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Entry tags:
teaser/opinion post
Notes: this thing is hideously incomplete and feels like Johnny Truant of House of Leaves and I'm not sure how much sense it makes. Feel free to poke at it.
A Tea Party With My Shadow
Ever had one of those strange but realistic dreams? They're most common when you're on that sinking-swimming boat between being awake and being asleep, when you've got your head above water but are still about to drown. You don't even quite realize that you're asleep until you open a book and the words are crawling on the page or you can stick your finger through the palm of your hand. (Have you tried that? It doesn't always work, but when it does, it looks damn weird.)
I've had one of those. To this day, I've never figured out whether it was really a dream or not. Could have been. Might not have been. Hope it was, because it'd be embarrassing as hell if it really happened. (I say really like it being self-contained and only in my head would make it fictional, which is not entirely true.)
I blame the fact that it happened at all on the idea that it could happen, which I blame on a good friend who shares my name but isn't actually related to me. He'd gotten really into lucid dreaming because it's apparently somehow like a really, really good marijuana high. Don't ask me what convinced him of that; I'm not sure myself, though the beginnings of the idea could have come from good old Wikipedia, land of facts and learning. Then again, when you mix a thrill seeker with substance abuse and clinical depression, you can get some pretty strange results.
Ell always was into surreality anyway. I told him this story, once. Rather than freaked out, he got jealous. He's got his own problems, I guess.
I knew where to start it with Ell. It's a little harder putting it on paper. Firstly, the words on the page look more real, black twelve point Times New Roman on white, crisp and gorgeous and factual like newsprint. Not that what newspapers report is anything close to the truth, anyway.
Secondly, and more importantly, there are a lot of peripheral facts. The entire thing felt half like an actual event and half like an allegory for my brainscape. It was a very pretentious, self-referential kind of dream-not-dream.
So let's start. At the time, Ell and I lived in a ramshackle, run-down house. Five bedroom, three-story, classic Victorian affair. It was one of those white picket fence, 2.5 kids pieces of ugly. I probably should've got that awful yuppie haircut just to walk in the door.
The story gets better. The plumbing was old, every floorboard creaked, doors didn't stay shut, locks would engage at weird times. You name a haunted house cliche, we had it out the ass. The tile in the bathrooms (and in the kitchen. Apparently the previous owners didn't know that disco is dead) would start to mold over if you blinked for too long. We had to change the baking soda in the fridge at least once every couple of days because it always started to smell awful. The doors all had old fashioned skeleton key locks and the doorknobs were made of crystal. Every room had a fireplace, though most of them were blocked up. Rooms were small and there was even a servants' hallway that led up from the kitchen and went nowhere. (That's a lie. It went up to my room, where it was bricked off, and yes, I did think I heard people walking up and down it on foggy nights.)
We shared it with a girl who called herself Morning Glory or Ivy Moon or some crazy hippie thing when the name on her rent checks was Susan Pennington. She dyed her hair green and wore green contacts and vampire dentures she'd made herself.
I never called her "Morning Glory" or "Ivy Moon" to her face. She was always Susan or Goth Chick to me. She never acted like she cared one way or the other. It was always Ell who bitched and yammered about crap like that. He'd hand-picked her for a roommate or some such story. I get the feeling they dated once before she moved in with us but that's not exactly trustworthy.
At least she paid her rent on time.
Susan wasn't the only roommate Ell and I had--the house comfortably held five, which meant it uncomfortably held seven--but she was the only one who actually mattered. The other four were in and out all the time, only occasionally joining in the party.
One day, I came in from work at about two in the afternoon. For once, Susan was hanging around in one of the strictly common areas of the house: the ground floor living room.
"There's polk plant growing in the side yard," she said. "I took Ben's weedeater to it but I think it'll grow back."
"I'll take care of it later," I told her. At the moment I just wanted to chill in an air-conditioned room that in no way involved dirt, garden implements, or sunlight.
That's the last waking memory: Susan and her multihued green hair sitting on the couch with a copy of Blood Brothers of Gor and a cup of coffee sending steam trails up by her elbow. It was like some sort of absurd sacrifice tableu except it was happening in real life.
