Shadowed Soul (28 page)

She left this statement hanging for a moment, giving me the time to absorb something that I had always been aware of but had struggled to avoid accepting.

“So, this is me forever, then?”

“It is one part of many parts of you, Thomas.  You, Thomas, you are a genuinely wonderful man,
that
is who you are forever,” she sat back again and smiled. “Depression does not mean an end to your life. It’s one part. It’s not going to be easy at times but with help you can get through it, you can dilute it, and you can flourish and thrive as an individual.”

“Really?”  I barked a harsh laugh at the thought.  The sound was so brutal that Bailey moved as though he had been kicked.  I gazed down at his gentle face as he looked at me with a mildly reproachful expression.  I reached down and ruffled his ears a little and he wagged his tail in return.

“Woody Allen, Christian Bale, Jon Bon Jovi, Buzz Aldren, Jim Carrey, Winston Churchill, Halle Berry, Harrison Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Newton, Degas, Vincent VanGogh, Peter Sellers, Walt Whitman, Uma Thurman, Abraham Lincoln!  Thomas, all of these people are among the millions who have suffered from depression.  Life can and does flourish if you give it a chance.  If you can ever start seeing the Shadowed Soul as a companion that inspires you, gives you contrasts, rather than simply terrifies you then you can get beyond feeling trapped.”  She paused and looked at me as if working out the next best move.  “Tell me ten things that you love about your life.”

“Bailey, Beth, her parents, my son,” I said immediately and I stopped.

“Thomas, it’s not important that you think of them all at this moment but if you can think of ten things that you love about your life then those are the things that will get you through this.  The trick is that you have to look at yourself and your life objectively and find the qualities that others admire or love about you and you start to get a balanced idea of who you are.  I’m not someone who usually contributes to people’s lists but what I will say is that you have been articulate, honest and strong coming here.  One might say intrepid.”

Her words were freeing.  I had already begun to focus on my list. I was determined that I would find a list of ten things that I liked about my life and about myself.  Determination was already on that list; even after all these years I was still searching for a way to beat my depression and I had not been defeated.

Bailey and I reached home.  My mind raced over everything that had happened over the past few weeks, my mom’s death, my father’s persistence, today’s conversation with Sophie and the missing items on my list became apparent.

1.
       
My Family – without them I was adrift and as much as I needed them it was important to remember that they needed me.

2.
      
My Strength – I had grown up in an environment that had left me alone and I had survived that – in fact it had been more than survival, it had been growth.

3.
      
My Compassion – I had been able to show love to Beth and her parents, I knew that some people who were stunted emotionally could not show anything resembling true love to those around them but I could and did.  I knew that my attitude toward my son had been unusual and not ideal but with the strength that I had I would be able to change that. 

4.
     
My Empathy – While this might be similar to compassion it was still separate enough that I could understand how people were feeling and if I was well enough I could also sense how that was affecting them. 

5.
      
My Intelligence – I was not dumb, not by a long shot – I had always been smart about the things that mattered, I had enjoyed education – so much so that I had always striven to enhance and expand upon the education that I had.

6.
      
My Creativity – I was able to express myself through my poetry and on occasion through my art, this was something that I often let fall by the wayside when I was unwell but if I identified this as a strength then I would be able to somehow ensure that the creative side of me did not atrophy.

The strong benefit of having written this list became clearer the longer I focused on it.  It gave me a defined pathway that ultimately could dilute the attacks of the Shadowed Soul.

While Sophie had confirmed my suspicions that the depression would never fully leave me, the news came from a person whom I had grown to trust and therefore had been a terrible blow.  I had left her office feeling as though the weight of the world had been dumped directly onto my shoulders and the journey home had been difficult.  I had been struck by a desire to go to the address that featured so prominently in my dreams and knock on the door.  However, after we got off the bus, Bailey and I had stood staring at the door for what seemed like an eternity, both terrified and desperate for a man I suspected was my father to open the door.  Of course life was not a television soap opera and there were no signs of movement from inside the house.  Eventually I turned, relieved and dejected in equal measure and made my way back to my apartment.

Bailey was unsettled; I was not sure why.  I had thought about calling Beth but had decided against it.  Her parents were upstate for a few days, celebrating their anniversary by spending two nights at the B&B in which they had honeymooned.  Beth would probably be relishing time with the baby without them fussing over her.  Although she had invited me over I had declined; I wanted her to have a peaceful time, as peaceful a time as having a baby in the house would allow.  I planned to stay with them tomorrow but always felt some degree of emotional and intellectual turmoil after I had visited Sophie and wanted to center myself as much as possible before I descended into Beth’s world again.  I was looking forward to being with my wife but wanted it to be on a level that we would both appreciate and enjoy.

As I sat at the table I gazed at Bailey, he was seated and looking at me with anxious eyes and occasionally letting out a soft moan. I had known Bailey for so long that I knew when he was unsettled.  His nose was cold and wet and he had eaten his food normally.  Tonight he seemed to be physically fine, but emotionally on edge.  I tried to bring him out of his mood but even his chew bone was useless.  I was worried about him. 

As he seemed so unhappy I broke Beth’s long-standing rule and invited him into my bedroom.  As soon as I was settled in bed I patted the top of the mattress and he gratefully jumped up and nestled his body against the side of my legs.

