I.
A male adolescent voice shrieks in the night: I’M DISAPPOINTED! It echoes through the hills. Silence. Then the drums start; alarmed, hot-blooded music.
My cat sits in a pool of moonlight beside the bed, his tail twitching with corrupted calm. His eyes ask: “With whom do you war?”
Out the window I see tents, a campfire, trespassers: deranged boy scouts, bent on proving manhood in all the wrong ways.
I lock the door, pull the curtains, search for the phone number of a white knight whose name I cannot remember. I spot his decapitated head in a pot on the stove, facial features rotted away; he cannot name himself.
They are trying to get into the house. Chaotic thumps and bumps against the walls, mock warriors on the roof. I enjoy the fear, delicious and black, my hiding a sort of game. Disrobing is the deeper desire. Let them in. What are they selling? What am I?
They are strangely silent before the open door, suddenly small, sorry for themselves. I am courteous, suggest assigned seating. They shuffle like tired octogenarians, ready for a rest, sit cross-legged on the floor.
“Court is in session, and private property is on trial!” I quip, standing before them, flooded with relief. I recognize them — they are my children, my precious babies. I search the refrigerator for something to give them. Vitamins? Orange juice? Black olives?
There is a tremor in the earth, ominous rumblings. The house is ripped from its roots and hurled towards a distant galaxy. Out the window I see a beautiful blue-white rope stretching behind us across the night sky, an umbilical cord to earth, a telephone line, eliminating isolation.
II.
I have teenage neighbors who play their stereo too loud. Concerned about an elderly neighbor they might disturb, I stick my head out the window, insist they cut it down. They ignore me. I ask again. Again they ignore me. I stride out, angry, go over to the stereo which is on an outdoor patio and has turned into a large computer terminal. I mash every switch to “off,” and pinch the cheek of a young girl until it bleeds.
The entire group of stereo-players turns into first graders; I am “the disciplinarian.” To teach them a lesson, I offer them a ride to school on a snowy day, strip each one naked before letting them out of the car. They will not freeze to death, I think. They can always go inside the building. I am furtive, hide their clothes behind the gate of a nearby house.
I drive off in my car, to another dream, in which I am a senior in high school, at a class meeting. The school principal comes in. He is a kindly man who thinks he knows right from wrong. He asks if anyone knows anything about naked children. I stiffen in my seat, guilty heart racing. He sees, he knows, I confess, ashamed and embarrassed. He passes around pictures of my “victims,” black and white photographs of concentration camps in World War II. There are thousands of naked children, grouped by age, many frozen to death, all of them suffering from starvation, persecution. “The younger ones just couldn’t take it,” he explains to me softly, “not even for a few minutes.”
III.
A very small man tries to sell me a pair of oversized electric shoes that keep your feet warm in the winter, “for only $100!” He is a slick salesman, who originally wanted to sell me a car, but when we get to his house, there is no car, but a pair of suede shoes, multi-colored in soft grays, blues, pastels.
I complain: “The edge of this one is frayed. And they are three times larger than my feet. I can’t wear these shoes!”
He insists, “Try them on! Walk around! You’ll grow into them!”
His fingernails are dirty. He is a swarthy gypsy in need of a cook and a mother for his edgy adolescent son.
I am too polite, try on the shoes, and mysteriously end up married to this man, spending my days in a greasy dark kitchen, my nights fighting off the oversexed son who keeps a loaded gun under his pillow at all times. My husband laughs too loud, tells me I am petty, drives around in second-hand Cadillacs, selling shoes to the handicapped and naive.
I suffer for years, unaware I can make an escape. I break out of the house on a moonless night, a small dark gypsy woman myself now, in my fifties, tiny and withered with white hair. The briar patch I must crawl through to find freedom seems a small price.
I arrive at a river, camp alone on an embankment. My privacy ends when “spring break” occurs and campus refugees pile into every available space, to “party party party.” I try to mix with the crowd and succeed but must hide my hard won wisdom to do so. It bloats my stomach, an irreversible pregnancy, and the young crowd boos me when I “lose my figure.”
I walk away barefoot, pleased and at peace. The calluses on my feet protect me from sharp stones but are not so thick that I can’t feel the earth, enjoy a sensuous relationship.
I find a smooth pebble in my palm. It is cool to the touch, an adventure stripped of drama, purpose laid bare.
IV.
The world is being corroded by a kind of acid that is slowly eating through everyone’s skin. It is surprisingly painless, but one is unable to have hope. There is no wholeness; everyone is being transformed into nubby, pock-marked, balding beings who rove the streets in bands in search of the source of their disfigurement, ready to punish.
I am a survivor, moving along for years, keeping written records, weary but wise with humor; having no hands, I write by inserting a pen into my belly button. My graffiti decorates the walls of abandoned buildings.
Mutant life forms arise. I watch the hairy pet beast of a woman eat a man. She slaps it in anger. It eats her. I run away, follow a man I love into a basement room. “Is it over?” I ask. “Not yet. But soon, soon, I hope,” he says. We cry together, in desperate need of clean water.
It is over. It wasn’t real, it was a musical show, a Broadway production. I am in the street where people come up to me with their misshapen hands, grotesquely and comically mocking their deformities by pretending their nubs are puppets through which they speak in falsetto voices.
A group of people approach me who have not been touched by the acid. Their clothes are immaculate, they have full heads of hair, clear and glowing skin. They are “agents” for our “show.”
Everyone begins to unmask. There is a cast of thousands. The lights of flash cameras go off in my face while I stand and accept congratulations “for a role well played.” I am dazed, beloved. Familiar faces drift by in the crowd, faces of people I have never met but know, faces of people I know but haven’t seen in years. I give them all red rose buds which have begun to grow in my hair.
V.
I am carrying my cabin on my back, like a turtle. Where can I put it? I have pulled up my roots and must resettle. So has everyone else. Camp setting. Shelters going up in a field, tents, teepees. Friendly fires blazing with cheerful keepers warming their hands.
An older woman friend cautions that I must not seek isolation, must stay within screaming distance of the others. She warns me of the horses in the pasture. They are “boxers,” with horns. I realize they are unicorns. I cross the field unharmed, forget my house, and find myself in Amherst, Massachusetts.
There is a riding school in the street. The horsemaster sits up high on a lifeguard stand with a riding crop across her lap. An old friend approaches me, a woman I grew up with whose aristocratic pretensions have put me off in the past. She takes me for a ride, but sits backwards on the horse, facing me. There is snow and ice on the street as we gallop down it, but the horse’s movements are smooth, graceful, silky, safe.
We arrive at my friend’s school, a place steeped in tradition. There is a full blown, richly complex texture to everything I see. She carries me into an inner hall which opens into a windowless circular gallery room, softly lit, a sanctuary, with portraits hung on ivory walls of women who made the school what it was.
The portraits are abstractions until my friend pulls a secret lever and the paintings open, like books. I gasp as the women’s faces, their thoughts, their histories come alive. They are unaware of us and may be studied on any level we choose. I watch the woman closest to me. She is in her thirties, with short dark hair. She is an athlete.
My identity dissolves and I am absorbed into this other life, merge with this woman, hurtle towards her death, an early one. There was an accident, a wound in her belly.
Suddenly a cranky old house mother enters the gallery, scolds my friend for showing an outsider anything beyond the exterior of the school. My friend ignores her, but I am resentful. My gaze follows the old biddie as she teeters off, rigid and stingy and brittle. She feels my eyes on her, turns and nails me with a look of absolute distrust. An enormous trashcan full of garbage materializes between us. Empty tin cans crash to the floor and I wake up.
