Zombiepocalypse

I had a lot of dreams last night.

I've let this one fall by the wayside too long.

Two worth reporting from last night.

The first was a party at my apartment, which of course was larger, whiter, and different from my current one. The folks who were coming consisted mostly of coworkers, including people from my last job. I had been napping and overslept; the pounding on my door woke me up. I looked at the clock and gasped. It was the hour of the gathering, and I had done NOTHING to prepare my apartment for the onslaught.

I darted to and fro, gathering up papers and loose books and dumping them in my bedroom, out of sight of the living room. There was a small blue couch that folded out into a bed, but which lacked cushions and looked rather altogether too dingy for propriety. I yanked the bed out and despaired of ever moving the couch on my own, but accomplished it nevertheless, ending up grunting and panting and staring in the eyes of the Jack Russell terrier that was living with me. Once that was safely stashed away with the dog, I looked around at the carpet and realized how filthy it was, but the people outside had managed to get the door partly open, so I had no time to vacuum and let them in.

The dream at this point skipped to the end of the party, after most of the people had left. I was sitting on my nicer couch, flopped to the point of exhaustion, when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye to the left. A bright-orange Bic cigarette lighter was moving. Upon closer inspection, the lighter was moving on the back of a large black cockroach, which was in turn attended by a slightly-smaller golden cockroach.

I understood that they had been disgruntled by the relocation of the old couch and were therefore taking what they could (which included the cigarette lighter) and searching for friendlier climes. This required several trips across my living room floor so they could collect various of my odds and ends. On the last trip, I killed them with my foot.

A little while later, I was dreaming that I was in some sort of a workshop led by one of my coworkers, who was teaching a group of college-age kids the basics of painting. I started talking to the student next to me, explaining the mechanics of various significant gatherings in aesthetic history, conferences and conclaves and shows and biennales.

She encouraged me to get up in front of the class as I spoke, which I did without realizing it, and when I wound up a disquisition on the obstinacy of Chuck Close and how it had led to the collapse of what would have been a particularly significant show, I realized I was speaking to the class, my coworker was sitting among the students with a strange look on his face, and there were three hands up.

The first one asked a question, which I don't remember, although I remember the answer: a flat "No." The second question was something about God. I had to leave the room and look at something and come back and give her an answer, which sounded deep and meaningful at the time, but which I have, unfortunately, forgotten. The third question was about why artists seem to enjoy working in palettes of yellow so much. That was easy, I said. Natural light, but it goes deeper than that. It's one thing to include hints of yellow everywhere in order to say, this is during the daytime, but quite another to use a yellow wash to convey sunlight. I then had to explain what a wash was (a dilution of the paint with some kind of thinning medium, like water, in order to make it more transparent, like watercolors).

At this point, I noticed that several faculty had wandered in and were listening raptly, and I realized I had somehow ended up teaching a class on the history of aesthetics. Or something like that.

I just took a nap, which started off both at my parents' house and in a city somewhere. I was staying in a room with a beautiful black woman and her mouthy daughter. They were both wearing yellow. There wasn't an involvement there, just platonic, although I would have wished otherwise and thought she felt the same way too.

It was morning and one of my sister's old roommates was preparing a big, fancy dinner for my family and a bunch of other people. We had a grandmother of some kind wandering about, she the girl encouraged me to try some of her antipasti, which consisted of a very light-tasting green olive coated in sesame seeds, fried, and then soaked in olive oil. It was really rather delicious, and I told her so, and she looked pleased. I noticed a stain on the carpet, which looked like some kind of orange-colored oil sprinkled with seeds and nuts of various types, as well as pretzels. The grandmother looked at me apologetically.

I went to my room/apartment and found out the black woman in yellow was leaving with her daughter for an unspecified amount of time. I accompanied them to the corner and said good bye, and then waited as they started down the street before following them for a little while until they reached the bus stop. I knew they'd find it rather odd that I followed them, so turned back just before they reached the stop. Still, I paused when I hit the corner and looked back down the hill. They had seen me, and the woman in yellow raised her hand and so did I.

