Tag: dreams

At the intersection there are two police vehicles pulled aside bumper to bumper. Before them is heap of blue aluminum and glass on rubber wheels, its nose collapsed into an old face. Moments ago it was a car. The driver has vanished. I roll down my window—it’s unusually warm—and stare at the officers as I pass, but their heads are bowed into screens and they don’t look up. Heads shaven and radiant they could be brothers. I drive to work, park and forget the carnage entirely.

The following morning. A cheap veneer of ice and snow—the earliest in a century—has transformed the neighborhood. Schools are closed and the traffic is light, cautious. It’s quiet but for the crunch of tires and an earthmover, hidden from view, tolling its little warning. 

And then I remember. The shimmer of shattered windshield. The bored gravity of the twin sheriffs. The siren-less banality of the scene. The forgetting. The destruction, largely anonymous, unseen, forgotten. A man or woman, boy or girl, is somewhere in agony, maimed or dead. Disturbed certainly. A sibling or two, a mother, a friend, a lover knows. The intersection, the stage, is unchanged but for its disguise of snow. I pass through it on my way to work.

Later that day. I read “the ruts became deeper,” a sentence of no great import in Madame Bovary, and images of a dream, gossamer-thin like a Lina Bo Bardi drawing, suddenly return with a pleasant potency. I’m in my car, idling behind others at a red light. To my left is a steep slope, a khaki swath of dry grass crowned with asphalt. Another road. The camera pans to the light, still red, and back to the grass. A man in a derelict gray hatchback is scything down it, hell for leather, with cartoonish whimsy. The dream invites me to trace his tracks—up, to the road—and, once he has passed, I accept. The going is difficult. Perhaps because I’m no longer in the car—I am the car.

On television linemen are restoring the electricity. Classes will resume tomorrow. The weatherman explains what happened. Nothing else, it seems, did.  Smashed sedans and broken bodies go unremarked upon. The cops are in bed with their wives. Rome is in bed with Belial. I warm a bowl of spinach soup in the microwave and scroll through stock photos of Pitigliano. A city without a future in a country of caryatids without arms. A city without cars. I’d love to visit, but I’m a menial and I have no money.

That night. I’m lost in a maze of narrow streets. In a dream. And there she is, post-workout, still wearing gym shorts. Aphrodite, waxen, shorter than I’d imagined. Her limbs are the necks of swans. She hoists a charger of frosted doughnuts and, overwhelmed, wonders, “What am I going to do? I ordered drinks and a pork chop, too.” Revelers encircle her, ogling the spread, taking pictures of it, posing with it. But we cannot eat the treasure. We are in search of a party elsewhere, and go looking, but it isn’t there. It isn’t anywhere. I stoop to pick up a coin. Even in my dreams I am poor.

And haunted by food. Cheeses and tarts, plantains and pie, cakes, fishes, buttered toast. They steam and drip, swirl and become melodies. Chords in the song of the thin man. The dirge of dirges, carried by a plaintive cello on a bed of heavy cream. The fast is his vote, the feast his cudgel. Every candied lick the sting of a mortal wound because it is submission to the world and its sovereign, death. Sweet death. How queer she appears as a tangle of string beans. Give us red meat! If only to say, “Ah, yes, there she is.” But I am still besotted with sleep and the long hour between meals when death can only come to the edge of the wood. No further. She must squint through binoculars and drool. So the thin man eats without opening his mouth. The fat man she has seated and served.

I put a full bladder of warm piss into the toilet bowl. My heart leaps from hibernation, confused, revving in high gear. It is but three a.m. and I am a congeries of stupid thoughts, grocery lists and impossible dream images. The man, for instance, without a face, whom I suspect is only the lowly moderator of an online forum. “Thoughtspace,” he says when I ask of his handle. I turn to the flashing leaderboard in search of his moniker but see only versions of it. Chimeras. Thoughtfake, Thoughttheorem, Timespace. “Are we in the game now?” I wonder, turning back, but he has vanished. Another faceless, hooded thug in a velvet track suit approaches and, in passing, stealthily reaches into my jacket, reaches—preposterously—inside me. Violates me with only a tickle. And yet I’ve been—somehow—rearranged. The mongrel! Beast! I am incensed. I seem to float forward on thoughts of revenge and, looking down, find I’m cradling a rod of gleaming, warm steel. I’ve born a rifle.

But I’m no man of violence. You have forced my hand. Pitting father against son, teacher against pupil, stranger against stranger. It is only self-defense. I once aspired to sing, then to write. Now I must fight. You trick and accuse and deride and lie. You divide. You dress up death in the clothes of truth and lie. You populate my dreams with freaks and puzzles and lie. But I’m no man of violence. I’m barely a man. Childless, passive, a pauper. I only wanted to write. But you bore me a gun. 

