PROLOGUE
NEXT
SLIDE
PLEASE
I time-traveled in spirit long before I did so in bodily fact. Until the moment of my departure my life had been a slideshow of dreams divided one from another by many small darknesses of wakeful dread and anticipation. The dreams and the darkness sometimes alternated so rapidly that I couldn’t distinguish between them. An inability to tell waking from dreaming may be an index of madness or it may be a gift. After more than thirty years of trying to integrate the two into a coherent pattern I now know that it is, or was, my gift.
When I was four my father Hugo bought a slide projector from the BX, or base exchange, at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita Kansas. This machine featured a circular tray for slides and if you kept clicking the changer the same scenes the same past moments flashed repeatedly into fleeting prominence. In a way each slide wheel functioned as a time machine and the march of images on the wall or a hanging linen sheet continually recycled its tour of bygone days. Often then I found it more fun to have gaps in the tour, empty tray slots that translated into windows of blinding white light, partly because my father who spoke English with a distinct Spanish accent liked to create silly captions for those vacant squares:
Moby Deek’s backside!
Frosty the Snowman at a Koo Kloox Klan rally!
A polar bear swimmin in a vat of vanilla ice cream!
My sister Anna and I called out our captions most of them more juvenile than Hugo’s as our mother Jeannette who liked continuity urged him to get on with the show. She tried to keep the trays filled with slides each held a hundred to reduce the opportunities for nonsense. She didn’t lack humor but for her each slide wheel represented a living world, a mandala of bright recapturable experience. Her fun lay in viewing again every brilliant epiphany in the show.
After Hugo was moved from McConnell to Francis E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne Wyoming and Jeannette went to work for one of Cheyenne’s newspapers as a book columnist and feature writer our family took fewer photos. The slide trays still came out on birthdays, holidays, and Dad’s or Mom’s occasional moments of nostalgia but once you’d endured their programs five or six times they grew as predictable as TV sitcoms. John-John Pointing at Cows always preceded Jeannette Hauling John-John Out of Pasture and always followed John-John Bundled for October Walk. You could count on this sequence.
From the darknesses between clicks I began to create my own private slides. After my eighth birthday I often fell into a light trance whenever the projection equipment operated. I abandoned the here-and-now for a past more antique than the one flashing by on the wall. Already I was notorious within my family as a dreamer not the spaced-out chin-on-fist kind common to most classrooms but a rare visionary variety of dreamer and Jeannette’s apparent fondness for our slide programs stemmed partly from her well-meant wish to tie me to reality. She wanted to reinforce my allegiance to the Monegal family by impressing on me the indelibility the vividness of my tenure among the three of them.
Yes each slide wheel was a time machine albeit one with a limited range but it yoked us to the status quo. By ignoring the Monegal Family Past and investing each dark flash between slides with a freight of private meaning I subverted my mother’s intentions by distancing myself not only emotionally but also temporally.
When I was ten I played a joke that may have presaged the principal rebellion of my adolescence. Hugo, a noncommissioned minion of the Strategic Air Command, had just been sent from Cheyenne to Guam. Even though there were facilities for dependents on the island he’d reported unaccompanied. Not only to decrease the length of his tour but also to honor the demands of Anna happy at her current school and Jeannette now earning good money from her reviewing and feature writing. That no one had consulted me about my stake in the matter was no big deal because my dreams recurred wherever I happened to be. I tried to learn more about them though by visiting libraries and poring over magazines devoted to travel or natural history but with Hugo absent the three of us in Cheyenne seemed to be riding a dozen centrifugal interests outward from our family’s nuclear heart.
My joke? Well just before Christmas that year I took our slide equipment and the boxes containing its trays back to my room. There I spent a half hour or so randomly rearranging slides leaving gaps in sequences, slotting some transparencies sideways or upside-down. John-John Bundled for October Walk followed a topsy-turvy Jeannette Enjoying Beach at Cádiz, while Anna Watching Semana Santa Procession in Seville yielded to a sideways-slotted Grandfather Rivenbark Checking Out Customers at Old Van Luna Grocery. Then I returned the trays to their boxes and the boxes to their closet shelves.
On Christmas Eve Anna now fourteen fetched the slides and set up for another trip into the Monegal Family Past and we gathered in the dining room. I turned off the lights, Anna clicked her magic changer, and a wacky chaos ensued. Jeannette’s reaction to my vandalism wasn’t what I’d expected. She muttered, What the hell, gave me an appraising look, put her fingers into my wiry hair, and pulled my head into the pit of her arm. She refused to let go but I could tell she wasn’t angry just amused by the form my sedition had taken. Instead Anna flipped hectoring me about how long it would take to restore the slides to order and refusing to proceed with my slideshow travesty.
Damn it, Johnny! she said. You gotta fix this mess yourself! Don’t expect any help from me!
Anna, it’s all right, our mother said. Go on to the next one.
Mama, he’s mixed them all up!
Jeannette laughed. But we know what’s what so let’s just run through them and enjoy them as they come up.
How? Someone who’s never seen em wouldn’t know what’s going on. They don’t tell a story now. They’re just bits and pieces of . . . one big mess.
Anna, the story is in our heads. Why worry about a hypothetical somebody who doesn’t even know who we are?
Mama, I’m not going to reorder them.
Then don’t. I’ll do it. It won’t be hard. They’re numbered anyway so let’s just get on with it okay?
And Anna sullenly showed the slides in all their helter-skelter heels-over-head gap-ridden glory and I escaped punishment, for Jeannette had spoken truth: The story resided in our heads. The slides evoked their own context. I heeded the program the immutable one implicit even in this crazy shuffling as I hadn’t paid heed to any of our slides in a long time. The Monegal Family Experience shone with new life. My shuffling of its images conveyed nuances that linear sequence could not communicate. Each changer click signaled a revision and a gloss.
I lay my head on Jeannette’s breast thinking that she’d at last surrendered to the randomness of reality. But then I recalled her saying, They’re all numbered anyway and saw in the corner of each cardboard frame the tiny numerals she’d inked there as hedges against forgetfulness, entropy, chaos and these curdled my appreciation of my mother’s unusual tolerance of my prank. It was no chore to be great spirited when it was so easy to reset a jostled world to your liking: a boy’s uncharitable insight one chilly Christmas Eve in Wyoming.
Later an acne-ridden teen I rebelled more violently against another of Jeannette’s ill-advised attempts to impose order on my random experience.
And we both suffered.