I had a large, thick book by Stephen King in my hand from the library where I work, and I realized I should be getting along to work -- I'd only taken a couple hours off and they were expecting me.

The shuttle stopped right in front of my apartment, which was on the first floor and part of a bank of open storefronts covered by brightly-colored awnings. The street in front was very narrow, only one lane, and ran along the lip of a sharp-edged cliff, with a declivity that plunged to the foothills below, protected only by a concrete bank. It was a beautiful spring day and the sun dappled the awnings in shades of bright yellow, red, purple, green, and blue.

I got onto the shuttle with my book and found a seat facing the back and sat down, prepared to read until I noticed that I was actually facing forward -- because the road was so narrow, the shuttle could only back down it while retracing its route. People squeezed back, nearly scraping the fronts of their bodies on the shuttle and I thought, How do they do it?

The street split off from mine and continued slightly downward off the cliff, made of concrete and suspended in space. It was only then that I realized that the cliff was actually a very, very tall building, and that there were a few, all connected by these extremely high and narrow streets. People were fishing off the concrete sides or watching the clouds go by underneath while basking in the sun, which was split up by the shadows of these thin buildings which vanished into blueness both above and below. We reached another building, and the street went past another bus station with several benches along the street, all of which were filled with different elementary-school classes of deaf children. There was almost no clearance between them and the shuttle, and each bench looked terrified en masse. As the bus passed each bench, the teacher for that class would stand on the opposite side of the street, against the concrete railing, scraping his front against the shuttle, cut off from his children, and encourage them to ignore it in different ways. One told his students to recite the twelve-times table. Another told his students to sing, and listened for their voices above the roar of the shuttle.

The shuttle continued to back down the narrow streets in the sky, until we reached the ground, and we were on campus. The driver could finally put the shuttle in Drive and move through the fresh rolling green hills that Gallaudet had become with relative impunity. At one point, I noticed that we had reached the lip of a vast basin, shell-shaped, a gentle, circular decline leading to an abrupt steep rise along one side, and that side looked peculiar, many-colored in thin horizontal bands. Then my stomach growled, and I decided I'd go to lunch first -- my supervisor couldn't fault me for that.

I stayed on the shuttle. It took me to a gleaming hotel on the water which looked like it was made of many cubes, cantilevered out into the sunshine, the tall, thin buildings mere outlines in the blue haze that had settled all around the horizon. I debarked the shuttle and looked for the way in. There were dozens of escalators, all leading to different places, and I knew the cafeteria I was going to was underground. However, the sign for it was actually an enormous banner that took up the entire first-floor bank of escalators and gave no indication whatsoever as to which escalator was the right one. However, I have a policy in these cases: Follow the kids. I noticed a little knot of children heading for one down escalator in particular, followed them, and found myself where I had wanted to be -- but realized I'd forgotten the book on the bus.

I gnashed my teeth, but told myself I'd only stay long enough for that same shuttle to come around again so I could get the book back. If it wasn't there, at least it had our barcode on it, and it was a campus shuttle, so anyone who found it would probably return it to the library. In the meantime, I found myself a Coke and only had enough time to drink it before I saw the shuttle coming around again.

I ran for it, and barely made it. Searching for the shuttle, I found many abandoned things, most identifiable as books of one kind or another, but none of them were mine. Then I saw it on the floor between two seats, and grabbed it, only to notice that we had returned to the basin I'd seen before, so rushed to the front of the shuttle and disembarked there. As it rumbled away, I stood among the vast green hills and looked at the bowl stretching away before me to that strange steepness. I began to walk across the basin, noticing that a jogging path ran all along the rim, splitting into two levels when it hit that sharp end -- and then realized I didn't have my book with me. Cursing, I turned around and looked at the crossroads, hoping I'd dropped it there. I saw something that could have been the book, but instead turned out to be a crossed pair of palm fronds. I threw my hands up in the air, and noticed a student jogging down a gravel path along a distant hill, and thought, I could do that. Curious to investigate the basin, and why Gallaudet might have built it there, I started off jogging until I reached the far end.

