Geof Huth
Dreamovies
Dreamovie 2 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, March 11, 2007)
I waited too long to note down today’s scrap of dream, so I have only slivers of memories of it that I’ll try to reconstruct.
There is a dark hallway at night, lined with windows, somewhat like an enclosed porch. I am in the hallway with someone and Bill Cosby. No idea why. There is snow or ice outside, and it glows a bit in the dark.
And the rest is lost.
Dreamovie 6 (North Easter Island Road, Englewood, Florida, Saturday, April 14, 2007)
The storylines in this dream change quickly in my recollection of it.
My father, Nancy, Tim, and I go to a flat open spot in a park to hear a free Prince concert. Once we get there, we realize that seating is on folding chairs and that the organizers apparently expect few people, maybe a couple of hundred. I decide we want seats close to the front, so we walk down the row of chairs until we reach the middle. As we walk towards our seats, Nancy walks away, out past the hedge that marks the end of the venue.
There is no-one else on this side of the audience, and the chairs are not all set up. Just as I arrive at the middle-most chair in the row, someone adds another chair, one that doesn’t match the others and that appears a bit less comfortable. I consider changing the chair, but decide not to. This seat is right in front of the podium for this show, which we discover is actually some anti-drug rally ending with something (maybe not even singing) from Prince.
We figure out the details about the event from a program in the small capsule we are sitting it. This capsule is basically round with large portholes that allow us a view of the scene before us. Three fit inside it fairly tightly, so I’m not sure how Nancy would have fit inside with us. I decide we need to take pictures of this event, but I’ve brought no camera. Tim says he can use his camera phone, so I have him prepare to take a picture, but we wait until a tall serious policeman who is patrolling the seating leaves the area. Tim opens the hatch to take a picture as Prince is standing, but not yet presenting, at the podium.
I’m riding in a van with some men I know (though I don’t remember who they are). Those of us who are passengers have to give directions to the driver as he wanders through small towns with white churches. He moves erratically. At one point he circumnavigates a church. As he’s doing this, I tell him to stay on the road, but he allows the van to drift off the road. We tell him not to run over the church’s bushes (five thin trunks willing themselves into a hedge), but he rides over these and back onto the road.
We stop at a small convenience store with no windows. It is run by two people we know. We pick up a few things we desperately need, but they are small and forgotten. People decide I should pay, so I try to, but the shorter man won’t tell me how much anything costs. I tell the other guy that I won’t pay anything unless I’m told the cost. He tells me the cost is $26, which is about four times the expected price. He explains that this extra cost includes the costs of extra services, including direction to a place to stay. He has a list of Midwestern visual poets, and this serves as a guide to lodgings in the general area.
He also hands me a plastic sack of many small objects as part of the extra services package. Most items are identical boxed items we don’t need, but four items are loose syringes with large needles. I ask him about the syringes, and he replies by saying there aren’t any. I point them out, but he doesn’t believe me. I say maybe they’re not hypodermic, and suddenly I find a largish box for one of these syringes. By reading the box, I discover that these syringes are created by Apple and are motorboat syringes used to add oil to boat engines. The man is relieved at this news.
We are about to set off someone, somewhere where my oldest sister (who was supposedly older than I and who resembles Zoe Deschanel in my recollection) went off to college. I cannot remember such a sister, but I remember my mother crying about her dying as a child. None of this makes sense. I have no such sister. I am the eldest child in my family. The conflict between the reality I know and the reality of the dream wakes me up.
Dreamovie 7 (Schenectady, New York, Saturday, October 27, 2007)
It is difficult to remember where a dream begins because I remember them in fragments, and only rarely can I find the ligaments that bind two pieces of a dream together, yet the pieces form a cryptic whole.
There is a room with two units of shelving in the middle of the floor but at the far end of the room. These shelves have all manner of office junk on them, including pieces that I might use in a “project” of mine. But I am interested in the records, so I see the shelves and move towards them, looking for the records that are scattered about in little piles.
In another room, a small bedroom, in the same building, I find more records and publications of various weird sizes. I am trying to put all of them in boxes, but the variety of their sizes makes that impossible. Finally, I decide that I have to take all the publications by jwcurry and place them in a single box because many of these are ledger size (11" X 17"), even though many of these are tiny publications that could fit in the palm of one’s hand (and even though I’ve never known curry to produce ledger-size publications).
I am walking through a small knot of people towards a building, maybe the same building where the records were stored. The building is a public building of some kind with a wide fan of stairs leading to a row of columns and the front door. At one point in its life, it must have been a grand mansion. As I walk towards the building, I run into a village clerk I know (but I don’t know who she is, only that I’m supposed to know her). Her village offices are in this building, as are the offices of its sister town.
As I enter the building, there is a hostess at a station. I walk past her into an informal dining area where there is a table with plastic cups and a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade. There is only enough lemonade for one glass, so I pour the lemonade into the glass and add a teaspoon of the honey that rests in a bowl for us to stir it into the lemonade.
Maybe in the same building, I am in a kitchen that resembles the kitchen of my maternal grandmother, La, who is still alive, though she appears to be younger than the 100 years she was when she died. She is baking obsessively. (Her obsessions were always repetitive chores and doing things always in the same manner.) She is baking uncrescented croissants, little pastries just like croissants but not bent into crescents. I help her load these into the cupboards, which are filled to overflowing with uncroissants.
I find myself in a bathroom in this building, a bathroom that is located where my bathroom at home is located, but which bears only one other similarity to my bathroom: the location of one of its windows. The bathroom is dark. The bathtub’s basin is not plastic or porcelain but small white tiles. Many of these tiles are loose, mold is growing everywhere, and tufts of moss grow between some of the tiles.
Nancy and I are driving with an artist in the countryside, which consists of squared canyons of rock. As we drive through certain areas, I point out Nancy’s art installations being erected. Workmen are covering the faces of the canyons with large square plaques of stone into which words and wordlike shapes are carved. This artwork is a large visual poem, and as I drive I point out another outcropping of Nancy’s work. The man, because the artist is a man (dark hair, maybe Asian), is stunned by the size and ambition of the project.
We stop at a restaurant to eat, and we have two children with us, two children who are not our children and who are much younger than ours are. One of the children, the boy, is rude to the waitress, who tells him to behave. When he complains to his mother, who shows up in the dream just at this point, she tells him the waitress is in her rights to what she did.
