The Cathedral
Scott is sitting in a pew, bathing in spacious light when the feeling returns.
I’m in the season of a year passed since writing, sharing, and publishing this story. The creative spaces I’ve traversed in this time have been most fulfilling and transformative, trying and stressful though they were. Returning to this story is a return to the headspace landscape that grounds me again to glimpsing back and forward with perspective. Gratitude. Affirmation. Renewal.
(This story is available as part of Not Ghosts but Spirits I, a queer anthology from Querencia Press.)
A river flows fast through the night. There is no paddle, and direction is either passively accepted, or resisted with nauseating futility. Like, upstream on a flume ride. The space above is a small enclosure. This room, it grows with Scott as he floats along, both he and the boat passing through similar spaces of increasing size. The child’s bedroom with glowing stickers. The classroom, every surface a blackboard dotted with chalk marks. All at night, the auditorium, the warehouse. He staggers back, head reeling up and up. The earth is flat now, the entire sky a box filled with pinhole stars, and Scott can no longer comprehend the breadth of it.
Yet he soon feels at peace, infinitesimal, the waters calming. On this first trip down the river, he becomes sickened with a presence from childhood. A looming entity in the doorway, a phantasm between sleep and dream, its body warped and pulsating through many dimensions, has returned. Forever approaching and retreating, standing up while falling through the floor. The shrunken head, the belled limbs, it is a tumbling pear in black drapery. Scott remembers paralysis, eyelids failing to protect him but letting it get away. Is it returned now, or has he found it, long buried in this cave of night?
It is only later in the full light of day that Scott returns. That initial horror from recognition was replaced with curiosity, compassion, pity even. No longer a place of shadow, the river now transports Scott under a dawning sky. The banks are lined with memory—the last minute, earlier that morning at home, ten years ago. Scott is in a current all too fast to linger on any moment, time enough only to get repeatedly confused trying to stay oriented. The river responds by hastening, memories replaced by abstractions—they are once again in those expanding rooms of night— but now all warm, shimmering, softly aglow from within.
When the waters calm, slowing down as the riverbanks part, widen, recede, Scott is pulled into a softness, the boat also a pillow that carries them on, eventually running aground. Scott finds themself at the base of marble steps. They are slow to take in. Grandeur leading up to the vaulted doors of a humbling cathedral. Gothic, but all in white.
Scott is sitting in a pew, bathing in spacious light when the feeling returns. The entity is here, they realize. Unseen, but approaching. In the expanse of the cathedral, a voice comes from everywhere:
I am a self, too. I am the other.
I am suppressed. You knew me once.
Denied for so long, but I remember us before.
Waiting for you to find me, I built this. Welcome back.
When the tears come, they leak out, they are drawn out. Membranes dissolving. Freewheeling osmosis. Ducts, eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex. The reasoning mind, long-term memory, the emotional center, the conscious self, the subconscious other. Half a mind, half a person.
It is seeking me, Scott finally thinks. “Who are you?”
“Your intuition. I am bestowed, my name Isobel.”
(This is the part of the story that I can’t find the right words for. Or, really, I refuse to find them. I know what happens here; if I write them down in a private document, okay, but god, if I say them out loud...I know how incantations work, and I’m not gonna mess with this kind of magic so haphazardly. If I say what I felt then, if I tell you what Isobel said to Scott—even in the third person, it’s too powerful. It becomes true. When she asked me the question, I knew immediately that answering her honestly would be the end of Scott. It’s been a year since she asked me, and I’m not done avoiding her just yet.)
Scott runs out of the cathedral doors, staggering halfway down the steps under the weight of all that they now carry. The tears are no longer individual; they are a grieving deluge escaping down to the river.
The horizon is approaching again, ushering, in its familiar way, the end of their visit together. They’ve sat in this solemn moment at least a dozen times. From each visit, Scott has been sent away by Isobel with instructions, questions, a helpful suggestion. They wonder, how did this all start so simply with a little playful prompt to paint their nails? How far they’ve come. How far. Too far.
Scott is sitting with this a long time before Isobel joins them on the steps.
“It’s too far!” Scott erupts in awareness of her presence. “It’s too much. Take it back. Please, take it all back. I—I wish I didn’t know.”
Isobel leans in, an arm around them now. They both jolt with shock in their first contact—not static, but a melting. “You understand what this is now, though. You know my name.”
“I do, I do.” Scott grows a little self-conscious of their tears, wipes at a face weary and uncomposed. “Look, I’m not ready, though. This is still too much.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Isobel gets up from the cathedral steps, turns. The horizon contracts around them. They are alone on an island of steps that lead nowhere. But everywhere, in time, perhaps.
As she extends a hand to Scott, she says “It can be as much or as little as you want. I’m with you for all of it, of course.”
Their hand in hers, it is a first glimpse of being okay, a silent assurance is received. “Whenever you’re ready.”