground.
The entire village.
In the space of the destruction, now sits his glory.
I feel cold as I put the pamphlet down.
I can almost see that spirit who looks like me, laughing. A phantom haunting the very stones I sit on.
I watch the other members of the group move past me and am again struck by the sensation they are part of a moving body of water while I am a rock, stuck in the mud of the riverbed.
Could it be a real demon? I think. One whispering temptations, driving you to sin, or maybe insanity?
How large is the gap between sin and insanity?
I start to shiver.
I can’t see Steve anywhere. But I think I can hear him just outside the Abbey. I think I can hear the way his laugh is so present, and I wonder if I’ll ever be so capable of being present again.
Is the veil between the worlds a mix of molecules and neurons? When the clinic shut down my pituitary gland, did they evacuate my brain of whatever chemical was keeping it closed? Are the hills of Milton Abbey inhabited by a spirit who haunts kings and Kerrys?
I stand up and I walk from tomb to tomb inside the Abbey, scanning the names of the dead.
My wet, wool socks leave footprints behind me as I go.
•
It’s egg collection today. They gave me a Valium this morning, but I don’t feel it working. Not even a little bit. The room is hot, and I am half naked and shaking. The doctor is almost unrecognizable in her surgery garb. She is covered from head to foot and is wearing goggles. I can’t see her eyes.
They give me something in an IV and everything starts to get fuzzy fast. My legs are pried back (so dignified!). Steve is holding my hand, all whispering and smiles.
When they asked me earlier how much I weighed, I was embarrassed about how much weight the hormones made me gain. So, I lied. By about thirty pounds.
It’s not until they use that weight to start calculating my anesthesia that I realize you should never lie about your weight to doctors who have to give you anesthesia. Especially if you’re a redhead and you need more than other people do.
The next thing I remember is pain. Screaming pain. Writhing pain. Tearing pain. Deep, penetrating pain. And a fuzziness. I am here and there and nowhere all at once.
And then, in my mind, I am back at Tintagel, where the sun beat down on at us when we scaled the cliffs. I can feel the sun against my eyes, my head throbbing against its piercing. The sun is blanching.
I think about the word “blanching” and immediately my inner voice begins to recite Elizabeth Barret Browning’s “Grief” in a nonstop loop as I kick at the dust of the cliffs. Intra-poem, “Grief” morphs into John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” and then “Batter my Heart.”
Below I see the bright aqua of the Atlantic Ocean, crashing on the shores next to Merlin’s cave. The air smells like dust and salt.
I remember the way Steve meets me on the top of the hill where, underneath our feet, lie the ruins of a castle floor. He walks with me to find shade. I am beginning to stink with sweat and my headache intensifies, shooting a stake through my pupil to the back of my skull.
Steve kisses my cheek and puts a “pregnant” flower into my hair. “It’s a magic flower,” he says, pointing to the way the belly of the flower bulges. “The ancient veins of power pulse here with the mystery of conception. All they need is an offering now.”
“You talked to George too long,” I say. George, the bus driver, kept going on about the “veins of power” underneath Tintagel Castle. I frown in the blanching sun, unable to smile at Steve’s magic flower. My inner voice of Browning-Donne chanting grows louder and louder, humming in a cacophony of grief, sin, and death.
We make our way, shoes in hand, down into Merlin’s cave as the tide comes in.
“You feel the power here, don’t you?” asks Steve.
Cold waves crash, stinging against my feet. The cold slowly creeps from the numbness of my toes to my torso, but the ache in my head lingers and the stink of my sweat mingles with the crusty smell of water and sand. “Yes,” I say. “I feel it.”
I wade into the oncoming waves inside the cave, pushing my sunglasses up into my hair to help adjust to the darkness of it. I’m teetering on rocks as the swirl of the tide sends me off balance. While I try to right myself, I do not notice my sunglasses have fallen from my head and have been sucked into the swirling vortex of water and rock.
Back on the beach, after the tide has pulled the cave opening almost completely underwater, I notice they are gone.
The Tintagel Gods of conception have taken their offering, says the ghost of Cecil Rhodes, who is laughing. And fortunately, they have a taste for hideously ugly eyewear.
I cry out, shake my head.
“No, Cecil Rhodes is not allowed to be here,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” says the doctor. “Hallucinations are common with this type of anesthesia.”
“I lied about my weight,” I say.
They don’t believe me. The nurse strokes my arm. “Hush honey, it’s going to be okay.”
The pain is making me sweat and it’s a struggle not to scream out.
My memory is doing funny things
In front of me, I see my thesis and I see myself sitting over it, hunched with anxiety.
My advisor wants another draft. And he wants it to be good.
I don’t care if it’s good. I just want it done.
But I know if it’s going to be good, I’m going to have to consider the logical possibility there is no god.
The premise of my thesis is that Enlightenment philosophers misinterpreted the physics of Newton’s Principia. That the hypotheses upon which their atheistic philosophies rested were laden with fallacies.
You can’t write that kind of thesis without considering the logical possibility there is no god.