Dreamovie 8 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, October 28, 2007)
We (my family ill-defined—I’m not sure how many of them there are) are walking north on what is sometimes 12th Avenue in New York City. We see a large building on the harbor side of the road that appears to be in the shape of a boat. Tourists are streaming up one set of stairs into the building and streaming out another. We join the crowd going into the building. We climb more stairs inside the building. Tourists and entertainers both are entering the building, looking for the dance floor. A band is playing, though it makes no sound, from a small raised platform at the end of the dance hall. I stay off to the side, and people pass by me. Four young women, who are performers at this event, pass me. They wear no set uniform except for light-colored bandannas with a simple design on their heads. People start to dance, but there are jagged openings in the floor that lead to jagged holes descending into darkness. These are large enough that a small child might fall into one. My father complains that the floor is dangerous and goes off to complain to someone. I walk off looking for something to drink and find a large cardboard box under a table. It appears to be a vending machine, but there is a woman inside the box. When I ask her for a drink, she tells me they are all for her.
I am on the street in a different city. This might not be the same dream anymore. It seems unrelated to the other story. I try to do something with my email account, but Gmail gives me an error message:
It is nighttime, and I’m leaving a building with people from work. We are meeting people somehow related to the work we do. A limousine pulls up with five or six women in it. We are supposed to ride with them to dinner, but there appears not to be enough room in the car, and the women are smoking long cigarettes. Chris tries to decide where to go to dinner. She suggests Proctor’s (which is apparently where we go, even though it is in Schenectady and does not have a restaurant). The spaces in the car all called for, Maria and I walk to the restaurant. There are holes in the street from road or sewer repairs.
Dinner takes place beside a river, from a good vantage point, and outside. Afterwards, I leave, finding myself in a small but warren-like office. There is something unnerving about the office. I’m not sure what the people do, the building appears to be designed to keep you from finding your way out of it easily, and the people don’t appear to belong here—though they look perfectly normal.
I return to the compound where we live, and everything is a bit foreign. People from this office are also staying in this compound, and I’m suspicious of them. We have discussions about this in the compound, but nothing happens about them. Ann Marie, however, goes off to talk to the foreigners. I think nothing of this, but I find myself outside between our building and a field of corn. I see Ann Marie by a parked car talking to one of these men. I crouch down by the edge of the building and peek around and I see her look back at our building, watching for us. I assume she is working for these people.
Back in our building, it is night. I’m working on the drafting table in our workroom. I do not notice that one of the foreigners is choking one of our people. When I do notice, I take a long dowel and start hitting the foreigner. He stops, and the person he was choking sits there, as if the choking was a ruse, before leaving. The foreigner says I cannot hurt him with the dowel. I break the dowel in half to give it a couple of sharp ends. The man kicks at me and says that he is stronger than I am, even though his left ankle is always in pain from the 100,000 kicks it has landed on people. I break my two broken dowel pieces in half again and stab at him without effect.
I somehow escape from the room, but now I am the man who was being choked. The compound is empty, weirdly quiet. I find a sandwich wrapped in a waxed paper bag. I grab it as I leave.
I find myself walking up the stairs to that same office. Once in there, I am running away from people I never see. The door to exit the building isn’t marked, but I find it. I’m ahead of my pursuers. I run down the stairs, out of the building, and onto the street.
Dreamovie 9 (Schenectady, New York, Monday, October 29, 2007)
I am in a group crossing a bridge by train, but we need to travel by water. Kathleen suggests that we pull the train car down the hill at the end of the trestle. We turn right, descending the sandy bank to the river. The water is dark but roiling, each wave tipped with white. By the time we reach the edge of the river, our train car is a rowboat, and we have almost no room inside it. The boat is filling with water. Two boys have climbed onto the boat and are hanging onto the bow and the port of the boat. We push them off, so they can wade back ashore, and we move down the river through the shadow of the bridge.
I am walking in a crowd of people along a boardwalk in something like a carnival. I pass a man who is selling popcorn from a vendor’s cart.
I am waiting for an elevator in a hotel. There are two different elevator doors, each peeking out from behind huge potted plants placed on either side of both doors. The elevator lobby is filled with people and luggage carts. When the elevator door on the right opens, I move towards it along with a dozen other people with their luggage and furniture. There is enough room in the elevator for all of us because it is the size of a service elevator
When the back elevator door opens, I exit into a warehouse. It is dark with a few bare bulbs hanging overhead from the distant ceiling. I walk through the warehouse, looking for nothing. I find a woman sitting on a rack of shelving. She is young, about eighteen years old, the same age I am now. She lounges a little in a space that should be awkward for her but isn’t. I enjoy talking to her for a while, but she feigns a lack of interest even as she exposes her tiny breasts. Each is but a handful, and I cup each delicately with my right hand.
Later, in the same basement warehouse, I find a classroom filled with darkness and pipes. One boy is sitting in class talking about a paper of his that Nancy lost. Nancy can’t find it. Dan L asks us how we can lose people’s essays. As we look for it in our airy apartment, the light drifting past us like breeze, Nancy finds half a book, and the last page showing is one page of the story the boy’s essay was about. The student’s notes are scribbled into the margins of this page, and it is apparent to us that these notes constitute the boy’s essay.
Dreamovie 16 (Schenectady, New York, Wednesday, November 21, 2007)
Only flutterings of a dream.
I turn my car to enter a retirement park. The road leading into and out of the park is divided by a small island of grass.
From a hill I look across at the scene of a small lake. It seems to be a postcard, and when I walk up to it I discover it is.
Dreamovie 20 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, December 23, 2007)
I am walking with Denzel Washington, in the crepusc, out to a baseball field. He goes around to the side of the fence around the field to find a way in, but I climb over the fence and onto the outfield. A woman meets us on the field and guides us into the building beside the baseball field.
I find myself in a library, looking for the location of my meeting, which goes well even though I do not recollect its subject. After the meeting, I walk around the library and see a sign for a MARAC steering committee meeting I must attend. It is at 3 pm, and the sign is handwritten in a scrawly red script. Although this is a meeting I do attend, people are surprised when I show up. John LeG is in attendance as is Susan. Originally, people were clustered around a table for the meeting, but as it progresses the meeting room transforms into a stairway and Susan is soon conducting the meeting from a small ledge beside the staircase.
When I leave this meeting, I realize that the library I am in is now a large performing arts center, and people are walking through it to get to different performance stages. This is part of a college campus, and students are sitting on the floor against the walls of the space. A man arrives and begins asking the students questions, apparently in some approximation of the Socratic method.
One of his questions is why some students are now exhaling car exhaust. No-one has an answer, so he explains that with the recent redirection of traffic through the center of campus the campus itself has filled with soft gray exhaust. He explained that people are breathing in that exhaust and so now, inside the buildings on campus, people are exhaling exhaust that others can see and smell.
I leave the performing arts center during the explanation (which follows me on my walk). As I walk through campus, I note that it is a traditional college campus except for the road cutting through the green space in the middle of campus. I also realize that this is the campus of Purchase College, although it bears no real resemblance to the actual college.
