MIRIAN

The physical world is a superfluous concept. Human perception
is not much. In 1947 I was thirty. Thirty, deaf, dumb and blind!

For the first thirty years of my life,  I had no psychic powers. I was
ordinary in every way, and if not for a peculiar occurrence, I would
have remained blessedly ignorant --ignorant of occult matters.

Wizards, ghosts, demons, I thought, frauds, preposterous, made-up
things, imagined and manufactured to entertain and to scare. Since my
earliest childhood years,  I have heard strange noises in the night,
have had visions of dead people, and have seen objects move as they
please, without a physical cause for their motion. I heard and saw
these things like a normal person, when I slept and dreamt, and later,
when I was drunk.

The last Thursday evening of 1947,  a fog, that I thought was
borne solely  from a bottle of  whiskey, put a film,  filter, over
my eyes which made the astral world visible.  Normally, Providence
keeps this world closed to our babyish eyes. Mercifully, the Good
Lord gives human beings blinders, fragile creatures' goggles, to spare
us from seeing the whole damned world in its dark entirety.

I kept seeing big whiskey red balls of flashing light, hearing a
loud thumping noise, feeling a draft of cold air blowing hard on my
face, and smelling damp mold, cooking. Eventually, I saw supernatural
things that were so real, I knew I was having no dream. I was not
asleep. I feared a brain disorder. But, I am getting ahead of the
story.

1947's last Thursday had a rainy evening. I got drunk. That
afternoon, I'd finally buried my youth. The funeral was a week and
a day after I buried my mother and my Aunt Lu. They were in a car
crash. Mr. Danny  drove the car. [Editor's note:  Miss Mirian's childhood
is described in her autobiography, ME IN THE DARK,  published by
Brown University  Press, Research Program,  in 1980]  ...He {Mr. Danny}
was killed too.

 I felt as low as a person can get, who'd been abandoned by her love ones
and by God. Often since --  I have found something soothing and comforting
in the company of a good whiskey, like Jack Daniel's. I was thirty, when
I took my first drink, several straight shots of Jack Daniel's. I was one day
passed burying my mother when I  first realized, an evening with "JD"
brought forth from deep in me recollections as mellow and as pristine as
the prettiest childhood memory of lounging under the family's old apple tree.
JD made everything crystal clear, put everything better and made it possible
for me to believe that the true memories of my life were truly happy and purely
good, and that anytime I wanted too, needed to,  I could retreat from
unpleasant incidents. At age thirty, drunk, I could still see life as it was
when I was a little girl.

As I drank, I hoped that no amount of counseling and of critical thinking,
when I would have to sober up, to go to work, to support myself, et.al,
would cause me to close off my link to this retreat.

Then it began with an explosion that sounded like the ceiling
crashed. Everything shook. The room lit up. Fire erupted around
me. Years ago, I saw a natural gas pipeline explode. Flames shot
hundreds of feet into the air in a fireball that was seen for miles
around. The explosion in my room resembled this, except, I was not
outside the area of the explosion, but within the fireball. I felt
burning heat. I heard the fire roar. It seemed credible. I thought a
plane fell out of the sky and doomed me. The fire's roar got louder,
its heat hotter. I could only see fire, but I wasn't ablaze. I
tried to get out of the chair and run. I couldn't move. My body was
sluggish. I was drunk. I screamed, yelled for help to no avail,
nobody came, not at first, and not to rescue me.

My body was still unburnt. Why? I did not know. I was too
frightened to sort out this or anything. Then, I saw them in the
blaze. I thought they were men in firefighters' gear, wearing
breathing masks, protective clothes and thick black boots, and
were coming to help me. The fire vanished. I thought they'd put it
out. I shouted thanks to them. Then I could see the room was
without a trace of fire, and with not the slightest burnt scent. The
room looked normal except for them. They popped up into the
air, like white bread from a toaster. Their feet were off the floor!
And  then they defied the laws of gravity completely. They flipped
around in mid-air, and with their feet up, scooted across the ceiling!

They laughed and leered like bad teen age boys. I yelled: What
the hell is this!

The week before, while returning from the hospital and my
comatose mother's bedside, I was run off the road into a ditch by
two car loads of delinquent teens, tail-gating, and speeding,
on a joyride. I yelled at those wild ones too. Remembering this, I
settled down. I said: This is not real. The intruders, like the fire,
flouted the fundamental laws of reality. I announced to myself: Girl,
you are asleep, having one hellva a dream! Those were wicked shots
of whiskey, which you guzzled down.

 Then a dark skinned black girl smashed through the wall in front of me,
hurling a burst of lighting bolts from her bare hands. The masked
youngsters scattered. I heard a series of "snaps". At first I thought
of the sound made when dinner crabs backs are snapped. Then several
of the girl's targets fell down. I thought of a movie, a war picture, and
of the sound of the shattering bones, of two soldiers in that movie
whose unit is hit by sniper fire. I clenched the half-full bottle of whiskey
in my lap and asked the bottle's cork if it had any happy scenes of
happy pictures to bring me.

