A Series of Dreams

27/06/2025

I.

Reading Gargantua in a spa on the 49^th floor of the Royal when the phone rings to remind me who I am. ‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ I reply to the caller’s acclimatising accusations. ‘Yes, that was me alright!’ When the line goes dead there’s a knock on the door so startling I drop the old book beneath the suds. It dives, and the hardcover’s corner cuts into the soft flesh of my thigh. The next knock is so fierce the ceiling fan farts out grey tufts of dust, all nervous like. ‘Is that you, room service?’ I ask with desperate optimism, but one look out the high glass of the bathroom windows, into that vision of the city spread out in vertiginous sepulchers with their electric squints of light, makes clear that my only escape is through the glass. I rise out of the soupy spa, leaving the book to sink down to the polished deep, and press up against the window in soggy nakedness. The city is spread out in some immense accumulation of impersonal mind and clustered fevers, and not one person in its million windows sees me, not even that Commander-in-Chief from the World We Cannot Know, whose All-Seeing Eye rolled over the darkness of the Gelatinous Goop in the Beginning. I ooze through the windowpane, without cracking, and drip contiguous down to the street, sinking deeper still, into sewers where the rushing under-water stings the one-inch wound Gargantua has inflected upon my thigh. We rush together, cut and me, through our pipes and under grated glimpses of the world above, flashed by snatches of purpled night and blinking heaven. ‘This is all very familiar,’ I say in the echoing cylindrical passage, head just above the churning waste. ‘Like when you emerged from your mother’s ear canal, my monstrous friend.’ The little wound winks in recognition, bleeding at me, and I understand: never was I unseen, but only briefly was Eye itself, and this watery afterlife, alas, will be a weeping.

II.

They let me work a day job at the mattress warehouse. There’s a new model available for customers with a loyalty card. They’re calling it the Red Baron – a racy hot-rod setup designed to appeal to working stiffs who’ve come home to empty homes in their post-divorce desolation. They’ve hired monks to test the springs, and I’m watching them ascetics bounce on the Sleep-Saver coils in their orange robes while some time-motion expert watches in the wings of the corridor with a clipboard and an aptitude for corporate savings. In the lunchroom he comes over, dripping brill cream like some 50’s cliché and says, ‘They’re saying good things about you at Head Office.’ A call comes in, collect, from Istanbul. ‘This is me,’ I say, in response to some vague accusation. ‘Yes,’ I repeat. ‘I’ve been a Catholic Observer my entire life and there’s little I’ll say against the institution of marriage. Now wait a minute!’ I’m only speaking indignant to cover up the fact that there’s a cadaver in the office, half rotten, by the Easy Chair theatre our manager installed for his own satisfaction. When the call is over, I pull the sheet off the dead bodies and look closely at the ruin of the flesh. There’s a star-spangled mess accrued along the corpses, like a sordid metaphor for all the wars to come. If you look closely at the dead, they appear to be accusing you of crimes. Their fungus affectations, their mycelium rataconniculations. Bloated, they look back at us as histories of mankind might. In the office opposite ours, a blonde secretariat with fishtank heels is flicking through a PowerPoint Presentation proving Ancient Egypt was overrated in the extreme. ‘Here is old Isis, and Osiris,’ she says, with a tone of derision. ‘If love was real, why did the Gods go to so much trouble to accoutrement its fictions?’ The final image she presents is just a list of all the reasons that the dual sexed God never consented to his participation in our ordinary affairs. ‘The end,’ she says, and bows as if the world is watching.

III.
The Australasian author, Dick Cooker, sends me an email asking for permission to appear in my schizophrenic visions. ‘Dear friend, I hope you are well enough to consent to this invasion. It is on the horizon, either way.’ I write back to affirm the world is disappointing in the extreme, and pray at the bedside of a dead doghound, asking for the forgiveness of an indifferent empiricism. She’s called Penny, my old border collie, that we mistreated till her dying day. When the maggots poured out of her infected fur, all we could do was watch the collateral collapse of her hind legs, until a door-to-door vet came along and injected her arterial passage with a shot of euthanasia. ‘Go to hell!’ my brother cursed the curious creatures that crawled out of the brickwork of our deck to eat the fallen parasites erupting from her wound. It’s the sort of thing you think about when funeral songs are being sung, or when there’s talk of war in faraway lands you’ve learned to mispronounce in your native tongue. At the edge of these memoranda, there’s a woman who owes me love, I can see her just beyond the firelight. Must be a thousand years ago, when we first kissed in some distant life I barely lived. Her fulsome hair is slung across her shoulder like an armoury against religious taboos. ‘Will you dance with me, for my pleasure?’ She says, in the lancing light inside this anachronistic cavern. ‘I’ve waited for you here,’ she says, reaching out with an inviting arm. Her hand sits in mine like the final puzzle piece of human kindness. We huddle together, on the hard crust of the cavernous earth, and let the fire fill us with its fancies, till sleep is all we are.