I looked up. The incline was rough, made of round, horizontal striations of varying sizes, colors and materials, running in unbroken cylinders from one end to the other. I noticed a small sign, and found out it was actually a mountain-climbing practice area. It warned that only climbers of at least +2.75 proficiency should try this, but I thought it was so neat, I just began to pull myself up.

It was easier than I thought it would be, and I was nearly to the top when I noticed there were other people climbing with me. They all wore dark blue workout tops and black shorts and were climbing in straight lines, very close together. When I reached the end of my climb, I realized the last level of the training consisted of the striations leveling off into a flat, horizontal layer -- the object was to pull yourself up by hooking your fingers over, progressively, a bar of granite round enough to give your fingers plenty of purchase to pull up a little while pushing off with your feet, then a smaller bar of brick, with slightly less purchase but more traction, and so on until you finally had to somehow find a way to hook your fingers around a very smooth, very low, very small layer of marble. There was a beautiful blonde woman standing over me, and she began to encourage me, grabbing my hands and guiding them to their holds.

However, as I pulled myself up higher, she finally saw my clothing and started pulling my hands off altogether, attempting to make me fall.

"What are you doing?!" I asked.

"Sorry," she said. "But I only help those who are with us. You're not wearing the uniform."

Bullshit! I thought to myself, and only tried to scrabble my way up even harder. I kept kicking the uniformed people waiting in line below me and to my left, and the woman only kept kicking my hands off, until I lost my temper, grabbed her ankle, and pulled her over my head. She tumbled through the air, screaming all the way down, but the lowest striation was extremely large and made of some kind of foam-stuffed toy material, so I knew she would be all right, barring a few bone-jarring bounces.

I finally made it all the way up to the top, and noticed the uniformed people rapidly climbing down, trying to get away from me, the attempted murderer. I could hear her voice screeching thinly far below, but ignored it, casting my eye over the scene. Somehow, the hills had turned into a large room, red-painted, and I failed to notice this, running down the steep rim and exulting in what a cool room this was, and that it was too bad my father hadn't built one in his house. Along the opposite wall was a large window running almost its entire length, and on the wall adjoining it to my left, there was a thin row of windows admitting a late-afternoon sun. However, the large window directly opposite me was showing night, and I found if I blocked out the light of the afternoon window, I could see thousands, millions of stars and bright, beautiful nebulae in the night window, all rotating slowly and stately. Fascinated, I climbed down and crept up closer to the window.

Through it, I could see faint glimmerings of an enormous silvery construction, nearly wholly vertical, constructed of thousands of towers. It shimmered through my reflection, making me appear as though I were wearing a crown, and reality began to shiver inside my head. Something odd had changed, and I opened the window. A scene lit up inside it -- a mechanical diorama showing a train moving through a city, chased by little barbarian paper cutouts clustered together, so their spears stuck up, thousands of tall, skinny, vertical sticks, and I reached up to my head and realized I was wearing a crown with strange little vertical stick-like things coming out of it. I pulled the crown off and looked at it, but realized it was only a simple metal circle, so reached my hand back up to my head and felt the sticks, and saw my hand in the process. There were tentacles on it. Reality kept shivering in that odd way, and I slammed the window shut and looked at myself in the glass. I was covered in small, inch-long tentacles, covering my eyes, nose, mouth, along the line of my cheekbones, along my jawline, down from my ears, and out from my hair. They were all the same flesh color and were smooth, moving and twitching, and I realized the odd quivering of reality in my head was actually my mind learning how to manipulate these tentacles.

Then I remembered the woman I had thrown off the odd cliff and how she had screamed at me from the bottom of that vast room and realized she had bespelled me in revenge for what I had done. I looked at my watch and it was four o'clock, far too late to make it back to work on time and still explain it away as lunch, and dinner was about to start -- but I couldn't go, because I had tentacles.

I leaned back against a thick layer of some padded blue and decided I would probably be in this room for a very long time.