I continue on my walk, traveling out to the lake at the edge of the campus. A number of huge wharves are under construction on the lake. They look more like enormous boardwalks jutting out into the lake, and they are designed to hold shops, restaurants, and open spaces for public activities. Near each of these docks are billboards, but they are not filled with static messages. Even though the contents of the billboards appear otherwise just like those of any billboard, these consist of advertisements with movement and sound. Some advertisements are for the construction along the lake itself and others merely answer questions that are in my mind as I walk along the lake until the system of entertainment docks dies away.
After all the docks, I find myself in a small grassy spot. Almost a knoll, it slopes gently towards are roadway. AM is on this grass, and she is preparing to sing a song. As she sings, the audience (including me) places its feet upon the flat surface of any of the large hemispheres strew across the space. Our goal is to balance on these hemispheres and move over the grass without leaving the grass. As AM sings, I rock myself atop the hemisphere, moving closer and closer to the roadway. Apparently, my doing this has something to do with my relationship with Karen, something to do with what will happen in my future, but I’m not sure what.
Eventually, I lose control of my hemisphere and end up on the gravelly roadside.
Dreamovie 26 (Schenectady, New York, Tuesday, January 01, 2008)
We are driving up a wide wide street on an extremely steep hill in the middle of a city. There are at least ten lanes of traffic going up this hill, and each car has to start quickly and keep its speed going the entire way up the hill. The hill is so steep that the slightest pause might cause a loss of momentum strong enough to pull the car back down the hill. There is a huge fissure cutting across the hill, and police cars scattered around it with their lights going. Also, one abandoned car is sitting near the fissure, maybe because it stumbled over it.
As I start to drive up the hill, I can see the entire scene: a multi-lane, one-way street heading up into the sky at about a 50º angle, skyscrapers along the edges of the road, half a dozen cars stopped sideways over the road, and dozens of cars speeding up the hill, none staying in a lane but zigzagging up the hill, avoiding other drivers and stopped cars as they go. As I begin my ascent, I’m a little nervous but determined to go up the hill as quickly as I can. The people in the car with me, whom I assume are my family, are also nervous. We make it to the top of the hill, at which point we appear to be on a tall overpass with a vertiginous 50-story view of the city. The roadway is not stable at this point; smaller fissures appear in the road. As a man tries to enter our car, it slips into one of these slenderer slits in the road and gently drops into water right below the roadway.
The water is aqua and dappled with light, as if we are in some giant aqarium. The scene is beautiful and serene. As we escape from the water, we are not concerned. We merely leave our car and exit the waterway not by going upwards, as if through an oubliette, but sideways through a portal. The man who tried to enter and steal from our car is left in the car. We know he won’t drown, and he floats, in some semi-conscious state, in the water.
After exiting the water, we find ourselves in a subterranean space—all clean lines and whiteness. At first, it seems to be empty, sterile, but soon we see all kinds of human activity. We are in a set of offices that support a series of performance spaces throughout an underground facility. We watch a Shakespearean play I have never heard of before, some recently discovered play being performed for the first time. It has a title like a comedy: something like “As You Will,” something similar to “As You Like It,” so I think at first that it will be “As You Like It” that we watch. The main character in this play has a doppelgänger that is attached to himself, a tiny conjoined twin that is little more than a teratoma but which can speak, occasionally and ominously.
As we leave the performance, we pass through a bar and see a young child, maybe ten years old, pass us going in the opposite direction. Megacephalic and nearly bald, he seems dour, reserved, and walks with a halting gait. Next, we come upon a little card table set up by a group trying to garner support for its program. We imagine that this group is a support and research foundation for children suffering from whatever affliction the child we just had has, but the people never tell us. We learn that these kinds of charities now do not tell potential donors what their disease of interest is. They have found that that information can turn people away and that simply asking for help is best.
The group is called The Wall, and that is all we know about it except that its table is run only by pre-teen children and one lone woman who watches them from off to the side. They ask us to sign what appears to be a petition, but actually it is just a sheet asking for our phone numbers. All of the phone numbers are only five digits in length, as if everyone signing the form is from the same state agency phone system and only communicating with each other. I do not want to leave my phone number, since I don’t want anyone to call me, so I leave my email address instead. I have a difficult time writing out my email address, and have to try three times before I get it right. I cannot control my hand well enough to form the letters correctly.
Next we move to a beautiful granite dolphin aquarium somewhere in Italy, yet still in the same area we are. The bowl of the pool, the deck around the pool and the stadium seats are all made out of black granite, and the walls are also black. Light shines in such a way that the darkness is glittering. As the dolphins perform, their bodies flicker in the night, the arcing waves capture handsful of light, and the entire place sparkles. The audience is entranced by the beauty of the performing dolphins and the performance space.
After the dolphin act, the dolphin trainer, a dark-haired Italian woman, directs our attention to the clerestory windows near the top of the space we are in. As we first look at the windows, they are but screens that show zodiacal signs, illustrated encyclopedia entries, and ongoing performances from Shakespearean plays, including the one we have just seen. But the windows, like two rows of dominoes falling in opposite directions from each other, then turn clear to show the night sky. Next, they slide open in one spot to create a wide slit of a window that looks out onto a dark star-punctured sky, a sky too dark and too filled with stars to be in a city. This is the place’s planetarium, a view of the real heavens, and the woman begins her talk about the stars and the planets above us.
After this event, we return to the white spaces beneath the ground where we see the rehearsal for the Shakespearean play we have just seen. A man walks around the middle of a room with another man on his shoulders (representing the conjoined twin) as he speaks to another woman. For some reason, we know that this is how Shakespeare prepared for this play: that he put actors together and let them practice his lines and then he tried to figure out how to make his play right. In this case, he was haunted by the idea of a man growing out of the shoulder of another man, but he had no idea how to make that real twinness into something of symbolic power, so he worked the actors until he figured out how the story could explain that situation, until he figured out how to make something significant out of it. Hearing this revelation, I exclaim that that is how I write: that I have an idea and I incorporate it into my writing and make sense of it later, that I allow my imagination the freedom to wander.
Dreamovie 31 (Schenectady, New York, Saturday, January 12, 2008)
I have submitted artwork of mine for an art show, but one of my pieces was somehow incomplete, so I am writing out an explanation of that work of art, which is a picture of a man by a window. It has no words, but I incorporate the image into my new text, creating a different work of art. I leave it with the museum, which is located in the parking lot of Niskayuna Commons.
From that parking lot, I walk with a group of people to a restaurant just across the roadway. I tell everyone that this restaurant will be crowded, and as we approach it we can tell that it is. Before entering the restaurant, we turn around, heading back in the direction we had come, to go elsewhere.
