dreamstack

[dreamstack]

Gabor’s mom’s place, but it’s not a corner condo—it’s one of a few buildings on a country road overlooking fields. The wallpaper border in the front room is an endless horizon of tornados. Out the window, you can see rain descend on the whole county in the dusk. It’s not coming this way. Darkness falls.

The house is filled with treasures. Gabor had said “take what you want, don’t feel bad”. I try on a pair of thigh-high leather combat boots. Ralph Lauren, not my style. I spy a mirror that matches the one that jumped off the wall and broke last month. Then I see a pair of much older mirrors, silver and mercury.

The crystal is in the basement but the door is locked. As I poke around for another entrance, another door swings shut behind me and now it’s locked too. I realize all the door handles in the house are switched to the lock position. I sweep the ground floor layout, unlocking doors as I go.

I never make it to the basement.

[dreamstack]

At the office, I drop a little plastic sandwich toy cuz it’s covered in flies. I realize someone’s put a real red pepper slice on it so I try to pick it away without touching the flies, but I get squeamish and accidentally flick it across the room. I’m in the way as I go looking for something to pick it up with. Someone has a paper towel roll on his desk, which is also covered in napkins. I overhear someone tease him: “how bout I help you one-towel-cleanup your desk?”

Jesse is there. I’ve always looked up to him, but today he seems even taller.

[dreamstack]

Last night I returned at last to the cove behind the rocks at the shore. Its basin was filled with blue ice and frigid water. A man slipped and fell in. The cliffside hotel is still there, up around the corner on the bluff. The air crisp, the sky clear, the caves mysterious and secluded, the sand sticky and smooth.

[dreamstack]

Sitting on the riverbank the sun filter through the beech leaves in autumn. They glow pink and gold. There’s construction downstream and the river is running very fast. Suddenly, a car floats by! We look on in amazement. There’s someone inside! A man and his two chihuahuas. He looks like he’s texting.

Later on, behind the scenes at Ace of Cups, I ask around about how to call in to the police about such a thing. “That was me!” a voice pipes up. I turn around and it’s Aaron Sturgill. He’s sitting at a picnic table in the break room with his dogs. I don’t ask any more questions.

I make for the bathroom. Women’s is out of order as usual so I enter the men’s room. First, the door is barely a door at all, just a flap of wood on hinges. No handle, no latch. I look around me for something I could wedge behind it when a chameleon appears on the wall above my head. He reaches for my shoulder like he wants a ride.

Just as he touches me, a man barrels through the door, brushing past me, vanishing into the crowd behind me. There’s no back wall to this room either, no toilet, it’s just an exit to the back patio.

The patio is a lumber yard with a gravel clearing near the back of the bar. Parties are sitting at picnic tables, drinking and laughing. I go on a parkour adventure to find a private place to pee. I don’t find one, but I do knock over a lot of poorly constructed framing. “I’ll help you fix it after I pee,” I call behind me.

Aaron has a show later. His hair is long and black with bangs. When he gets offstage, he looks like Bobby Hill. I guess it was a wig.

[dreamstack]

Back in school again I think.

[dreamstack]

A huge beluga washed up in the harbour. A crowd watched enthralled as waves churned its soft pale flesh against the slick wood of the dock. It seemed an omen.

[dreamstack]

Lost in Loretta & Brian’s house at night. It’s huge and dark and full of guests lurking around corners. I can’t find my room or I don’t have one, but I’m just looking for some privacy.

Just when I think I’ve found a corner to myself, a fat round little man with a clipboard rounds the corner and turns on the light. This isn’t Loretta & Brian’s house, this is a Bavarian restaurant. They’re joined somehow. He points me in the direction of the house.

I look out the windows as I go and see I’ve gone very far from the main house. I can see their pool across a courtyard filled with tables. It’s been snowing, too, for this is Lambeth in winter.

I crossed a causeway to get here in a great dark storm. Tornados all over the suburbs.