I was in a city in broad daylight, talking with friends outside the window of a shop that sold TVs. I Love Lucy was playing. We had a clear view of the skyline, although we were right in the heart of downtown; this explains why I was able to notice the odd building sidling its way in.

It was slightly yellowish, rectangular, and covered from bottom to top in horizontal rows of three enormous, black, square-headed spikes on all four sides of the building. It was moving in with alarming speed, sliding behind some buildings and taking a definite place in the skyline. Now that I noticed it, I realized that several more identical buildings were moving into other points in the city, and I drew my friends' attention to them. The buildings were hostile and alien-looking. The shop was at a streetcorner, so I moved closer to the cross-street and looked at the rest of the city, and saw even more of those buildings sliding into place.

Then I noticed that the sky was turning gray, and funnel shapes were forming in it. Two of them to be precise, and they roared into the city, destroying only the alien ones, which tore apart in a very odd way, as though they had been constructed of large, loosely-linked particles. We seemed to be safe where we were, and I watched the tornadoes' progress, until I realized two things.

First, the tornadoes had definite termini at their tops, rather than disappearing into the clouds. Those termini were heads, the heads of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, gray-black and flickering, grinning maniacally as they shredded the alien buildings.

Second, the alien buildings were made of people. Thousands and thousands of people somehow unwillingly forced into rigidity and linked together by their arms and legs. They were being torn apart, to a one, by the tornadoes. It didn't take long for the streets to be filled with broken bodies, and I realized that Earth was under attack.

When it was all over and the sky had turned blue once again, the survivors filtered out of the city and down a garden pathway to a Wal-Mart. The merchandise had been emptied out and piled into pyramids surrounding the store, protecting it from direct attack. In the meantime, the employees had opened the Wal-Mart as a shelter for the survivors. We filtered in among a gigantic crowd and were diverted to various tables to get our tent assignment (a tent city had been established in the Home & Garden section), food rations, spare clothes, and toiletries.

I got my assignment and went to the tent city to get myself set up. I was bunking down with a few other people, but noticed that a little living area had been set up near our tent, as sort of a communal living room, complete with a couple of sofas, plenty of patio chairs, and a few small tables. A sofa was open, so I slid into it, lying down and just trying to pull things together and figure out what was going on. I felt someone perch on the back of the sofa and looked up to recognize an old friend from high school. She looked very upset and mentioned that a few good friends of ours had been killed in the attack on the city.

This was very upsetting, but not as much as what happened an hour or so after that. I got drafted for sentry duty, out along the stock-pyramids, and at one point, I stood on the apex of one of those pyramids and I turned around to look back at the store, only to see it exhaling what looked like a thick black liquid -- people, running for their lives, pouring out the doors. Behind them, I could see over the roof and saw enormous machines at the back of the store, crushing their way to the front, leading a giant rolling cloud that extended all the way across the world from horizon to horizon. I turned and ran down the pyramid and joined the crushing crowd.

I looked back in time to watch the giant machines rip their way through the front of the Wal-Mart, their undersides painted by the blood of people bursting underneath them like overripe grapes, and come slowly to a halt. Others noticed, and slowly the crowd began to slow and look back, afraid of what was coming next. Suddenly, each machine disgorged a giant beagle puppy the size of a very large house. When each puppy landed, it crushed even more people, and then it would stand up and start running indiscriminately through the crowd, scooping people up into its mouth and biting down once or twice before disgorging the ground-up remains and scooping up another mouthful. One of the cutest terrors I'd ever seen, and I turned and ran and kept running until I reached a line of suburban houses and filtered into the neighborhood.

I found a partially-constructed house and hid there, joined by a couple of other people. We could hear the rumbling of a puppy's passage and knew they could sniff us out if we allowed the wind to catch our scent, so huddled in a corner with the windows shut. We heard human footsteps, and a guy appeared, sliding between the bare studs of a framed-in wall -- just as a puppy walked past a window and we heard it sniff, a noise like a wind tunnel, and reality stuttered -- and we heard human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall, just as a puppy walked past a window and we heard it -- human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall, just as a puppy walked past a window -- and we heard human footsteps and the guy slid between the bare studs of a framed-in wall -- and we heard human footsteps ...

