I Heard the Owl Call my Name
Oh, if ye saw what I see
- Molly Whuppie
I will paint my picture,
Paint myself blue and red and black and gray,
All of the beautiful colours are very, very meaningful,
Gray is my favourite colour,
I felt so symbolic, yesterday,
If I could meet Picasso,
I would buy myself a gray guitar and play.
- Mr. Jones, The Counting Crows
You get to open your eyes once, and then, there it is. There's no real shock, no sense of falling, or of dread. There's just everything the same as it was. The little room where both Sam and Dean are sitting, talking to the doctor. Outside, there's still sunlight. The clock on the wall is still working, ticking by the seconds. Vaguely, he can hear two orderlies discussing what their plans are for the evening.
"Man, I heard that movie's horrible."
"Are you kidding me? You can't trust what the critics say."
Orderly Number One shakes his head, "No way in hell am I spending ten bucks on it, though. Whether I trust the critics or not. I'll wait until it's out on DVD and rent it."
"Well, what do you want to see instead?" Number Two asks. John watches them pass right by the open door, uninterested in the two men in the room they pass by, or the man watching from the hallway.
Somehow, that makes this situation real. John frowns, turns his attention back to his sons, and thinks, What the hell does this mean?
Take two and three quarters. It's not opening your eyes anymore. There is no blinking, no sleep, nothing but the clocks that tick by. John finds he can go wherever he wants to. Nothing holds him back. He visits Mary's grave, visits Ellen, visits Missouri who stops what she's doing for a moment, and looks up with a worried expression. He gets to go see Mount Rushmore, gets to see the Vietnam Memorial Wall. John is a ghostly drifter, wandering the back-roads. Sometimes he meets others. There's the guy outside the entrance to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dressed in bell bottoms and a bright purple shirt, or the girl in Georgia whose blond hair is done up in pigtails. They never say anything to him, and he's never quite sure what to say to them. They don't seem entirely aware of what's going on. The little girl didn't seem to see him anyway. Sometimes, he sees other things. Faint, strange swirls of dust out of the corner of his eye. His first thought is that they are all lost spirits, but he doesn't think he's a spirit, or at least, not a spirit in the classic sense. When he's with his boys, Dean's EMF meter stays silent. This is some place in-between.
In his mind he has a memory of white hospital walls, raised voices, and a glass of water (carefully placed) that goes flying across the room. There is a vague picture of Dean wandering hospital hallways, listening to John and Sammy fight, unable to mediate, unable to stop it, frustrated, angry, hurt, dying. The image is terrifying. His boy, all alone and yet not. Unheard. John thinks, that's what I saved him from, but on the tail of that is the idea that that half-existence was not Dean's fate. He can't compare his own current state to that, either. Dean had a body to go back to, and John doesn't.
No wind blows wherever John is, but it's always disgustingly cold. Not the type that burns, like in winter when you don't have mittens and you stick your hands in snow; they turn red, and blowing on them makes them ache. No, this cold is just bad enough to make you want to get inside, sit by a warm fire; a miserable autumn day when it rains and you get soaked to the bone.
Three months, two days, and four hours. John's learning to count time differently. He's tired of the United States and wonders if he could move on to Europe. He always wanted to go to Rome, see the Coliseum. But he's a father, first and foremost, now (if not before when it counted). He sits in the backseat of the Impala while his sons drive in silence.
He's not sure what he expected. Not Mary, because she's gone. Gone for good. Or returned to the most basic form of existence, mere dust particles in the air of the living world, and still gone. But his boys are alive, and that should be worth something more, shouldn't it?
Sam says, "I want to stop for food."
And Dean doesn't say anything at all. John might be somewhere else, but even on this plane, this whatever and wherever it is he currently lives in, he can still feel the tension between the two. He wonders what he's missed in his sojourns.
They pull into a rest stop and Sam climbs out of the car, stretching his long limbs. John watches him until he's disappeared into the convenience store, then turns his attention to Dean. His elder son grips the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles are white. He stares straight ahead, not aware of anything out of the ordinary. The car is still on, idling, like Dean's prepared to leave--
Sammy behind
-- in a hurry. For the first time, John notices the silence. Sam comes back. The sound of the car door opening and closing is loud.
John remembers Dean at four years old, completely silent, unable to form the words around his grief. The teachers all thought he was challenged. They'd leave messages on the phone, arrange for meetings between counsellors and psychologists for the boy. None of them understood Dean's need to stay quiet, that subtle fear John's son had of letting it all go and finding nothing left.
