윤

It’s been a lifetime since I might have had the chance to for real, anyway. It was dark gray and didn’t have a driver, as far as I could tell, but its engine was revving and the door opened on its own for me. My understanding was that the car was possessed by AI or demons, though that had little to do with the scenario immediately preceding it, where I had been cleaning up a ground-floor patio. I could feel the dried leaves sweeping under my feet. There was a railing that ran along its length but I found an opening at the far side and fitting together two parts of the gate, I thought I could easily secure it with the unused combination lock I had inside. Returning to our house I saw other units’ doors, including one wedged next to ours, which made me question the idea. The Lamborghini, as it turned out, was not magically or maniacally piloted and instead I sat behind a chauffeur whose passenger-side companion asked me for the key, which I produced from my pocket, remembering it from an earlier movie scene.

Dream the other night had all my usual conundrums, debilitating fear of heights, frustration with commonplace expectations, and one that a quick search reveals I haven’t mentioned much if at all despite being a fairly regular concern, my slavish observance of the bus schedule. My return ride was always around 8-ish or else I’d miss a transfer and face a long walk home, never mind modern conveniences such as Uber. (I wonder if in a few-odd years when drones will come pick you up anywhere, my subconscious will update then?) The others in my group led the way to a higher platform, effortlessly traversing the gap over a ravine of white stairwells, while I froze; the steps on the other side were so narrow, I wasn’t sure I would land on them safely before attempting another leap upward—it was a wall-jump, fucking videogames! Eventually I determined my only solution was to be forced onto the ledge, which I somehow managed by inserting myself in front of another uninhibited procession. The balcony opened into a dark hall lined with warmly lit, classically decorated sitting rooms, each occupied with well-dressed snobs who seemed offended by my inspection. Lurking in the shadows beside me was Peter Capaldi the Doctor, looking a little worse for wear, but amenable nevertheless for a selfie, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the phone not to overlay dinosaur stamps on the camera.

This morning I found myself in an office building among a band of survivors of an apocalypse. Three of them who looked like members of the high school chess club decided that a Vietnamese girl Binn present would satisfy their pent-up urges. She complied and completed her duties promptly, and I tried to find her to express my sympathies, but instead I ran into an old colleague who seemed to remember me and called out my name. He wasn’t anyone I knew from my past, but he did seem familiar, like an actor who played the role of computer salesman in the 80’s, except his hair was gray and he was missing his right arm. We sat down at a table and he explained that he had been drafted for his expertise with the “Lexor-9” system, whose pre-Internet standalone capabilities made it especially useful in these times. I left by telling him to contact me if they needed help with the modems, which was apparently something for which I myself had a reputation… but as Silver Spear reminds us, “some reputations are false.”

We moved into a new house on 15070 Hazel St., from my memory of the new front door the wife ordered but for some reason left standing inside, white with shiny gold accents, including the slot for mail. Soon enough we’d discover why the previous owners were so eager to close: beneath the laminate wood was a green graboid-like monster, and a room connected to the entry opened to a vast underground facility. We fought off its breaches the first night and realized it had the magical ability to repair the floors, hiding evidence of its existence. I awoke on a makeshift island of blankets and flattened boxes and saw Sheila on the couch and asked how she had appeared seemingly overnight, or if we had been in Asia all along. And as unwise as it may have been under the circumstances, she invited over the entire family to assess the situation. I suggested using it to rescind the purchase, as surely this constituted an adequate failure to disclose. Hopping around in boxes kept our housemate from detecting our movements, as did traveling through the circuitous ventilation system suspended from the high ceiling. [That’s the best Eraserhead, Mountain Dew and The Silmarillion could concoct. Signs of water damage along the floorboards.]

I still hold to the idea that Lynch packaged his rejected Twin Peaks follow-up with the “it was all just a dream” finish as an FU to the studio.The night terror Ben’s experiencing in Evil (which reminds me a lot of Millennium) has got way too much of the demonic makeup for me: my latest one was just a dark outline of a face pressed against the small window in the door. It seemed pointless keeping it out, because the back of my apartment was always open to a stairwell shared with my neighbors, so I tried a frightening demonstration of martial arts. The door knob turned and the figure entered, still only a shadow.

At least it wasn’t like the kind I’ve been having the past few nights where all I’m doing is looking at screens, watching football on TV—surely a low point of my imagination, even if it was from my perspective as an unprepared player—scrolling through map locations between San Diego and the Mexican border, monitoring the child’s video content that included a Monty Python-narrated skit in which bodies chased one another lewdly inside a couple’s coat, and playing a Pokémon game together. There was a Chansey to catch, but I missed her.

