April 17, 2010
When I woke, I had managed to roll on to my broken arm, my old bandages had stripped off my leg, and my abdomen hurt like a son of a bitch. I groaned then turned to my phone that was blaring like a bomb-siren. I picked it up and answered groggily. 'Hello?'
'Honey?' asked my mother's voice. 'Honey, is that you?'
'Yes, mum.'
'Are you alright?' she asked. She sounded worried.
'Yes, I'm alright. What's wrong, mum? Did the dog drink some paint again?'
'No!' she said. 'Well, yes, he did, but that's not the reason I'm calling you.'
I looked at the time. 'It's four in the morning, mum.'
'Oh, sorry,' she said. 'Time zones, you know . . .'
Mum spent her time drinking tea, reading literature, and feeling richer than she was. Occasionally, about once every two years, she did the same thing, except over in a foreign country. She'd pack a shitload of literature, a shitload of teabags, travel to a country less well off than Australia, then observe how less well off they were, while reading Jane Eyre and with a hot cup of tea clutched in her bony hand. She was insanse. Currently she was in England, experiencing, in her words, "English high culture". I had laughed too. Although not too loud.
'It's really six at night here,' she said.
'Great,' I said. 'Why did you want to call me? What's wrong?'
'The hospital managed to contact me,' she said. 'You were in a car crash!'
'It was more of a car ruckus,' I said. 'Not much of a crash, really.'
'Oh, honey,' she said. 'I'm so glad you're alright! I mean, ever since your father passed away . . .'
Ever since your father passed away, Mike . . . Ever since he's died, Mike . . . Ever since old Joe had kicked the bucket . . . every time, always the pause at the end of the sentence. Always the words left unsaid. My mother was a master at that. She could go years without saying anything, and she'd managed it so far. You tried to talk to her about it, but she insisted she was fine. And there was no backing down for her, because if she backed down, well, she wouldn't be . . . herself. She mistook strong for idiotic, and brave for heartless.
She still wouldn't accept that my father had died taking too much meth, too. She knew it, but she sure as hell wouldn't accept it.
'I'm alright,' I said. 'Apart from the broken arm and my scratched up leg, I'm fine.' I decided not to mention I only had one kidney now. I was pretty sure that wouldn't go down too well.
'Where are you?' she asked. 'Are you still in the hospital?'
'I am still in the hospital,' I lied.
'Don't lie to me,' she said.
'I am still in the hospital.'
'If you're lying to me . . .'
'I'm still in the hospital,' I said. 'Here, I'll prove it to you.' I took the phone from my ear and made a few vague whizzing computer noises. I returned it to my ear.
'Sounds like a hospital to me,' she said.
'Exactly,' I said. 'Anyway, mum, I gotta go. It's late right now and the - uh, I don't want the doctors to hear me. The hospital doctors.'
'Of course, honey,' she said. 'Call me, okay? I'd like to talk.'
Of course she'd like to talk. But it was never anything more meaningful than a chat with her.
'I will,' I said. I said goodbye and hung up and curled back in bed. Cold air must have been leaking in from somewhere, because I felt my skin prickling with the temperature. I pulled the blankets around me and made myself a coccoon, then put my phone back next to my wallet-
Hang on, my phone? My wallet? Weren't they were lost in the crash?
I scrabbled around next to the phone and the wallet and my hand fell upon a scrap of paper.
I found these around the place. Thanks for pulling me out of that pool.
-Tandy
Okay. I guess a dead dude just found my phone and wallet for me. Thanks, Tandy.
I tried not to worry about, you know, how the hell he had found them and how he had got into my room, and also about the fact that he was fucking dead. I was already tired enough that I drifted back to sleep within minutes.
*
They say dreams are your mind's way of interpreting all the shit that's happened during the day, it's just that it all gets screwed around in translation, and you get dreams. My personal theory is that your mind deliberately mucks it all around, twists your transistor, so you're not just running over the events of the day again. Instead you've got exciting shit happening, like car chases.
I don't usually remember my dreams, being inclined to keep a sleep schedule roughly equivalent to that of a grumpy, constipated owl and all, but I remembered this one vividly. I woke up under this big birch tree, in the shade. Around me was the desert; big wide, stretches of sand dunes, and here in the middle of it, a birch tree. I remembered thinking three things: 1) I did not fall asleep in the desert 2) what the fuck a birch tree in the desert, and 3) seriously this is a desert what the fuck is a birch tree doing in the desert.
I got up and walked out on to the sand dunes. They weren't hot. They weren't cold or anything, either. They were just . . . nothing. Not even room temperature. They didn't have a temperature. The sun wasn't beating down on me because, I realised, there was no sun. Just eerie, open blue sky everywhere. Somehow, everything seemed to be doing alright without the old guy.
There was an army major sitting in the sand dunes a few metres away from me. I knew he was an army major because as soon as he noticed me, he stood up and enthusiastically shook my hand and told me he was an army major. Then he punched me straight in the nose and called me an un-American son of a bitch. My nose didn't hurt, or even bleed. Just . . . nothingness, like the sand.
