Dreams.

Sleep...

 

2000

You arrive suddenly at a shallow river flowing through thick jungle. On the other side, a silverback gorilla with a spear, and a mask of mud and straw.

 

You regard each other silently for a moment.

 

“What is this place?” you call out.

 

The gorilla-man pauses. “We both know where we are.”

 

It’s true. You do know. But you do not want to accept.

 

“You must be thirsty,” he says. “Come down to the water and drink. It’s very sweet.”

 

You want to drink, but you do not like the tone of the gorilla-man. He would snatch you, you know.

 

(The mud mask is there because he is fucking rotting away dead! There is only fetor-slick skull beneath it.)

 

Many more times you find yourself back here, and each time there are more gorillas in mud masks, watching you, imploring you to cross over... One in the ford, close enough to snatch you...

 

You surmise, after a time, that they are in the Land of the Dead.

 

You are wrong.

 

You are in the Land of the Dead—they are in Limbo.

 

They want what you have, an afterlife.

 

 

2015

 

Garbage trucks downshift and gun black pennants from the pipes in order to crawl up the slope of a Möbius strip highway; as they invert across the sky the trash begins to spill out and rain down, only it isn’t trash, it’s babies, and people run to catch them in buckets and tubs (some padded with hasty quilts, some not) and as they thump down into the lucky bins and unlucky ground some onlookers get creamed with a six-story baby to the head, knocked flat, and the rest begin fighting on the gore-slicked pavement over the best parts, feeding and pulling hair as the first truck comes unstuck from the asphalt clouds and begins its ponderous, energy-gathering descent toward the crowd below...

 

 

2016

 

I had a cut on my arm, and as I investigated with gentle fingertips I felt a strange lump inside. I pressed and prodded and finally expressed the thing with not inconsiderable—but curiously pain-free—effort. Turning it over in my hands and wiping away blood and tissue the thing suddenly resolved into a weird teratoma: conjoined fetal skulls.

 

Being hollow, I decided I’d use it as a dice cup.

 

⁂

 

 

I was in an Ace of Base cover band.

 

I’d like to think we were called something cool like “Ass of Bass” but I didn’t have time to figure out the band name what with our whirlwind international stadium tour. Actual dream-thought: “Wow, fifty-thousand people are about to be deeply disappointed.” But somehow they loved it even though we weren’t nearly as good as the source material and I seemed to be organically predisposed to being incapable of remembering the lyrics.

 

⁂

 

 

2018

 

the man-frazzle on the throne leered from the smoke

 

⁂

 

 

a bikini rod is a lead dildo designed to prevent bikinis from going critical

 

⁂

 

 

Vacuum had become currency, and all the mines were in the sky. 

 

Everyone carried around little metal flasks, and you paid for something by letting air hiss into your flask. 

 

Using a pump to create more vacuum was counterfeiting.

 

 

2019

 

I went off-roading in deep desert canyons with J.K. Rowling. Afterward, she invited me to a party for billionaires, where I stumbled into a couple making hasty love in a bathroom. The man was in a hospital bed, complete with incomplete gown, tubes and wires. The woman invited me to join in but I just wasn’t sure how that might work, so I demurred.

 

⁂

 

 

I was in Italy, and there were no bathrooms.

 

⁂

 

 

My wife woke up, stretched, and said, “I was having a good dream, so I wanted to finish it.”

 

“What was it about?” I asked.

 

“We were swinging—”

 

“???”

 

“—but it was for a good cause. We did it to break up an international spy ring; we were having the press conference about it when I woke up.”

 

Upon further questioning I learned it also involved Disneyland, numerical tattoos, animatronics, me taunting the animatronics and the animatronics painting me with goo—a goo that would allow them to track us anywhere in the world.

 

This is pretty much why we’ve been married 30 years.

 

 

2020

 

The dreamgirl said I fucked better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I got that going for me.

 

⁂

 

 

The board game I designed in my sleep last night had two resources: chrome & blood.

 

⁂

 

 

Fog is actually ghoul urine—they piss it into air after they devour a corpse, and in enormous quantities.

 

⁂

 

 

The good news: The Fountain of Youth has been discovered! Peel back the years! Live smooth and bendy and pain-free like you did in an earlier onion-layer of yourself!

 

The bad news: It requires threading a throbbing lumpy-chunky vat-grown umbilicus from a lady’s hoo-ha to a man’s belly button, and they have to remain within five feet of each other for months and months and months like an eye-rolling performance art piece.

 

The worser news: It only works for men, and for some reason men are having a hard time finding women who will put up with that shit.

 

⁂

 

 

The dog has dog toys that contain microscopic pixel art made from individual atoms which require a special viewer to see. Patrick Stewart warns me that I shouldn’t look at them too much, as every time you look—aw, shit, there goes another one.

