September 2015
The dreams have returned. The same cold panic that woke me as a child and made me rush from my bed with a pounding heart. They always begin with the rushing noise, then the images and finally the paralysis.
I know the noise but then the images appear. Fire. And the screams of animals. Sometimes it is a fleeting image of flames, sometimes it seems so real that I can feel the heat on my face and smell the stinging smoke in my nostrils. And the screams. A deafening crescendo of inhuman bellowing that rings in my ears long after I am standing in my bedroom desperately trying to order my thoughts – Who am I? Where am I? Cold sweat sticks to my skin and my heart is beating so hard hat I think it might break my ribcage any moment.
But the worst thing is the paralysis. I remember reading in a book that it is called “sleep paralysis”, some sort of state between being awake and being asleep. Your body is asleep but your brain is active. Some people hallucinate demons into their bedrooms, others feel a pressure on their chest but I am lying in bed unable to move, desperately trying to fend off the flames that are licking at my face while the screams are close to blowing out my eardrums. I try to move my arms and legs but a numb paralysis makes it unable to move. Seared with panic I try to scream but my voice does not obey me anymore.
More than once I was lying over the toilet bowl to regurgitate half-digested food, shaken by muscle spasms that I can feel hardened in my back and shoulders days later.
The “fire dreams” are increasing in the last months and they mingle with the other ones. The ones that come in October. The ones since Carl disappeared.
I walk through the woods, in which we saw it and I can hear Carl’s laughter behind the trees. When I look around the trees and I think I can see him and hear his snorting child’s laugh sound behind another tree. Suddenly the laughter turns into crying and I can hear various children weeping behind the trees. Then there’s a man standing in front of me but I don’t know him. Panic-stricken I shake off the paralysis and I realize that my pillow is soaked in tears. I am having these dreams since I am ten years old and they always come to me when the day of Carl’s disappearance approaches annually.
I think it is the attempt of my brain to recapitulate what happened in order to process it. But the “fire dreams” are new. I have been dreaming them for only one year. Through some kind of psychological short circuit I sometimes think I am hearing the children crying in the fire or the animals screaming in the forest. What I am always hearing is the hated noise. The noise from the 17th of October, 1996.
1996
Carl der Ruiter was my best friend. Since our first day at the Friedrich-Schiller elementary school we were inseparable. We were joined by the shared outsiderdom of overwrought boys that are lost in their fantasy world for hours. While the other children were in the local football team or chasing through the woods with their mountain bikes, we were staying at home, drawing endless cards of fantasy worlds or playing Warcraft 2, later recreating the epic war between orcs and humans on playgrounds or in the nearby forest. Carl was always the orc, while I was always the human. Just like I always was the ninja turtle Rafael, while Carl was Michelangelo. And no turtle suited him better than goofy Michelangelo.
Carl had an explosive snorting laugh that made my mother and even the teachers laugh when he let it detonate in the classroom.
He imagined the strangest monsters and drew them meticulously on printing paper and was scared the most by the fuzzy VHS tapes his cousing gave him. Secretly we watched Mortal Kombat, Terminator and Army of Darkness, Carl always hiding behind his hands when Ash fell into the pit. Of course we didn’t say anything to our parents just like we painstakingly hid the booklet of Warcraft 2 because it showed an orc licking blood from a chopped-off head.
I think our mothers were worried because of our excessive imagination, especially when Carl made the barbie dolls of my sister to the prisoners of Shredder.
When Carl disappeared he left a black hole that sucked everything into it. From one day to the next he vanished from the face of the earth, like the ground swallowed him up. The police searched for him, deducted, questioned but Carl had turned into a memory in a matter of a few weeks. The lively boy was gone. His body was never found. Thousands of children dissappear every year in Germany but almost 99 percent reappear. Carl never reappeared.
The hysterical screams of his mother, his crying father, the troubled faces of my parents and teachers and the empty chair in the classroom shattered my childhood like a hammer blow. I prayed to God at night for Carl to come back or searched for him in the woods. In a way I am still searching for him in the woods in my dreams.
Sometimes I wished his body would be found to receive the closure that also his parents desperately wished for. But Carl remained gone.
He was seen for the last time, leaving school but he never made it home.
I was shell-shocked. But not only because of Carl’s dissappearance but also because of the thing that happened a few weeks before on the 17th of October.
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