At Least They're Committed

“Did I spell it right?”

“Think so, though I’m not sure I’m the one you should ask.”

“True, so . . . . oh, great sage, what about these freaking dreams?”

“Which dreams?”

“I’m sitting in the woodlands on an uninhabited island, uninhabited except for the few of us survivors, and I’ve steeled away and I’m talking to a severed pig’s head swarming with flies and it’s telling me that the beast is not on the island! It’s in all of us! It is our nature! We are the beast! Oh, God!”

He leans back in his chair and rolls his eyes. “You didn’t dream that.”

“Hmmm, oh, that’s right. I’m living that! Ha! ‘Hello, my name is Simon!’ Is it bath time?”

He’s stoic. Waiting.

“Yes, yes, OK, my dreams; flood, war, famine, plague, pestilence . . . a new one each night. Not a good sign. The last time I had dreams like this was the months before 9-11, and that was different,” I grow quiet, yet he says nothing.

Finally I pipe up, “I sat up calling out, ‘they’re alive, they’re alive! They’re trapped! Save them,’ and I saw their silhouettes beneath tons  of cement and wire and metal and I thought maybe they were in, like, a pocket . . . all this months before it even happened.”

“But?”

I don’t want to say, but he’s staring at me and I hate that. “I wandered in, zombielike as others did, unheralded, at 9:30 a.m. on 9-11, sent home at 1 a.m. so I could come back and watch the wire and build a digest of survivor stories at 8 a.m., hope, you know. I was placed on survivor watch at the Rocky for Sept. 12. And I waited and I watched the wire and the TVs and I saw the EMTs with their stretchers waiting . . . waiting . . . ”

“And you waited.”

“I did. But there were no survivors that day. The voices that had been calling to me, they were dead . . . . . . . . . . . . .”

“So, your dreams?”

“Recent? Well, in one I was spewing foam from my mouth, trying to push the people away from  me so they wouldn’t be harmed but they acted as if nothing was wrong, or is that were? They thought they were immune; the next had a demon child, no child I knew, a white, pale child with light blue eyes and I wrapped my fingers around his neck not to harm him, I could not do that to a child, just to keep him at bay. Jesus, this keyboard sucks!”

“He says He doesn’t care. So the next?”

“The floods, then the drought, then the airlift, but we were too many and we’re sitting on a tan couch cushion on the outside of the chopper — me, another young gal and Joseph Gordon Levitt or maybe it was Dante’s friend Kevin, they look just alike. But we weren’t secure and — as in all the dreams — I was only in my early 20s yet felt responsible and feared for their safety. And as the helicopter pitched I reached out to make sure they were secure but then it pitched the other way and as I lost my balance and fell, I thought of that Badlees song as I plummeted to the Earth, you know? I have no fear of falling . . .”

“But I hate hitting the ground.”

“Yeah, and it was ugly. I only saw enough to see that there was no distinction between flesh and cloth and bone and matter . . . I’ve always had great hair, but it was buried beneath the mess of me. I turned away from my corpse and the coroners who came, I will remember their faces, but they were indifferent to me . . . to who I had been and what, if anything, I’d done. And I tried to speak into the guy with the Buddy Holly glasses’ mind, but he could not hear so I wandered around, being OK with being dead, talking, amused, wondering if anyone could sense me. Then someone did. A slender, dark-haired woman in her 30s was happy to talk with me and she was getting on a bus and encouraged me to do so, so I did. And I thought maybe I had survived. Maybe that broken blob wasn’t me. Everyone else on the bus could hear me! And I was glad because we were myriad and diverse and . . . then of course I realized they could hear me because we were all dead and that was OK.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the bus took us over green pastures with beautiful waters and mountains and forests and we could pick our space; where we wanted to be.”

“And where did you pick?”

“I di’unt! I woke up. Yeuwp, still here.”

“Interesting. Back to the pig’s head,” he says. He looks silly in that hat, but I barely smirk.

“No talking pigs today, thank you, or flying ones for that matter. And in the end, I’m not opposed to hanging out and talking to pigs heads. Just prefer not to get bludgeoned by the rabble, you know? I have kids.”

He chuckles, “You’re talking to me, is it any different than the pig?”

I smile, “No.” I ponder a bit more, “Well, yes. You’re much more attractive.”

Neil Young is playing, “Doesn’t mean that much to me, to mean that much to you!” I sing. “It’s kind of my mantra, but only to power hungry peeps.”

“That’s a good one.”

“Aw, thanks! OK, bedtime.”

“Sweet dreams.”

“Yeah, sweet dreams. See you in a few?”

“Most likely.”