 

⁂

 

 

Riann Wilson had a ludicrous horse penis, and wanted to shoot some hot “lucky Pierre” action with his girlfriend and another man who also had a tentacular member. The kink was that this wouldn’t be any mere x-rated movie, but an x-ray movie, so really just grindy skeletons with ghost-meat wafting around them. I’m not sure if I was the director or coffee boy, but at one point I accidentally walked in front of the beam and stood there, gawking, for something like four astronauts’ worth of chest x-rays.

 

⁂

 

 

a fragment: 

 

by concentrating really hard, like so hard I could only hold onto it for the briefest of moments, I could shapeshift—not into terrestrial animals but things completely alien and unknowable... 

 

and then my mind would flag and I’d pop back into a people shape

 

⁂

 

 

The aliens were ultradense gray prisms, man-sized, thin and angled—but I didn’t know that yet as they were wearing people-suits. They were very helpful, nudging me in all the right directions as I tried to figure out the mysterious flight characteristics of the UFO I saw. It spun with a wobble due to the hideous mass of the pilots themselves! When I saw through their ruse (imagine a pry bar as heavy as a truck inside a blowup doll) they showed me another human who knew them, one they had convinced to build his house over a volcanic vent which they then triggered. And that’s how I came to do all this petty shoplifting, officer—they demand Slim Jims and nail polish, and they’ll kill me if I don’t!

 

Then there was a hazy part about my hotel room, and how one entire wall was open to a busy shopping mall, which made getting dressed interesting.

 

⁂

 

 

There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas. It used to walk but somebody smashed its legs. What will it do when it gets to Vegas? No one knows... but it won’t be good. People drive out into the desert to see it, to stand on its back, to attach their cars by ropes and chains and have a picnic while it drags them ever on. Some people put things in its way for it to crawl over or around or tunnel under, stunts it pulls with dogged, machine-like tenacity. There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas...

 

⁂

 

 

The mariachis—hundreds of them—were dead in the park because the cartel had glued their faces shut. I drove over a few, with great wincing regret, in my efforts to flee the scene.

 

⁂

 

 

A titanic moth, dead, gliding still in the upper atmosphere... A city built upon its back, flight maintained by the Pinion Guild. No one talks about the Antennae People... or the Mouth Mines.

 

⁂

 

 

The guy in the disco cowboy outfit wore an undergarment body rig that vibrated him into invisibility so he could shoot people at the party... Luckily for all of us Will Smith had a head clamp that vibrated his head at the same frequency, so he shot him first.

 

⁂

 

 

The Melungeons who were hosting the convention in the swamp had bred two enormous hamsters—like the size of mid-size sedans—to act as guardians. As I was making my way out of the swamp I saw that they had killed a stag, and though they ignored me (perhaps I still smelled of the convention?), I kept my souvenir cardboard tube pointed at them, knowing it wouldn’t do a goddamn thing if they decided to charge.

 

⁂

 

 

This is what happens when you flip randomly through the choose-your-own-adventure dream:

 

- The robot was a three-foot black chrome skull suspended between two wagon wheels, and it wanted my burrito. We fled (the burrito and I), but the burrito was so scared it shit itself, beans down my forearm, tortilla gone floppy, as we hurriedly picked through the ruins, and that terrible, hungry robot rolled impossibly ever on...

 

- As the armored troop carrier screeched to a halt in front of me, its angular door scything upward, I shook my lunchbox, a self-constructing mini-missile launcher that unfolded over my shoulder and into my hand, placing the trigger over the pad of my right index finger—I squeezed and popped a pencil-thin missile that tracked for the vehicle interior in glorious super slo-mo...

 

- I slid toward wakefulness in the middle of a confused ramble about the Second Amendment with a female firearms instructor who was infatuated with my beard (she was a staff member of a post-apocalyptic CITADEL OF KNOWLEDGE where handsome and beautiful young people in uniform yoga pants learned to shoot real good); I clawed at the fabric of sleep to haul myself back in to add nuance to my point, which was far too blunt—

 

⁂

 

 

Super stoked to have coined the word “intranquil”—woke to find it already in the dictionary. Somewhere, somehow it darted in through the eyes or ears and lay dormant in the sediment of the unconsious, needing only the stick of sleep to stir it up...

 

What else is down there?

 

WHAT ELSE

 

⁂

 

 

On Mars, no one is interested in my new book, Astrology on Mars.

 

⁂

 

 

When you’re the only human in the room on the pregnant vampire’s due date, run.

 

⁂

 

 

I am the walking life support for a killer whale. His heart has failed him and so the arm-thick red and blue hoses plugged into my chest mean my heart is beating for two. I can go places, but not very far. Outwardly, I worry that my meagre monkey heart can’t possibly serve us both—but it’s somehow working, I feel his ocean-bullet strength in me and am secretly proud.

