Deejay Napoleon Solo. A Sense Of Space. Clover. Orpheus And Eurydice. Flight.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in the broadcast studio upstairs at KMFB with Patti
Ferreira, who used to run the Mendocino Theatre Company, and Napoleon
Solo, the Man From U.N.C.L.E. Napoleon Solo is a visiting deejay who
just plays music on his shows and doesn't understand about the way I do
mine, which is to read letters and stories and information aloud all
night. Patti tries to explain to him about me; she says, "He never
plans." Napoleon Solo raises an eyebrow. I say, "If ya try to figure
it all out in advance it takes way longer than just doing it and it
isn't any better. If you just go forward, you always just know what to
do next." Oh. Yeah. He sees that. /Except that's not what I think --I
don't know why I said it-- and our shows are not at all alike. It's
apples and oranges.
Next dream. The back-story feels like the overall story of Stargate
Universe (the latest Stargate spinoff show) but without the dark tones;
we're not in trouble for resources-- we /are/ on a mysterious ship
that's going where it wants to without any input from us; and we have
short opportunities to visit planets and learn things.
On one planet a squat, ropy tree that's important to the local
people's government and religion is failing. The special clearing in the
city park where the tree and all its various parts, some of them
detached, is made available for us to investigate. Here on the grass is
a brown paper shopping bag with animal guts and a big cow tongue in it,
and this is considered to be part of the tree. Huh.
We think we can help the tree by washing it with water from our
ship. I'm holding the end of the hose. The water starts coming out with
fierce intensity (of course; it has a column of water hundreds of miles
high); I shout into the radio, "Turn it down a little!" It backs off a
little, not much. I shout, "Down! Way down!" Okay, that's better.
Another man here with me makes a discovery of tiny non-glowing
L.E.D.'s in the flesh of the ropes of the tree. He points out that we
have little dots on our own skin; that it's a thing common to all life.
I look closely at my arm and, yup, there are little red dots there. Huh,
again.
Up in the ship, two scientist men share a bare apartment. A walkway
balcony goes across the front. There's a huge empty space below and
above the balcony. I become one of these scientists, the one that looks
like actor William Hurt. I free-associate about where the ship might be
going; I say, "I know what it's doing; it's finished its job after
thousands and thousands of years, and it's /giving us the tour./
On another civilized planet, here's the tree thing again, or another
similar one, also in a city park. The local religious general says to
me, "Have you arranged the singing?" I say, "Oh, sure." No, we haven't.
I think he's referring to some religious nonsense that has no basis in
fact. But fish start going back and forth in the concrete pond, and a
hydrocephalic dolphin-man-thing is in the water, getting closer and
closer to being in the way of the heavy, solid, fast fish. I become the
dolphin-man-thing, wait for the exact moment and jump out of the water
to let the fish go by. I see now that the fish have been conditioned by
the religious song to stabilize and become calm when they hear it, so it
/is/ necessary.
On another planet the two doctor/scientists and Juanita and I are in
an open-top car going down a steep, winding mountain road. I'm in the
back seat; Juanita's reading her book in the front passenger seat.
Everyone vanishes but Juanita and me. The car is careening down the slot
of the road. I say to Juanita, "Control it. Push the brake." She
doesn't move. I say, "Push the damn brake!" She moves over to be
behind the wheel but does nothing. I say, "Push the brake or get out of
the way," and I climb over the seat-back, shove her aside and control
the car.
We're stopped, safe, at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of a
rural town. Standing on the side of the road, I say coldly to Juanita,
"Next time I ever tell you to do something, you /do/ it. Do you
understand." She says yes, but she doesn't like being talked to that
way; she and a local demented girl (?) get into the back of some other
local hippie's VW pickup truck that suddenly roars away. God /dammit!/
Years have passed. I've found Juanita in another town, where she's
become actor Ian McKellen, a wise old country doctor who came from outer
space years ago and settled on this planet to do what good he could. I
say, "So is this your mission? your reason for being?" He says, "The
ordinary jobs --wiping your windshield in a gas station, and so on--
there's comfort in that, a sense of space."
Next dream. I and someone else (?) balance walking across the tops
of wooden fences behind the old Brannon's Restaurant in Mendocino (CA)
to get to a big open space where the MacCallum house and the post office
and eventually the high school should be. We go north through that big
field. Here's a paddock that contains a morose tall thin horse. I pet
the horse, give it attention, let it out; it becomes too friendly and
follows me on my way (the other person with me has vanished). To get
through the fence at the next road and leave the horse behind, I have to
trick the horse. It becomes a physically sheeplike man with an
untrustworthy aspect, and he wants what he calls /clover/, which is thin
very green brush-shrubs he can't get to. He talks some tourists into
letting him out of the bigger field to get the clover, and this results
in him and /all the other sheep/ getting across the street and loose in
the rough fields there.
