The Children's Hospital

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I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it. So happy and so dead — it wakes me screaming every time.

The happy dream is the one where I hang myself and then set myself on fire (through merely an act of will) as I dangle from the oak in the Nottingham’s driveway — I know it is that tree because of the tar patch on the trunk that looks like a mocking face. I stab myself in the belly on the green of the seventh hole, and my blood flows in a torrent, filling up the low dells and the high hills of Severna Forest, until every house is floating, and every neighbor declaims from their porch, Finally, Calvin. Finally! They are scolding and congratulating me all at once.

If I have the one where I cut out my own heart and then put out my eyes, then I am buoyed up all day, and nothing can spoil my good mood. I know why it is so. If you are a born sacrifice, then knives and chains and fire are the things that comfort you. If I were born to be president, then dreams of long black sedans and budget summaries would give me the same feeling.

And it’s not even the hard part, dealing with that. It’s not keeping my violent dreams to myself, or practicing little violations on myself, or even imagining the really impossible ones: a person would need four arms to cut in such a way, and how can you cut out your tongue if you’ve already cut off a hand? The hard part is understanding how it can follow that a supreme act of violence against myself could be an end to violence.