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.

Oh! Snorkel lament!

I am moving into the most excellent bedroom: windows on three full sides, just like my last house in Newark, whose sunroom addition I appropriated en boudoir. In this case, for no discernible reason, there is a narrow, semi-enclosed walkway outside the room along all three window walls, with exterior half-walls rising maybe six inches shorter than my windowsills. I recall having traversed this walkway as a child, but this is the first time I've been in the room it circumscribes.

Elsewhere in the same house is a library, which Fomo and I have recently finished filling with books. Unlike my new bedroom, this room has no windows at all; it is 100% shelf. Shelving covers every square foot of wall; there's a support beam running the length of the room that weirdly bears shelves on either side; and—strangest of all—the ceiling is covered with shelving. And somehow Fomo has managed to fill those ceiling shelves with books.

I am just getting around to wondering how he managed to do that with, ahem, no visible means of support, when suddenly one book falls abruptly from the ceiling. The first thing that occurs to me, of course, is "How suspicious is it that that book just fell the very second I started wondering how these books stayed up in the first place?" This, I gather, is unusually clear evidence that Brain lives in a vat on the counter of an evil scientist's lab (or is a computer program, or some such).

And then another book drops, and another, and another, and several more, including now books flying off the wall shelving, books that have visible means of support, which gravity ought not molest. It's a Flying Book Bonanza. It's a horror movie telekinetic nightmare. It's raining books hallelujah.

We (a really non-specific other person, not Fomo, and I) call Maintenance to report the book disaster. Nobody can tell me how books were successfully shelved on the ceiling in the first place.

Later, Tom Lenk shows up outside the elevator bank. He is in a wheelchair. I am amazed and delighted that he recognizes my face and calls me by name. I have been writing a play (screenplay?) especially for him to perform; fortunately I do have some good news to give him about some producer's success in moving the project forward, and with that news I am able to obfuscate the embarrassing fact that I haven't quite finished writing the damned thing. (Sound familiar? Hahahaha.)

Tom is on his way to a gig; it is not clear to me whether his wheelchair is medical or thespian. I accompany him so we can chat along his way, into the elevator, out of the elevator, along hallways and open public spaces bustling with executives, artists, techies. I guess it is a TV studio; while it's mostly the same sort of office building where I've worked for the last 20 years, it is certainly not my workplace and no reason was presented why I should be in the elevator lobby to begin with. The meeting with Tom was fortuitous, not scheduled.

Anyway, I am a starfucker and Brain knows it: as we part company, Tom gestures for a hug. We embrace and air-kiss each other's cheeks.

Omg omg omg I touched Tom Lenk!

The Wilde West

The movie is something along the lines of Parting Glances with a side of Wilde—slice of life, humanizing queer people, but also with a "taking culture to the Philistines" theme. But toward the end I'm not watching a movie anymore. Instead I'm watching live humans; I'm at the back of the stage for some reason and I am watching the main gay character from the movie perform. Maybe he's Wilde reciting a Shakespeare soliloquy; but really he's everyfag reciting humanity.

This is a documentary film and a reenactment and a deeply personal tragedy all at once. I know what happens in this story. Indeed, the bully hecklers in the audience, loud and rude, are already calling our hero out. It's a frontier saloon and a modern barroom all at once, and a mean drunk is picking a fight: nothing ever changes. I know what happens in this story.

One of the bullies runs out the front door while the other is haranguing our hero, something from the "That queer stuff may fly in Paris or wherever" clade of bigotry; "but here in Ferguson..." (Yes, Ferguson: Brain thinks you are all indistinguishable bigots and assholes.) By this time the second guy is back and he's brought a gun. This was always going to happen. It is Shakespeare after all, and we all know what happens in this story: the faggot dies bloody.

Then I am home. Mom is Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland) and she says, "Oh, honey. Are you ok?" I tell her I'm fine and I start up the elaborately curved stairs. In this case I am both walking upstairs and playing with a plastic childhood puzzle toy in which you have to manipulate ball bearings up a "staircase" (which is just a painted image); if your hand shakes the tiny steel balls go everywhere and you have to start over.

