Something Restless

A story about a dream and a few days.

I dreamt that I was in what I understood was Las Vegas, even though it didn’t really look anything like Las Vegas. I was looking down at an enormous complex made up of dozens of identical luxury high-rise hotels, built in an “X” shape across a massive, otherwise empty square in the middle of the desert. Each hotel was physically linked to its immediate neighbors along the diagonal in an obscure way that I don’t really know how to explain, and although shuttle services existed which would pick tourists up at the perimeter of this square and ferry them across its blank emptiness to whichever particular hotel they wished to stay at, I understood that the only way to get the “real experience” was by checking in at a hotel at one of the corners and then slowly working your way inwards, one hotel at a time, never stepping foot outside, somehow gaining the right to book a room at each subsequent hotel in turn. How exactly this right was acquired was unclear to me (I experienced this dream mostly from a floating, birds-eye perspective far removed from the inner workings of things), but I understood it was mostly a matter of wealth and influence, which one was expected to either already possess or to acquire along the way against nearly impossible odds. At the center of the square, where the two diagonals crossed, there was a kind of ultra-luxury palace-hotel. It was much larger than the others, with numerous domes and balconies and jutting spires, and covered in all sorts of elaborate ornamentation. Only the most unimaginably wealthy and powerful could stay there, I understood. Despite its extreme exclusivity, such that it was hard to imagine who could even book one of its rooms, it was always bustling with life and activity, numerous people coming and going, puffs of smoke escaping from industrial smokestacks buried discreetly behind the splendor of its facade. And it was quite spectacular, really, kind of literally awesome in the sense it made me feel a little of that deep, pit-of-the-stomach nauseousness one feels in the presence of the immense and unfathomable. I wasn’t really interested in any of this, though. What I was interested in was the way the shuttle buses went here and there across the great empty flatness between all the hotels. There were no roads or traffic markings or anything, just a big sheet of blank, sandy brown pavement, and so the buses would wind their way through it randomly, like tiny black insects carrying people that were even tinier black insects. I liked the way the sun beat down on everything here, being out in the desert. It was high noon on a perfectly clear day and it made everything flat and hard and everywhere perfectly the same. I felt sad I couldn’t go inside the hotels, really experience any part of this myself, but I understood I could only perceive the bigger picture, and accepted this. Then I woke up.

I think my neighbor Char Bear is going through some kind of traumatic life experience. I say this because after I woke up this morning, I heard her screaming in her apartment, which is next to mine. It was very jarring at first – I don’t like hearing a woman, or anyone else for that matter, scream. But then, when I heard her scream again, the same shrill, sharp sound after several minutes of silence, I understood this was just something she was doing, not a sign of any immediate threat or crisis, and I was able to relax and let myself get used to it. She kept it up all through the time I spent cooking and then eating my breakfast. Every few minutes, or sometimes even less than that, there would be another scream. It was always very loud, despite being muffled by the walls of our building. I felt surprised she hadn’t exhausted her vocal cords yet. Then, I went out. I was collected and taken to various places where I did and said various things and was given money, and was given a note the contents of which cannot be discussed. Later, when I asked Char Bear what was up, she said, “Oh, yeah, I’m really sorry about that, but I can’t promise you it won’t happen again, so don’t even ask. Basically, I’ve been going through a lot of fucked up shit in my life, and it’s been causing me to freak out and like, scream, and cut up sheets of paper. Like, I cut the sheet into a special shape, right, like, its own special shape, just its own, and then I cut that up, too. I cut the special shape up and it turns into like, a bunch of different shapes, and I cut those shapes up, too, until eventually it’s just a bunch of little scraps and fragments that basically aren’t even fucking anything except too small for the scissors to cut, they’re just nothing, garbage. Fucking, dust. And so yeah. I’ve been doing that sometimes lately, because of some stuff that’s going on with me lately. So you’re probably gonna hear me doing that sometimes. The screaming is a part of it, also, so don’t ask me not to scream. I have to scream, because I’m basically totally freaking out. Sorry.” I said I understood that. She said, “You really don’t, but it’s okay. It’s nice of you to pretend. You’re cool, you know that? Like, you’re chill. I’m glad you’re my neighbor, I’m glad you moved in here. The guy that lived here before you, he was crazy. Total douchebag. He was obsessed with his car. He once woke me up banging on my door at like, fucking six in the morning because he thought I’d scratched it. He found a scratch on the fender and just assumed I’d done it for some reason. Which I hadn’t, of course, I didn’t give a fuck about his stupid car, but that’s the kind of shit that’s always happening to me, you know? It wasn’t even like, a muscle car or anything. It was just a regular car. And his apartment smelled like ammonia. Like, you’d walk by it and you’d just get this super powerful ammonia smell in your nostrils, and then like, this really artificial floral undernote like from an air freshener or something, like he was trying to cover up the smell with Febreeze or whatever. Definitely something cheap, like that you’d get at Dollar Tree. I started holding my breath whenever I was on the landing there, just because I’d get these awful headaches otherwise. I’d feel like I was losing my mind, like my head was going to split open and a bunch of dirt and roots and mulch was going to come out. I guess it didn’t bother him, though, living there, even though the smell must’ve been so much stronger inside. Fuck. Anyway, I’m glad he doesn’t live there anymore. I’m glad you’re my neighbor now instead.” I thanked her. She rolled a blunt and we smoked it. “I like, need to go listen to something on my record player now but we can keep hanging out if you want. You like Kemialliset Ystävät?” I told her I appreciated the offer, but I was going to stay outside a while longer. Then I sat outside for a while longer. It was basically night but I could still see a little bit. I saw a guy crawl out of the bushes on the other side of the street, look around, make eye contact with me, and then run away. I felt disappointed about this. People run away from me too often, even when I don’t want them to.