 

 

⁂

 

 

...and wake.

The part where we're done.

Part I —  All-in on alien.

On the screens above their rainbow heads it's all tentacle sex, gaping and surging, eyes wide and watering, what happens, perhaps, when your culture gets gut-punched by two nukes.  Below it's all human-enough—people-shaped, smells unfamiliar but not outright wrong, sounds like laughter, anger, need—it's just that it's not coming through on the right channels.  The faces mean the same things, they're just unfamiliar to my uninitiated gut.  So I keep my head down and suck my noodles alone.

Barking syllables, repeated, give me the he means me jolt, repeated again because you never look up until you're sure, and when I do the other face is clearly pissed off, same family after all.  His body language is a giant sneer, and he repeats himself, this time with a two-finger poke into my shoulder that twists my skeleton.  My hand wants a gun like a prayer wants God, but they don't let you fly like that around here and my contacts were all head-shakes on the weapons part.  I decide to play dumb until I have to hit him.

I turn in my seat to free a boot from the bar rail and line it up, all sneaky-like, with his inseam.  That's when I see the tats and know this isn't random.  He barks again and I think about a chain of events that doesn't start with me getting shot, but does have me rabbiting through an Orwellian panopticon, built to prevent pretty much everything I might think of to escape.  There's a ludicrous car chase that ends with a hostage I don't want and a cartoon sniper taking the shot—

Through the super slo-mo of brains-blood-teeth-single-flapping-eye I see her step forward in the unusual direction and engage him with hot gibberish.  His face does this thing like he's been asked to fuck a three-headed dolphin and he turns with comic leisure, the leading edge of him a barely contained backhand slap.  They trade sounds and faces and postures that ratchet ever upward and finally he hits her, spinning her hair into a dark shining spiral.  She puts a hand to her face and withdraws.  He turns to ignore her and perhaps give me some, then folds his arms with the arrogance that comes from living with a tribe of thugs at your back, feet wide in genital-wagging bravado.  And then she's back with a stick produced from nowhere, the first crack across his skull almost quiet, then magnified on the second shot by his open mouth when she breaks it over his head, grabs him by the hair and pumps the jaggy end into his gargling neck three, four times.  He hits the floor and curls sideways like a gill-sprung fish where she takes an athlete's windup and kicks him in the brain hard enough to make the rest of his passing painless.  The whole thing is almost refreshingly familiar, human, humane.  Comparatively speaking.

She eyeballs everyone in the joint and they give her a radius like a force field.  "You," she says to me, "he will see you."

Part II — In through the out door.

We didn't fuck in the car, though it smelled like we might, with all the unbuttoned humanity freighting the air.  That came later at the coffin hotel where she went at it with the workmanlike enthusiasm of a bucket-list tick, all business and taking care of herself, my own orgasm slapped out of me at the last moment like a half-forgotten ellipsis dot dot dot.

"You need a better hotel.  Another driver will take you to one."  She slid into her pants and to the hatch, popped it and sat on the edge, a wilding shape.  "Clean yourself and wait for the call."

Her walk away, pulling her scent with her, was that ancient, ultimate ad:  This way to the eggs.  Loud enough to tell from the other side of a roaring river whether or not it was worth the swim.

Later.

Cigarette smoke and a ringing in my miserable head that comes from having a firearm discharged too close, these are the things they leave me with.  Instead of a finger I have the object of interest, grasped in a half-hand and bloody towel.  It's a cylinder of quartz with the top taken off at a funny angle, fine silvery-white tracings inside that hint at puzzle pieces, constructed, not flaws.  If they knew what I know, they wouldn't have left it with me, traded it for the puffs of nothing that are promises, information, gold.

When I move my mind a certain way and regard the object just so I am lopped and hollowed, sectioned, an exploded view of myself, and the shame at so few moving parts is one of those parts, making it an embarrassingly large percentage of what I am.

Time passes and I fall through places chasing understanding, ejected from the penthouse within 24 hours, then a week at the coffins, a month in an aptly named hostel, the better part of a year in the streets where no one really lives.  When understanding finally dawns in fullness, it's because I've become extenuated enough for the caverns of darkness to shine through, those dense overhead miles encompassed by my smeared gaze.  I'm the only thing that reflects anything in here and I can see that I'm done.

When it comes it's like a migraine tear, space-time jabbed and pressed into and nothing I can say can describe it—it struggles with an earnestness we would call "rage" but that doesn't even come close.  We are thin in a way it is dense and the pull of its gravitational emotion smudges the edge of what I am, permanently.

Part III — It'll come to me.

One outrageous act, it's all I can afford, all I'll have—I almost said "time for", but of course that's meaningless where I'm going, where I am.  Too many open doors showing the trajectory of my life, points connected in a neat spiral with a sudden, paper-tearing pulse off the table.  It will find me, it's only a matter of—"time" is wrong, again.

