mercuti0

DREAMSCAPE on a train somewhere dry, the windows fast as television. We pass a hundred, two hundred thieves’ towns and I just sit quietly, innocent even. I browse a newspaper from the city I’ll never get to. I notice a woman at my side, biting her nails softly, brown hair and inscrutable eyes. both the girl who left me and the girl who stayed. She is my wife. The marriage was a silent, instantaneous affair. She smiles at me, concealing something. A baby, perhaps. The air inside the train feels cool, like marble. The train becomes a plane, casually as in anyone’s dream. I’m a movie star, engorged, eclipsed by mirrors. I feel strongly that I should not drink from the plastic offering of the pretty stewardess. I might become a dragon, or a priest—anything is possible here. Slowly I notice that water is trickling into the cabin, I know that we are not moving at all, that this flight ended some time ago. The drink was hemlock, or else laced with ketamine. I try to alert the other passengers but a film is on and they are entranced by it. In the film a man about my age is leaving his wife and she is crying. As if by projection I am single again. I get up, I steady myself, walk slowly to the back of the plane where the blond-faced stewardess is brushing her hair, as if to prepare for a viewing or a wake. “Excuse me,” I say. “What did you put in my drink?” She just laughs and rises pressing herself against me, tousling my hair, avoiding the question. “We’re drowning, aren’t we?” She laughs loudly and the others turn around from their film and fill the silence with the sounds of joy, the sounds like a carnival. She pulls my head toward her chest to shelter me from the laughter.