And I woke up.

I dreamed I was in a large city with a group of people and a professor, studying urban design and planning. It was an odd city, in twilight, all the glass lit up in purples and blues and brilliant oranges and crisscrossed by massive cables on which were strung what appeared to be Metro train cars.

After a while, I realized that a good friend from college, let's call her Emma, was in the crowd with me, and we hadn't seen each other for years, so we split off from the class and made our own way.

We flagged down a city bus, got on, and headed to the restaurant in back, where we just started talking and catching up. The candles were very nice, flickering as the scenery went past outside the windows, and we'd been eating and talking a while when she mentioned that she didn't really have a place to stay in town and was wondering if she could crash at my place. "Sure," I said. "How long will you be staying for?" "I'll be here until Tuesday," almost a week away.

"Sounds good. What happens on Tuesday, though?"

"Oh, I have to go home on Tuesday -- my brother's going to die, so I need to go to the funeral."

"Wait, what?"

She nodded and explained that her littlest brother had a condition which required a weekly supply of vitamins and other undisclosed ministrations, but the nurse who was usually responsible for this was on vacation. He needed the vitamins by Tuesday and would not be getting them.

"But, wait. Your brother's going to die just because this woman decided to go on vacation and you guys aren't doing anything about it?"

She spread her hands. "We can't. We have no choice."

That struck me as being particularly awful and she pleaded with me not to cry, she couldn't take it, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Finally, we arrived at an enormous grocery store, and made a beeline for the deli section, which was known locally for having a bunch of deaf people working there. When we arrived, I had to laugh -- the deli workers were these people I had known in college who had been sort of a joke among the campus deaf people because of their incredible snobbery. And now they were making sandwiches, which was actually pretty fun to watch.

Emma suddenly said she needed to go to the bathroom, and she'd find me later. "Okay," I said, and went back to watching the snobs assemble a particularly complicated sub. Several minutes later, I realized there was no sign of Emma anywhere, so I began searching through the store. Nothing. At this point, I figured I'd probably set her off by my reaction on the bus and she was probably busy sniffling in a bathroom stall somewhere, so I went outside for a cigarette.

Someone walked up to me who looked very vaguely familiar but had the kind of face where you can just tell that some weight was lost at some point along the way. He grinned a big gap-toothed smile and said, "Ya remember me?"

I scoffed. "Yes."

He put me in a headlock and then let up, "Bullshit. What would your mother say if she heard you say such things?"

"She'd say you need to lay off the drugs, Matt." He laughed.

"So," he said. "It's almost April 12." Belatedly, I suddenly remembered that we had the same birthday. I stopped without warning and nearly pitched him forward, grabbed him by the shoulders, and gave him a big, long kiss that ended with us rolling on the ground and laughing at the people who stared at us, their shock writ large. His lips were very dry.

We stood up and brushed ourselves off, and he mentioned he needed to grab a sandwich, wished me a happy birthday -- and I did the same to him -- and left. I turned around only to see another group of people I had worked with once coming along the arbor on the side of the store. I found a wall and hid behind it and -- no more of these stupid encounters! -- woke up.

I dreamed it was my 10-year class reunion last night.

I was in a hotel lobby, just kind of putzing around. I was different in a way that matters, although not inside, and wondering who I'd see and whether it was worth all the money I'd spent to come. Nervously, I scanned the faces of the new arrivals, looking for someone friendly, when one showed up.

Let's call her Megan. I had thought of her only once in the decade that had passed since graduation -- and that one time had been this dream where I bumped into her in a hotel lobby at our 10-year class reunion.

She was wearing a white dress with a pearl choker that draped down her decolletage like an Arizona sunburst. She smiled and said hello, and I thought to myself I haven't thought of this bitch but once in 10 years. I meant "bitch" in kind of a good way -- although she had been unswerving in her contempt of certain people and modes of thought, she was still an effervescent personality, and we had competed for good grades in all the AP courses we'd coincidentally taken together. Sometimes I got the better grade and lorded it over her ass, sometimes she did the lording. Overall, it was a good time.