'I'm not American,' I said. 'I'm Australian.'
'A-ha!' exclaimed the major. 'So you are an un-American son of a bitch.'
'I never said that.'
'You said you weren't American. Sounds pretty un-American to me.'
'I'm Australian, you American son of a bitch,' I said. 'Why should I be American in the first place?'
'Americans are Americans in the first place,' pointed out the army major.
'That's because they're Americans.'
'Well why,' blustered the major, his face going red, his hands pawing at me like a wild animal, 'aren't you?'
'Get away from me, you American son of a bitch!' I said frantically, pushing him away. He looked up and laughed raucously, then his legs collapsed underneath him and . . . split in half. Just split in half like they were two loafs of bread. Big, hairy, ugly spiders poured out of his collapsed legs, and then the whole major ripped apart at the seams like a cheap shirt and more spiders poured out of his body. I wasn't scared of spiders myself, but there's something about a swarm of black spiders that just burst from the body of a patriotic major that puts you off. The spiders rushed towards me and before I could move they were rushing up my legs in a tide. You know how I said before I couldn't really feel anything in this stupid-ass dream? Not now. I could feel vividly the thousands of legs swimming over my own.
I tried to bat them off, but that just seemed to make the little bastards pissed at me.
Then, without warning, I was covered in gasoline. I felt it hit my head and then splash down across my face and into my clothes. I could smell the stench of gasoline all over me. I turned round. Tandy was there, holding an empty tin.
'Thanks, Tandy,' I said. 'Now I'm covered in spiders and gasoline. That really helps.'
'Stay still,' he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter.
'Hey, hey,' I said. 'Let's not go crazy here.'
'It won't hurt,' he said. 'Don't worry.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'I'm sure being lit on fire will not hurt at all.'
'Do you want the spiders off or not?' asked Tandy. I wanted the spiders off, that was for sure. They weren't biting me or anything, and hadn't yet, they just sat there, chilling on my legs with their hairy little bodies.
'Is there any way you can get the spiders off without me being lit on fire?' I asked.
'You could slice your leg open,' said Tandy.
'How the hell would that help?'
'Well, they wouldn't be on you you any more. Not technically. More inside of you.'
'I'll take the fire, thanks,' I said. 'Are you sure it won't hurt?'
'It won't hurt,' assured Tandy. 'And feel free to reconsider any time. I went the spiders-inside-of-me route, and I'm healthy as ever.'
'You have spiders inside of you?'
'We all have bacteria inside of us,' said Tandy. 'We've evolved with them so much that, without them, we couldn't live without them. And they couldn't live without us. It's like the Cattle Egret and the . . . Cattle. The Cattle Egret eats the bugs the cattle stirs up when it's eating, and in return it keeps lice off the cattle. It's just my Cattle Egrets are a little . . . bigger than yours.'
'That's fucking disgusting, Tandy,' I said.
He sighed. 'Maybe, maybe.' And then he lit me on fire.
Have you ever been on fire before? I'm guessing that since you're reading this, you haven't. Have you ever been on fire before, but with no pain? I'm guessing again that no, you haven't.
You can see the flames and the smoke, but you can't feel the pain, and I dunno, your mind thinks you're a jerk or something because of all the conflicting signals, and it just shuts down while the flames roar. I felt the spiders flee from my legs until I was completely free of spiders, then Tandy clicked his fingers. They instantly disappeared. I looked over my skin. It wasn't burnt or anything. I'm sure I would have noticed if it was.
'Alright,' said Tandy, and started walking off.
'Hey, hey - hang on!' I said, running after him. He turned to me and raised one eyebrow. 'What is it with you, Tandy?' I asked. 'What . . . are you?'
'That's the wrong kind of question,' said Tandy.
'Are you dead?'
'I was, that's for certain.'
'So you're a zombie, then.'
'No, no. Look, Mike. I don't mean to sound like a hipster asshole, but you're just trying to fit me into a category you can understand. I find it's best to think of me as Tandy Smith.'
'That's just a name,' I said.
'And "zombie" isn't?' Tandy asked. He turned around and began strolling down a sand dune. Tandy Smith looked too alive to be a zombie, too dead to be a human - and he was definitely too full of spiders to be considered not filled with god-damn spiders. He was an enigma. I decided to follow him.
Tandy turned to me suddenly and told me if I even thought about following him, he'd chop off my hands and feed them to his spiders. He looked deadly serious for a moment, and then his face lit with laughter and he walked away.
I turned around and came face to face with a skeleton. He was wearing a suit, and he had the kind of look on his skull that suggested he was the kind of skeleton that listened to The Mars Volta while reading classic literature in coffee shops. He looked like the kind of skeleton that polished his skull and bleached his bones.
'Wake the fuck up, you lazy bastard,' he said in Dave's voice. Then he added soon after, in Josh's voice this time, 'I dare you to put your balls on his head.'
'Jesus blasphemous Christ,' I said.
'How much?' asked the skeleton, then answered himself: 'I'll give you twenty cents.'
I woke.
No comments:
Post a Comment