We find a building that I enter it through a window, first slipping in my left leg and then slipping the rest of my body around and into the room before dropping to the floor. I am in a well lit room, totally white, but empty of anything except for a set of concrete stairs (with a metal railing) leading up to a door by the window I have just entered. The next person in our group, a woman, has trouble following my lead, so I walk up the stairs and unlock and open the door.
The people I am with begin to file into the open room and then up another set of stairs I had not noticed before and then disappear down a dark hallway.
I climb the same stairs. At the top of the stairs, I can look around the corner into the hallway. As I step into that space, I feel something squishy under my feet. I move out of the space then return to the space to investigate. I determine that I was walking on human intestines, though they are a bit dry, not from a newly eviscerated person. Nancy and I realize we are not safe. Suddenly, people are coming simultaneously through the door I had opened to this building and from the other end of the dark hallway we are in.
We try to hide in the kitchen right around the corner, but they are too quick and are soon upon us. I open the back door to escape down the outside stairs but they catch me and tie me up with uncoated wire. Although I am tied up, the wire is primarily designed to tether me, so I can still move around. Nancy they have left free of any restraints. We stand on the landing of the wooden stairs leading down to a back lawn from the kitchen. The stairs run along the face of an outside wall of the building, and I try to swing the wire binding me out over the face of the building to catch it on nails on the wall. Once I catch the wire on a nail, I swing myself out, trying to catch myself on an even more distant nail and to escape. The captors allow me do this, assuming I can't escape.
As I do this, I find objects on the wall that I give to Nancy to protect herself, explaining their purpose. A couple are heavy objects she can use to hit people, and one of these is an ancient iron. The third and last object is for stabbing. It is a letter opener embedded in a heavy stand, with the letter opener's blade sticking up in the fashion of a spindle. She doesn't want to use these weapons, doesn't think they will work, but I've laid them out on the flat railing at the top of the stairs for her anyway. Nancy opens the door to the refrigerator, which is right next to the door, to look for something else.
My swinging plan is not producing results, so I try another idea. I stand on the railing and start tearing out the ceiling just above the landing of the stairs. Our captors ignore me, thinking nothing of it. I tear out siding, insulation, and wood, creating an opening. I lift myself up through this opening and enter through the floor of a closet into a room.
This room is on the fourth floor of our house, a floor I didn't know existed, and it it Erin's storage room for the overflow from her bedroom, yet it looks like a bedroom without a bed. The floor is carpeted, she has full dressers in the room, the room is decorated, clothes are hanging neatly in the closet. She has a few windows in the room, but they are high up, and I must get on my tippytoes to see out the windows.
From that vantage point, I can see that our captors control the shoreline, but that the "normal" people of the country—including the military, the police, and civilians—have boats out in the harbor and they are conducting their lives normally. I can tell our captors from everyone else by the white uniforms they wear.
I decide I have to leave this room before they find me, so I take a door leading out of it and down another dark hallway. I find myself in a living room with a wall of windows that allows me a view of the shoreline, which the white-uniformed people are patrolling in a desultory way. I realize that the room I am in juts out over the shoreline, affording me some cover, so I go downstairs and outside.
It is now low tide, so I have space on the shore to leave a message, which I write in coded language with green-brown seaweed. The white-uniformed people are nearby, so I work quickly. I am hoping that someone in one of the pleasure boats on the water will see this message and get it to the authorities. As I do, one boat drives up, and a portly man hops out of the boat and trudges through the water to my message. I am still there but I don't tell him anything. I just point to the message, making sure he takes pictures of all of it. He looks confused, but he dutifully photographs the whole message, piece by piece and then as a whole. Sometimes he photographs the message upside-down or sideways, but that won't ruin the message. As he leaves, I know he will take the message to the authorities, who will puzzle out its meaning, presented as a kind of minimalist poetry.
I do not reenter the house. Instead, I turn and walk along the shore up the hill the house is on, and into a small wooded area. There is a wooden stairway, with periodic landings like terraces, and I am walking up those stairs. The woods are close in on the stairs, and a metal line that pulls a small gondola up and down the hill moves through the tops of the trees. To speed up my ascent, I grab onto one side of the line and allow it to pull me up the hill. I am strangely too heavy for the line, so it pulls me up for a few seconds, but then succumbs, allowing my weight to drag me down to the ground again as the line builds up tension to pull me up the hill one more time. I ascend the hills in a series of jumping pulls.
At the top of the hill, I find myself in a small driveway next to the house, with woods tight around it. The driveway leads to a wide garage door that opens like stable doors (a vertical pair of doors opening in the opposite direction from each other). A young black boy who has come up the hill just before me rushes to the garage doors, fiddles with them (maybe entering a combination) then goes inside and closes the door. Immediately, he exits and runs back to the edge of the woods. It is clear to me that he is alone, that he has had to figure out how to live safely in a world controlled by people who are determined to control us.
I am now at the door to the garage. I see it is open, so I enter, but I haven't figured out how the combination works, not even where it is entered. I look out the paned windows of the garage and see that the boy is trying to return to the garage surreptitiously. He throws himself to the ground and crawls towards the garage. He climbs into a black suitcase, zippers it partially closed and scoots towards the garage. He climbs into a green costume of a Tyrannosaurus rex and creeps towards the garage. Somehow, these processes are meant to hide the fact that someone is approaching the garage, but a young boy and his father spot the boy and start walking towards him.
I work on figuring out the combination to the garage door's locking system. I find a keypad beside the door and decide that I should be able to enter a password there to open, close, or lock the door. The wall around the keypad is covered with writing in pencil, sometimes scribbled, and somehow hints on the password are contained in those notes. As I consider the notes, I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. I hide against the wall, but I am in plain sight. As a couple walks down the stairs that connect the garage to the system of dark dank tunnels and hallways in the house, I crouch.
When they come in, they are talking to each other. They are discussing friends of theirs, another married couple. They cannot see me because I am invisible, but they take me for the male half of that couple, and they talk to me about my supposed wife. I somehow know facts about that woman, so I can carry on a conversation without becoming suspicious. They do not suspect that I am not their male friend because I am invisible, so they assume I look like him.
The woman and I go for a drive, maybe to find my supposed wife. As I drive her, she mentions how I am invisible, asking what I'm doing all the time, since she cannot see me.
At some point, the occupants in the car become a group of old women, and they are chattering happily to themselves. I continue to drive, past strip malls and into a small town whose main street is lined with trees and small white clapboard houses, but we drive straight, always on the same road.
I do not know where we are going.
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Dreamovies
Dreamovie 2 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, March 11, 2007)
I waited too long to note down today’s scrap of dream, so I have only slivers of memories of it that I’ll try to reconstruct.
