The Ill-Tempered Clavicle

PRELUDE
I am bequeathed what I gather is partial ownership of the Long House—not the shabby, shady one Daniel B—é lives in on the edge of civilization; rather the well-lived-in multi-tenant property in town. As always, the house is three rooms wide across the front and all the way back. As always, it is two storeys tall and inside the front door, past the entryway, is a broad, slow staircase leading up to a sort of ballroom on the second storey, which is as wide as the house; three doors against the back of the ballroom lead into three separate rooms, and so on, all the way back; there are no hallways. As always, it's not clear how far back it goes; in fact, at one point I say to someone else who lives there, "I have a tendency to imagine this house just goes on and on without ever coming to the back, but I know that's not true."

As always, I love this house. But I notice for the first time what sad shape it's in—at least aspects of it. There are water stains and cracks in its front face, between the roof and the second-storey windows. Some of the interior walls have cracks, and some floorboard are loose.

As always, there are sneaky back stairs, curvy Dr. Seuss servant stairs leading from one apartment to another. I take one such stair from the ground floor to the first storey and wend my way through someone else's apartment. Seeing as how I have been left partial ownership of this house, I wonder whether or how many residents still live here. Some rooms are completely bare but others are full of the stuff of somebody else's daily life. Eventually some of the owners of these things show up. They are all women. I am put out because I wanted a houseful of hot gay men who own no clothes.

Eventually I leave the Long House and go visiting. After some forgotten partyish encounters at a friend's country villa—I think it may be Rob & Joe's place, but with significant modifications, e.g., a sliding back door on ground level—J.D. shows up as a hobo: in rags, grimy, just off the train apparently but still absolutely J.D.—razor-sharp, perceptive, deferential but quietly opinionated. He is wearing a funny hat. I lead him down the hill into the yard where an oil-drum fire still burns from earlier festivities. None of the other houseguests are still around. J.D. finds some discarded meat and reclaims it. There is no other context to this story.

FUG YOU
A scene unfolds on the deck of a ship. Apparently pirates have taken over and they are exceedingly unpleasant characters. They are currently molesting a young woman whose hands are lashed to a mast, above her head—except when she needs to move around, in which case not. The head pirate in charge of intimidation is hollering at her, all sorts of cliché script business about how she will beg for death if she doesn't tell them [where the treasure is, or whatever the fuck]. She is not so easily broken, however, and withstands a good deal of operatic or silent-film slapping with aplomb, or possibly with sang-froid.

The pirates go away by means unknown and the deck of the ship is now a deck on top of a tall, rude wooden structure, maybe 40 feet off the ground. A dozen or a score strangers and I are prisoners up here, presumably of the pirates. Looking down over the railing is also the tiniest bit like looking over the back of the bleachers at a ball game. There are a few humans below going about whatever business. I'm not sure what any of them are actually doing there vis-à-vis pirate and prisoner—collaborators? passer-by?—but one of them is engaged in the business of hectoring the lot of us up above. She is a young and enormously attractive woman of indeterminate but gorgeous color. ("Historians agree so it's not lewd in us to say that she's phenomenally pulchritudinous.") Think Sonya Braga circa Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).

Anyway, Sonya's swearing like a sailor who swears a lot. She's unleashing such torrents of abuse and threats against the lot of us up on our deck that she's effectively pissing everyone off, driving us to despair. She knows what buttons to push, and at length, some of us start hollering back abuse and threats. Then one of our number, another young woman, jumps off the deck and goes splat on the muddy ground. She does not move. Everyone is silent for a long moment. It's the first death in our little drama and people are truly taken aback: it's all fun and games until...

It is now clear that this is exactly what the voluptuous young woman on the ground intends: to verbally berate us into committing suicide. Sure enough, another woman soon sits on the railing and sort of nudges herself off; the plummets straight down without changing position so that she lands on her feet and her ass. A horrible sound accompanies this landing, causing another silence among the crowd.

Much as I'd love to stay and relate more gruesome suicides—I know from the movies each one will be worse than the last—it turns out I have a doctor's appointment. My doctor is almost but not quite Gena Rowlands circa Playing by Heart (1998). She is treating me for some sort of ailment of the throat. I can still speak, but she assures me that three out of four thingummies in my throat are completely paralyzed. The good news is, treatment is easy and effective. If I will just follow her to the operating room... 

Which I do. For a long, long time. She's striding briskly along corridors, turning here and there, taking flights of stairs (always down) and leading me through a veritable maze. Furthermore she seems to be speeding up, especially going down stairs—she's remarkably spry for a woman seemingly in her 60s! I wonder if she is purposely trying to lose me, or just showing off. Fortunately I am unnaturally spry too, and I follow close behind her, nearly flying down the stairs, taking 6, 8 steps at a time, finally bounding whole flights, doing airborne turns with only my left hand on the corner posts.

Which is clearly the point of this medical episode, since we never actually get to the "operating room" for her to fix my throat. Instead I am in a sort of group therapy session where people are opening up about their feelings. Everyone is in the spirit of the thing, including the attractive young woman from two scenes back who so effective lobbed taunts and vituperation at us captives. Now, however, she is soft-spoken and pleasant, though she did apparently carry from our previous pirate encounter a vivid scrape on the side of her nose. We are talking in such vague terms we could be talking about anything: "There must be one," says a young man, who may be the group leader. "That cannot be avoided. There must be one"; to which not-quite-Sonya Braga replies, "Yes, there must be one, but it cannot be that one."

It occurs to me: we will never be cured at this rate.