She was extremely attractive, but was one of those geek girls who approach their academics with the bloodthirst of a Tatar. She ran with the other geek-girls who were in band and chorus and the Humanities & Etymology Society and the National Honor Society and all that, and they clustered around her even here, two of them, fading into the background as faces barely recognizable but wholly unmemorable.

And here she was, linking her arm with mine and we went into the ballroom, which looked like the typically crappy Event hosted by your run-of-the-mill chain hotel with four-star aspirations. We sat down at a table together and drank champagne, and I told her all about living and working in DC and doing my thing. She told me all about how she'd found out there'd been all these girls in high school who knew her, knew her name, knew all the stuff she'd done academically, but whom she had neither known or even met.

The bubbliness overflowed as she mused on how she'd actually been popular but hadn't realized it, and so was attending this reunion to showcase her newfound confidence as a non-mainstream popular girl. It was true; she looked fantastic next to the girls who had enjoyed name recognition in conventionality, who looked vaguely haggard, as though they'd worked long hours as lawyers or brokers or ad executives. One in particular, whom I'd known since I was a wee one, kept knocking back gin and tonics as she discussed various esoteric points of copyright law with a bored bank vice president who'd been her best friend in high school.

Against this background, she looked even livelier as she took various supplicants for her attention, all the outcasts who'd become writers and artists and librarians, but about her own occupation, she remained silent. We spent most of the evening this way, and then ... well, suffice it to say the rest of the night doesn't need description.

This was an incredibly random dream -- she was one name I'd utterly forgotten until this dream dredged it up against all reason. Not to mention the recursive nature of the dream, given the way that I'd remembered the dream itself while I was dreaming it, as though I were actually seeing the future and remembering that I'd seen it. It's not the first time it's happened, but it's certainly the strongest instance.

Well, I survived a nuclear bomb.

Or at least, I remember having survived one, although I certainly can't place where or when it might actually have happened because it seems to be happening right now. I'm hauling a nuke along with two other guys. We're in an isolated residential school in the woods on the outskirts of a city. We're struggling like hell, though, because that sucker is heavy. We wanted to get it into the large atrium of the school, but we're stuck in the hallway just outside the cafeteria, one of our compatriots screaming and cussing up a storm because he just doesn't wanna do it anymore. The other guy sighs and says, "Fine, we'll just blow the device right here."

I'm a little nervous about being in the same room with the nuke when it goes off. The other two don't seem to mind so much, although that's not a very good indication of its safety. Suddenly the calmer fella says to me, "Go down the hall, and take the third door on the left. It's a classroom with a window in the far corner. Get there and watch for smoke. If you see any, that means the others went off. Should happen a little after six o'clock, just like this one."

"Okay," I say, and toddle off. I find the classroom, but there's a pair of nervous students in there, having a late-night study session. I nod and move past carefully, wondering if they know what the hell's going on. They go back to what they're doing as I reach the window, part the blinds, and put my back to corner next to it, sliding down to rest on the floor. I scoff to myself a little -- the guy said to watch for smoke, but it's pitch outside, no real way to see much smoke. Then my eyes adjust, and the night becomes brighter, lit by a million stars over the woods, and I catch my breath, it's beautiful.

It's almost six now. I wonder if I should curl up, try to protect my spine or something. I examine my memories. I seem to be remembering the present as though it were already past, or maybe it's the future I'm remembering, and maybe I'll forget it when it becomes now, because I remember watching the (a?) bomb go off. It's all this crazy light and it gets hot, and there's a concussion, but for some reason it's not so bad for me, I can stand my ground and squint through the light and when it's all over, I'm still there, maybe with a decent suntan.

So I sit there, remembering what's about to happen and wondering if I should try to have a cigarette before the thing goes off when I check my watch and realize it's almost six-thirty, so I look outside through the window and see smoke far off in the distance, blowing away -- I almost missed it, and, convinced that my bomb was a dud, I stand up and sit down again in a cab that's coming to a stop in a parking garage, the cabbie just throwing the thing into park and opening the door and running off, and I can see almost everyone else doing the same thing, so that eventually the only things I can see moving are emergency response vehicles, coming into the garage and sluing off into different directions on different ramps.

