Nemonymous Night (part two)

Amy talked to herself. She imagined knives and saws and axes, with blood along the tips of their edges. But that was part of herself she had ignored or not even known so as to be able to ignore it. The talking revealed more. She expected a role that she hadn’t yet been given. The as yet missing part of herself meanwhile visualised me carving joints of unrecognisable meat. The ribbing thicker than most poultry but with a vague appearance of a fish’s backbone, whilst with the floppy feel of sirloin as it slid too easily off the T-spine.

“What to do,” she asked or stated. The vacuum churned noisily, cutting out such thoughts before they hit the fuse with a deafening spark of the Earth wire failing. Her missing part viewed a vista of a dull pinky yellow sun smoked over with clouds of birdlife as seen from a distance. A craggy sea and a giant submarine with rotors just nosing into view from the creamy waves. A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.

Her actual conscious self meanwhile brooded on the real past. I had not quite come into her life as yet. She was still living as a child at home with her mother and brother. Her brother Arthur had always been a bit of a loner, non-expressive and wild. He concocted experiments with household goods, mixing them into a chemical syrup by means of adding garden mud to substances like washing-powder, disinfectant, flyspray. Symbolic, in hindsight of, mixing dreams, too, just like those to which we have all needed to grow accustomed in recent years because of the world’s difficulties. Fixing dreams, too.

These misalchemies were alive – at least in her brother’s eyes and Amy laughed as she remembered their mother’s remonstrations of despair while she tried to talk sense into her son but merely ended up communicating with the “cowpats” of mixture he had left in his wake. At least, he did the experiments outside. And indoor fireworks only came out of Christmas Crackers in those days, so they were not an all-year problem: those sizzling wormcasts on the seasonal carpet. That was a Godsend. One day, they’d invent daylight fireworks for the outside! She laughed to herself. Why had nobody thought of daylight fireworks before, so potentially au fait with the way the world was now going, with street riots meaning there was always a strict curfew during any dark hours.

Amy was scared to recall the past because, by dragging it onward through time, trawling it through the coarse-grained muslin of memory’s filter, she could too easily tug or tussle through into the present more dangerous element of the past, undoing, in the process, everything I had since done up for her. Untying the nemonymous knot would release a booby-trap – and she continued scraping the lower surface of the vacuum across the grit in the carpet that had collected there like any dust collects there … from wherever dust and grit and, indeed, stains come from – a mysterious source only hawlers are able to fathom.

Dreams came from below, not above. She shrugged, turning over the vacuum and emptying it of what it had collected. Her missing part now viewed a scene in a park, a park so cultivated its grass was more like a plush lawn for the toes of effete royalty or fairies. She saw it in her mind’s eye, but failed to recognise the fey walkers that positively languished in its heady Proustian delights. A man she knew instinctively (yet still unconsciously) was named Swann walked past with a girl, her sleek fin de siècle dress buttonholed with cattleyas.

****

In the past, Amy’s mother, Edith, having finished with adjusting the oven, reached the apartment window again and eagerly scanned the inner square between the walls of the four blocks that formed it. There was a solitary fountain at its centre – and a few all-weather seats surrounding. Not much for children to do in the square but it was certainly better than the city streets amid which this square was a relatively safe oasis. She saw a huddled figure on one of the seats: a man writing. She grew suspicious.

Clare, a schoolteacher, had just announced her visit by the officious knock on the apartment door. She’d come up in the lift. No doubt there was some problem with Amy or Arthur. Or even both … at once.

“What can I do for you? Would you like a cup of tea?”

At this moment, Arthur arrived, Amy in tow. They must have spotted their teacher arrive from wherever they had been in the building. Arthur’s hands were covered in some sort of heavy-duty grease, as if he had been oil-changing a large ship in dry dock. Amy dragged a tiny toy trailer behind her, in which was seated one of her dolls. A large ugly one, more in keeping with a punch-and-judy show than one in a little girl’s keeping: it almost looked knowing enough to be alive. Yet she loved it despite its plastic and mock synthetic hair and badly painted rosebud lips. Amy had rescued it one day when she found it in the garden trying to bury itself in the ground, soil which Arthur had just loosened as part of one of his ‘mixing’ projects, when looking for new ingredients below the surface of top earth.

****
Hawling is not dissimilar to being a liftman, pressing the buttons, allowing beings to board or disembark as each floor light flashed and resulted in the lift-doors sliding aside … new strangers coming in, old strangers leaving, but there was more to hawling than that – it’s running a butcher’s shop, listening to the carcasses crack as you lay in bed at night. I was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on … and eventually extinguish with a dying wink … which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from my mine.

I watch Susan and Sudra running through an unkempt, shaggy park, among stub-winged birds flapping from bush to bush, hardly using the air at all. I glimpse a figure in a cape watching them.

I woke in a cold sweat. I put one foot outside the bed to ensure at least the bedroom floor was still there. Nobody snored beside me, mercifully, it seemed, because anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me … or were still besetting me.

****
My body was the most mysterious thing about me. I could easily fathom my own mind – but my body felt like impersonal meat on a base of bones: somehow disconnected from the ground that I – my mind – walked upon. Self-cannibalism did not occur to me, obviously, because, if it had, I would certainly have considered myself mad. Bad enough even to skirt such touchy subjects amid the other thoughts, let alone delving into them.

One nemonymous creature of applause – with the merged thought that each member of the audience in the concert hall remained (to themselves at least) single entities – sounded from the radio after Brahms’ Double Concerto drew to its close. And I dozed off again.

****
As I press my head close enough to the connecting door, I can hear the sleeping couple's heavy breathing as if I am actually in the bed with them both.

