Recommended listening for drim-dram #3: “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution”
Dearest Jerneth Bearington III,
There are few immutable truths in this life. Someday, we all must die. Rain will always be wet.
Gin is an affront to mankind.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but anyone that claims to like gin is actually just nurturing a traumatic pain. Probably from childhood.
Them’s the rules, and I do not make ’em. That being said:
This dream is brought to you by gin.
You ever have one of those dreambinos where you’re not quite yourself? Maybe you’re not even someone that you know, you’re just some random character. Perhaps this person is an amalgam of other characters you’ve been hoovering off of screens and pages throughout your life: TV super spies and dashing knights and zombies.
I don’t know where this person came from, but as so often happens in these types of dreams, it feels utterly right to walk in their skin. Or maybe it’s just that all day as I coast through my conscious life, this made-up stranger is walking in my skin.
Maybe I should let my imaginary friends out to play more often.
Not too long ago I was on a cruise ship (slaycation, you well know). Some people find it mildly terrifying to be adrift at sea inside of a massive boat, but I’m sort of the opposite. I find comfort in a self-contained city surrounded by nothing but miles upon miles of water. And that’s what a cruise ship feels like–a tiny city. You can walk from room to room at all hours of the day, from bar to casino to theater and back again. Everything is just steps away at any moment.
This is what the city of my dreams feels like.
There’s an interconnectedness, a metropolis made of rooms. A promenade shopping mall here, a pub there; but for me, it always starts and ends in the theater.
I like theaters, too: the smell of crushed velvet, heavy drapery the color of cabernet, gold leaf molding, dust motes cascading down under the stage lights.
The theater of my dreams is empty. Footfalls echo. I weave through the aisles of velvet chairs, whistling all the while.
(This is the first moment I can look back and know I am not me any longer, because I cannot whistle.)
I push through the heavy black doors into the city beyond. The promenade awaits, half abandoned and overgrown with ivy. There is evidence of a time before: shattered glass panels, a filthy skylight, amputee mannequins in windows, cracked cement. If that time was somehow more profitable, good fortune has clearly passed.
I first see her surrounded by a crowd.
She is laughing and grinning, with a smile that could cut glass. And maybe, in fact, she is the source of all this ruin. I think to myself it’s entirely possible. She’s artfully cruel like that.
My sister, the destroyer.
Not Mackenzie’s sister though. This one has wild, dark curls and green eyes. This one is tall and waifish, and she doesn’t shy from a crowd. Not just my sister, but my twin.
Pulling my jacket a bit tighter around myself, I lope into the shadows, trying to walk past the crowd unnoticed. The problem with that is, I can’t seem to go anywhere without her finding me. Except, of course, the theater.
She laughs and laughs and laughs.
I take the escalator to the house on the hill.
In a little blue house on a hill, with a little white picket fence and little pink flowers, a man lies dying on the lawn.
Maybe this is a thing that would scare me–real-life, actual me–but dream me is here with a purpose. This is what she was made for. The man must know it, because when I come towards him, he chokes, begging me to turn away. “Not yet,” he’s gasping, “please.”
I kneel by his side. He seems like a nice enough man. His hair is thinning, belly only just softening with the paunch of middle age. In the driveway there’s a little pink tricycle parked beside his car.
With a single touch of my hand, the child that rides that tricycle can be made fatherless. I know this, implicitly. A history of taking and taking and taking from the world is known to me in an instant.
This is the worst part of the job, really.
“What are you waiting for?” Sister asks me. She’s more curious than she is agitated. I guess I’m an oddity to her.
In the distance, sirens are wailing, heralding the ambulance that will drive this man to safety.
“I don’t have to take him.”
“If you won’t do it, then I will.”
She reaches for him. I grab her by the wrist. It’s not what I’m saying with my mouth, but with my eyes. For once, can we just do things my way?
I’m shocked that she lets me lead her away. She can’t be so bad, can she? Not my own twin.
We’re strolling down the hill as the ambulance arrives. Twilight has fallen over the promenade and the looted shops below. Sister isn’t talking to me, but it’s a comfortable silence. I’m proud.
She can be different. I can be different, too.
A middle-aged man passes us on the stairs, dark-haired where the man on the hill was fair. He looks, strangely, like Burt Reynolds. And he’s whistling and cat-calling my sister and asking to take her home.
“Let me show you a good time, sweetheart…”
It’s the kind of attention that makes me want to gag. It’s uncomfortable and unnecessary, and I’m just about to tell him off when she shrugs and smiles coyly.
“Why not?”
She winks at me, and I’m left staring after her. The man slings his arm over her shoulder. If he’s lucky, she’ll be the best he’s ever had. She’ll almost certainly be the last.
Why do nice reapers always finish last?
With my twin by my side, I’d be invincible. But here I am, strolling these strange shopping mall catacombs alone at night, and I feel weirdly… vulnerable. Kind of ironic, I suppose.
There are young people sitting in stairwells, laughing from low walls as they drink malt liquor. All eyes are on me as I pass, and I can’t help but feel that they’re laughing at me.
I try to pass through into the theater, but a girl stops me. “Hold on. You gotta pay up to pass.” Her cronies surround me on all sides.
“I don’t have any money.”
“You’ve got money. Everyone’s got money. Pay up.”
I empty my pockets. “I don’t have anything. I just need to get through.”
“No one gets through unless they pay.”
I push. They push back. One of them shoves me, then another. Then the lead girl is swinging a fist.
In my theater, nothing can hurt me.
I keep touching my face. My right eye is swollen and puffy, but I can see, and I can hear, too. There’s laughter in my theater where there should only be silence.
I walk up the right aisle of chairs to find my mother joking with a blonde woman my own age. When I say my mother, of course, I mean Lorelai Gilmore because… well, why not?
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. She’s not usually around when I need her. And while I wouldn’t exactly say that I need her now, I need someone. Anyone.
Not that she hears me.
“Mom? What are you doing here?”
She and the blonde are laughing and laughing. I take a seat in one of the red velvet chairs. They’re laughing by the yellow light of the stage.
“Mom?”
She turns, as if only just realizing I’m here.
“What happened to your eye?”
Jenny, why doesn’t Lorelai Gilmore love me?
Okay, maybe it’s the gin that doesn’t love me. It certainly doesn’t love my stomach. I do have some good news though: that bottle of gin that’s been taking up space in my cabinet for a year and a half is now in the recycling bin.
And if nothing else, I got a pretty interesting dream out of it.
Sincerely,
Mackextra