"Jesus," I say to myself, wondering what's going on. I'm wearing what I remember as a "Hakuto" jacket, whatever that is, and wonder if I'm in Tokyo or somewhere where there's a major disaster going on, maybe an earthquake. Then I see a white cop's face in a car as he goes past and remember the bomb, so I try to flag someone down. I'm ultimately unsuccessful, until I turn around and see a pair of grim-faced cops parked just behind me, discussing the bomb that just vaporized half the city and one of them says "They got most of our emergency infrastructure," and I realize I'm in Jericho, experiencing the show from the perspectives of both the folks who set off the bomb in Denver and the surviving city folks who experienced its aftermath.

Once I realize that this whole experience is fake on a fundamental level, I wake up and have the spooky feeling I'm being watched.

I was in a suburban copse, watching a giant grasshopper rub its wings together and orchestrating an orchestra of giant insects.

A black cat arrived on the scene and the orchestra broke up, while the grasshopper managed to somehow acquire a large metal hook which he then used to try to capture the cat. The cat was black, a curiously spindly, attenuated figure, and thus it always escaped.

Bored, I went to the store, where in the parking lot they were having an event; avoid getting shot and you would be allowed to take shelter while the nuke went off. A besuited man was among us and behaving oddly (odder, at least, than the rest of the people, who were busy dodging bullets), looking skyward as though he were seeing something I were missing. The sky was this magnificent cerulean, a terrific dark blue never observed in nature, peopled with gargantuan clouds and I got the impression there was much more going on here than first appearances would allow, the sense of vast forces moving beyond the sky.

He pulled out a protective suit and gave it to me and said I was welcome to take shelter with the two winners, and I ran into the alcove that would serve, putting the suit on on the way. The alcove was just a gap between two protruding walls off the grocery store; it drained into the sewer and was full of dead leaves. I shoved myself in there first, and waited for the other two, who showed up without protective suits. Fat Latina women, they gobbled as we waited for the flash and boom and when it was all over they cackled, "We were right, no need for suits" and they died of radiation poisoning.

I left the alcove and walked back to the suburb. Everything had died, and I looked into the sky down the road and there was a structure there, like a mountain many miles tall, the base actually past the curve of the horizon but so large it was visible, but curved and pointing off to the left with a hollow peak, and it looked patently artificial, like a missile silo for giants. The sheer scale of it was monstrous, galactic, mind-boggling -- and a rocket erupted out of its peak and sailed halfway around the sky and things clouded over and beyond that point, I could see only half-glimpsed hints of enormous machinery behind the sky, above the clouds. A ship here, a missile there, an enormous white strut miles long, sliding behind the clouds and I knew there was war in the heavens.

I guess it all started with a family thing involving my youngest cousin, who my mother was trying to convince to aspire to a life that went beyond simple settling down with children. She used me as an example, saying that I had recently gotten a job as a librarian in Washington, DC.

That reminded me. I drove up to the building where the job was, which looked like a large, red version of the OEOB in the middle of a complicated Victorian-style neighborhood. I finally managed to find parking and went inside the building to check out my new digs. I wasn't to start working until the next day, but managed to get in and find my desk number on a card on the manager's desk. Locating it, I left a book and the framed photo of myself in France standing next to the wall with Sharpie'd graffiti saying "nowhere to go but far ... "

I left it in a drawer and left the building. On coming outside, I was picked up by my grandfather in his old truck, in which were also riding the rest of my family. It was a worrying experience because he kept talking rather than watching where he was going, which grew dangerous as we approached a tunnel topped by a large concrete walls with a pair of pointed arches cut into it, and I had him drop me off in the same place. I looked up, and the sky was full of stars. Giant, bright silvery clusters of them from horizon to horizon and there were multiple meteors going off at once. It was beautiful, but after a while, there were no more meteors and the stars dimmed and the sky looked like a giant television with a dirty screen.