But in any case I don't get very far up the stairs before my breath catches and I break down, sobbing. It is now the case that the guy murdered in the saloon was my brother and the whole family, including Joyce, is grieving. Our brother, our son, was violently taken from us. We are all just trying to cope, to ride out the immeasurable tragedy that is the human species.

And then I wake up. And resume trying to ride out the immeasurable tragedy that is the human species.

Mein Drumpf

Donald Trump is a projection.

I mean, the pussy-grabbing seems authentic enough, and his business and show-business records speak for themselves: he is a thoroughgoingly reprehensible human being. But what the heartland has made of him is something else entirely, something artificial and reflective rather than directive: in his accidental quest for the presidency he has soaked up the image of gun-toting Jesus, the dead-steeltown rage at thwarted manifest destiny, the frothing blind hatred of all things liberal and "elite"; and he has ended up espousing radically xenophobic viewpoints he had no truck with more'n 15 month ago.

The alarums liberals have sounded all this time—the preemptively anagodwinian comparisons with Hitler and so forth—have been all about "facism"; but the usage is sloppy as always. The image fascism evokes in mosta folk is xenopohobic authoritarianism—fears of which the journalist-thrashing Trumpisti certainly reinforce. But fascism has a more precise economic meaning:

So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model” by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called “fascism” but “planned capitalism.”

And the inevitable result of such a rich-people circlejerk is that the poor are increasingly cranky about being fed table scraps and invent hatreds against entire classes of people to pursue in vicarious vengeance.

The Democratic establishment is arguably every bit as fascist as the GOP—owned by industry, beholden to the bottom line, intolerant of dissent, ever more parsimonious with guaranteed constitutional rights—they're just more educated and slick about it. And they know they can throw social liberals enough bones like gay marriage to distract us from the cutpurse at our heels. In this regard—the culpability and collusion of the so-called left—Trump fans are absolutely spot on; but they only get it half-right: once again, in the us-and-them economy, we see only their iniquity. It's an astonishing feat of selective blindness not to see and recognize that this huckster billionaire, this amoral businesscheat, is not a legitimate friend of the working poor—but there it is. 

Derp, saith America. Derp.

In any case, the engine of Trumpism—the populist groudnswell and tearful, rapturous allegiance to a pro rasslin' heel—isn't fascism. It's fundamentalism. It's not stupidity; it's programmatic ignorance. It's the inevitable and planned result of the forced starvation of public liberal education in America. We have shat in our bed for generations. Yeah, it's gonna stink some. Go figure.

My Glorious '70s TV Childhood, Writ Large

I have been reading up on Mech E. I don't know how this came to pass, but it turns out I have been learning some very practical things about how roller coasters work. I surprise myself when I read text from a scholarly article about the application of the new "triple contoid rail shifters" or some such, and I understand pretty much all of it, despite its grounding in forces and principles of physics that probably don't exist. I am so excited by this new area of learning that I am, for the moment anyway, dead-set on changing careers to becoming a roller coaster mechanic.

It's a butch place, though, this coaster shop (a simply vast factory floor, the kind of place you drive golf carts through to get from Point A to Point B) and one of the guys has already expressed his smirking disdain for the new faggot. He's a 40-ish tank with neat graying hair, an old-school 'phobe who, deep down, couldn't be bothered less but feels the need to keep up appearances with the mates. I'm trying to make nice, partly because it's the morally superior, adult thing to do, partly because I don't wanna get beat up, and partly because holy shit I'd suck that in a trice. Anyway, I make a point to thank him, politely and professionally, whenever I can—e.g., on returning a gizmo I have made use of that's not really his to lend but the company's. It's working, I can tell: he'll be fucking my face soon.