The ground floor has a big staircase. One of those classic square ones, like they were going for spiral but the house wasn't big enough. I could see Susan as I headed up it to the second floor. I kept my hand on the bannister as I went up. The sight of her head bent over that ridiculous book has stayed with me even when some of the images of the dream have begun to fade. No, that's a lie, invented because it sounds good. I remember every moment of that dream like it was vitally important. Not one frame has begun to fade.
But I do remember her reading the book, seen from above and away.
Actually making it up the stairs and to the first room on the hall, the first of three, is hazier. I don't remember changing clothes, but I don't specifically remember not changing clothes, either.
Ever hear of non-Euclidean geometry? H. P. Lovecraft loved to assume that it could drive people crazy and looked alien. I'm not about to agree, because he was a nutty hack writer in the teens and twenties and besides, The Mountains Of Madness is a really fucking stupid title, but he's right about one thing. (And it's not "Acid is bad for your brain," because I think we all know that H. P. Lovecraft was dropping acid with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or maybe that was a Neil Gaiman short story I read once.)
Anyway, he's at least half right about gemoetry. Euclidean geometry is good. Looks normal. About as comfortable for the brain as the idea that we only use ten percent of it. About as comfortable for the brain as Murder, She Wrote.
Non-Euclidean geometry is weird.
For a while, I was back in high school geo, cracking jokes on the back of an exam about Mrs. Goldwyn's huge tits. Not the smartest or nicest thing I've ever done, I'll admit, but I don't think that deserved to have the type of shapes on the front side of the paper suddenly change.
Instead of identifying isoceles triangles, I was supposed to be writing a short essay on the differences between hyperbolic and elliptical lines with common perpendiculars. For anybody who hasn't taken an exam recently, that shit should be against the Geneva conventions.
Compounded, of course, by the fact that awake, I've got no clue what a hyperbolic line with a common perpendicular is. I didn't even stand a chance in the dream.
The next question was just as bad. Short answer question: "_______ deals with geometries which are not homogenous."
Like I had any idea what that meant. Questions went on like that before derailing into litcrit questions about H. P. Lovecraft that I'd answered in college. Cite three sources in which Lovecraft references Swinburne, for example, which I didn't know in college and don't know today. Pretty sure that was a trick question, anyway. One I did know the answer to was "Short answer: Quote or paraphrase Lovecraft's views on science, revelation, and human understanding of the universe."
Is anything about this dream starting to sound strange to you? Yes? No? Concentrate and ask again?
Well, how about the fact that I was reading in a dream and the letters never changed? The text never changed once. It really was like being fifteen and stupid again, sitting in a cramped desk that somebody had taken a penknife to until it had R E O SPEEDWAGON carved into it in painful knife letters.
After the six or sixteenth question, I got fed up. I wrote NOT LIKE THIS ISN'T HORSESHIT ANYWAY on the top of the test, right next to my name, and handed the exam in.
Then I walked out the door, except I was walking out the door to my room. On the wall right outside there was this big full-length mirror.
I could see myself in it. This is another "dream sign," by the way, looking at yourself in a mirror. It's supposed to be strange and vague. For some people, their reflection looks scary.
The only thing scary about my reflection was that it was smiling and I knew I wasn't.
As I stared at the reflection, it started to darken and its face started to blur. My lipring vanished before my eyes, darkening until it was part of my skin, then my nose smeared into nonexistence. I was staring at my shadow.
And my shadow was smiling.
"How much do you want to bet that she's still reading Blood Brothers of Gor?" My shadow asked.
Even though he didn't really have a face, I could see his smile. I took one look at him and knew what he was thinking. I could tell what he was planning.
Given half a chance, he would steal her.
How exactly a shadow in a mirror is going to steal a green haired chick who thinks Gorean philosophy is funny, I don't know. Not really sure what he'd do with her. He's just a shadow, after all, right?
I looked at it for a couple more minutes and decided that I was crazy. This was still just a dream, and it was even crazier than the one I'd left.