However, strangely, the words which sporadically break the surface of their sleep, I cannot make out very plainly. I soon gather, however, that they are exchanging remarks from separate dreams: holding an almost logical dialogue about the nature of the nightmares each is undergoing, without awakening.

I turn the handle and push the door merely a creak, but surely loud enough to wake them. One of them merely stirs and says something which must have been out of context, since the other says:

Man: "Who are you talking to?"

Woman: "Only someone at the door, but he's gone now."

How she knows my sex is a mystery, since even I am uncertain as to who or what I am.

M: "Good."

W: "What were you saying?"

M: "I said that the twins were welded at the two hinges between their four legs when they were born."

W: "I hope the doctor did not attempt separation, leaving them at least a circus act to perform."

M: "But it does make you wonder how Mother Earth could have borne such a monstrous pair."

W: "As a sort of punishment to the parents for having sex, perhaps."

M: "There's a lot you don't know about the Earth. Its core bubbles and burps, stews and curdles, with worse things yet to come up the chimneys shafts. In my dream, I can see the terrain peppered with the evidence of vertical tunnel openings. Even Superman cannot plug them all up."

W: "Especially as I've got the real Superman in my dream. He's with me now. He wants me to bear his child."

The sleeper laughed to herself with a ricochet of snores.

They both grow quiet. Evidently, gaps in dream-talk are not so embarrassing as in real life. Nobody can blush in their sleep. But I can see from a seeping glow in the bedroom curtains, hinting at a makeshift dawn, that the upper profiles of the bodies on the bed glisten with sweat.

I dread returning to my own bed where they have put me every night so far, in case my own dreams merge with theirs. I am their child. Their changeling. Their foundling. Their treasured groundling. I am not sure which, except my flesh is theirs. I'm too young, perhaps, to comprehend even my most simplest thoughts.

Knowing them and calling them Mummy and Daddy in daylight hours is no help to me now...

Should I wake them? I fear the monsters I might stir, if their dreams are aborted. So, I creep on all fours (on all claws, as some dreams say) under their bed. It seems the safest thing to do. Their tosses and turns upon the spring-loaded mattress make me think Hell is where Heaven should be.

I must be half asleep, or half awake, really. I have to budge the chamber pot to make more room. I'm a growing child, after all. The pot's contents slop from side to side for longer than I would expect. The Overgrunts resume:

W: "I am climbing down one of the shafts. I can hear the core seething below. It must be the Infinite Cuckoo taking an early morning skinny-dip in the white slime of Earth's innards."

M: "Be careful what you are doing down there, while I tell you about my dream. I've become a butcher-surgeon and a monstrous fleshy carcass has been deposited upon my slab. It is joined at its wing-tips. At each of my careful incisions, purple slurry free-oozes. They groan in pain (because the carcass is made of two different creatures), despite the sleep medicine I've administered. But how they know to groan alternately, never overlapping, is too mysterious even for a dream."

I curse. The chamber pot has overlapped. My bottom is more than a little damp. As is the carpet. The mattress presses down upon my head with each turn-spitting of the bodies above me in the bed. I cannot creep out easily now, since some of their bed-covers have slipped over the side, concealing the horizontal door of dim light. It should not be long till daybreak. Meantime, I can only squat, listen and lurk.

W: "I can see the light at the end of the chimney tunnel below me, a white mass of flickering tails. I dearly wish I could wake up before I get there."

M: "Let me take your mind off it, with my dream. The next patient is not a pair of mutant twins at all. It's a woman, I can tell, but for various medical reasons there are several incompletions. Despite being pregnant - a straightforward diagnosis - I can find no way out for the baby. Evidently, it's my job to make one. And the only implement I've been given is a heavy-duty chain saw..."

As one sleeper hesitated, the other spoke up.

W: "The hand-holds have run out and I'm in dream free-fall. Too slow for real life, but far too fast for a nightmare. By the way, do not use the chain saw. It seems too ... cruel. Isn't there an alternative?"

M: "I've got no choice. The clock tells me I've only a few minutes before the next operation is due. And that one is far more important. Waking up is literally impossible before I tackle it."

W: "What's making you do these things?"

M: "Shunting shapes of shadow in yellow, with eyes where eyes shouldn't be. But what about you? Have you reached the Core yet?"

W: "Yes, of course. I didn't want to tell you, in case your hand slipped on the chain saw. But it was a great shock. The Infinite Cuckoo is not a bird at all, but a huge deformed foetus whose bones are on the outside grinding against each other. It gobbles up human heads with legs in the necks from the swamp of white melted slug-meat in which both fed and feeders incubate..."

M: "A human foetus?"

W: "Yes, I believe so, but it has too many of its own limbs and other appendages. And some of its parts have formed too early, others too late. With the swatches of hair, it looks older than ordinary time would allow. But too young to live. The thick cuckoo-spit heaves back and forth, as the Earth shudders around me."

M: "It's incredible. There's also an earthquake in my dream. the woman's body has slipped from the operating table and flaps on the floor like a fish. Its belly balloons further. Hard for me to keep upright, the floor angling back and forth like a frozen sea."

W: "I must be waking. I zoom up the chimney like a fire-devil."

M: "We'll soon be together again."

W: "Indeed, my love."

Then, the breathing grows less heavy, and finally ceases altogether.

Suddenly I realise that the bed now only tosses because of me underneath it. I have grown far too large for a believeable child. I feel my back hump violently, as if its spine is jutting, sawing, finning...

I am still sliding from deep folds of darkness in the floor, as the waking process takes full purchase. I am fleshing out as the dreaming screws existence with cross threads. I am in two minds whether to humour reality with my presence. I must stop the process of my physical existence, before it is too late for the world. I hope.

The floor beneath the bed has suddenly nothing there, but its carpet remains quite damp - and not with just urine.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part twenty-eight)

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