After this, I went back inside the large, old building and decided that I had probably been wrong about where I was to sit -- there was no telling whether the card on which I had found my desk number was outdated. As I entered the annex to the large room where I was to be working, I noticed a small candy dish full of mini-fun-packs of Skittles and some sort of sweet made of peppermint creme covered in chocolate, and stole a few. As I retrieved my book and photo, I noticed a few people already in the room, and asked them where I was to sit. They pointed me at a small vertical desk, where the screen was higher than my head and the keyboard at my lap, and I sat down to noodle around for a few minutes. I checked Google Reader, found nothing new there, and left the building, intending to store my things in my truck until it was actually time to work.

Something else caught my eye: an old-fashioned horseless carriage parked on the side of the cobblestoned street. I went over to check it out and found out it was available to rent or park using free tokens that could be gotten from any number of kiosks or one of the drivers of the local horse-drawn carriages. As it happened, one of those carriages was parked behind the automobile, so I asked the driver if I could have enough tokens to last me through the workday. Instead of responding, he showed me the pipe he was smoking out of and said, "Guess what I'm smoking."

"Tobacco?"

"Nope. Coke."

"Coke as in -- ?"

He nodded. "Historical accuracy, you know, so it's legal for me to smoke it. Go ahead, smell the bowl."

I smelled it, dipped my finger into its crackling blackness, and rubbed the soot across the palm of my right hand and smelled that. Yes, indeed. It was cocaine.

"As for those tokens ... " the carriage-driver said. He smiled nastily and tossed a fistful of golden coins behind me, onto a young boy who was sitting in the backseat of the auto. I had to pick them out of his red shirt, and there were more, many more, than I had thought there were at first, so it took some time. I finally managed to get enough, more than enough, and fed a few through the slot and started it up. It came with a humming rumble, and as I wheeled it out of its spot and into the road over the cobblestones, it began to shake and hum and rumble all at once and it was a strangely pleasant feeling. Once I had circled the block, I began to pull it back into its old spot.

Only to discover a number of small boats cordoning it off. There was a small-boat bazaar happening next to my parking spot and it had taken over the space. The little boats on the road were connected by lengths of monofilament fishing line and were sailing on the road.

Last night, I dreamed that I had had a lot to drink.

I went to Tara's townhouse, where a large group of people were congregating. To escape the crowd, I found a room in which there was a large TV and Guitar Hero. Never having played it before, I gave it a shot in private, curling my hand over the bottom edge of the body in order to reach the buttons, a highly ineffective arrangement. Just after I realized you were supposed to drape your hand over the thing, not come up from underneath, a young black guy came in, and I offered the fake guitar to him. He promptly broke off a white, rectangular button and grew rapidly distraught.

I attempted to comfort him by showing him that the thing could be snapped back on--while finding out that it couldn't--only to be interrupted by Tara's sister, Molly. The floor morphed into a well-landscaped pond surrounded by several large boulders, on which we all perched. Everyone else entered the room and began chattering about going to a bar named "Hotrods," and I was invited along. Already drunk, I was leery, but decided that I probably could not get any more intoxicated, so it ought to be safe. Molly offered to drive everyone, but ended up dropping her keys into the pond, at which point I finally realized that she was fantastically drunk. I thought to myself, She certainly holds her drink pretty well for a thirty-nine-year-old.

Somehow, improbably, she skittered across the boulders and, perching rather precariously in heels on a particularly loose rock, she stuck her hand in the water at random and immediately retrieved an absurdly large keyring, with dozens of brass keys, and we set off.

The dream skipped over the bar and into the next morning, when Tara and I arrived at her townhouse and discovered Molly dozing in the driver's seat of her little green car. I began dancing, sort of a little soft-shoe routine, around the front of the car, and went into Tara's place, while Molly, waking up and wiping the running mascara off her face, followed. We settled down on a large group of beanbags in the living room, looking out through the large glass windows, while I filled both of them in on the details of what had happened last night.

That ... really was pretty much it.