Back up the pipes

TW: suicidal ideation

“Everything is a dream because everything is already past. We are forever catching up with the past that we have yet to remember."

I wrote in my journal that day, when I made my discovery. I read it now and hear the rambling angst and narcissism of the poet waiting for his brilliance to be discovered. Had I meant for someone to read this entry? My showmanship suggests a yes, but now that there is no one to read it I am glad for a bit of showmanship. It keeps staleness at bay.

*

Jan 1st

The now. The now. The now. The now comes crashing into my head like an orchestra that collectively fell into a large metal hole, instruments and all. A splattering conjoined crash. The past is a cement truck that pours the grey flood over the orchestra at the moment of the fall, cymbals forever separated, an arm here, head squashed under the tuba...all memorialized in quick set. Forever.

I have woken from my dream. I think I have found the key.

Everything that happens in the now the now the now is memory the next nanosecond. All experience... all reality...is memory. It is memory so soon after happening that one could posit that if you shift just slightly, just a tiny fraction, the memories would come first. Memory of what will be a memory.

Is this telling the future? Seeing memories before they are memories? Anticipating what will be past?

I will move my arm to brush my hair. And

I have moved my arm to brush my hair.

I move.

I have moved.

I move.

I have moved.

I can remember that I will have done something in the past but in my future the thing that hasn't happened will happen and will have happened. By knowing what I will do next I can feel, love, see what my memory will be. Is this not fortune telling? Am I not psychic?

*

I always had dreams of things that felt so familiar that I yearned for them as I dreamed them. They felt like warm brandy creeping down my midsection, in the now but always familiar. That life could be familiar before first felt…

Then at a time, days hence, I would feel something creeping up on me. The moment would crawl up behind me like a snaking street thief. Then stroking my neck in restrained seduction. Then over my head and it would be that, that moment, that dream. The light would be the same. The placement of my body and hers. The sound of the cups clinking and the air con humming with the staticky click. The smell of the burnt dust in the heating vents and the movement of time...slow then fast. Then the moment would catch up with me and be gone.

Déjà vu, I would always say. But I was wrong. This was different.

The day things clicked into place was not a different day. I still woke in my stale sweaty sheets to a dim bulb shrouded by a towel hastily thrown over the lamp. The mattress, left by the last tenant and me too lazy to move it, sinking all over as I sat on the one spot. If I took the sheets off I would see the stains. I told myself they were sweat stains. I really didn’t know.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked toward the window, covered by the thick mustard blanket curtains. Another throwback from the previous inhabitant. The floor creaked as a I shuffled to the small sliver of a bathroom shoved unceremoniously between the kitchen and the hall and the living room, excess space that just needed plumbing. No windows. Razors in the walls. The staining on the toilet seat was not sweat.

I sat on the toilet and meditated as my bowels moved things down. Head in my hands, stubble rubbing the palms. An acrid smell filled the room. I took the spray can with red and purple flowers on it and sprayed the air above me. This was for my benefit alone.

In the acridity, the urine and the mustiness, the overburdened flowery bouquet scent, I recalled my dreams.

*

I had been in a room full of toilets. Floor to ceiling, front to back. Large and small. Gray tubes of piping snaking from bowl to bowl. Some too small to sit on, Some overflowing. Some full of things I preferred not to look at. Some on platforms three feet tall. None private. None with doors. A warehouse of bowls.

I had to pee desperately and I couldn’t find the place to go. The floor was wet and slippery. There were people there. Faceless and nameless drones to shout the battle cry of “Shame” for my needing to pee.

Then I was in a plain box of a room. The box was made of white plaster, only plaster. No wood or stone or nails. Plaster as a mold. All white. I was on a chair, of metal, I believe. There was a small mouse in the room with me, hunting for a door that did not exist. I sat on the chair and I hunted for the door. Because I also was the mouse.

*

I blinked. I shifted on the toilet seat.

*

The white room was gone and I was in a car, in the back. I needed desperately to drive the car and I couldn’t reach the steering wheel. I finally had the steering wheel in my hands but I was in the backseat, so very far away. I couldn’t get to the pedals.

The car was going to fall over a cliff. It was running with no brakes. I was going to crash. I couldn’t stop it. But I didn’t fall. I woke up.

*

I cleaned myself and left the bathroom. I dressed for the day. Baggy black jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Combat boots and a pair of ribbed socks.

I walked out of my building and ran into a woman who was carrying a coffee. She was carrying it high and way from her as if trying to keep it as far from herself as possible. Her dress was white. The mouse was trying to get out. The room smelled of plaster and coffee and wet air. The room was white.