“Goodnight, buddy, we’re seeing Beth tomorrow,” I said softly and as I closed my eyes I heard him sigh and give one little whine and shift his weight repeatedly.  “Go to sleep, Bailey!”  Visits with Sophie always exhausted me and as I was drawn into the dark comfort of sleep, I could hear the far off rumble of thunder that rolled across the horizon outside the edge of the city.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The dream came quickly and the usual preamble was edited from my mind.  The dream began face-to-face with the tall man, his features obscured by the shadow of his hat but I could see the glitter of broken glass deep within his eye sockets.  As had developed there were two figures at either side of him, both kneeling with their hands behind their backs and ropes wrapped tightly around their arms and bodies, their mouths silenced by balls that were held in place with leather straps and their eyes were trained on me.  There was no fear in their expressions and for the first time since they had appeared in the dream there was no accusatory hatred in their expressions either.  There was, however, an expression of quiet expectation.  Beth and Sophie gazed at me as though they were waiting for me to release them.  And tonight, even in the depths of this dreamscape I knew that I would do my best to accommodate their expectations.

“I know who you are,” I said to the Shadowed Soul, my voice echoing around the dry and dusty canyons of the city.  The figure just laughed an unhinged, high-pitched giggle.

“Who am I?”  It spoke in a childish, sing-song tone that was almost worse than the laughter.  “You don’t know anything, Thom-
ass
.” It giggled again and I closed my eyes and sighed.

“Of course I do, I’ve known you all my life,” I said coolly.

“You don’t know Jack and you don’t know shit, you incredible cretin!” It hissed.  And Beth and Sophie giggled into their gags as though they were all in on the joke.

“You’re me,” I said.  “You’re part of me anyway.” I shrugged.

“And you want to kill me, don’t you?” The figure adopted a petulant voice and cocked his head to one side.

“No, not anymore,” I replied quietly.

“Really?”  It hissed again and seemed to grow taller as it pointed at my pocket.  “Then why have you brought
that
?”

I instinctively placed my hand onto the outside of my coat pocket and felt the weight of the gun that was always with me in my recurrent nightmare.  I closed my eyes.  I had held off talking about the gun; with the hatred and anger that consumed me at times I did not want to frighten anyone.

“Answer me Thom-
ass
!” it said in a snarling tone and both Beth and Sophie turned their heads to look at the shadowed figure.  He seemed much taller now, almost seven feet tall and impossibly thin.  Like a shadow at noon on a sunny day.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said in a low, even tone.  “You are part of me and maybe I need that part to be the person that I am.”  I felt like a cowboy in the westerns that I used to watch when I was a child with my dad and with this realization the figure took a step backwards and I understood what this dream was all about.  As a child I had loved cowboys, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, television reruns like
The High Chaparral
and
Bonanza
had animated my young life.  This dream was a showdown, the street, the sun, the weight of the gun in my pocket; it all echoed the archetypal faceoff between good and evil.  And even though my love of westerns had been forgotten by my conscious mind, it had resonated through my subconscious like a vein of hope.

“This ain’t going to end the way you think it is, sheriff,” the shadowed figure spoke in a Texan accent and somewhere behind me a bell began to toll.  It was
High Noon
in my dreamscape, the 1957 western with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly.  And here I was, about to face off against the gun-slinging bad guy who had ravaged the landscape of my mind for so long.

“I won’t fight you anymore,” I said.  “Fighting you doesn’t work.  You’re too big for me to fight.”

“That I am, sheriff.  You ain’t never goin’ t’beat me.”

“I know, but I can do something else, something different.”  I smiled a little and this obviously did not sit too well with the Shadowed Soul, he hissed and shrank a little as he took another step back.

“You’re weak, sheriff, you’re too weak.”

“No, I’m not!”  I put my hand in my pocket and brought out the gun; in the dream I could feel it shift and change shape, shrinking and losing weight as it transformed from a tool that was used to kill to something different and infinitely more powerful.  Beth and Sophie gasped as I raised the silver object and pointed it at the Shadowed Soul.  I put my finger on the trigger and the shadowed figure shrank a little more.  The object had been with me all my young life, up until the point that my dad had left.  It had given me so much fun and enjoyment, and being an only child had probably fed my imagination and given me a basis for my own moralities.  There was good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness, me and the Shadowed Soul and neither could fully exist without the contrast the other provided.  Life, like the world, was held in a constant balance.  Feeling depression, being pursued by the Shadowed Soul had given me balance.  Although too often, it had been skewed in his favor, the fact was that at my core was a complicated individual.  A man who had tried to do all he could to live a good life and had succeeded, even when the Shadowed Soul had been in control, I had never done anything truly bad.  My addiction to online pornography, my apathy toward my son, the other things for which I had learned to hate myself were not good, but they were forgivable and fixable.  Everyone in the world is entitled to days that are not as full of light and love; everyone must go through days during which they are held prisoner by their own Shadowed Souls.  At that moment, as the bell tower slowly pealed out the count of twelve I understood the nature of who I was and where I fit in.

“You’re under arrest,” I grinned and pulled the trigger of the Roy Rogers Cap Gun that I had loved so much as a little boy.  A tiny plume of gunpowder clouded the air.

The Shadowed Soul cringed and fell backwards into a jail cell that had materialized behind him and the door slammed shut.  Trapping him for a while, never forever because he was a persistent villain but he was where he should be at this time.  I turned to see that Beth and Sophie were free from the ropes that had bound them.  Both smiled at me and I tipped the brim of my swashbuckling sheriff’s hat in their direction.

“Thomas, dear,” a voice spoke behind me and I sat up in bed to see my mom’s image fading away.  She was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, a worried look on her face. “I think it’s time that you woke up, Thomas.” 

A crack of thunder shattered the room and I saw Bailey pawing urgently at the door to get out of the bedroom. Now that I was fully awake I noticed his hackles bristled with anxiety.  Whining, he turned to look at me and I understood that I had to get up and follow him.

As I stood, the bedroom was illuminated by a sharp, fresco of light.  More thunder followed. 

Something was very wrong!