Which did not necessarily mean that I didn't want to keep an eye on this guy. I just wanted to do it from a distance.
As I walked away from him, down the hall, I noticed that our feet were connected. There was a black line dragging from my toes. It went backwards until it reached the shadow me.
There were two bedrooms besides mine on the second floor. The one farthest to the staircase was Ell's. The one on the other side of Ell's and mine belonged to Ben and Peter, the fourth and fifth people in our band of seven.
I knocked on Ben's door, but there was no answer. No answer from Ell, either, so I shrugged and headed back to the stairs.
Susan was still in the living room, chilling with her Blood Brothers of Gor. Nyuk nyuk nyukking it up like crazy people on the internet.
My shadow was behind me. I couldn't hear his footsteps but that didn't matter. I could almost kind of see him in my periph. Even when I couldn't see him, I knew he was there.
I had to keep an eye on him. I had to get him where I could see him. Then I just wouldn't move from that spot.
I tiptoed past Susan into the dining room. Behind the dining room was the kitchen, which had a door opening to the side yard. I peered out the window. I could make out several stubs of stalks that might once have been polk, before Susan revved up Ben's weedeater.
It was going to need to be dug up.
After a moment, my shadow stepped up to the door and looked out its window with me.
"A weedeater. Really," said my shadow.
I turned to look it in the face. The head spot. You know what I mean.
The face was completely gone now. It wasn't some digitally darkened photocopy of myself. It was my shadow: a sometimes wide, sometimes thin, vaguely human-shaped bar of blackness. It just happened to be a bit more independent than any trick of the light could ever be.
"What'll happen if I shine a flashlight on you?"
For an instant, my shadow had a face, an expression. The face was blurred and distorted, like a reflection in a dream. The only thing I could see clearly was the wicked curve of his lips.
Then it was gone. He tilted his head. "Why don't we try it and find out?"
A Tea Party With My Shadow
Ever had one of those strange but realistic dreams? They're most common when you're on that sinking-swimming boat between being awake and being asleep, when you've got your head above water but are still about to drown. You don't even quite realize that you're asleep until you open a book and the words are crawling on the page or you can stick your finger through the palm of your hand. (Have you tried that? It doesn't always work, but when it does, it looks damn weird.)
I've had one of those. To this day, I've never figured out whether it was really a dream or not. Could have been. Might not have been. Hope it was, because it'd be embarrassing as hell if it really happened. (I say really like it being self-contained and only in my head would make it fictional, which is not entirely true.)
I blame the fact that it happened at all on the idea that it could happen, which I blame on a good friend who shares my name but isn't actually related to me. He'd gotten really into lucid dreaming because it's apparently somehow like a really, really good marijuana high. Don't ask me what convinced him of that; I'm not sure myself, though the beginnings of the idea could have come from good old Wikipedia, land of facts and learning. Then again, when you mix a thrill seeker with substance abuse and clinical depression, you can get some pretty strange results.
Ell always was into surreality anyway. I told him this story, once. Rather than freaked out, he got jealous. He's got his own problems, I guess.
I knew where to start it with Ell. It's a little harder putting it on paper. Firstly, the words on the page look more real, black twelve point Times New Roman on white, crisp and gorgeous and factual like newsprint. Not that what newspapers report is anything close to the truth, anyway.
Secondly, and more importantly, there are a lot of peripheral facts. The entire thing felt half like an actual event and half like an allegory for my brainscape. It was a very pretentious, self-referential kind of dream-not-dream.
So let's start. At the time, Ell and I lived in a ramshackle, run-down house. Five bedroom, three-story, classic Victorian affair. It was one of those white picket fence, 2.5 kids pieces of ugly. I probably should've got that awful yuppie haircut just to walk in the door.
