Wireframe. Chinese Teleportation. 1957. John Wayne's Car. Oil. Hydroplane Barges.
Marco McClean
First dream. Two bad guys force me to guide them through
tunnels into a treasure mountain. We come to a wide place and
there's nothing here; they become ugly, thinking I've misled
them. I point up through a hole in the roof and say, "We just
hafta get up on top now." We go back up the suddenly much
steeper tunnel. Something big and alive blocks the light of the
opening and starts down fast; we scoot down on our butts to stay
ahead of it. I was leading, so I'm now behind; I shout, "Instant
you hit the bottom, get outta the way!"
I've escaped from my captors and I'm at a farm in summer
moonlight. On a train line across a field a wireframe minimalist
locomotive like a /sodaconstructor/ project loses its integrity
and falls to pieces. The woman in the farmhouse door is like my
childhood friend Jeff Coburn's mother; she says, "Looks like
sumpin's broken." I say, "You're not safe here. You should come
with us." (Us?)
Either back in time or forward, underground, a wall with
inset horizontal beams explodes toward me, spraying UV-decayed
polyfoam dust. This is a structural test. I explain everything
to the farm woman while the chorus of the song /Son of a
Preacher Man/ plays tinnily from a dangling telephone.
Next dream. Juanita is an important little Chinese girl I'm
supposed to protect; we have to teleport farther along through
our coffee-table-book journey-story fight against evil. People
are after us --they're on our side, but they're clueless;
they'll mess everything up. We hide in plain sight under folding
tables in a linoleum-tiled clearing in the forest. Juanita goes
/bonk-bonk-bonk/ on the floor with our magic baseball rock. It
doesn't work; we're still under the table. Our pursuers dash
into the clearing, look around. One peers at us as if he can
almost see us. /Try again./ Juanita goes /bonk-bonk-bonk/ extra
hard and we're outta here. That was close.
Next dream. I'm an old sergeant taking new student recruits
into the sky to have their first experience scouting an
alternate Earth. I've done this a hundred times and it's always
dangerous for a different reason. This time we have to fly up
into a twister in a dark storm; we'll stay connected by holding
onto a long black flying rubber hose. I say, "Go-go-go! You
first! You... You... C'mon, /move/." I go up last because I'll
have to swing us all around in the air so the hose goes into the
twister from the side. After I leave the ground I cut off the
excess hose behind me with a neat metal-and-black-plastic
folding knife that's easy to open and close using one hand. The
girl above me on the hose says, "Nice knife." I say, "Yeah. Is
it yours?" No. No-one knows whose it is. Hmm. Mine now.
In the other world we're invisible, it's Memorial Day
evening and people are having a funeral for a passably
reconstructed and embalmed marine dressed in his white uniform.
They carry his corpse over their heads into the vine-trellis
gazebo next to an old cemetery.
Our return point is out the second-floor window of an empty
house. I've sent the kids up into the sky on the hose and I
don't notice until I'm going out the window myself that across
the way a retarded girl is staring at us out her window. /Bye./
Wave.
We appear in a cave at the north end of Caspar Beach. The
kids are now small, all under nine; their father, Michael
Reilly, gets up from his beach campfire (there are lots of
people on the beach; they all have hotdog fires) and he says,
"Come, kids-- we're late for the movie."
I go to the cave to go back to the /other/ other world, the
magic one.
Now the cave is a stairwell hallway on a high-middle floor
in an old apartment building and I'm with other adults, all
equals. The jump to the magic world does not work, nor to any
world. I'm sure we'll figure it out; maybe we're just on the
wrong floor or in the wrong hallway. We go to the other end of
the hallway, to the bedroom of an old woman among us who's left
her shoeboxes of papers; I go in to get them for her and without
having gone past me she's already there, in bed. /She's a witch.
It's a trap./ I say, "We just want to leave." On the dresser is
her photo of John Kerry and John Edwards in the magic world-- so
they've been in other worlds; that's surprising. If they had
other-world travel, why didn't they win?
The old woman in bed becomes a stereotypical devil, then a
hat flopping in wind blowing through the corner windows, then
the old woman in the hall comes in and puts the hat on. She
says, "I like this hat." I say, "Uh, okay..."
It's determined that the transfer point is in the center of
the building. The square torus of hallway here is an art gallery
showing paintings from 1957. I tell Beat poet Ruth Weiss that I
wasn't alive when these painting were made. At the caterer's
table I, Juanita and the old lady from the room before (the
witch) eat normal crab and crab-carapaced baby arms. We discuss
whether or not it's polite to eat the little fingers and hands.
I don't eat the hands, but it's not out of politeness; they're
so small, there's hardly any meat. I develop a method where I
crack along the upper arm and forearm and pull all the meat out
in a string by tugging on the hand.
My dreams from Saturday, 2005-06-04:
First dream. I come in the night to where they filmed a John
Wayne war movie in a jungle village of huts on stilts over tall
grass. Up the hill an intelligent car has the character flaw
that it picks people it doesn't like and lures them to drive it,
then it rolls over and over down between the stilt huts so the
person inside is all smashed up. Then it dumps the body and goes
back up to wait.
I'm not getting in that car. I walk away down the raised
boardwalk past the huts. This whole place is a historical art
installation. They never made a movie here; that they did is
only implied in the art. I wonder who paid for all this-- Archer
Daniels Midland?
Next dream. I and some others walk up a hill on a lineless
road. I use this opportunity to teach two big nice dogs to heel,
one on each side of me. They learn fast.
I go through a bedroom, surprising the people sleeping
here-- /sorry! sorry!/-- to get to the bathroom to take a
shower. The water comes out of the nozzle already soapy, oily.
Yuck.
The college girl whose bathroom this is (?) comes in, turns
on the water in the second shower-bath around the divider wall,
undresses and gets in. Her friend comes, undresses, gets in my
shower. My body is a ceramic and wood mannequin. I dress, tuck
in my shirt, go out to the cafeteria building to have breakfast.
This is all some sort of a religious camp.
In the cafeteria, old Uncle /Somebody/ shows up dressed as a
matador; a woman here designed his look and the look of the
cafeteria, which now is all black flowers, black wallpaper. I'm
in bed. I peek over the bunched-up sheets at the designer woman
and can only see her blurry silhouette. I say, "I gotta get up.
I'm disoriented." An oily-skinned cross between actors Danny
deVito and Bob Hoskins stands next to the bed, but his head is
at bed-height. I say of him to the room, "Lookadat face, hey?
This guy can do anything. He can hold his breath for three
minutes." He's embarrassed by praise.
Next dream. A rangy old woman, her husband and I sit at the
edge of a grassy bluff above a river. A train of barges speeds
along on the water. I joke about them being on hydroplanes and
about how hard it is to steer a train of barges with the tugboat
pushing instead of pulling.
We get up to leave. The man slips down close to the cliff. I
say, "Do you want help?" No, he doesn't, but he's struggling,
slipping farther down and he's about to fall. I lie in the
tangled runner-grass, grab the man's wrist and roll uphill,
dragging him out of danger. We're lying next to each other in
the muddy grass, safe. He doesn't say /thank you/ but I don't
care if he's offended that I helped him. I mean, he can't have
wanted to fall, and even if he did, /I/ didn't want him to.
-end-