Dream Interpretation

I was sleeping less and less and the doctors said I was running out. Dreams were now tape-jittered reruns, recycled or indistinguishable from gas station food mart aisles and night key-fumbling, mirror-shoulder-signaling, all the forgotten and scattered components of a life. So I tried to become like sound before language, I wanted to be patternless, and to make only dreams, which are worthless, and silent inside. When I did sleep I woke up to find I’d written a dozen pages in an alien script. Even the linguists and the codebreakers gave up. When she received them (apparently I’d sleep-mailed in addition to sleep-written), she wrote back and I asked Do you know what they say? and she said No, but she came along anyway, because unlike me she slept all the time. We filled the back of an F-150 with salinated water, covered it with a tarp, and switched off driving and sensory depriving. I kept a folder of the pages that kept gathering on the motel nightstand which, while still incomprehensible, seemed to me to be growing more urgent. Then one day I swore some were missing, and there was a scratched lock knob, a distant recurring dark car. We wondered if, then who, then why. We’re going to have to be more careful, she said. We started drawing the blinds at all hours and retraced roads at random, ending up at the same rest stop vending machine over and over, spiraling inward to some tract of the country that only vultures ever cared about. Under an oil-yellowed kitchenette light, I watched her copy my originals in a sliding cursive of her own, and as quiet as it is, I know in this too there is no salvation or escape.

Published in Disposable Parts issue 2, forthcoming.