The story gets better. The plumbing was old, every floorboard creaked, doors didn't stay shut, locks would engage at weird times. You name a haunted house cliche, we had it out the ass. The tile in the bathrooms (and in the kitchen. Apparently the previous owners didn't know that disco is dead) would start to mold over if you blinked for too long. We had to change the baking soda in the fridge at least once every couple of days because it always started to smell awful. The doors all had old fashioned skeleton key locks and the doorknobs were made of crystal. Every room had a fireplace, though most of them were blocked up. Rooms were small and there was even a servants' hallway that led up from the kitchen and went nowhere. (That's a lie. It went up to my room, where it was bricked off, and yes, I did think I heard people walking up and down it on foggy nights.)
We shared it with a girl who called herself Morning Glory or Ivy Moon or some crazy hippie thing when the name on her rent checks was Susan Pennington. She dyed her hair green and wore green contacts and vampire dentures she'd made herself.
I never called her "Morning Glory" or "Ivy Moon" to her face. She was always Susan or Goth Chick to me. She never acted like she cared one way or the other. It was always Ell who bitched and yammered about crap like that. He'd hand-picked her for a roommate or some such story. I get the feeling they dated once before she moved in with us but that's not exactly trustworthy.
At least she paid her rent on time.
Susan wasn't the only roommate Ell and I had--the house comfortably held five, which meant it uncomfortably held seven--but she was the only one who actually mattered. The other four were in and out all the time, only occasionally joining in the party.
One day, I came in from work at about two in the afternoon. For once, Susan was hanging around in one of the strictly common areas of the house: the ground floor living room.
"There's polk plant growing in the side yard," she said. "I took Ben's weedeater to it but I think it'll grow back."
"I'll take care of it later," I told her. At the moment I just wanted to chill in an air-conditioned room that in no way involved dirt, garden implements, or sunlight.
That's the last waking memory: Susan and her multihued green hair sitting on the couch with a copy of Blood Brothers of Gor and a cup of coffee sending steam trails up by her elbow. It was like some sort of absurd sacrifice tableu except it was happening in real life.
The ground floor has a big staircase. One of those classic square ones, like they were going for spiral but the house wasn't big enough. I could see Susan as I headed up it to the second floor. I kept my hand on the bannister as I went up. The sight of her head bent over that ridiculous book has stayed with me even when some of the images of the dream have begun to fade. No, that's a lie, invented because it sounds good. I remember every moment of that dream like it was vitally important. Not one frame has begun to fade.
But I do remember her reading the book, seen from above and away.
Actually making it up the stairs and to the first room on the hall, the first of three, is hazier. I don't remember changing clothes, but I don't specifically remember not changing clothes, either.
Ever hear of non-Euclidean geometry? H. P. Lovecraft loved to assume that it could drive people crazy and looked alien. I'm not about to agree, because he was a nutty hack writer in the teens and twenties and besides, The Mountains Of Madness is a really fucking stupid title, but he's right about one thing. (And it's not "Acid is bad for your brain," because I think we all know that H. P. Lovecraft was dropping acid with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or maybe that was a Neil Gaiman short story I read once.)
Anyway, he's at least half right about gemoetry. Euclidean geometry is good. Looks normal. About as comfortable for the brain as the idea that we only use ten percent of it. About as comfortable for the brain as Murder, She Wrote.
Non-Euclidean geometry is weird.
For a while, I was back in high school geo, cracking jokes on the back of an exam about Mrs. Goldwyn's huge tits. Not the smartest or nicest thing I've ever done, I'll admit, but I don't think that deserved to have the type of shapes on the front side of the paper suddenly change.
Instead of identifying isoceles triangles, I was supposed to be writing a short essay on the differences between hyperbolic and elliptical lines with common perpendiculars. For anybody who hasn't taken an exam recently, that shit should be against the Geneva conventions.
Compounded, of course, by the fact that awake, I've got no clue what a hyperbolic line with a common perpendicular is. I didn't even stand a chance in the dream.
The next question was just as bad. Short answer question: "_______ deals with geometries which are not homogenous."
Like I had any idea what that meant. Questions went on like that before derailing into litcrit questions about H. P. Lovecraft that I'd answered in college. Cite three sources in which Lovecraft references Swinburne, for example, which I didn't know in college and don't know today. Pretty sure that was a trick question, anyway. One I did know the answer to was "Short answer: Quote or paraphrase Lovecraft's views on science, revelation, and human understanding of the universe."
