The Ram

Excerpt from The Nostalgic Future

Photo: Joonas kääriäinen

It is pitch dark and completely silent. I see that I am wide awake. I have nothing on my mind but exhaustion, and I cannot sleep. I am swimming in the darkness, floating on twilight consciousness. My body begins to tingle. I can hear a rushing sound in my ears. Is this the same sound that I heard when I fell down the stairs? The one where I decide to book a compartment UNDER a train instead of in it? It’s a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh rumbling sound and so VERY LOUD. I am scared. Joe is asleep to my left, very soundly asleep, no help at all. 

I hear the roaring, cavernous sound and it’s like a huge machine is in the middle of the bedroom. My body tingles pins and needles; I feel electricity running through me. I realize all of a sudden that I cannot move. I am paralyzed. Now I am really afraid. I cannot speak, can only dart my eyes from side to side. 

I can only see the room from a single vantage point. Looking at the walls and the corner of the ceiling off to my right, I recall getting the hairbrained idea to paint one wall chalkboard black alongside the other wall white, and there is a wooden beam on the ceiling where these two walls meet. It is at this juncture where it starts to happen.  

In the old days of the old-timey movie theaters, before digital projections, the film was flammable nitrate stock which sometimes caught fire, burning a hole through the film. Celluloid was a fragile medium, sometimes creating what they called a “burn hole” in the movie’s projection on screen. It would slowly begin to warp on the outside and then the audience would see a blackened hole of irregular shape with singed edges somewhere on the movie screen. 

This slowly growing black burn hole with ragged edges is the closest metaphor to what I see in the corner of our ceiling. The four-foot hole in the ceiling of our bedroom opens to complete darkness. The vastness of space is in the middle of the edges that look torn away. It opens outward. There may be stars in the distance that I cannot see. It is blacker than black out there.

The air turns strange. A scent coils around me that smells like scorched copper wiring and ancient ozone. It is faint and far off, but it’s there. It is the smell of outer space, if it has one, and also the smell of whatever this angry horned thing is that’s swimming into my room.  From behind the veil. It is coming into my bedroom from its realm. 

Through the hole floats a disembodied, wide animalistic head. There is no neck, no body, just a head floating through space toward me. It gets closer and closer by the second. I have never been so terrified in all my life.  Frozen, stupefied, immobile, I feel the vibrations traveling throughout the length of my body, up and down in waves. I hear the rumbling sound getting louder inside my head, and yet the room is dead silent. I try to scream but no sound comes out. My husband is like a statue; I don’t even see him breathing. 

I’ll call it the Ram. That’s what the head looks like to me. A ram. Or an alien. Or maybe a court jester. It doesn’t make any literal sense. It is flat, almost cartoonish, like a two-dimensional cutout hovering in space. The strangeness of it doesn’t make it any less real; in fact it feels more real than the bedroom I am in. The Ram has very long, thick, black horns on either side of its head, not the top. They twist in a spiral outward three feet across. It has wide, red eyes, mad eyes. Is it pissed off at me? Why? Is it trying to off me? Is it trying to forewarn me of something? Or does it just have to do this? The floating head sails across the bedroom closer and closer and I cannot move! 

I am facing something ancient, archetypal—like a symbol dragged out of the collective unconscious. It floats from space through the hole in the ceiling into the bedroom and glides silently ever closer to my face, coming inch by inch towards my screaming eyes. I know that I am not dreaming, but this monster looks like a projection, a dream, a cartoonish freak and yet it feels more real than any of the things in “real life” will feel tomorrow. It doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t need to.  I am prone. Yet in this terrifying moment I have the wherewithal to see myself as more than merely scared. The truth is that the Ram has PUT fear INTO me, like a nurse’s injection. This is primal fear: the kind that puts you in flight, fight or freezing and I’ve taken door number three. 

As the Ram drifts closer to my face, I try to scream again, try to raise my arms above my head, but I am its paralytic prey. 

And then it is over. I black out. All I know is that I have no idea how long I am gone. 

When I wake up, all is quiet in the room and the Ram is gone. 

I cry for a while, and then sleep like the Death. The night is lost to me.