I'm off shopping now, seemingly both for hardware and foodstuffs. (There may even be a stupid pun like "mixed nuts" going on here.) I visit the supermarket that's always there, whether the story is about actual grocery shopping, frustration over a mass of humanity in the way, or anxiety about being naked. In this case it's just here to be visited briefly because what I really need is over in a separate space across the parking lot: operated by the same grocery company but more like a hardware store. Except with tacos. They have tacos. I hear some folks in here complaining about how windy it is while I'm looking around. They apparently do not carry what I'm looking for and I don't want any tacos, so...

I step out onto the narrow terrace just shy of the roof of this retail/office building. There's a tired old guy out here smoking, and after we exchange greetings, he mentions that he's "about done with this damn wind". Sure enough, just as I look through the cloudscape in the near distance I see evidence of a cyclone forming. It is far too bright out here—really only partly cloudy—for a tornado, but there one is, and it has just touched ground, maybe a couple blocks away. I say to the senior, "That's it for me, I'm going in" (he seems less alarmed) and I head back toward safety. But the door I came through is egress-only; no handle on the outside. So I find the next door, which leads into a utility corridor, then going through another steel door opposite I end up in a main building stairwell. I am the first in here but other humans start gathering almost immediately; presumably it's a safer part of the building structure than their offices, with all those windows. I am surrounded by shouts of "C'mon, hurry!" and general panicking. We are all trying to determine whether the twister has passed or lingered, and where it is now.

It is here. It is precisely here. We humans lurch and scream as it becomes obvious the building is coming down. The space where we are all standing has become a steel and glass cube, an oversize elevator, and it is plummeting toward the ground. I am faced with that moment I have long contemplated: what happens when the plane is going down? What happens when I fall off a cliff? How do I react and what do I think about in that excruciating last minute before certain death?

There is no right answer. And anyway, Brain declines the question by an unexplained scene change. Brain always pulls that shit when it doesn't know.

Well! Since I'm not dead, I am in Carol Burnett tribute mode. There's a particular episode I remember, with a particular guest, and in which Carol Burnett sings a particular song at the very end. (In real life, the guest is probably Sammy Davis, Jr. but I have no idea what the song is. It may have bled over from Jerry Lewis singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at the end of this MDA Labor Day Telethon every year.) In what is almost certainly Mary Richards's newsroom, I sit and page through a mountain of old TV Guides until I find the episode in question. Apparently we are pre- or otherwise devoid of Internet research tools; and yet, having found paper reference to it, I have immediate access to the video in stunningly high quality—like being right there by the stage as Carol does her finale.

Once the song is done—and Carol has tugged on her earlobe—I am back in the parking garage, heading for the car with John, my partner in crime. John is played by Paul Newman. The car is played by a generic 1970s workhorse sedan. I am contemplating my performance during the twister/falling tower incident; in retrospect I was more than sufficiently reasoned and calm even as death inexorably loomed.

I have passed the test; I have found the tao; I have faced death without fear; I am a fucking badass.

So it is clear what I need to do: "I need a gun, John," I tell my partner as we open the car doors. He seems surprised. "I've never owned a gun, never even fired a gun." (True in our story, not true in real life.) But I need a gun to go be a hero—perhaps like Frank in God Bless America but this is not what occurs to me at the time: my end goal is left tacit—though one may assume enough thematic linkage with waking life that "overthrowing the oligarchy" is basically it. I need a gun to accomplish it in any case.

There are two women not far from us in the parking lot; they are clearly involved in some other sort of criminal activity and are newly on the lam. I ask John whether we should give them a ride; he declines, opining that that would be asking for trouble. We head out; but for whatever reason John drives the car down the stairs, every flight.

I sit up to grab and pen and paper to make notes about these dreams; except that I do not really sit up. I only dream that I do.

Tonight on the Sigh/Fie Channel...

I wake up on the third floor and remember that we have a houseful of people left over from the marathon, or party, or whatever festivities we just convened over the weekend. There are people sleeping comfortably on the several beds up here. I decide to have a ramble to see what the rest of the house looks like in the aftermath.