Is anything about this dream starting to sound strange to you? Yes? No? Concentrate and ask again?
Well, how about the fact that I was reading in a dream and the letters never changed? The text never changed once. It really was like being fifteen and stupid again, sitting in a cramped desk that somebody had taken a penknife to until it had R E O SPEEDWAGON carved into it in painful knife letters.
After the six or sixteenth question, I got fed up. I wrote NOT LIKE THIS ISN'T HORSESHIT ANYWAY on the top of the test, right next to my name, and handed the exam in.
Then I walked out the door, except I was walking out the door to my room. On the wall right outside there was this big full-length mirror.
I could see myself in it. This is another "dream sign," by the way, looking at yourself in a mirror. It's supposed to be strange and vague. For some people, their reflection looks scary.
The only thing scary about my reflection was that it was smiling and I knew I wasn't.
As I stared at the reflection, it started to darken and its face started to blur. My lipring vanished before my eyes, darkening until it was part of my skin, then my nose smeared into nonexistence. I was staring at my shadow.
And my shadow was smiling.
"How much do you want to bet that she's still reading Blood Brothers of Gor?" My shadow asked.
Even though he didn't really have a face, I could see his smile. I took one look at him and knew what he was thinking. I could tell what he was planning.
Given half a chance, he would steal her.
How exactly a shadow in a mirror is going to steal a green haired chick who thinks Gorean philosophy is funny, I don't know. Not really sure what he'd do with her. He's just a shadow, after all, right?
I looked at it for a couple more minutes and decided that I was crazy. This was still just a dream, and it was even crazier than the one I'd left.
Which did not necessarily mean that I didn't want to keep an eye on this guy. I just wanted to do it from a distance.
As I walked away from him, down the hall, I noticed that our feet were connected. There was a black line dragging from my toes. It went backwards until it reached the shadow me.
There were two bedrooms besides mine on the second floor. The one farthest to the staircase was Ell's. The one on the other side of Ell's and mine belonged to Ben and Peter, the fourth and fifth people in our band of seven.
I knocked on Ben's door, but there was no answer. No answer from Ell, either, so I shrugged and headed back to the stairs.
Susan was still in the living room, chilling with her Blood Brothers of Gor. Nyuk nyuk nyukking it up like crazy people on the internet.
My shadow was behind me. I couldn't hear his footsteps but that didn't matter. I could almost kind of see him in my periph. Even when I couldn't see him, I knew he was there.
I had to keep an eye on him. I had to get him where I could see him. Then I just wouldn't move from that spot.
I tiptoed past Susan into the dining room. Behind the dining room was the kitchen, which had a door opening to the side yard. I peered out the window. I could make out several stubs of stalks that might once have been polk, before Susan revved up Ben's weedeater.
It was going to need to be dug up.
After a moment, my shadow stepped up to the door and looked out its window with me.
"A weedeater. Really," said my shadow.
I turned to look it in the face. The head spot. You know what I mean.
The face was completely gone now. It wasn't some digitally darkened photocopy of myself. It was my shadow: a sometimes wide, sometimes thin, vaguely human-shaped bar of blackness. It just happened to be a bit more independent than any trick of the light could ever be.
"What'll happen if I shine a flashlight on you?"
For an instant, my shadow had a face, an expression. The face was blurred and distorted, like a reflection in a dream. The only thing I could see clearly was the wicked curve of his lips.
Then it was gone. He tilted his head. "Why don't we try it and find out?"
no subject
That's a wonderful sort of description of a person. It's vivid and immediately paints an image while being very succinct and easy to compile. The whole work is slightly haunting in that you're aware that the main character is in a dream, however there is the fear of the dream that "it could be real".
It's very nice how you manage to go into that hanging sort of realm and not extend too far into it so as to make it silly or something that would be a sort of parody of the real emotion.
The usage of slang in the narrator voice is something that I typically don't like, but it fits for the most part with the weight and emotions of the work. I would probably change perph to peripheral, but that's extremely nit picky.