by ERIC FRANCIS

From A Temple of Memory

WHEN I WAS LIVING in Miami in 1999, often I would fall asleep playing an unmarked blue CD that was left behind by a friend named Ramona, one of many visitors to my momentary life there who dropped in from unusual places. I lived alone right on the ocean in a little white-tiled hotel room with a big window that did not open. The room was cheap and it seemed to manifest effortlessly, like the space itself had invited me to come visit. It seemed to invite many other people as well.
 
The CD must have been from a musical genre called Trance. At the time, I did not follow electronic music, and I never looked into it, but playing it certainly put me into a kind of trance, and I found its sculpted sounds, its warm, complex rhythm and its narrated voice deeply reassuring in what were some of the more displaced days of my life. The music began from something close to silence, and then, gradually building on a rhythm, faded into existence. Then the rhythms and tones would develop and transpose until a kind of sonic dream had arisen.
 
Then, a man's voice would speak like it was projected through a veil of water: Meet me on the other side.
 
I don't remember how or where Ramona and I first encountered one another in the psychic ocean of the Internet, but her presence approached me with directness and invited a direct response. The next thing I knew, she was sitting with me in my small white room on the Atlantic. We spent one weekend together. I never heard from her again, and immediately after she left, her email address, our only form of contact, stopped working. There were times, after that weekend, that I wondered whether the experience had actually happened.
 
She was in fact blown in on a storm. Her flight, from Bermuda, landed on a Friday afternoon one hour before Miami International was closed for two days by Hurricane Irene -- a fine storm which, later that afternoon, came on furiously, taking out electricity, phones and briefly, bringing all of exterior life to a halt. It left 14 inches of rain on the city. The only reason her flight was not turned back was it didn't matter what airport it landed in; Miami happened to be closer than its point of origin.
 
Ramona's taxi left her in the parking lot near my room, and she showed up at my door with food, wine and flowers. And the CD, which we played the entire weekend -- made possible because I happened to have a few sets of D batteries that I kept in a clean, new plastic trashcan filled with hurricane supplies. I'm one of these people who prefers to be prepared for all possibilities, or at least most of them. A hurricane in Florida is not a stretch for the imagination. For some reason this was the only music we listened to -- we just set the player on repeat. So this particular music became fully infused with the rich, unusual memories of that weekend, the journeying quality of our discussion, the half-sleep and half-dreams we experienced, and the feeling of absolute privacy brought on by the storm.
 
We spent the weekend talking in the near-darkness, accompanied by the muffled sound of wind and the building vibrating. I don't remember what we said; only how it felt, and how it felt was limitless. At one point early the next morning, the eye of the storm passed over us, and for about 45 minutes the world was transformed into magnificent daylight. The eyewall looked like a tunnel up to the clear blue morning. Then the stormy darkness, the rains and winds returned for a while longer. And we resumed our conversation.
 
Rather than talking face to face, we met facing one another in the wall-sized mirror on my closet door. For some reason we started talking this way and it seemed natural and interesting and so that's what we did, for many, many hours. When we slept, we slept separately, and when it was time to talk, we faced one another's reflections. Everything we did, we did facing one another in the mirror. And continuously, this CD repeated, through the nights and the mornings and the days with the message,
 
Meet me on the other side.

Each time he said it, no matter how many times I heard the recording that weekend or in the weeks that followed, that statement took me by surprise. By Monday morning, the weather had cleared, the phones were back on, and Ramona booked a flight up to New York and then to Paris, a city I had never visited, where she said she had friends and family. I took her to the airport and resumed my life.
 
On a Friday night some weeks after Ramona left, I fell asleep earlier than usual and dreamed I was in my own room. Ramona was on the floor in front of mirror where we sat most of the weekend we spent together, surrounded by six candles. I remember counting them.
 
In my dream, faced the mirror and looked into one another's eyes. Her eyes were washed in bliss that I can only describe as perfect contentment, as she gazed at herself, then she glanced at me. She was naked. We were doing something very deliberate and specific in this process, something that she had come to show me. It was similar to during her visit, but something I could not see then was suddenly obvious.
 
With each look into her own eyes, she seemed to go further into her awareness, deeper into her peace with herself, and her placid face would melt a little more. Then she would look at me, guiding me to where she was. And I would look back into her eyes, which was difficult at first, but became easier. And yet each time her face would melt, it would seem that it could not be any warmer or more fluid. Then she would look at me again and then look back at herself, and somehow she would go deeper, leading me inward. Even in my sleep, I was aware that this was the logic of the dream.
 
Then she spoke. "Let's go there."
 
She said it with such a magnificently warm expression on her face, and her softness conveyed a kind of authority. Then she stood up. I could see the shape of her reflected in the mirror. I realized I was kneeling next to her at this point; for the first time I was conscious of myself in physical form. She extended her hand. I took her hand and stood up. She slid open the closet door. I tried to protest, explaining that it was a closet. She laughed.
 
"Let's go," she said again, and stepped into the closet, really, through the closet.
 
I thought to myself: "Oh, you're having one of those dreams of an expanded space in your house, like an extra room or an extra part of the building you forgot about. It's that kind of dream."
 
Then I had this momentary surge of paranoia that the closet was messy, and she would see that. But there was nothing there.
 
She led me, firmly clasping my right hand with her left. In a few steps we were outside, no longer in Miami. The strange part was it barely seemed strange. We were in a forest like none I remember. The forest was green, it vibrated and emanated green, and the sunlight that penetrated through the leaves came down in green rays. Not a detail of the old world was anywhere to be remembered, but the contrast and the natural quality of the new world was tangible and felt delightful.
 
We looked at one another. She raised her eyebrows a bit and smiled, and then we walked. I cannot remember how far. She held my hand delicately, and her feet took careful steps on the forest floor, every step seeming to bring a profound revelation or experience. She barely touched the surface of the world. We seemed to be on a mission. In fact the moment I acknowledged this, the more real the mission seemed. We were approaching something. I could feel this empathically.
 
Then we were standing in front of a tree that Ramona was bringing me to see. She seemed to gesture at it, extending her hand and turning her body, but it was her small, brown breasts that made the gesture, and that showed me what to look at. I looked at the tree and I could not believe that a tree had such a strong presence.
 
It seemed human; no, like a god. I knew the tree-god was 5,112 years old.
 
He or she...vibrated and emanated green, the green of pure love, the green of the natural world. We stayed there long enough to feel this, to meet this being or get its blessing. This seemed like a small eternity in itself as we watched and felt.
 
And Ramona led me onward, into the dream-forest. There was something else she wanted to show me. I knew this was her forest, her world, or rather, a world to which she had access, and with which she was familiar.
 
She looked over her shoulder at me. "Come," she said, "let's go and meet the others." This idea seemed to echo as wide as the world, penetrating into the deep woods and the thick green daylight. We walked on, further into the deep green woods.