When Sam puts on the radio, John can't explain the sudden sense of iciness that surrounds him. There is a swirl of dust out of the corner of his eye. When he turns to look, he sees a guy in his mid-thirties watching him from underneath the awning of the rest stop convenience store. Then Dean pulls away, and the man gets smaller and smaller until he isn't there anymore, but John knows he's still watching.
After Dean lost his virginity at the ripe age of thirteen in a completely unexpected manner, John had wished that he could be a fly on a wall to understand his son. Sammy was nine, still worshiping--
Dean
--John like he could do no wrong. But Dean, just entering into that awkward teenaged stage of his life, interests changing faster than the weather in Tornado Alley on a summer's day. The idea that his son would end up doing it with a twenty-year-old woman in the library washroom while John researched was so remote, so unexpected. Dean was supposed to be…John didn't know what Dean was supposed to be at that age, but prepared, with condoms in his wallet, wasn't one of them. How had his son known this? Who had taught him? And where was John when, in the end, he walked in on them and didn't figure out that there hadn't been some sort of bizarre accident until he was halfway back to where he had left Sammy?
Well, here he is, a fly on the wall while Dean, always so quiet when he's hurting in that place deep inside, starts to talk. Really talk.
Sam liked to talk. He would question, explore, research, argue when he needed to know, needed to express something that was beyond the normal dynamics of John. Dean, he didn't argue, didn't cry, didn't even blink when a twenty-year-old seduced him in a
library. It was a matter of doing for Dean, getting everything--
life
--over with. John had always figured it was cleansing for his older boy.
But talking? Settling in, saying it out loud?
When he'd first opened his eyes, standing in the hospital hallway while those two orderlies discussed their plans for the evening, John had thought, What the hell does this mean?
He is beginning to understand.
Three months, twenty-seven days, one hour, two minutes. He feels like a robot. How's that for weird? He's dead--
Not quite
--but he's still here. He can go anywhere he wants to go. Sometimes, he goes and visits Ellen and Jo. He listens to them argue, watches Gordon go from insane to mad (as if there is a difference), watches Dean talk more and more while Sam listens like he knows what's going on. Dean had said Sam had visions of the future. John wonders why his youngest can't see the storm that's coming, even if it is from an unexpected source. At night, John whispers in his son's ear, but Sam can't hear him, and John can't leave a message.
He watches the dust move out of the corner of his eye. His joints are aching from the constant cold, and all he wants is a mug of hot chocolate like Mary used to make. The people on the side of the road continue to look through him. He tries to talk to them, but they don't seem to hear him or see him or sense him.
One day he follows Dean into Wal-Mart. There's this little old woman who's trying to pick up a knife set box that she's dropped on the floor. Without a thought, Dean helps her. He smiles at her, wishes her a good day.
John shouts at his son, tries to warn him as the old woman's eyes switch from faded green to endless black. She gives a little chuckle and winks at him. There is frustration building in his chest, an itch that is deep under the skin and can't be scratched. He thinks he's going crazy. In the back of his head is that new internal clock counting the months, days, minutes, seconds. He thinks, if I could breathe, I'd be holding my breath.
"You should have made that deal. See people talk about hell but it's just a word, it doesn't even come close to describing the real thing. If you could see your daddy, hear the sounds he makes because he can't even scream anymore."
John wants to say, Demon's lie. On the sides of the road, a woman is walking in her bare feet. John stares at her as they pass. She doesn't look up, doesn't seem to even know there's a car on the road. She's dressed in a period piece. He wonders how long she's been here, wherever that is.
Dean talks to Sam, but in the end, he can't answer. John thinks about giving flowers too much water, the way they drown, slowly and surely. Sam leans in, desperate to hear, needing to know. Outside, the thing that was once a woman fades into the background. The clock in John's head ticks away mercilessly and he has a sudden urge to try and dig it out. He has a feeling he could do it, too. The only thing he can feel is this horrible fucking cold, and he just needs to get warm.
Four months, two days, and four hours. There is no sleep, no blinking. You don't open your eyes because they're already open, staring straight ahead. It feels like those horror movies where you know something bad is going to happen, something so terrible that if you see it, you're going to go crazy…but you can't look away, and that's the most terrifying thing about it. He can still hear the blasting music from the car speakers when he puts his hands over his eyes, but what he sees is the woman at the side of the road, dressed in early settler period style, wandering aimlessly, no destination in mind.
The music is ear crushingly loud. John wants to say, Demon's lie but he's too busy screaming and his boys, breaking down slowly from outside and inside pressure until there will be nothing left, won't be able to hear him.