Dream: Look At My Hands
January 1st, 2007
We lived in the Corridors.
The walls were ashy, felt soft like gypsum, porous like mica. Interconnected tunnels, warrens. It was Elsa, it was Don, it was Elsa’s husband Dave, it was Frances & it was me.
Down below our tube was the ditch, and then the street. High fences topped by rolling coils of blinking razor. We’d crawl out and down the tube to walk to town. At night there was laughter, distant fires, and I’d look at Frances and feel glad. I’d stand near her. I’d compare things to her hair: the good, wet red clay of the road, the sheen of a beetle’s carapace. I’d ask her to repeat herself so I could listen. just listen. while above us: frayed white slashes in the cloth of the orange-black sky.
And then they were gone. Frances and Elsa were gone. The rest of us hunted through the cold cramped corridors. We called through the fences. We attracted too much attention. We’d hear the great clicking and hide when the spiders came, halogen flooding from their metallic bellies. Men covered completely from head to toe watched us. Moving big darkcloth-wrapped objects from holes in the walls. Maybe one of them was her.
Don picked up the phone. It was Samantha. & I could hear her voice. I could hear her voicing saying that she had her. She had you. She was taking you apart. She was taking pieces out of you. Disassembling you. Consuming you in careful bites.
I close my eyes and I can see your body. Frances I can see it: the head is gone. Poised with the noble patience of a sculpture unfinished. I open up my eyes to focus on something, anything. I look at my hands and look at my hands and look at my hands.
And I’m stopping it, I’m saving you, stopping the process somehow, of the eating the pieces of you, I’m reversing it, I don’t know how I am, just thinking hard and remembering and reconstructing cheeks of autumn and the eyeteeth and neck and throat, and it’s working, there is time, all we have to do is get to you –
Where? It was Ocean street. Opal street? Water street. Owar Oplawar Oapar Oaline Oraline Ocean street. Ocean street. I stood there. I punched the button for the cab which was nearest O___ street to come. We were in the cab now. We knew where to go. Inside the apartment were her roommates. Two young men. My voice wouldn’t work. My guts twisted. They were eating dinner. Where is Samantha. She’s in her room. the room.
Samantha came out, her face was greasy, cunning, porcine. She said a word I didn’t hear, I said Hello I walked up close I held her body and took her to the floor and held her skull and turned it until I heard the noise I was waiting for, no one moved, now I am in the room, Don goes in first, there is nothing in there but a puddle on the corner of the bed, opaque and milky, floating on the sheets, a disc too thick to sink, nothing the fibers could hold, nothing the interstices could steal, luminous, I am looking at the ceiling the door the wall my hands, my hands, my hands.