There is a dark hallway at night, lined with windows, somewhat like an enclosed porch. I am in the hallway with someone and Bill Cosby. No idea why. There is snow or ice outside, and it glows a bit in the dark.
And the rest is lost.
Dreamovie 6 (North Easter Island Road, Englewood, Florida, Saturday, April 14, 2007)
The storylines in this dream change quickly in my recollection of it.
My father, Nancy, Tim, and I go to a flat open spot in a park to hear a free Prince concert. Once we get there, we realize that seating is on folding chairs and that the organizers apparently expect few people, maybe a couple of hundred. I decide we want seats close to the front, so we walk down the row of chairs until we reach the middle. As we walk towards our seats, Nancy walks away, out past the hedge that marks the end of the venue.
There is no-one else on this side of the audience, and the chairs are not all set up. Just as I arrive at the middle-most chair in the row, someone adds another chair, one that doesn’t match the others and that appears a bit less comfortable. I consider changing the chair, but decide not to. This seat is right in front of the podium for this show, which we discover is actually some anti-drug rally ending with something (maybe not even singing) from Prince.
We figure out the details about the event from a program in the small capsule we are sitting it. This capsule is basically round with large portholes that allow us a view of the scene before us. Three fit inside it fairly tightly, so I’m not sure how Nancy would have fit inside with us. I decide we need to take pictures of this event, but I’ve brought no camera. Tim says he can use his camera phone, so I have him prepare to take a picture, but we wait until a tall serious policeman who is patrolling the seating leaves the area. Tim opens the hatch to take a picture as Prince is standing, but not yet presenting, at the podium.
I’m riding in a van with some men I know (though I don’t remember who they are). Those of us who are passengers have to give directions to the driver as he wanders through small towns with white churches. He moves erratically. At one point he circumnavigates a church. As he’s doing this, I tell him to stay on the road, but he allows the van to drift off the road. We tell him not to run over the church’s bushes (five thin trunks willing themselves into a hedge), but he rides over these and back onto the road.
We stop at a small convenience store with no windows. It is run by two people we know. We pick up a few things we desperately need, but they are small and forgotten. People decide I should pay, so I try to, but the shorter man won’t tell me how much anything costs. I tell the other guy that I won’t pay anything unless I’m told the cost. He tells me the cost is $26, which is about four times the expected price. He explains that this extra cost includes the costs of extra services, including direction to a place to stay. He has a list of Midwestern visual poets, and this serves as a guide to lodgings in the general area.
He also hands me a plastic sack of many small objects as part of the extra services package. Most items are identical boxed items we don’t need, but four items are loose syringes with large needles. I ask him about the syringes, and he replies by saying there aren’t any. I point them out, but he doesn’t believe me. I say maybe they’re not hypodermic, and suddenly I find a largish box for one of these syringes. By reading the box, I discover that these syringes are created by Apple and are motorboat syringes used to add oil to boat engines. The man is relieved at this news.
We are about to set off someone, somewhere where my oldest sister (who was supposedly older than I and who resembles Zoe Deschanel in my recollection) went off to college. I cannot remember such a sister, but I remember my mother crying about her dying as a child. None of this makes sense. I have no such sister. I am the eldest child in my family. The conflict between the reality I know and the reality of the dream wakes me up.
Dreamovie 7 (Schenectady, New York, Saturday, October 27, 2007)
It is difficult to remember where a dream begins because I remember them in fragments, and only rarely can I find the ligaments that bind two pieces of a dream together, yet the pieces form a cryptic whole.
There is a room with two units of shelving in the middle of the floor but at the far end of the room. These shelves have all manner of office junk on them, including pieces that I might use in a “project” of mine. But I am interested in the records, so I see the shelves and move towards them, looking for the records that are scattered about in little piles.
In another room, a small bedroom, in the same building, I find more records and publications of various weird sizes. I am trying to put all of them in boxes, but the variety of their sizes makes that impossible. Finally, I decide that I have to take all the publications by jwcurry and place them in a single box because many of these are ledger size (11" X 17"), even though many of these are tiny publications that could fit in the palm of one’s hand (and even though I’ve never known curry to produce ledger-size publications).
I am walking through a small knot of people towards a building, maybe the same building where the records were stored. The building is a public building of some kind with a wide fan of stairs leading to a row of columns and the front door. At one point in its life, it must have been a grand mansion. As I walk towards the building, I run into a village clerk I know (but I don’t know who she is, only that I’m supposed to know her). Her village offices are in this building, as are the offices of its sister town.
As I enter the building, there is a hostess at a station. I walk past her into an informal dining area where there is a table with plastic cups and a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade. There is only enough lemonade for one glass, so I pour the lemonade into the glass and add a teaspoon of the honey that rests in a bowl for us to stir it into the lemonade.
Maybe in the same building, I am in a kitchen that resembles the kitchen of my maternal grandmother, La, who is still alive, though she appears to be younger than the 100 years she was when she died. She is baking obsessively. (Her obsessions were always repetitive chores and doing things always in the same manner.) She is baking uncrescented croissants, little pastries just like croissants but not bent into crescents. I help her load these into the cupboards, which are filled to overflowing with uncroissants.
I find myself in a bathroom in this building, a bathroom that is located where my bathroom at home is located, but which bears only one other similarity to my bathroom: the location of one of its windows. The bathroom is dark. The bathtub’s basin is not plastic or porcelain but small white tiles. Many of these tiles are loose, mold is growing everywhere, and tufts of moss grow between some of the tiles.
Nancy and I are driving with an artist in the countryside, which consists of squared canyons of rock. As we drive through certain areas, I point out Nancy’s art installations being erected. Workmen are covering the faces of the canyons with large square plaques of stone into which words and wordlike shapes are carved. This artwork is a large visual poem, and as I drive I point out another outcropping of Nancy’s work. The man, because the artist is a man (dark hair, maybe Asian), is stunned by the size and ambition of the project.
We stop at a restaurant to eat, and we have two children with us, two children who are not our children and who are much younger than ours are. One of the children, the boy, is rude to the waitress, who tells him to behave. When he complains to his mother, who shows up in the dream just at this point, she tells him the waitress is in her rights to what she did.
Dreamovie 8 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, October 28, 2007)
We (my family ill-defined—I’m not sure how many of them there are) are walking north on what is sometimes 12th Avenue in New York City. We see a large building on the harbor side of the road that appears to be in the shape of a boat. Tourists are streaming up one set of stairs into the building and streaming out another. We join the crowd going into the building. We climb more stairs inside the building. Tourists and entertainers both are entering the building, looking for the dance floor. A band is playing, though it makes no sound, from a small raised platform at the end of the dance hall. I stay off to the side, and people pass by me. Four young women, who are performers at this event, pass me. They wear no set uniform except for light-colored bandannas with a simple design on their heads. People start to dance, but there are jagged openings in the floor that lead to jagged holes descending into darkness. These are large enough that a small child might fall into one. My father complains that the floor is dangerous and goes off to complain to someone. I walk off looking for something to drink and find a large cardboard box under a table. It appears to be a vending machine, but there is a woman inside the box. When I ask her for a drink, she tells me they are all for her.
