My mother would get home from her job as a middle school nurse, turn on the TV, and watch her favorite daytime soap from the DVR. I’d be at the kitchen island, eating my Lean Cuisine chicken tikka and trying to follow along with the show from across the room. She’d fast-forward through the storylines she didn’t like, and press play, for some unknown reason, on every pharmaceutical commercial, careful to catch the listed side-effects before skipping ahead. For me, the viewing experience was like a variegated dream, controlled by another dreamer.
One day, my mother paused mid-scene to use the bathroom. The screen was frozen on a blonde actress, her back turned away as she walked towards the manor’s spiral staircase. Most of the show’s dramatic action took place in a large family mansion, an ornate and somewhat German Expressionist-inspired set that seemed at odds with the show’s tawdry conflicts. At first, I took no notice of the still image, focused solely on the masala as I poured it into my white rice. But at some point, I looked up. And that’s when I saw it—in front of the actress, above the marble stairs, hung a painting of a yellow tree. It was this artwork that triggered my memory, buried deep down and not thought of since its inception, clear-cut and pristine in the mind’s replay. On the night of our family’s near-death car crash a few years prior, I had a vision during surgery. A fair-haired woman painted a golden fig tree. And myself, much older, watched her from behind. I realized that such a tableau was not the mere offspring of a misfired synapse, but a sign from the future. A still frame of the soap opera, projected into the past. Using the dream-vision as indisputable evidence, I convinced myself that I was, indeed, a prophet.
When my mother returned from the toilet, she found me pressed up against the LCD. I turned to her, and in my excitement, made the crucial mistake of pulling back the curtain on my circular thoughts. Oh those mental iron maidens! The phantasmagoric framework of your shit and your piss, the secret conspiracy of the inanimate, your solipsistic certainties, the putrid smells you secretly like, your relationship to all these things as they poke and prod you like a circus animal—one should never reveal such intimate designs to anyone. And yet, I did. To my own mother. On and on I went about the image of the fig tree and my powers of precognition. It was not until I caught the look in my mother’s eyes that I trailed off into silence. In that moment, her field of vision had rapidly widened. She could see the trajectory of this pivotal event as it collided with my future milestones, knocking them askew. And as I stood there, fidgeting in front of the TV, my mom realized (as she tried to explain to me many years later) how great the horrors were that lay outside a parent's purview, worse than any petty fears of drug use or academic failure. That an ancient madness was still out there in the ether, one she thought to be locked away in pre-war basements and government laboratories. Anxious gods who reached out from the void and wrapped their tendrils around the softest flesh they could find.
But at the time, my mother said nothing. She only nodded her head and pressed play on her stories.