CODETTA 
I visit Vidéo Américain in Newark, Delaware. The store is in the mini-mall, across from Days of Knights. The check-out counter is in a new place and looks like the front desk in the most run-down Somerset Maugham-scripted hotel in the tropics. I recognize the clerk on duty but he doesn't seem to know me. I remind him that I used to work here, which doesn't help. All the videos on the shelf are somehow linked with individual bones. They are meant to be human bones but are reproductions thereof. There is no obvious bone type = genre code going on; in fact it's not at all clear the associations aren't just random. Which might as well be a dream's thesis statement.

Three Little Oddities

Impromtu
There's this guy, right? He's part Yeshua of Nazareth, part Matthew of McConaughey, and he is a movie star and he has been flitting around all day stressed about his public image. We're in what appears to be an industrial basement, mazelike but tidy, and through a series of rooms a series of issues has plagued McJesuhey. The most recent problem is his being linked in the subversive online press to pedophilia. (Pizzagate and Comet Ping Pong are not mentioned by name, but it is obvious what's on Brain's mind.) So here's the stripper messiah, wearing shiny pants (oldsters: think BeeGees) and a sort of vest-thing designed to obscure from view not one single square decimeter of his tan, ripped, lightly furry torso (oldsters: think Andy Gibb).

With this latest scandal brewing, McX is fretful and pacing, positively outgribing with anxiety. It falls to me to calm him down and map out his rehabilitation strategy. So I put a hand on his shoulder and speak quietly and reassuringly—'Look, this is nonsense and everybody knows it and we have to deal with it head-on and blah blah blah'—like a diva whisperer, and I talk him down to the point where we can go see The Guy, some media nabob or representative thereof who is suddenly standing behind a service counter (actually, he has just re-purposed an institutional 3' x 8' folding table). And I say, 'We have a problem here: the adoring public may start lumping my client in with John Wayne Gacy.' 

Both guys look at me blankly. They've never heard of Gacy. I have my work cut out for me.

Romanza 

I'm with a bunch of friends in a restaurant in California. We're drinking cocktails and engaged in lively conversation, but what's really on my mind is a bit of geographical detail re the city we are in: it's a sort of sunken table land in the middle of the city, with a lake on one side and a highly storied neighborhood on the other. It has an instantly, universally recognizable name, like Hollywood, which waking Brain can't recall; for our purposes, let's call it Wallyhood. Wallyhood has the unique feature of extending across the table land and other parts of the city which sit in a vast earth-structural overhang, somehow naturally cantilevered, such that much of Wallyhood is basically in a cave.

I've never actually been to this area of the city but I've seen—we've all seen—so very many movies set there. What's on my mind right now, since we're just a few miles away, is how the reality of the place compares with the mythos. So at one point I avail myself of the presumed expertise of the restaurant's manager. He is mid-30s, Latinate, rotund yet spry, neatly bearded and mustachioed, dapper in a dark red suit over black shirt, and absolutely adorable. Yes, sir? How may I be of service? he asks. 

My words run away and hide. 

I want to ask him what is the real story of Wallyhood. It's not really all glamorous and sexy and Sunset-Strippy, right? But I can't remember the name Wallyhood, or the name "Sunset Strip", or any names or attributes of anything I set out to ask. It suddenly occurs to me that I am very drunk: so drunk that things I thought mere seconds ago are being irretrievably misplaced. And the manager, without his professional smile diminishing one iota, is becoming more and more impatient. I finally give up the battle to make words and deflate into a blancmange before him; he leaves with a masterfully snide quip about how it is absolutely his duty and his pleasure to assist me.

Yep, I'm drunk. But Heather is totaled. She is lying facedown on the tiny cocktail table. She is still awake, though, and responsive in conversation; she just can't get up. It's because we've been drinking stiff cocktails for hours and we ordered food ages ago (some huge shrimp preparation for a dozen people to share—perhaps because in this world there is only shrimp) and after all this time the food hasn't arrived. I become mortified that it is my fault the food hasn't arrived, since I distracted the manager so pointlessly from his actual labors.

Novelette
It's the basement of Morris Library and I still don't know where anything is, since they completely overhauled it (years after I left my employment there). I try to think back, and I believe I can safely say that where I am sitting right now, in the midst of an Technolollapalooza, used to be the Government documentation stacks. (Actually, while I was there Brain came up with "Reference Section" but I am correcting Brain because Brain was wrong.) Anyway, I tell Marya, by phone—and then by writing the same message in red crayon on the wall with my foot—that where I am right now used to be Government docs, back when they actually had information printed on paper stored on shelves. Progress must progress! Indeed, the red crayon is really a stylus and the wall is a screen that accepts my writing and lights it up all Christmasy.

I set out to see what else has become of my old stomping grounds; and I've stomped almost out of range when I hear some appealing, old-timey music coming from where the Medicine and Technology stacks used to be. I turn around and head back toward the music. It is a group of guys performing a patter-song, but somehow it is one they are creating on the spot by reading the words of a technical journal to an existing tune, something awfully Arthur Sullivany, rather like Tom Lehrer's listing the chemical elements to the tune of "I am the very model of a modern Major General". Only this song, or at least the rendition, is more distinctly ragtimey or dixielandish. It's an intriguing performance, and for the infraction of being intrigued I am summarily called out to do the next such filk. 

Well, actually, Cramer and I are both called out to come up with something. We get to choose the tune and the source material to be sung to that tune; but I can't for the life of me come up with any good ideas. Brain tries out things like Moby-Dick sung to the tune of "I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkle; whereas Cramer, clearly an art masochist, goes for the yellow pages and Buddhist chant.

We are not a hit.