The second floor is definitely more crowded; I am surprised to see how many people are crammed on the beds down here. And then I realize, as I'm tiptoeing toward the exit door and the stairs (it's very dark in here and I can't see the floor) that I'm stepping on people. I slow down and try to readjust—there must be a clear path to walk between the sleeping bodies, but I can't find it. Fortunately I don't really seem to be disturbing anyone; occasionally somebody hollers "Ouch!" without selling it much, and then giggles.

I head down the stairs and, like the Haunted Mansion, I'm suddenly outside. There's just an enormous number of people here—sleeping, not sleeping, hanging out in the yard, which is as expansive as a public park. It is fence-to-fence people, like late night/early morning at a folk fest: not raucous but humming with residual party energy. I'm over by the eastern fence chatting with some folks who are, incongruously, still lying in bed, and I'm surveying the whole huge expanse of humanity when a violent commotion, over yonder and moving quickly, commands the attention of all the waking folk in earshot: a small group of humans are fleeing—it's a little more than running; they seem semi-airborne—from a pair of vampires. The latter are bald, pink, huge, and lithe—think Max Shreck meets Corey Stoll—and they chase the humans over the fence and into the night.

The crowd has reacted as expected, with screams and such. I tell myself resolutely: This is a gimmick. It's a prank. There are no real vampires. And sure enough I have immediate occasion to test that theory, because the vampires quickly come clambering back over the fence exactly where I'm standing. One of them jumps on me, knocking me down; the other does the same to a friend on my left. Fortunately, we have another friend who is standing behind us and who laconically narrates the "attack" like Penn Jilette, giving every bit of the trick away: Nice fence-hopping! Must be easy when you're on a wire. Oh, look, there's a crushable vial of "blood"! and such like. Thwarted, the vampires retire.

Later, I accompany Carlos to the basement rooms where he has long executed his sci-fi/paranormal experiments. There is a fatalism about this excursion, a definite "one last time" vibe: it is late in the movie and everything is going to hell above, maybe. The basement space is a classic set-up, with a control room overlooking an experimentation room; but Carlos has always worked solo, never experimenting on anyone: it's always been about communicating or learning more about... x.

Just now he is in the control room doing his sci-fi thing while I putter about the experimental space. I attempt to to put together the contraption Carlos sits on during his attempts—it's an essential condition for reaching the aliens or "the other side" or whatever he needs to reach; but it's also fiendishly difficult to assemble and balance and actually sit down on. It's two pieces of wood: one has five or six prongs all in a row, 2.5 or 3 feel long, fanning out like a splayed fork, which all sit on the floor. There's some sort of seat in the center of them. At the top where they converge instead of a straight fork handle, it curves back and down, like the handle of a mug or pitcher, though disconnected, ending in midair with a curlicue. I need to balance this end on the second piece of wood, which looks like a drum with one leg. So the fork tines and the one-leggèd drum rest on the floor and I try to get into the broom's seat while maintaining this impossibly awkward balance of mug-handle on drum head.

I do not succeed. I have never had good balance.

A hear a voice softly saying "Hello". I cannot tell where it's coming from. I listen for a while and I hear it again. "Hello." I abandon the contraption and head for the control booth to tell Carlos. He thinks the voice is "from beyond", wherever that is, and so he adjusts some controls and says "Hello" into a microphone. But it turns out the voice is entirely more mundane: it came from the other side of a door, heretofore unrevealed, but it's a plain old residential/commercial door, two horizontal rectangles of glass in the top, 20th century all the way, plain old knob, plain old lock, at the bottom of plain old basement stairs from the street level down to these rooms, which are now also a used bookstore.

And, look, it's Jon Lovitz behind the door, saying hello one more time before barging in and arresting Carlos. Or rather, he and his law enforcement brood attempt to arrest Carlos, but the lawyers are right behind LE down the stairs: they are led by Susan Sarandon, who looks fucking amazing in an indigo dress with an elaborate spiderweb decoration on her breast. And she makes quick work of Lovitz, threatening a wrongful arrest suit that'll keep his family unemployed for generations, or some such.

My sinuses are really dry. I need water.