I am on the street in a different city. This might not be the same dream anymore. It seems unrelated to the other story. I try to do something with my email account, but Gmail gives me an error message:
I try to tell Nancy about this, but she isn’t there. I’m standing on the street without a computer, so I don’t know how I received this message, but I use my wireless mouse to shut down the alert window. I next use the mouse to push buttons on the side of the traffic light. Apparently, this is a necessary action to deal with my email, but I wonder how it changes the sequence of traffic lights.You have been close to two women in the last ten weeks.
It is nighttime, and I’m leaving a building with people from work. We are meeting people somehow related to the work we do. A limousine pulls up with five or six women in it. We are supposed to ride with them to dinner, but there appears not to be enough room in the car, and the women are smoking long cigarettes. Chris tries to decide where to go to dinner. She suggests Proctor’s (which is apparently where we go, even though it is in Schenectady and does not have a restaurant). The spaces in the car all called for, Maria and I walk to the restaurant. There are holes in the street from road or sewer repairs.
Dinner takes place beside a river, from a good vantage point, and outside. Afterwards, I leave, finding myself in a small but warren-like office. There is something unnerving about the office. I’m not sure what the people do, the building appears to be designed to keep you from finding your way out of it easily, and the people don’t appear to belong here—though they look perfectly normal.
I return to the compound where we live, and everything is a bit foreign. People from this office are also staying in this compound, and I’m suspicious of them. We have discussions about this in the compound, but nothing happens about them. Ann Marie, however, goes off to talk to the foreigners. I think nothing of this, but I find myself outside between our building and a field of corn. I see Ann Marie by a parked car talking to one of these men. I crouch down by the edge of the building and peek around and I see her look back at our building, watching for us. I assume she is working for these people.
Back in our building, it is night. I’m working on the drafting table in our workroom. I do not notice that one of the foreigners is choking one of our people. When I do notice, I take a long dowel and start hitting the foreigner. He stops, and the person he was choking sits there, as if the choking was a ruse, before leaving. The foreigner says I cannot hurt him with the dowel. I break the dowel in half to give it a couple of sharp ends. The man kicks at me and says that he is stronger than I am, even though his left ankle is always in pain from the 100,000 kicks it has landed on people. I break my two broken dowel pieces in half again and stab at him without effect.
I somehow escape from the room, but now I am the man who was being choked. The compound is empty, weirdly quiet. I find a sandwich wrapped in a waxed paper bag. I grab it as I leave.
I find myself walking up the stairs to that same office. Once in there, I am running away from people I never see. The door to exit the building isn’t marked, but I find it. I’m ahead of my pursuers. I run down the stairs, out of the building, and onto the street.
Dreamovie 9 (Schenectady, New York, Monday, October 29, 2007)
I am in a group crossing a bridge by train, but we need to travel by water. Kathleen suggests that we pull the train car down the hill at the end of the trestle. We turn right, descending the sandy bank to the river. The water is dark but roiling, each wave tipped with white. By the time we reach the edge of the river, our train car is a rowboat, and we have almost no room inside it. The boat is filling with water. Two boys have climbed onto the boat and are hanging onto the bow and the port of the boat. We push them off, so they can wade back ashore, and we move down the river through the shadow of the bridge.
I am walking in a crowd of people along a boardwalk in something like a carnival. I pass a man who is selling popcorn from a vendor’s cart.
I am waiting for an elevator in a hotel. There are two different elevator doors, each peeking out from behind huge potted plants placed on either side of both doors. The elevator lobby is filled with people and luggage carts. When the elevator door on the right opens, I move towards it along with a dozen other people with their luggage and furniture. There is enough room in the elevator for all of us because it is the size of a service elevator
When the back elevator door opens, I exit into a warehouse. It is dark with a few bare bulbs hanging overhead from the distant ceiling. I walk through the warehouse, looking for nothing. I find a woman sitting on a rack of shelving. She is young, about eighteen years old, the same age I am now. She lounges a little in a space that should be awkward for her but isn’t. I enjoy talking to her for a while, but she feigns a lack of interest even as she exposes her tiny breasts. Each is but a handful, and I cup each delicately with my right hand.
Later, in the same basement warehouse, I find a classroom filled with darkness and pipes. One boy is sitting in class talking about a paper of his that Nancy lost. Nancy can’t find it. Dan L asks us how we can lose people’s essays. As we look for it in our airy apartment, the light drifting past us like breeze, Nancy finds half a book, and the last page showing is one page of the story the boy’s essay was about. The student’s notes are scribbled into the margins of this page, and it is apparent to us that these notes constitute the boy’s essay.
Dreamovie 16 (Schenectady, New York, Wednesday, November 21, 2007)
Only flutterings of a dream.
I turn my car to enter a retirement park. The road leading into and out of the park is divided by a small island of grass.
From a hill I look across at the scene of a small lake. It seems to be a postcard, and when I walk up to it I discover it is.
Dreamovie 20 (Schenectady, New York, Sunday, December 23, 2007)
I am walking with Denzel Washington, in the crepusc, out to a baseball field. He goes around to the side of the fence around the field to find a way in, but I climb over the fence and onto the outfield. A woman meets us on the field and guides us into the building beside the baseball field.
I find myself in a library, looking for the location of my meeting, which goes well even though I do not recollect its subject. After the meeting, I walk around the library and see a sign for a MARAC steering committee meeting I must attend. It is at 3 pm, and the sign is handwritten in a scrawly red script. Although this is a meeting I do attend, people are surprised when I show up. John LeG is in attendance as is Susan. Originally, people were clustered around a table for the meeting, but as it progresses the meeting room transforms into a stairway and Susan is soon conducting the meeting from a small ledge beside the staircase.
When I leave this meeting, I realize that the library I am in is now a large performing arts center, and people are walking through it to get to different performance stages. This is part of a college campus, and students are sitting on the floor against the walls of the space. A man arrives and begins asking the students questions, apparently in some approximation of the Socratic method.
One of his questions is why some students are now exhaling car exhaust. No-one has an answer, so he explains that with the recent redirection of traffic through the center of campus the campus itself has filled with soft gray exhaust. He explained that people are breathing in that exhaust and so now, inside the buildings on campus, people are exhaling exhaust that others can see and smell.
