I am calmer now, stranger, different. I feel more in control. I don�t know why.
And then, like a mallet to the brain, I get a flash of a hallway, dark, deserted. No, not deserted: there is a man at the end of the hallway, a man with his back to me and an eerie pale blue ice cream suit. He turns around: flash! Nothing. No, not nothing: two men, wearing identical pale blue ice cream suits. Flash! Four men, all smiling the same eerie pale blue ice cream suit smile. I am beginning to shake.
Then back, here beneath a mirrored sky of purple-grey, back in this loathsome person, this body I can�t even describe. There is a vast and unattainable pointlessness to this place, a place that seems to exist just for making me afraid, and weak. I don�t like it.
I come to something: a jut in the ground, a tiny peninsula into the sea, which up here is so different from the mass of worms and people I first emerged from. Here the ocean appears tawny and fresh, more watery. And from it struggles a man, a strange man. The one from my dream, who wears a pale blue ice cream suit. He staggers towards me, seeming not to see me, and I turn to run, only to find that there is nowhere to run to. He moves a little quicker, and I see no option but to scream.
It�s like watching a broadcast of myself. The man falls, twists and contorts. His face becomes not a face, but a mask of intolerable anguish. I cannot stop screaming. Finally, seeing no alternative and seeking for a way to end his pain, I take up one of my bonelike fists and swing it in a sweet arc, catching him neatly on the head. He stops turning, stops with the desperate flail of a man under nothing but a cruel enchantment; this enchantment called an afterlife. I would prefer, I think miserably, no life.
I sit, and I wait for the man to come back to me. Dawdling, I wonder what he sees. Can there be an alternate reality to the alternate reality in which I dwell? My mind spins, and I long for a paintbrush, a simple canvas or simple words to say. Here everything is jumbled, everything tangled (as Jim Morrison said) up in dances. It all seems an elaborate charade, like a test that I will come through eventually. Pass or fail, now Andrew�which is it?
I sound like my gym teacher in the ninth grade. Mrs. Bempuss�no joke!�had a steel beehive the likes of which I had only seen in crackling reruns of I Love Lucy. Mrs. Bempuss wore disgusting tracksuits each day and polished the whistle around her neck until it gleamed evilly. She had a knack for picking out the worst thing you could do and holding it over your head like a machete, always one step ahead when all you wanted to do was sleep in the locker room. I longed for a male gym teacher, and he never arrived. Bastard.