I digress.
I did spend some days and nights down Atlanta way. This was before those homebrew prepper Hitler fetishists popped off the CDC containment protocol and the city went what it is today. This was in The Day, back in, and I am during these rapid repeater dreams towered high above the Midtown rabble, in a room always different from this room tonight. Wait, no, yes. That’s how I meant to couch that. I am there in a suite I never could in all my squalid lives pony up, but I am there, regardless, and the Woman in White, Lady of the Many Names, there is she, as well. Down in the guts, covering the war, you hear tell of the WiW, though she’s a tripper urban legendary lady, not what you put your eyes and hands upon. But for a happenstance few only a necessary fiction to be exploited by the blippers. Still, there she is, sparklesome as December tinsel treeforms, and she says, and I gaze out at the neon sodium-arc headlight mercury vapor OLED thoroughfares like Jesus in his high place of temptation. And she says, I said, and what exactly does it matter the precise of her words? She says them, and she says them to me. And mallet to the meat, that is. The air outside the vast window is swarmed of a sudden with flittering crowblack wings, raven eyes, a vortex of feather beats upon the twilight. She says, though it might have been any, but let’s set down some arbitrate specificity, she says the names of Not Gods and all their not-holy retinues in turn. Dapper scar, you bet. Cuts my throat in essence, those immemorial words that could spell The Over Ending if there’s any truth in her book.
Well, let me not here do the untruthful pitter-pat. Not her book, at least in my dream it’s not her book. It is, no, rather, hauled from out the sea, and she says hauled from out the sea off the coast of Massachusetts, twixt Boston and Provincetown. Except other times, when says hauled from the Sea of Maine. She sits tidy in a comfy big damn chair, smoking and reading to me from the undrowned volume. Oh, I haven’t, no, not have I asked to hear the gospel long written down, but that don’t stop her. She is a big spun herself gossamer off the cuff, as they say of her in Old New Amsterdam. A being of her own devising, and that includes not soliciting the opinions of those to whom she evangelizes.
Lo, whiche sleighets and subtilitees . . .
Our all-media suicide du jour accepts from her jisatsu second the nightly’s highstand tantÅ. The suicide is dressed in hooker’s lace and gild, which says so much and hardly anything else at all. This is how they would have her, the penitentses, the gawking predynastic underdogs, the slavering, and the casually curious got the best of them. She both gazes into the camera’s eye and the camera gazes from her own complex optical system, her twin gelatin vitreous seas. Before this night, she was fitted with the host’s pricey implants so it flows both ways, receive and transmit, because who does not want a good and for all of the faces of the audience she has called from every cranny and nook and penthouse shitter? Myself, covering the war, all I need for the job of work has been seen to by the network engineers and underling sawbones. She grips the samurai knife tightly in both hands, hilt bedward, blade to the low popcorn ceiling. Mind wandering, as I am not here to see that, I wouldn’t wonder if that ceiling were sprayed in place all the way back in the nineteen ands. I’m chatting up the live feed with my shifting thoughts, and a producer whose name I can’t recall, she reminds me I promised her to keep off my come-natural street shanty. I tell her she can two-second delay and run it through the translators. She says a bad word, and then, well, she says a few more.
The woman on the bed has jellybean hair.
Indeed, without an oathwhich, bewept on a cheap duvet, gives me superfluous death, O how the wheel becomes it. Got that, studio? Got that? Thought and afflictions, hell itself? Heel, then, head over?
I was speaking of the dream, digress reminisce, and of the Woman in White, as she inhabits that dreamtime, when it comes to me again and again and again. The woman on the bed, she’ll wait, I am sure. Not goin’ nowhere. And, remember, I am not cum for her. The hostess here in 707 passes me a beer, though in the dream my throat and mouth go parched. But, no, yes, in her chair, chain-smoking, there is the WiW, who is no older, they say, than that day on Deer Isle—you believe that part, and if you credit a sliver might as well credit the lot for a penny, for a pound. Her face stops clocks, as they say, her heart going tick - tock - tick - tock - tick - tock - tick-tock, and she stops me, too, with that beauty. She actually is talking about tranporteichon, and I tells her I takes the bus. I likes the bus. Gives a fucker time to think. Then she returns to talk of assembly programs, authoring systems, naked-eye constellations, transistors, protoplanetary party-time. I turn away from the mirror, and she smiles, oh god does she smile for me. Eyes as blue as Howlin’ Wolf. She sees my reaction and offers me a couple of slickers, a bebop, and one of her contraband Czech cigs. I accept the first, and I accept the latter. I dry swallow and ask her for a light.
“That’s a neat trick,” I say.
She shrugs.
“Mr. Carlisle, what was it you wished to discuss?” she asks.
Wait. What? Dreaming, that’s my inline thought, because I have shit-all recollection of desiring to talk about anything at all.
She smiles again (unless it’s that still same smile from before), says, “Je suis sérieuse et j’écoute attentivement.”
I almost remark how I dream French better than I speak or understand it.
“True you’re Queen Bee?” I ask.
Again with the thwarting shrug.
“In Cleveland, I heard the tape,” I tell her, and awake I will admit that’s a lie. They keep it wrapped, the buggers, and I’ve only laid my ears upon the thirdhand whisper dubs, iymk.
One of the crows does as good as that woman on the 707 bed and nosedives into the sheet glass behind me. Pow. I jump, but the WiW does not so much as flinch. Like they tell, ice water in her veins. She’s chili swag, Arthur.
“Do you play?” she wants to know.
“Chess?”
“Chess,” says she to me. “Of course, chess.”
“No.”
On the bed in 707, meanwhile back in the now awake, achy-achy shake-and-bake, I do believe the suicide is bracing for the first cut. I hold to and appreciate this timeworn tatterdemalion ceremony, more than the more fatter of mac routes to death. Those make shit telly, someone drinks drain cleaner or takes a load of pills. And guns are just lazy. Oh, but this once, up in Beantown, I filmed one of these soirees whence a girl swallowed liquid nitrogen. You shoulda seen that one. The ratings went to the moon, three times around, before the referees in legal found a microscopic wrinkle in her contract and shut down the feed.
In her chair by the ATL room’s only and one lamp, the alabaster Queen Bee shuts her eyes a moment. I know well enough she’s jetlagged. I know that, dreaming the way we dost tumble to things not would we know not dreaming. I try not to stare at the tip-jab-coddles all down her left arm. In the dream, she’s on the needle, but down in Atlanta, who isn’t, yeah? No? Though, she ain’t from Atlanta, just passing through, and just passing through, apparently, because I wanted to talk with her.
She opens her eyes, and then another bird hits the window.
“Last month, was that you on the waves? Or was that your sister?”
Rumor has it about the sister, though R&D swears sis is still more mythic than the WiW herself. But I cover the war, and that makes gold of rumor and only copper or antique green paper of whatever the nerdulent crowd back in the tower have to say. The producers understand that, sometimes.