Next morning. Snow melting. Crows cawing. Cars crawling. Babies bawling. Everything here is endowed with the myth of my childhood. I can open the same cupboards, the same books. Peer through the same windows into the suppers of the same people. The very people whose painted cheeks haunted me on Halloweens. Here I can be all eye. 

The patient dawn behind the blinds putting prison bars of light across the dresser-cum-bookshelf [I’m coming for you and your Ethics next, Aristotle! And you, Ms. Ditlevsen, don’t budge!]. Ma, ageless in her nubby flannel pajamas, hunched before her jumble. Squirrels twitterpated by the harvest and growing plump on their bounty. Pops in his chair with the obits. The fogged glass into the foyer. The headlights searching the furniture. TV news—always TV news. Turn it up! Turn it down, please. Why is it so quiet? Why is it so loud, dear? I can’t hear it! Can you hear it? The opening salvo. Shall we go for a stroll?

Someone has lost a calendar. The wind has decked it with faux cobwebs and folded it around a signpost. It is March. We have traveled back in time. And in a heavy feminine hand, in the square marked “8,” someone has written, “leave everything.” It is a Friday. Did she? What is it about Fridays that inspire such utter hopelessness? Leave my job, no. Leave Michael. No. Everything. I picture a young woman, her stomach in knots, head dizzy with unanswerable questions. Car pointed east. Wipers going furiously. An American baptism at 75 miles per hour. Everything will be new. She’s too young to know that it is a lie.

Spring is always that way, teasing. It is Palm Sunday, years ago. An uncharacteristically clear evening. People are out walking, birds are singing and courting in the brush. I’m light as air. A young family charges past me, dad pushing a stroller and mom corralling a trio of smiling, fleet-footed tykes. They are racing each other down the boulevard. Laughter ricochets off of yellow brick houses—huge, billowing laughter, really, in the absence of cars. I remember laughter. The good has triumphed, has overcome the world, if only for some seconds. If only for eternity.

Alas, I must turn away from it. And immediately I enter a dream. Leafless arms of stately elms ripple over me and I trip down a corridor of gentle light. Golden light! At its end, some blocks ahead, a door in the trees reveals the sunset, suddenly a point of intense concentration. Through the keyhole, someplace else. A New Jerusalem. Unearthed memories slide on top of one another like mille-feuille, fold into each other, jostle the senses, become almost physical. Christ, too, is walking beneath wrought iron into the City of Many Names, alone, with knowledge of his fate. I see a light breeze sweeping through Golgatha, whipping up little eddies of dust in anticipation. Cue the centurions. His coming resurrection is my own hoped-for conversion, a crocus emerging from frozen ground in the night of life into the heaving bosom of innocence. A clean break from winter. Is it too much to ask? It snowed late into April of that year. And I remain un-bloomed.

Enough poetry. I, too, was once a child. Perhaps I still am—in spirit—as the artist should be. The adult is the crucible of corruption, corruption being the supplication of transience, the denial of truth for lies. This street, for instance, is a lie, a run-on sentence composed for a vile machine. The kitten crushed into soupy leather by a two ton something. Andrew lost in the fog and found on the hood of an Expedition. It is a lie if our hands beget power and speed before tenderness. The lie of lust. It is not our way, to murder. But there are screens to return to and spouses to see through and it’s been such a long day. Accelerate. 

Or turn here and become small again. Become slow again. Try, again, to really notice. Repetitions, pathways, throughways, pipeways, the ciphers of ordinary time. I’m talking about the big mess of life in a patch of weeds and dead leaves and inside the skull. The play of light on vinyl siding. Semantic drift, the immutable—and beautiful—ignorance of youth, the sensation of clothes, vagabonds. Intelligence is an intense noticing. And distraction, its correlative, a kind of retardation. Distraction, destruction. They are sister lovers. No mere hausfraus, they are—beware—seductresses of universal infamy swaddled in exotic patterns and lounging like cats on the ledges and toppled blocks of travertine ruins. Dance about them, delight in their perfumes, but do not meet eyes. Who does anyhow anymore?

Evening. If Canetti is right that “All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams,” who can be their savior? What of crimes compartmentalized and paved over? God, come with me, the guiltiest man alive. Last night a woman, perhaps a former employer, is confronting me with video evidence of some wrongdoing I’ve committed. I see my face on the screen, warped, embalmed. My arms, swathed in a mushroom heather cardigan, wave wildly. “But I’ve done nothing wrong,” I think to myself. There must be some kind of mistake. “I’m so disappointed in you,” says the woman. Lies! The word staggers the dream, but it holds. Lies! I stand accused, naked but for my innocence. Yet she is intransigent, cannot see it. The truth. I’m strong-armed into a purple robe. Hot dust chokes my nostrils. The sensation of falling. And then I wake up.