Refrain

Chapter 11: Lohengrin

My mother, a chronic night owl like myself, says when we nap during daytime, we're more prone to bad dreams. Never a good dream for afternoon naps, she says.

So that day, with the sun blocked out by thick damask curtains, in the soft feather bed of Frankie's guest room, I sank into a sleep so deep, its waves turned vivid, stirring—it took me hours to roam the dreamland, the vast cloud of exhaust discharged from our consciousness—before I could reach its shores, the sobriety of sea wind.

I guess light-blocking curtains aren't nightmare-proof.

The dream began in a marsh. Dark water, thick reeds. There was a nest of dry grass and sedges. I was standing a few feet away, but I could make out its owner, a swan: luscious feathers, slender neck, with a plumpness fresh from motherhood. I stayed, because her vigilance gave away her treasure—a cygnet, a brittle orb of gray, would catch light once in a while from under her wings.

I was posted there for days—weeks—watching as the cygnet grew. At one point I shifted onto my side under the sheets, and tipped over the jar, so the small bird was poured into the mould of its noble lineage, into the shape it was destined to take: a slender neck, curled into an elegant scroll, primed for far, plangent cries.

I could see it: it was starting to gain feathers. White, stiff ones. And while dreaming, I recalled what a biologist friend had once told me, that when cygnets morph from its soft, gray down into a plush of sturdy white, it would have to leave home. The parents would peck at them until they do. Swans may be European, but their child-rearing code is not. Eviction from your childhood nest is their idea of adulthood. Non-negotiable.

But this single mom was strange. She wouldn't let those new feathers alone—before her child could preen out the infantile fluff, the older swan was beating him to it, jabbing at the spouting flight feathers until they fell out, their roots stained with blood. It was a strange twist on the Christian pelican. I'd never thought there could be a bird myth more ridiculous than the Christians' pelicans. Until I bore dream-witness to this.

It went on for some time—I didn't know how long—but as it often happens in dreams, my hands were bound, and couldn't intervene. I could only watch on as night turned to day, and to night again, and the white snow back into gray clay, spotted with crusted black.

Until one evening.

The sky was an inverted abyss, and gliding over was a formation of silver pinions. A fleet of four swans in migration, sailing across the dark.

And the swan child in the nest—barely a swan, his armour of purest white plucked into a mangled shrub—stretched its neck towards them, and called, over and over, until his throat turned hoarse. They were cries, but steered clear of the ugly, uncontrolled bawling. For some reason, even in despair, I sensed his pride, his firm and futile insistence on refinement. And the swans above echoed him. The strange chorus went on, and on, filling the night, a hair-raising hymn to the moon's silent passing.

And the mother went mad. At first she barked at the sky, and when the black, vacuum distance nullified her rage, she bit at her own child. First the wings. Then the neck.

I couldn't move my body (afterwards I suspected that some degree of sleep paralysis must have been involved) so I shut my eyes, over the eyes that were already shut. Thick curtains over blinds.

And when I opened them—I had to, because the day had broken—the scene had shifted. Fast-forwarded straight to the finale. The nest, disheveled, like sedges are supposed to be disheveled, housed no living birds. The child was gone. And the mother, its neck bent straight, wings hanging limp, was dead.

With the strange, unfounded conviction one tends to hold in dreams, I was fairly certain that the child had escaped. But I still feared the possibility, however unlikely, that he had stepped into the deep water, and without the feathers to keep him afloat, had drowned.