I close my eyes. Take a breath. I’m not entirely sure whether or not I’m about to talk myself out of my faith and it terrifies me.
Axioms, I think.
If you follow them back far enough, all logical conclusions are ultimately based on fundamentally unprovable axioms.
Trace the logic back to the axioms. What’s the axiomatic difference?
The pages of my thesis get caught in the breeze of my swamp cooler, but I let them scatter.
Nothing.
Something.
I realize.
That’s the axiom.
There’s either something.
Or there’s nothing.
Neither one is provable.
Neither one is necessarily more probable.
Both are the beginning of two very different types of logic.
Logic, ultimately, is a question of faith.
“My left ovary is a mess,” I say. “Scar tissue. It burst a couple years ago. And I lied about my weight.”
The nurse leans down harder on me because I am writhing.
I repeat things without knowing that I’m repeating them.
My left ovary.
I lied.
I lied about my weight.
There’s scar tissue.
I lied about my weight.
Every few minutes I see the doctor hand something to the embryologist, who then runs into the lab next door.
“We’ve got another one,” I hear coming from the other room.
If I could be just the tiniest bit coherent, I might realize this is the moment of human conception: dreams meeting reality inside a petri-dish.
Psalm 19.
I’ve been having Steve read it to me every night. I’m not entirely sure why, but it has resonated with me in a way none of the other psalms have.
The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech, nor language, where their voice isn’t heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun
The sacredness of nature. The importance of words. How all things testify of God.
I can feel myself shaking, feel the nurse holding me down.
I start to cry. A deep moaning sob that I could never have allowed myself if I weren’t drugged.
It was never Cecil Rhodes who sent me to compete for those scholarships, I realize. Never Cecil Rhodes who sent me on this trip.
It was always God.
I try not to writhe, try not to let the pain get in the way of the collection.
Should we have faith in God? Or faith God will do what we want?
I know the answer to this, and it makes me feel desperate and angry. I don’t want to be told an empty uterus is all part of God’s plan and I don’t want to be told that God wants me to suffer. I want someone to tell me it will all work out. I don’t want anyone to tell me it will be okay even if it doesn’t work. I want it to work.
I am not okay with failure. And it makes me feel like a terribly selfish person.
•
Now I lie on the edge of a London gutter.
The air smells of dust, grime, and cigarette smoke. Vaguely, I am aware of the filth that is coating my hair, dirtying my clothes. But I can’t make myself care. Everything is hazy from the egg-collection anesthesia and my stomach is aching.
Steve is knocking, trying to get the property manager to open the door so we can check in and I can lie down on an actual bed instead of a grimy gutter.
“We’re not open right now,” says someone from inside. “Come back in an hour.”
“But I told you we’d be coming,” says Steve. And he did. He told them I’d be having surgery. That we needed to check in right after it was finished.
“It’s lunchtime,” says the nasally voice through the door. “Come back in an hour.”
“Steve looks at me, a little desperately. I see the lines of anger, compassion, worry, all deepening as he looks. “But my wife,” he says, “she’s not doing very well.”
His face is so kind. So Steve.
The voice from the other side of the door snaps, “A person has to eat!”
And Steve steps away from the door, fuming. He kneels down next to me, touches my hair.
I’m aware that I could be crying, but I am feeling so hazy I can’t tell whether or not I am. I simply smell the dust, the cigarette smoke. I feel the pavement under my hips, the total dirtiness that has accompanied this entire attempt at an, ironically?, immaculate conception.
And then, there in the steamy London gutter, I feel her next to me.
It is unalarming in a dream-like way. And maybe I am dreaming. But when I think about it, she’s been watching me for days. Watching me as the heat sets me snapping. Watching as I retched at the toilet during Les Misérables. Watching as I cried when we rowed our way across the lake at Hyde Park.
Today, when they took those eggs so forcibly from my ovaries, they put them into a dish. There was no sex. No meeting of two people in love. Just a violent attempt to force open the veil.
I look at her Madonna face. She seems so young. So much younger than I would have ever imagined. How violent was her immaculate conception? How hard was it to open the veil and let Jesus through?
“Did you know?” I want to ask her. “Your uncle talked about light and darkness and death when he heard. But did you know he was talking about you? That you would have to go through something even Joseph, sweet as he was, could never understand?
I close my eyes, listening to the hum of traffic as it is filtered by the concrete.
I don’t know yet that this procedure is going to bring me those children I dreamed of. But I do know things I didn’t. That conception, no matter how miraculous, brings you directly through the shadow of death. That God meant it when he told Eve she would have sorrow in childbirth.
And that even she, mother of God, was a daughter of Eve.
I watch the black taxis whiz past, stirring up black fumes.
She reaches out, holds my hand.
She puts a hand on my ankle. “The thing about immaculate conceptions,” she says, just a hint of laughter underneath the softness of her voice. “They just never let you in the inn afterward.”
And, for just a moment, I forget about the pain. I forget about the grime and the ache in my stomach. The entire dirtiness that has accompanied this possibly futile attempt at an immaculate conception.
I just stare at the open veil.
And I laugh right along with her.