The next day I stayed inside trying to build a house of cards. I thought about how stereotypical it was for someone like me to be doing something like this. It wasn’t really something you saw people doing, except in movies, but I recognized that in a movie I would be exactly the sort of person who would be doing it. Building a house of cards turned out to be very challenging, which made sense, but it was still more difficult than I had expected. It kept collapsing after I had built the first layer. Eventually, though, I started to get the hang of it. Many hours had passed, and I was starting to get very hungry. I felt like I was close to success, but I decided I would knock off for a while and get some lunch. I walked to 88th Dragon House, a family-owned restaurant in my neighborhood, and got lemongrass soup and vegetable dumplings. The menu above the counter had been there so long it had yellowed with age. Most of the pictures were so faded it wasn’t really possible to tell what you were looking at. They could have been pictures of anything sitting on a table somewhere. Involuntarily, I imagined my whole body chopped up into little pieces, each of them in its own small puddle of blood on its own petroleum byproduct tabletop. I put another steaming hot dumpling into my mouth and the thought went away. When I got back to my apartment I found the deck of cards I had been using scattered all over the floor of my living room, like a big wind had come through and picked them up and tossed them wherever it was they needed to go. In the mess, I could see the unformed potential of the greatest house of cards anyone had ever known.

I was walking along the side of the highway. This was later, sometime the following week, a Tuesday or a Thursday. I know which it was, but it’s not important. I was walking along the side of the highway and I heard something coming from behind me that sounded much larger than a car, but when it passed that’s all it was, just another car, except a piece came loose of it and bounced onto the shoulder, just up ahead. When I got to it I picked it up and turned it in my hands. It was a pocket lighter. There was a picture of Friedrich Nietzsche on it. It was warm in my hand. I was standing by a chainlink fence, and beyond that was a low rise covered in yellow grass, and beyond that was a large, white factory. An employee came up to the fence. “Hey, you have a light?” he said. I said I did. I stepped over to the fence. He held a cigarette through the links of the fence and I lit it. He exhaled. “Are you on your break, too?” I shook my head. “That’s cool. I hate being on break, but it’s mandated. I don’t have a choice. If I could, I’d just keep going and going and going and going. As long as I keep going, that’s all there is. I always feel like the ground is falling away behind me, like I look back and there’s going to be nothing there, nothing to stand on, no history. There’s just myself. But as long as I keep going, I can stay ahead of it. And I do, I am ahead of it, still. Definitely. But whenever I’m on my break I can feel myself losing ground, you know? So if it were up to me I just wouldn’t take it. But it’s not. I have to, so I do. I’m sure you’ve had to make some compromises in your life, too.” I told him I guessed I had. “Right. Anyway, I like to come down here by Route 3 on my break. I like it here because no one else does. Everyone else thinks it’s pointless to come to a place like this, so they leave me alone. Except people like you, of course. Which, I don’t mind the company of, even on my breaks. You get it, I can tell. You know, I read about this place in a book about the history of this region once. They said the natives avoided it because it smelled bad. Right here, this specific spot along the highway. I mean, there wasn’t a highway or anything here back then, but it’s this spot for sure. I cross-referenced a bunch of maps at the library. It’s not cursed or anything, just smelled awful, apparently. That’s what their traditions say. You never really know, though. There could be something restless buried here. It could have been buried here since before there was anyone alive to know about it.” The cars and trucks kept driving by behind me as he talked, and, as clouds gathered and rain began to fall, sometimes splashed my calves with arcs of brown, muddy water from the puddles forming in the depressions in the road.