I could not figure out why this girl would be in a dream of mine.
I could not recall any one in my life who resembled her. I wondered
if she symbolically represented something in my deeper thoughts. Colored
light emanated from the girl's body. She looked angelic in a fierce
way. Well, I called to her, demanded to know for what she stood.

"Honey, what are you?" I asked.

She ignored me. She continued to shoot down the masked youngsters.

"You can't talk, girl!" I yelled.

Her lighting bolts got louder, brighter and more violent. They exploded
on the targets. The youngsters screamed and their bodies vaporized,
like they'd been hit with a death ray.

What did this mean? I tried to think. I tried to shut my eyes. I failed.
I wanted to shut this scene out. I wondered why I could not. I yelled
at the girl, "What are you trying to tell me! Why are you killing these
boys!"

The girl pretended not to hear or to see me. She continued in silence to
dispatch the screaming boys. I tried to wake up. I always retreated from
a dream whenever it became too intense. I shouted, "Wake up you, fool!"

Finally, the girl stopped firing her lighting bolts. None of the
boys remained. She turned to me. She spoke softly, polite.

"Miss? Who are you?"

 Now, I didn't want to talk. "I don't like you very much," I
mumbled. Not that I could like her -- or any body could. She didn't
appear to be the sort of person someone would want to converse
with --or a girl who would have a boy who would send her flowers.
She wasn't the kind of girl for flowers. I mumbled: I bet no boy
leaves roses at your front door.

She stood still and watched me, did nothing but stand still. I began to
get irritated. I couldn't think with her staring into my face and
saying nothing. I wanted her to vanish. When my facial expression
showed this, she began to turn hostile. She used foul language. She
drew her tongue into her mouth and breathed fire. She even threatened
to zap me with a lightning bolt, if I didn't speak civil to her.

 The girl said, "I am Ann. What are you? You look mortal." She
sniffed. "Smell human. What are you?"

"Me? I am me," I replied. "I reckon in God's name you are a spirit of
damn, too much whiskey."

"God is irrelevant. You are a man, aren't you? Man is insignificant."

"I am a woman!" I stared. "And God is what?" I frowned, growled. I
was feeling guilty for blaming God for my recent loss. I took this girl to
be a creature of my conscience come to berate me. I was raised in the
church. Spent twelve years in Catholic schools, doing time under the
wardenship of several dutiful nuns. I knew the meaning of guilt.

"God is irrelevant," the girl repeated.

 "I say what is irrelevant. This is my dream." I'd had more than enough of
her. "Why am I talking to you? Better question: why have I dreamed
you? I'm fixing to make you vanish by waking up."

 Just then, a young man came through the hole in the wall that the girl
had opened with lightning bolts. On each arm he held two mask boys in
headlocks and dragged them along. They kicked, screamed, cursed. The
young man zeroed in on me, stared like he was seeing a talking fish.

"Who is she?" he asked the girl.

 She answered, "It appears she can see us. This is an unfortunate
situation."

 The young man barked at me, "Are you delusional?"

"Boy, I am not your dog. Don't bark at me!  I am god, your god ...,"
I took a sigh to calm, "... like. In a real sense I am y' all's creator."

"Are you claiming superiority to other humans?" the girl asked.

"Y'all are laughing at me." I might have rolled my eyes. "Y'all just fictions
from my imagination, therefore, in creating y'all and putting those words into
y'all's mouths, I am laughing at myself."

The young man looked at the girl. "She is drugged, incapable of knowing
what she has done."

"And what have I done?"

 The young man shook his head.

"Boy, are you going to answer my question?"

The girl said,  "Miss, you are in the wrong place at wrong time."

"I am in my house. Y'all are in my head. Won't yall just go? I want to think of
something else."

The young man asked the girl, "Must we kill her?" He asked her this as if he
was asking her to pass the peas. He looked and sounded creepy.

I laughed.

The girl replied, solemnly,  "No. We must understand how she can see us."

"Y'all are trying to frighten me. I am frightening myself. Why?  What am I feeling?
Self-hatred? Disdain? Abandonment? Self-pity?" I muttered talking to myself.
"I am not holding up? I am not measuring up?"

The girl interrupted, "You are disturbed."

 "Disturbed? Me! " I shouted. "You disturb me!"

"Your state of being is not ordinary," the girl said to me. "You are out of balance."

I shouted, "Don't talk to me!"

The rude young man barked, "Who are you to talk to, human?"

 "Don't zap her, Jacko," the girl said.

 I shouted, "Symbol-of-I-don't-reckon-what, be gone from my head!"