[dreamstack]

A house in an old amusement park, tornados falling to the ground like weights but heading away from us, construction between us and the recording studio, trading beds with my sister who can’t sleep still, a big poolside party, hanging out with Kevin Bacon taking silly pictures in the pool.

[dreamstack]

Feeling sick on a Zoom call with my family right before we’re all gonna see each other again for the first time in a long time and I’m describing my unexplained fever and fatigue and it takes a pretty long time before someone asks if it could be COVID and of course it is.

[dreamstack]

Every river leads to the sea. This one is sick with detritus. Everything that swims through it is dying or dead. You might cutely believe the expanse of the ocean would have room enough for all of it, but the photic zone is uniformly contaminated. Dead animals are trapped in trash nets. A great white shark’s lips mush sneering against the grid of a steel cage it could neither avoid nor escape. Pale stringy gums creep away from its rows of razor teeth. Its dead eyes seem alive, begging you. Every eye begging.

[dreamstack]

In the arctic circle, I looked up at the sky. Not just more stars, but different too. Freckled faces circling a central void, the North Pole beaming into space. “Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s what I came for.”

[dreamstack]

Things were put to bed, but I texted her anyway. The next thing I knew, I was in a rotting 70s mansion, and she was standing in the door. I don’t know how she died or when, but her skin was taut and pale and sagged from the weight of the flesh behind it which had started to liquefy. Her eyes were grey and cloudy. She didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t even seem to see me, but here we were together, all because of a text. I backed out of her sight line and slipped into a hall.

The wall fountain was crumbling, like the house that held it. Its pillars were bone white and sturdy still, but no water ran from its spout and the basin was long dry. The metal spout was loose, and slid away with little effort. Behind it was a porcelain lattice pipe, bone white, part of an ancient tile plumbing system no one uses anymore.

There was buried treasure in the living room. The ceilings were vaulted in stucco, the carpet frozen in time, fluffy and white as the day it was made. Soot and grime eriupted into plumes as I rooted and dug. The goods were in the vent. I was sure of it.

In the meantime, the corpse of my enemy had put herself to bed. She lay on the left side of the stale old mattress, as if expecting a bedmate, silhouetted by the bedspread, with just a little tuft of matted hair poking out at the top. Her toes were exposed at the bottom: still too tall even in death. I prayed no one made a sound to wake her. I slipped away again.

The living room was a theatre now and it was movie night. Every seat was filled, but instead of rows of stadium chairs there were tufted couches, pillows and mattresses, and everyone had snacks. We staked our claim on a good spot in front.

Out back, a pile of rubble inside something like a carport seemed to hold something threatening. “It’s the piggies” I said to the kid. “PIGGIES!” the kid echoed, only it wasn’t the kid, but a prize-winning heavyweight hog that appeared like a genie from a bottle, as big as a horse, hot and pink and alive. My friend Piggy was happy to be here, and I was happy too.

I awoke in a panic—I didn’t REALLY text my old boss last night, did I??

[dreamstack]

The storm isn’t coming, it’s here. Through the skylight, the clouds roll in so fast they froth like waves breaking on rocks. They are blacker than black. We skirt the edge of it, we think it’s missed us, but there’s always more.

Water looks great. He’s down the beach, he’ll meet me at the party.

[dreamstack]

Bits and pieces. The beach, a field, a road in the woods, saving a dangling woman from a grisly bridge death.

[dreamstack]

We have a baby. I love this baby. It’s a fun baby, not too fussy. Great baby! But suddenly we can’t find the baby. “Babe, help me find the baby!” I say. I hear something under the guest bed. I keep finding cats. You get distracted by the cats. “Whoa, it’s Tupelo!” “Babe, the BABY!” “Whoa, ANOTHER cat!” I find the baby under the bed. She’s fine. You play with the cats.

[dreamstack]

Shaving my legs with a utility blade.

[dreamstack]

I found Tupelo! He was in a pet crate and already scared but then the crate fell several storeys down a stairwell shaft. He wouldn’t stop running after that, his eyes were huge, his ears were flat. He wouldn’t let me hold him.

At the beach at dawn.