Jin directed our attention to a number of comically small houses outside, and they were indeed scattered along the undeveloped side of the freeway, sized no larger than a single room but with a front door and windows on each painted wall under a traditional triangular roof. The further I explored the area, it grew dark and I happened upon a junkyard guarded by a green luminescent dinosaur. In a building on the premises was gathered a rag-tag group of resistance fighters or gypsy artisans who welcomed us, so I offered what help I could by finishing a project on one of their tables: a circular cut through two of its layers was meant to hold a pen with three foam bushings. When it was time to leave, I was joined by Karen King in a black overcoat.

Seems everything (in dreams) was about sex to Freud, and while I haven’t any argument against that interpretation, I’m more inclined toward the modern one about stairs representing the journey of growth or progress and the emotional challenges accompanying it. In my case those almost exclusively embody crippling fear, and you’d think that after all this time together, my subconscious could communicate directly without the need for any symbolism!

It was so typical of my former employers to find laughably cheap solutions for us. These stairs to the second floor were hardly a body wide, covered in the kind of vinyl used for gym mattresses and looked flimsy leaned against the side of the wall. I wasn’t about to walk up them, and instead leaned back on the steps and inched my way from one to the next while holding the sides. A conveyor belt-like mechanism seemed to assist me to the top, and when I reached it, by design, the lower half of the staircase lifted to keep us balanced. A metal railing lowered and would have caught my hands if I hadn’t moved them, another sign that this was a death trap. There were others at the bottom waiting their turn, but fuck them.

Wife asked me about the bar (which I refuse to take unless I am allowed to in the afterlife) and I told her it was just the right amount of ambition, not too little that I threw my life away or so much that I made many times what her company might have paid, to put me on a career path to her, like the book—or was it an episode of the Twilight Zone—I remember from my youth with pictures of the earth freezing and burning if it were only the slightest bit further from or closer to the sun. Roots of Intelligent Design for some, perhaps. She looked flustered by my response, which I still felt was such a brilliant one that when 남재 woke up in a bed in the room, I had to tell him he missed out on it. He’d be my first choice on LINE when I woke up at 3am.

An obvious by-product of the son’s interest in Scooby Doo and our recent viewings of live-action adaptations, the proprietor had been conducting some ghastly rituals, and once I learned of them, I returned with a sample leech the shape and size of an orange slice under a form-fitting plastic case and explained to her, squeezing it to reveal its jaws, that he was reviving the dead whose souls had been sucked out of them. She turned and quite effortlessly removed a giant specimen hanging on the towel rack like a lei and tossed it aside.

We congregated in the hall where the madness was at work, and saw an animated scene that seemed to depict his machinations, while staying safe in shower-like alcoves. The wooden floors were giving way, I surmised, as a result of the damage being done to reality. My cousin and Rebecca looked on as my indiscernible companion began choking, her mouth ballooned and I desperately tried compressing her chest from behind. Her ribs converged to a single bilateral ridge and her lips pursed as I continued helplessly, regretting my past decisions.

Rebound after the Line of Duty series (6) finale, police drama in the other part of England that give or take an iPhone, looks like it hasn’t changed in 50 years. I couldn’t find but the last episode of the second season—er, series, but it seemed more of the same, protagonist and criminal bumbling along, no grander scheme in mind other than self-preservation. Which I suppose is alike everywhere, even at work, where I was in my dream, fulfilling more of my staple IT duties, stopping with my bundle of paperwork at various stations throughout the office to take short naps, my way of distributing them without overindulging and maintaining the all-important appearance of industriousness. One of the characters jumped to his death at the end of Happy Valley, which carried over to a sad fellow who did the same in my building, except he did so with a bomb strapped to his chest and triggered it just as he passed my window. The explosion sent me flying headfirst in slow motion toward the remaining wall and I hoped it would at least be enough to get me out of the rest of the day.And if I were ever to return to a desk that’s dusted by the cleaning staff at night, I’d like to resume my reputation for techno-macabre with a faux body mod like this attachment, which reminds me of Zaphod’s third arm being used to operate a digital watch スマホ while my left could be free to help open sauce packets.

This was a form of torture to which I was to be subjected—for what or by whom I don’t think was ever identified—but it caused me very little dread, even if my toes were completely removed, maybe because running is blackening each nail and flip-flops have all but ravaged the soles of my feet to where they no longer seem part of my body proper. (Speaking of which, losing those Reefs on the curb and never being able to replace them was one of my many experiences teaching me to stock backups against discontinued product. Latest example are wired headphones, but soon it might be the Lightning adapters for them.) Like the universe is taking me back starting at the borders.

Update: Legs felt heavier than ever, and made it an effort to lift each one, like my heart wasn’t getting the bonus coordinating the work anymore. There’s barely anything left to my stride. Could the safe zone be closing in on my extremities?