(discontinuity)
I'm late for class in a college classroom downstairs below where in
real life is Crown Hall (the fire department's old church/theater-space)
in Mendocino. I rush in, sit in front of a Nordic version of Juanita and
behind my old schoolfriend Mike Bell. A tutor character is sitting to
the right of Mike, facing him, talking him through some problems.
(There's something wrong with Mike here, maybe a brain injury.) Mike
recites his lesson and misuses the word /obese/-- he says something or
somebody /obeeses/ the situation, which I think is kind of poetic, but
the tutor comes down hard on him for not knowing what /obese/ means. I
say, "Obeesy-berry pie," (quoting a Marshall Efron comedy record),
trying to be funny, but Mike starts to cry, the cries more because of
the embarrassment of crying. I say, "That's nothing. I cry all the
time, at everything." He won't be consoled. I say, "You'll get it.
You'll get it back."
The classroom becomes an underground parking lot in a level of an
/underworld/ (in the sense of the Land of the Dead in myths and
stories). Juanita (in her normal appearance) and I look for a way out.
Here's a package-delivery truck with a big sign on the side for the name
of the service company: /STAB ATLANTIS/. Funny. I say to Juanita, "I
think that sends the wrong message," meaning, a message of pierced and
water-damaged packages. Now the lower half of this side of the truck has
shelves of confections for sale, many of them weird, with little dead
animals in them, but the bottom shelf has good things. I say to
Juanita, "Do you want one? Take what you want."
Here are the stairs. I think we can get out into the real, living
world. I hold Juanita around the waist from behind as we climb up and
come out into a dim, creepy version of Mendocino. /This is still the
underworld./ We move stealthily but nonchalantly north/northeast to the
end of a giant dam under construction, that's much higher in the middle
than at this end. We climb up to where there's a ledge around both sides
of the dam. A small but formidable golem-like (machine-like) man blocks
the way. I say, "I'm here to teach someone to fly around the side."
The man steps toward me menacingly, but a spider or spider's shadow gets
in the way and confuses him. We pass him and go around the left side of
the dam, which is a slope of crumbly gunite (sprayed concrete) over soft
dirt, with one layer of spread-out two-by-twelve planks, and people
sitting on the planks, waiting for something. Our arrival destabilizes
the whole arrangement and the planks and people go sliding down.
I can't worry about those people. Juanita and I go down a dirt track
toward the slope at the other end of the dam, where I know the road will
go to the left. /I've been here before./ Now I realize that when we get
to the boathouse (?), the boatman in the ticket
booth/halloween-funhouse/theater entry hallway won't let us pass without
the metal tokens you have to have there, which we don't have. We keep
going anyway.
Off the side of the path, actress Toni Orans is looking down into a
deep square pit in the eart with humans and animals (or human animals)
screaming at the bottom. Juanita is drawn to look down into the pit; I
stay back. /Please be careful./
Finally, here's the boathouse/theater. We go into the entrance
hallway. An invisible skeleton grabs me from behind with an arm and long
finger bones; it won't let me go in with Juanita. I pull the door shut
on the bones and am released.
Here's the ticket booth. All is quiet. I don't have any ideas left
as to how to get past this point. I say to the counter man, "We've been
here before. I know the rules. I know you can't make an exception. But
can you let us stay together down here." Juanita's crying because of
not going up to live in the world again. She's so beautiful and so
helpless and so sad. I say to the counter man, "Don't look at me; look
at her." He bends down through the counter slot and examines her face.
He says something sarcastic about maybe meeting her later. (He means
/he/ would meet her later.) I say, "Will you let us through."
He lets us through. We sit in bleachers in a dark theater. The whole
time in this last place we never took our arms away from around each
other, but-- Juanita is not here. I'm alone. /Well, I tried. We tried./
Next dream. Juanita and I are fleeing Death-character-like cops.
Mister Incredible (from the movie /The Incredibles/) flies by on a
flying motorcycle with a flying motorcycle cop after him. They're
avoiding power lines that cross this dark country road, but Mister
Incredible has been fleeing for a long time and he's /tired/. His
motorcycle turns around and flies backward. Juanita says like a sports
commentator, "He always gets sleepy and drops his knees." And she's
right; his feet slip off the footpegs and his knees catch on a power
cable, spinning him and his motorcycle over backward and catapulting him
the other way. Somehow the same thing happens to the officer, and that
officer becomes the one Juanita and I have been fleeing from.
Now's our chance. We pull out onto the road on /our/ (non-flying)
motorcycles and speed away from the temporarily discombobulated cop. I
see a dirt driveway to the left. "Come on." We turn up the driveway
and immediately turn left again to go parallel with the road, partially
shielded from view by a hedge. Here comes the cop. I say, "Lie down."
We lay our motorcycles over on their sides and lie still. The cop tears
by on the road. We get up, get back on the road. I drive bent forward
over my handlebar, with my right hand on the front fork of Juanita's
motorcycle next to me; I steer both of us so we stay locked next to each
other around the turns of a winding road just like Highway 128 beyond
Yorkville. /We might really make it out of here this time, out of this
underworld./
-end-