Dream Thing

The lady missionary didn’t see this as a reasonable compromise. In fact, she became enraged and violent. She disrupted Okyek Meh Thih’s village temple and she found his book on psychotherapy. “Filth!” she named it, and threw it into a cooking pot.

Okyek Meh Thih retrieved it, cleaned it in pure water, and set it out to dry in the sun.

Then the woman missionary turned her rage on the bird, Chak. “Who put English filth into the mouth of this evil beast?”

Okyek Meh Thih answered that the beast wasn’t evil, and he asked her to refrain from saying so, for she insulted the People in a way she could not understand. As for his bawdy poetry, it had come from the anthropologist.

“The creature learns our words with much skill, so my good friend taught the poetry to the bird. My good friend assured me the poetry of the bird would be of much assistance to the People when the missionaries came.”

The woman sputtered. The bird chose that moment to perch above her and recite one of his favorite poems.

For fifty-odd years the old maid

bitter and angry she stayed

she’d be way less grumpy

if she’d just try some humpy

’cause what’s more fun than getting laid?

The woman went into paroxysms of fury. “Did you hear it?”

“Pushed your button!” the bird squawked excitedly.

The woman found herself the center of attention, and she turned more red than any human being the Caretaker had ever seen. She responded in the only way she knew how.

“That bird is possessed of evil! It is God’s will that it be removed from His earth.” She snatched a burning stick from a cook fire and attacked the bird.

The great purple macaw laughed and his head followed the pretty flames swinging back and forth under its branch. The People were mortified. Chak was more than just a favorite pet of their Caretaker and a friend of all the People—he was, maybe, the embodiment of a revered forefather.

The People, all of them together, escorted the missionary and her companions away and invited them never to return.

The anthropologist’s book was swollen from getting wet, but still legible after it dried, and from it Okyek Meh Thih found a method for dealing with the People who came to him dreaming of the old god called Chuh Mboi Aku. The book told him that most dreams among all human beings were about one subject only.

“It is a phallus,” he would tell them. “You dream of the fertility that blesses you and your family.”

“But in my dreams, the thing came out of the jungle was tall as a mountain,” the dreamer might tell him. “It rained down hot on the jungle for miles in all directions, farther than the People have ever ventured.”

“You dream of the magnificent semen of your bloodline, so powerful it has touched even other Peoples,” Okyek Meh Thih told them. “Did you not share your semen with the women of the People of the River Down the River when we met for our Feast of Peoples? I think your great semen has blessed those Peoples just as it has blessed ours.”

This tale worked well with men, as well as with women, and it transformed their night terrors into delight. His grandfather would have been proud of him.

Rarely they came with the other tales of Chuh Mboi Aku—the dreams in which they laid their eyes on Chuh Mboi Aku himself, who was possessed of multiple tentacles that writhed and snatched up prey. “Those are phalluses,” Okyek Meh Thih told his People. “You are dreaming of the many wonderful penises of your blessed bloodline and the splendor of those penises, for you and your brothers and father and sons and nephews all hunt well for the People and protect the People and spread your wonderful semen magnificently among the Peoples!”

It was gratifying how splendidly these explanations worked for him. The book was truly invaluable. Clearly, the wisdom of some from beyond the jungle was great—although clearly some, like the missionary, were great fools.

And the lie of the phalluses was a harmless one, for who would have thought the dreams would ever come true? For a hundred generations the dark secret of Chuh Mboi Aku was kept by his forefathers, and never had it come true.

Now the dreams were suddenly coming all too frequently. There were many of the People who were having the dreams every night so that they couldn’t sleep. They had the dreams every time they collapsed into just a moment of slumber. They awoke in terror.

“No more can we accept these interpretations of towering manhood,” they proclaimed. “What else could they be?”’

That was when the father had come with his daughter, who was in madness from her dreams and her torment of sleeplessness. That was when the Caretaker decided to go search for answers in the mountain, in the cave. It seemed unlikely that he would find enlightenment there, but his grandfather said that he must meditate on the painting …

So he turned away from his village, feeling like he was betraying them all, and walked away from the People in their hour of greatest need.

Chapter 20