And so I open doors along the curve of the harbor, looking for that summertime past, through the uprights of the dragon-tailed torii, traditional thresholds delimiting the sacred from the profane—which side is which cannot be determined here.  I push against a current of time, following the regression of modernity, everything bulking, simplifying, steel and concrete curling into wood and paper, clothing losing the conqueror's twang for something more authentic.  

I follow a rising wind that hums with the attenuated shades of once-people, it grows to choking with their ashes as I cross into a stain upon the world, a graveyard convulsed and inverted, its underside crawling with smoking ghouls.  The air growls and grows ever hotter until it ignites into screaming tongues of flame that recede toward a mad point in the sky where they compress themselves into a sudden apocalypse of light.

It is the summer of 1945, and children play in the park.

Everything stops when they see me, their headmistress calling to gather them back across the sward.  The children's faces are unafraid, observant at the sight of me out of nowhere, my flesh a door to forever, a beacon that calls to the thing beyond for whom time itself is meat and drink.

There's a little girl ahead of the group, an outlier with a red bow at her neck, and we both run for her.  I scoop her into my arms and she is light and calm until her headmistress screams and the girl turns her little head and begins to cry, infected with terror.

"I'm sorry," I say, and let the torrent of time drag us back.

My stuttered self sets her on new grass with new children and she has only just left my hands when I am consumed

.

The bathtub sloshes in the humid dark. It sloshes because it is filled with... liquid, a liquid that submerges and contains. A man cowers in the corner, a tiny, crumpled man, a man who fears for the end of bathtub liquid containment. He has in his possession a certain clock that can count those hours—has been counting those kernels of seconds mounded in cupped hands of minutes—since it was first constructed and wound by trembling, doom-palsied fingers. The man's fear is compounded by the essential paradox of clocks: that such devices are incapable of measuring the infinite (so it would seem, though it has never been true for anyone) ray of time, instead clipping, with their gear-work, a 12-hour segment joined at the ends like the Ouroboros wyrm. The horrid clock mocks the illusion of Eternity with the same 60 seconds, the same 60 minutes, the same 12 hours repeated for as long as the spring holds the nervous tension of those original hands. The man's true fear is not that things will end but that he must endure the anxiety of his circumstance in an unchanging, undying cycle as the bathtub sloshes in the humid dark. 

Question 1: When the alarm sounds, is it a heart attack, poop, or both?

Question 2: This is not a question: Let's involve a monkey with a radio collar (or bomb) somehow.

Ilsa and the Death of Doubt

Beneath the thumping floorboards, Ilsa hugged the hatbox and shivered, eyes squeezed shut. She tried to make herself as small as possible, pulling her knees up to her chest, collapsing inward, crumpling her consciousness into a tiny, infinitesimal wad. The final, fearful refuge of a prey animal, retracting into the crevices of the mind. I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not—

Above, the Ukrainians were making a mess of the Professor's lab. Drawers yanked from desks bounced hollow and metallic, papers fluttered like her heart. Something heavy crashed into glass again and again. Strange liquids began to seep and smoke into the crawl space. The sting in her lungs yanked her out of her mind-hole and a wave of panic gushed after.

"Here!" an accented voice bellowed, "There's a trapdoor under the table! The old man was lying! You two, move it!"

More crunching glass, grunting and a low scrape vibrated the boards above her head.

Ilsa looked at the hatbox. "I have no choice," she whispered. But the Professor said—

Another scrape, longer this time. A sliver of light slashed her face.

"Forgive me," she breathed. Ilsa upended the hatbox and the pearlescent garment spilled out, finer than silk, unrolling like liquid moonlight. She peeled her own dress up over her head in the cramped space, kicking her shoes away. Her bra came off with the one-handed trick, the envy of all man-kind, and she briefly bridged to peel her panties down over her pear-shaped ass and rolled them off her legs and gone. She gripped the second skin, oily and vaguely luminescent, hesitating for what could very well be the last time.

Above, more boots now, more grunting.

"I want her alive!" the voice barked. Scattered laughter followed.

Ilsa's hesitation broke and she thrust her feet into the legs, feeling the thing snug about her toes; she pulled it up, over her hips and cool across her tummy. The impossible task of finding the arms in an everyday bodysuit was absent—the thing wanted to be worn. She didn't so much slip into it as it slipped onto her. All that was left was the hood. What will it be like, she wondered, will I ever come back?

Another scrape and more light.

She yanked the hood over her head and it swallowed her face, her self, whole. The Insanitard claimed another rider.

Black was white, the moon was made of kittens. And knives, knives came alive in throats.

So close, so close, grown men struggled with a mere table.

"Hurry it up!" Ilsa growled, flexing against the trapdoor.