Folks arrive early and we do greetings in the front room. Lorie brings some small reptiles, which actually be either insects that look like reptiles or mechanical geegaws—the mystery is profound—and I tell her I believe I have seen these on TV somewhere—perhaps Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, perhaps a commercial thereamidst. We find a place to house and/or display these on the bookshelves.
On a provisioning run, I seem to be in line at a deli counter and there are two staff behind the counter fulfilling orders. it's unclear whether there is one line or two. When I look away for a few seconds, some guy has wandered up close behind the clearly-almost-done person at the second station of the counter. Fortunately the line police are there and shoo him away.
But when it's my turn to order, it turns out it's a grocery line and I have a bunch of stuff to ring up. Except I could not find the coffee and so like an idiot I ask the cashier—only I don't ask for a pound of coffee; in the moment I apparently forget how coffee is packaged and sold, and I ask for a half-gallon of coffee beans. As if she has the coffee beans behind the counter and will dispense it. She gives me a look. And she takes me to where, in the store, the coffee lives: with bulk foods. It's a sort of health-food/coöp-y place, apparently. And damn, don't I need lentils. And some of this, and some of that. I worry I am holding up the line but I need all these other bulk foods besides coffee. I'm preparing for a party, after all! When I get back to the line, it turns out she has put my order on hold and helped everyone else, and there's no line at all.
Back at the house, I can't find my wallet. Surely I had it in the store; I hope I haven't left it there. No, I tell myself—hazy on the chronological sequence of my recent actions—I've left it in some clothes I was wearing. Probably that jacket I put away. Where did I put that jacket away? I think it was in the attic closet.
So I trudge up to the attic, where Rob is staying. He is annoyed with me and he makes no pretense otherwise. I ask him what the matter is. It seems to be two things having to do with stuff I've written lately. The first is some sort of observations about "life in the country"; he is irked that I have had the audacity to say anything on the topic, as if I could know what it's like. As if the first exit west (on, seemingly, the Pennsylvania Turnpike) qualifies as "the country". Only he says "the mountains". Clearly one has to go further west to find actual mountains; and once there, one must spend far more time than my casual visit(s) to say anything worthwhile and pertinent about them.
The second thing he's annoyed about is the dream I recently wrote down. (Note to self: exploit recusrion.) I ask what was wrong with it. He said it was full of "black exhibitionism". I tell him that my dream had lots of black people in it and I simply wrote down what they said—how they said they felt—and how they behaved. He seems pacified by this. I say this as if I had been watching a movie or TV show—someone else's fiction—rather than Brain having been the author of the black people in my dream. Neither Rob nor I actually notice that this is nonsense I'm spouting. Because we have White Privilege.
I check the closet where I hung my coat, but it is crammed full of multiple copies of board games—Monopoly, Scrabble, and Ooh the Game of Life. I think to check the narrow door next to the closet—I can't remember what this door is, exactly... back stairs? attic, level 2? By now Roze has joined me, and when I open the door we are reminded that there is an enormous disused library in the center of the house: despite that the rest of the house is full of bookshelves, this was apparently once the house's central library. It stretches from ground floor to far above the attic (don't even bother): the top looks very Disney Haunted Mansion. The labyrinthine staircases (more Eberbach than Hogwarts) are all in extreme disrepair; banks of bookcases sit like islands at all levels, inaccessible.
I had forgotten this was here, says Roze, echoing my thoughts. By now the strange amorphous space has gotten stranger and even closer to a Disney attraction: dead things frolic through the air. Roze and I, with one brain or two, ponder the vast, elaborate haunting we have chosen to have in our midst, in the center of our house. It's always seemed benign enough, I offer; and Roze says, Till it's not. I mean, look at that! And she points to a ghoulist horse floating through the air chomping on a human's neck. Though they are both dead and ghostly, an horrific gush of vivid crimson blood issues forth. Brain tries to figure it out: either it is an elaborate hoax perpetrated by neighbors, or it is real and we live with the risk of such monstrous Raimian forces o'ercrowing their library dungeon and threatening the wellbeing of us residents.
We shut the door.
Later, the party is in full boisterous swing. I am talking to an unspecified friend and I find myself tongue-tied. I explain I am just a little... (the moment in Bedazzled where Stanley Moon searches for a word that means "inarticulate" does not occur to me) and my friend offers "party-weary?" That'll do. There are two other people I don't know and don't trust conversing loudly right beside us, and I do not have the gumption to out-shout them to talk to my friend. When they leave, though, I explain—because he has stated he is a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, that I have a bunch of tickets for upcoming games; also a bunch of concerts. Apparently I scored a lot of tickets on some kind of discount service. I haul out my folder of tickets and find not one but two Simon and Garfunkel concert (one is past and I've missed it), a concert by an artist who may or may not be Mel Tormé... a bunch of others. Somehow my acquisition of these tickets has to do with my visit to what Robi has disdained as "not the mountains".
A short while later, I decide to play piano; but I'm vastly intoxicated and that is selom a good idea. Anyway, I sit down and improvise what I think should be nice, warm jazz chords. Nice, warm jazz chords come out. Like Chief Dan George says at the end of Little Big Man, Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. Delaware punks are in the house now, as is Mike Raney, who calls me "Lucy"—by way of Vince Guaraldi's music for "Peanuts", I suppose, but I don't think what I'm playing really sounds like Guaraldi. Anwyay, Mike starts singing along, scatting a slow viper drag-like groove. We duet. It sounds ok. By the end of the number, I'm playing books, not keys.
Lastly, at a far corner of the field (most likely the park described by Madison Drive in Newark, Del.), in an episode of Star Trek, two high-ranking non-human (Romulan?) characters are decreeing that a young man must die. The young man was slated to be promoted, perhaps coronated, to a position of great power, but he has been misled and betrayed. The leading Romulan figure is a young woman played by Masatoshi Nagase, and she calls him "Carl Perkins": "I am sorry, Carl Perkins; you cannot be the Imperial Commander. That role belongs to..."
The guy they're *really* promoting is another young man, handsome and vulpine, but I do not catch his name. Not "Elvis". Not "Macbeth". There is some sort of high-tech transference of energy from Carl Perkins to his successor in fortune, and I am a functionary in this sci-fi rite, and having touched Carl Perkins (the death touch? it is not clear) I and up with a vivid colored pattern on my index finger: a center of bright metallic gold against a field of dark but still vibrant green. This, I suggest to Carl Perkins's successor, ought to adorn his beard. This is apparently not de rigueur, just symbolic. Hold still, I tell him, but his head twitches just as I make to applique him and it ends up smudged.
Close enough, I tell him. Frankly, he's still adorable—I mean, as murdering, smudge-bearded politicians go.
