Eolam
04-09-2005, 19:50
As I recollect, it begins with myself exiting a white sedan; about me on a mountain road stand perhaps three other individuals. In the cusp of distant peaks to my left I see the verdure of a river valley reminiscent of both alpine Central Europe and Korea. We walk up along the road until a low structure, doorway open to the cloud-flecked jaws of brimming dawn, comes into view. We pause to remove handguns, and advance across a dirt courtyard. Five figures in clerical garb stand before me, their countenances set in speechless gapes as taut as those of gilded carp in the dregs of a drained wadi. A harsh murmur escapes one; from another, a clarion keen. The morning air hollows behind gunshots, and they are felled. I peer within the doorway and level a gun at the man I know to be the pope. He raises his hands, as though in benediction, before a crimson rosette blossoms on his chest.
As we flee, one of my compatriots complains, inanely, of a bitter, resinous taste ("like myrrh") in his mouth.
Time passes.
I stand on the ground floor of an unlit house, before a cabinet-set aquarium I judge to hold 40 liters. Boschian shadows scrabble and dart within. Presently, a rattling at the front door heralds the expected entry of a broad-faced man backlit by a pastel grimace of moon. He barks something indistinct, as might a jackal, but I trot over to silence him with a stream of aerosol from the canister in my hands. He falls to his knees, clawing at now-unseeing eyes, but I continue to spray the suspension into the orfices of his upturned face. After he has ceased to breathe, I return to the aquarium.
Miniscule fish - flecks of malachite, cinnabar, and orpiment - loll and sway against the trickling filter output. A Sesarmid crab scuttles across a splintered bar of driftwood - only to be seized by the raptorial chelipeds of a hand's-length river prawn. I lift the plastic canopy to with a wooden dowel prod the crab free. At this, the prawn, all mercurial limbs and streamlined grace, recurved rostrum protruding like a serrated jambiyya, speaks to me through the glass, quoting Caliban and Nietzsche. Finally, it remarks, "Sheikh Usama died in 1998. Kidney failure on the anniversary of Thoreau's birth."
To which I reply, "I know."
Before the front door I find not a corpse but a slick mat of sphagnum. Here I reach up and grasp a dew-slick skein trailing, it seems, from the heavens. A nightingale's trill is consumed in the roar of fighter jets.
The dream culminates at the foot of glass spires in a city I know to be Tokyo: pockets bulging with screws, rat poison, and bacterial ampoules, seven cobalt rods sewn into my coat, I thumb a detonator and awake.
As we flee, one of my compatriots complains, inanely, of a bitter, resinous taste ("like myrrh") in his mouth.
Time passes.
I stand on the ground floor of an unlit house, before a cabinet-set aquarium I judge to hold 40 liters. Boschian shadows scrabble and dart within. Presently, a rattling at the front door heralds the expected entry of a broad-faced man backlit by a pastel grimace of moon. He barks something indistinct, as might a jackal, but I trot over to silence him with a stream of aerosol from the canister in my hands. He falls to his knees, clawing at now-unseeing eyes, but I continue to spray the suspension into the orfices of his upturned face. After he has ceased to breathe, I return to the aquarium.
Miniscule fish - flecks of malachite, cinnabar, and orpiment - loll and sway against the trickling filter output. A Sesarmid crab scuttles across a splintered bar of driftwood - only to be seized by the raptorial chelipeds of a hand's-length river prawn. I lift the plastic canopy to with a wooden dowel prod the crab free. At this, the prawn, all mercurial limbs and streamlined grace, recurved rostrum protruding like a serrated jambiyya, speaks to me through the glass, quoting Caliban and Nietzsche. Finally, it remarks, "Sheikh Usama died in 1998. Kidney failure on the anniversary of Thoreau's birth."
To which I reply, "I know."
Before the front door I find not a corpse but a slick mat of sphagnum. Here I reach up and grasp a dew-slick skein trailing, it seems, from the heavens. A nightingale's trill is consumed in the roar of fighter jets.
The dream culminates at the foot of glass spires in a city I know to be Tokyo: pockets bulging with screws, rat poison, and bacterial ampoules, seven cobalt rods sewn into my coat, I thumb a detonator and awake.