 The girl said to the young man, "We must take her with us to study
her."

 I shouted, "What in God's name moral are y'all here to preach?"
 The girl and the young man continued speaking to each other, for the
moment, ignoring me.

"Why are you abusing those young boys?" I shouted.

 "Young boys? Like in kids?" the young man shook his head again,
like he was in the presence of a retarded person.

 "Yes!"

"Look at them, " the young man barked. He shook both of his captives
until their mask fell off revealing monstrous faces, with large, protruding
ugly, yellow teeth, black tongues, and mouths drooling green bile.

My skin broke out in goosebumps. My entire body jumped, like I'd
been touched by a crawly thing, a spider or some nasty insect.

I looked away. The young man yelled at me to take a good look and I
took a quick peek, then looked at the floor.

"What are they?" I screeched.

 The two captives screeched in unison, "We, demons! Real cool
demons!"

The two screeched so loudly their noise set me trembling.

Within seconds, the room vanished. We stood in an open space,
void of everything but a bright, blinding light and a strong wind. I
quivered like a child, my arms and legs were cold and shaking.

 "Miriam, don't be afraid, sweetheart."

I heard a voice that sounded like my mom's, soft and reassuring,
and I felt a gentle comforting pat on my sweat-filled back.

"Mom!" I heard my own voice blurting aloud.

I turned my head and looked around for my dead mother, and I saw
IT behind me, poking me on the back of my shoulder. I screeched,

"God!"

A big rat, a giant rat, almost as big as me, stood on it hind legs,
and spoke with the voice of my mother. I ran from it. I got a few
yards from it in an instant.

I saw the black girl. She appeared into the nowhere. I was too
frightened by the rat to make mention of  hundreds of questions
I wanted answered.

"What's that?" I pointed, my finger shook.

The girl answered calmly, "It can't hurt you,  if you won't let it."

"Yes," I mumbled.  I tried to calm. I took deep breaths, held
my hand on my stomach. "I am having a nightmare, " I said
aloud. " I'll make it vanish right now."

The giant rat puckered its lips and made a kissy sound.  The rude
boy  and the  two demons caught in the rude boy's headlock appeared.
The two demons giggled. The giant rat said --

"Do you think you are dreaming, Miriam? Come to me, let me
bite you, and you will see."

Somehow, I knew I was wide awake. Don't ask me how. I just knew.
My heart pounded. The horror was real. The giant rat began to make
a leap, as it jumped off its feet to jump on me, the girl raised her
arms and BAM --the rat went up in a puff of smoke.

 The two captured demons became furious. They screamed loudly. Their
jowls puffed out, their faces turned blue. They twisted about on
their feet, tugged and pulled, struggled to break out of the headlocks.

The girl zapped them, with a  mild fire bolt from her hand. "Stop it! Are
you crazy?" She warned,  "Don't you know I will destroy you?"

"Witch!" the demons hissed, weaken by the power bolts.

With frustration and anger, I yelled at the girl. "What is going on!"

The girl replied, "With you? I need to interrogate you."

 I lost it for a minute. I  began to whine uncontrollably. I complained
about my life up until that point. I concluded my complaint by
attempting to explain this mess of unpleasantness with the hypothesis:
"I cursed God, He must have cursed me back."

The girl  replied,, "God is irrelevant."

An army of demons stormed out of the thin air-- Screeching! Screeching!
Screeching. I felt things grabbed me from behind and at my legs. I
grit my teeth and screamed.

 "Be calm," I heard the girl order me.

She battled the demons in back of me. I heard her power bolts zapping
away. I had no time to turn around and see. Demons appeared in front of
me. Demons everywhere! Demons all around me! They came by the
dozens, three squads at a time, straight for me. Fighting each other to get
to me, and to the girl, who kept  zapping them. I got angrier. I denounced
God again, accused Him of unfairly putting me into Hell. I yelled at Him,

"My eyes are open, I can see!"

The young man stood back from us, kept the two captured demons
in headlocks. The attacking demons didn't bother him. They attacked
me and the girl defending me. I watched the girl coolly killing every
demon around me, saying nothing as she slew them. I kept yelling at
her. She was too busy to respond. I became hysterical.

The young man answered, explained, "We are at war with the demons
all around us."

Soon, the attacking demons were gone, the two captured ones were
cowed. The girl stared at me.

 I asked her and the young man, "Are you angels?"

"Angels!" the young man scowled. "No, and you get ready to move
your ass and keep up!"

"I want to know what you are!"

"Quit your winding."

 "You are guardian angels!"

"We are going to transport to my place, " the girl announced.

 I said, "God sent angels to Abraham and to Lot to announce critical
news." I asked, "Is this near the end time?"

 The young man replied, "Quit bugging!"

 "You are the bodyguards of humanity?"

"Humanity is insignificant, " the girl said.