I leave the performing arts center during the explanation (which follows me on my walk). As I walk through campus, I note that it is a traditional college campus except for the road cutting through the green space in the middle of campus. I also realize that this is the campus of Purchase College, although it bears no real resemblance to the actual college.
I continue on my walk, traveling out to the lake at the edge of the campus. A number of huge wharves are under construction on the lake. They look more like enormous boardwalks jutting out into the lake, and they are designed to hold shops, restaurants, and open spaces for public activities. Near each of these docks are billboards, but they are not filled with static messages. Even though the contents of the billboards appear otherwise just like those of any billboard, these consist of advertisements with movement and sound. Some advertisements are for the construction along the lake itself and others merely answer questions that are in my mind as I walk along the lake until the system of entertainment docks dies away.
After all the docks, I find myself in a small grassy spot. Almost a knoll, it slopes gently towards are roadway. AM is on this grass, and she is preparing to sing a song. As she sings, the audience (including me) places its feet upon the flat surface of any of the large hemispheres strew across the space. Our goal is to balance on these hemispheres and move over the grass without leaving the grass. As AM sings, I rock myself atop the hemisphere, moving closer and closer to the roadway. Apparently, my doing this has something to do with my relationship with Karen, something to do with what will happen in my future, but I’m not sure what.
Eventually, I lose control of my hemisphere and end up on the gravelly roadside.
Dreamovie 26 (Schenectady, New York, Tuesday, January 01, 2008)
We are driving up a wide wide street on an extremely steep hill in the middle of a city. There are at least ten lanes of traffic going up this hill, and each car has to start quickly and keep its speed going the entire way up the hill. The hill is so steep that the slightest pause might cause a loss of momentum strong enough to pull the car back down the hill. There is a huge fissure cutting across the hill, and police cars scattered around it with their lights going. Also, one abandoned car is sitting near the fissure, maybe because it stumbled over it.
As I start to drive up the hill, I can see the entire scene: a multi-lane, one-way street heading up into the sky at about a 50º angle, skyscrapers along the edges of the road, half a dozen cars stopped sideways over the road, and dozens of cars speeding up the hill, none staying in a lane but zigzagging up the hill, avoiding other drivers and stopped cars as they go. As I begin my ascent, I’m a little nervous but determined to go up the hill as quickly as I can. The people in the car with me, whom I assume are my family, are also nervous. We make it to the top of the hill, at which point we appear to be on a tall overpass with a vertiginous 50-story view of the city. The roadway is not stable at this point; smaller fissures appear in the road. As a man tries to enter our car, it slips into one of these slenderer slits in the road and gently drops into water right below the roadway.
The water is aqua and dappled with light, as if we are in some giant aqarium. The scene is beautiful and serene. As we escape from the water, we are not concerned. We merely leave our car and exit the waterway not by going upwards, as if through an oubliette, but sideways through a portal. The man who tried to enter and steal from our car is left in the car. We know he won’t drown, and he floats, in some semi-conscious state, in the water.
After exiting the water, we find ourselves in a subterranean space—all clean lines and whiteness. At first, it seems to be empty, sterile, but soon we see all kinds of human activity. We are in a set of offices that support a series of performance spaces throughout an underground facility. We watch a Shakespearean play I have never heard of before, some recently discovered play being performed for the first time. It has a title like a comedy: something like “As You Will,” something similar to “As You Like It,” so I think at first that it will be “As You Like It” that we watch. The main character in this play has a doppelgänger that is attached to himself, a tiny conjoined twin that is little more than a teratoma but which can speak, occasionally and ominously.
As we leave the performance, we pass through a bar and see a young child, maybe ten years old, pass us going in the opposite direction. Megacephalic and nearly bald, he seems dour, reserved, and walks with a halting gait. Next, we come upon a little card table set up by a group trying to garner support for its program. We imagine that this group is a support and research foundation for children suffering from whatever affliction the child we just had has, but the people never tell us. We learn that these kinds of charities now do not tell potential donors what their disease of interest is. They have found that that information can turn people away and that simply asking for help is best.
The group is called The Wall, and that is all we know about it except that its table is run only by pre-teen children and one lone woman who watches them from off to the side. They ask us to sign what appears to be a petition, but actually it is just a sheet asking for our phone numbers. All of the phone numbers are only five digits in length, as if everyone signing the form is from the same state agency phone system and only communicating with each other. I do not want to leave my phone number, since I don’t want anyone to call me, so I leave my email address instead. I have a difficult time writing out my email address, and have to try three times before I get it right. I cannot control my hand well enough to form the letters correctly.
Next we move to a beautiful granite dolphin aquarium somewhere in Italy, yet still in the same area we are. The bowl of the pool, the deck around the pool and the stadium seats are all made out of black granite, and the walls are also black. Light shines in such a way that the darkness is glittering. As the dolphins perform, their bodies flicker in the night, the arcing waves capture handsful of light, and the entire place sparkles. The audience is entranced by the beauty of the performing dolphins and the performance space.
After the dolphin act, the dolphin trainer, a dark-haired Italian woman, directs our attention to the clerestory windows near the top of the space we are in. As we first look at the windows, they are but screens that show zodiacal signs, illustrated encyclopedia entries, and ongoing performances from Shakespearean plays, including the one we have just seen. But the windows, like two rows of dominoes falling in opposite directions from each other, then turn clear to show the night sky. Next, they slide open in one spot to create a wide slit of a window that looks out onto a dark star-punctured sky, a sky too dark and too filled with stars to be in a city. This is the place’s planetarium, a view of the real heavens, and the woman begins her talk about the stars and the planets above us.
After this event, we return to the white spaces beneath the ground where we see the rehearsal for the Shakespearean play we have just seen. A man walks around the middle of a room with another man on his shoulders (representing the conjoined twin) as he speaks to another woman. For some reason, we know that this is how Shakespeare prepared for this play: that he put actors together and let them practice his lines and then he tried to figure out how to make his play right. In this case, he was haunted by the idea of a man growing out of the shoulder of another man, but he had no idea how to make that real twinness into something of symbolic power, so he worked the actors until he figured out how the story could explain that situation, until he figured out how to make something significant out of it. Hearing this revelation, I exclaim that that is how I write: that I have an idea and I incorporate it into my writing and make sense of it later, that I allow my imagination the freedom to wander.
Dreamovie 31 (Schenectady, New York, Saturday, January 12, 2008)
I have submitted artwork of mine for an art show, but one of my pieces was somehow incomplete, so I am writing out an explanation of that work of art, which is a picture of a man by a window. It has no words, but I incorporate the image into my new text, creating a different work of art. I leave it with the museum, which is located in the parking lot of Niskayuna Commons.