And I ran into her outstretched arm as I came out my door. Coffee on the white. Crashing and fighting into the white. Shoulder rammed into the plaster, the mouse nose sniffing. The smell of coffee was overwhelming.

“I’m sorry. Shit. Are you ok?” I asked. I was a gentleman.

“Fuck! Ahh. I’m fine. Jesus. Watch where you are going, ok?”

“Watch where you are going, ok?” asked the passenger in the car. I tried to drive it with my hands. My feet couldn’t touch. My feet on the sidewalk walking toward the lady as she walked away, white and black flats. Red hair, dyed. Angry at me. The brakes were far away.

I walked down the street and then sat on a bench, warm in the morning sun. The dream was here in the street. The moments collided. There was imagery of course, but also a true oneness. There was a symmetry as the memory of what would be crashed into the action that was now.

*

I called my ex-wife on the phone. “Please leave a message for 324-504-5667…” I hung up.

*

I sat on the bench longer and let the sun play on me. I closed my eyes. There was a slight wind blowing on me. I had to pee again. I hadn’t even had a coffee and I had to pee again. Toilets are in a tower, hovering over me.

When I am in a room of overflowing toilets, I will really be in trouble, I thought. I laughed out loud.

*

I was so close but yet, had no idea. This was the tuning taking place. A big man with a key as large as the Milky Way turned it and it shifted the lock and I began to drift. Times and knowledge blended into each other like coffee and milk, never again unentwined.

Memory of the now cradling the past and my memory of what will come.

You might ask why I was the only person to be tuned. In truth, I don’t know. Perhaps everyone WAS and each of their universes also folded up into itself and collapsed into the size of a pea – like mine.

I am the rat in the maze that is a wheel, and it doesn’t stop while remaining still.

*

I walked from the bench and I saw another woman in front of me. She was an elderly woman. Her hair was dyed brown. She was walking a small white mini poodle who was yipping and walking sideways on the leash, pulling hard. The dog didn’t want to be led anywhere. I felt the need to remember something. It was there on the edge, right outside my memory. Then I had it.

It was a moment on a street. I was near traffic. Near a street. I felt the whoosh of the UPS truck. It went right by my nose. A hair’s breath and I would have fallen into the street and been gone. No more me. This wasn’t a dream from the last night, but recent. I saw it in my mind and it was now.

 I walked to the woman and I looked at the dog and the leash pulled and did not catch. The dog went sideways. I went sideways. The fur was in my hands. It was that smell, and that man in the truck. He was scared when he passed me. His wheels would have almost made sacrament of my flesh.

I was on the ground with the dog and I stood. There was a whoosh.

“Thank you! Buzzy, what did you do? Oh, come here you noodle. Thank you. I don’t know what happened.” Dog in her arms. She was grateful.

There was a whoosh. It had already happened. It would happen again. I remembered that.

*

I may be an old man now. This is my pocket universe, because it is in my pocket. I hear a noise and I know what the noise is, and what it was. I do sleep. The dreams are catalogues of the lives I have led and will lead.

I recall being old. One dream I was a scarecrow and the birds got to my bones while I was tied to a stake. They made a nest in my knee joint. I watch them and asked them what they are doing. They tell me that they are trying to help me. And that their young are hungry.

The doctor who replaced my knee joint was very fond of paintings of birds, of sparrows especially. He told me his grandmother had traveled to Canada as a child and fell in love with bird watching. His whole office was full of pictures of birds.

And plastic molds of knees.

*

It is a hard thing to be alone. You, my reader, might think that perhaps I was not alone. But aren’t all people in your dreams just figments of your own psyche? Are they not just actors on the stage of your own mind? This is not narcissism, but realism.

I have uncounted moments in which I would sit and watch and know the moment before what would come next. It was not unlike a game to me. I was watching water run backwards out of a tub and flow back up the pipes to come back onto my face.

*

I saw the pharmacist give me the pills. I was in a red jumper and I could smell the burnt coffee in the back of the store. It came from a woman who was on her last shift and chewing her lips, her dentures out. They gave me the medicine, no questions asked. I held it in my hand, but could not read the bottle. I can read it now though. I have already seen this. I have just to let it play out.

There is a place I will be going because I have already been there. For this. Once I have driven around long enough I will recognize it. I will recall that I can finally rest.

There is a nice view from that hill. You can see the mountains and a hint of desert. It is hard to reach in the winter.

I have already seen the end of the story. No one is there. But you, my reader, well…maybe there is just one who dreams with me. I leave this for you.