From that parking lot, I walk with a group of people to a restaurant just across the roadway. I tell everyone that this restaurant will be crowded, and as we approach it we can tell that it is. Before entering the restaurant, we turn around, heading back in the direction we had come, to go elsewhere.
We find a building that I enter it through a window, first slipping in my left leg and then slipping the rest of my body around and into the room before dropping to the floor. I am in a well lit room, totally white, but empty of anything except for a set of concrete stairs (with a metal railing) leading up to a door by the window I have just entered. The next person in our group, a woman, has trouble following my lead, so I walk up the stairs and unlock and open the door.
The people I am with begin to file into the open room and then up another set of stairs I had not noticed before and then disappear down a dark hallway.
I climb the same stairs. At the top of the stairs, I can look around the corner into the hallway. As I step into that space, I feel something squishy under my feet. I move out of the space then return to the space to investigate. I determine that I was walking on human intestines, though they are a bit dry, not from a newly eviscerated person. Nancy and I realize we are not safe. Suddenly, people are coming simultaneously through the door I had opened to this building and from the other end of the dark hallway we are in.
We try to hide in the kitchen right around the corner, but they are too quick and are soon upon us. I open the back door to escape down the outside stairs but they catch me and tie me up with uncoated wire. Although I am tied up, the wire is primarily designed to tether me, so I can still move around. Nancy they have left free of any restraints. We stand on the landing of the wooden stairs leading down to a back lawn from the kitchen. The stairs run along the face of an outside wall of the building, and I try to swing the wire binding me out over the face of the building to catch it on nails on the wall. Once I catch the wire on a nail, I swing myself out, trying to catch myself on an even more distant nail and to escape. The captors allow me do this, assuming I can't escape.
As I do this, I find objects on the wall that I give to Nancy to protect herself, explaining their purpose. A couple are heavy objects she can use to hit people, and one of these is an ancient iron. The third and last object is for stabbing. It is a letter opener embedded in a heavy stand, with the letter opener's blade sticking up in the fashion of a spindle. She doesn't want to use these weapons, doesn't think they will work, but I've laid them out on the flat railing at the top of the stairs for her anyway. Nancy opens the door to the refrigerator, which is right next to the door, to look for something else.
My swinging plan is not producing results, so I try another idea. I stand on the railing and start tearing out the ceiling just above the landing of the stairs. Our captors ignore me, thinking nothing of it. I tear out siding, insulation, and wood, creating an opening. I lift myself up through this opening and enter through the floor of a closet into a room.
This room is on the fourth floor of our house, a floor I didn't know existed, and it it Erin's storage room for the overflow from her bedroom, yet it looks like a bedroom without a bed. The floor is carpeted, she has full dressers in the room, the room is decorated, clothes are hanging neatly in the closet. She has a few windows in the room, but they are high up, and I must get on my tippytoes to see out the windows.
From that vantage point, I can see that our captors control the shoreline, but that the "normal" people of the country—including the military, the police, and civilians—have boats out in the harbor and they are conducting their lives normally. I can tell our captors from everyone else by the white uniforms they wear.
I decide I have to leave this room before they find me, so I take a door leading out of it and down another dark hallway. I find myself in a living room with a wall of windows that allows me a view of the shoreline, which the white-uniformed people are patrolling in a desultory way. I realize that the room I am in juts out over the shoreline, affording me some cover, so I go downstairs and outside.
It is now low tide, so I have space on the shore to leave a message, which I write in coded language with green-brown seaweed. The white-uniformed people are nearby, so I work quickly. I am hoping that someone in one of the pleasure boats on the water will see this message and get it to the authorities. As I do, one boat drives up, and a portly man hops out of the boat and trudges through the water to my message. I am still there but I don't tell him anything. I just point to the message, making sure he takes pictures of all of it. He looks confused, but he dutifully photographs the whole message, piece by piece and then as a whole. Sometimes he photographs the message upside-down or sideways, but that won't ruin the message. As he leaves, I know he will take the message to the authorities, who will puzzle out its meaning, presented as a kind of minimalist poetry.
I do not reenter the house. Instead, I turn and walk along the shore up the hill the house is on, and into a small wooded area. There is a wooden stairway, with periodic landings like terraces, and I am walking up those stairs. The woods are close in on the stairs, and a metal line that pulls a small gondola up and down the hill moves through the tops of the trees. To speed up my ascent, I grab onto one side of the line and allow it to pull me up the hill. I am strangely too heavy for the line, so it pulls me up for a few seconds, but then succumbs, allowing my weight to drag me down to the ground again as the line builds up tension to pull me up the hill one more time. I ascend the hills in a series of jumping pulls.
At the top of the hill, I find myself in a small driveway next to the house, with woods tight around it. The driveway leads to a wide garage door that opens like stable doors (a vertical pair of doors opening in the opposite direction from each other). A young black boy who has come up the hill just before me rushes to the garage doors, fiddles with them (maybe entering a combination) then goes inside and closes the door. Immediately, he exits and runs back to the edge of the woods. It is clear to me that he is alone, that he has had to figure out how to live safely in a world controlled by people who are determined to control us.
I am now at the door to the garage. I see it is open, so I enter, but I haven't figured out how the combination works, not even where it is entered. I look out the paned windows of the garage and see that the boy is trying to return to the garage surreptitiously. He throws himself to the ground and crawls towards the garage. He climbs into a black suitcase, zippers it partially closed and scoots towards the garage. He climbs into a green costume of a Tyrannosaurus rex and creeps towards the garage. Somehow, these processes are meant to hide the fact that someone is approaching the garage, but a young boy and his father spot the boy and start walking towards him.
I work on figuring out the combination to the garage door's locking system. I find a keypad beside the door and decide that I should be able to enter a password there to open, close, or lock the door. The wall around the keypad is covered with writing in pencil, sometimes scribbled, and somehow hints on the password are contained in those notes. As I consider the notes, I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. I hide against the wall, but I am in plain sight. As a couple walks down the stairs that connect the garage to the system of dark dank tunnels and hallways in the house, I crouch.
When they come in, they are talking to each other. They are discussing friends of theirs, another married couple. They cannot see me because I am invisible, but they take me for the male half of that couple, and they talk to me about my supposed wife. I somehow know facts about that woman, so I can carry on a conversation without becoming suspicious. They do not suspect that I am not their male friend because I am invisible, so they assume I look like him.
The woman and I go for a drive, maybe to find my supposed wife. As I drive her, she mentions how I am invisible, asking what I'm doing all the time, since she cannot see me.
At some point, the occupants in the car become a group of old women, and they are chattering happily to themselves. I continue to drive, past strip malls and into a small town whose main street is lined with trees and small white clapboard houses, but we drive straight, always on the same road.
I do not know where we are going.
posted by mark young at 11:00 AM
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