Several things: I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about my grandparents. I'd had a dream that my grandma kept putting her feet in or near a campfire, a campfire built into the floor at a restaurant, and wasn’t paying any attention to the fact that it was lighting her socks on fire and burning her feet — not until I'd put it out several times and not until she actually felt it (she has terrible memory issues that do strange numbing things to her response to pain), when she cried out like a little girl that it hurt, oh it hurt.
Finally we could launch into fix-it mode, whisk her through the dream, gather cloth and wet it in the sink to wrap her shedding skin in something cool.
The whole time she'd been leaning over the fire to my grandfather to hear him tell her how dumb she was for putting her feet so close to the heat, a relationship that mirrors their actual relationship sadly. For another time though.
I woke up with two insights and an urgency to check in with my family. These dreams don't come often, but when they do, they have a weight like what I'd expect folks of the past called prophecy. Perhaps folks of the present too - there's a girl here in Korea who says she -dreams-, and she emphasizes the word. Says she saw her husband’s face before she met him, and that’s how she knew.
But my one of two insights was that I’ve never had dreams of the future or dreams of aspiration the way other people claim to.
I don’t say 'claim to' in order to doubt that people dream of doing x or y in the future, and I use ‘dream’ loosely, not to say dreams like the one I just had of my grandmother in my sleep. I do include those - but I simply mean I've never had a vision of what I want my future to look like, so I've always stolen those of others.
I've never imagine where I wanted to go or the house I wanted to build, the job I've wanted; and I don't say that mournfully but honestly, sincerely, I just never have. I backpacked Central America because someone else said they'd always wanted to. I got a job as a whitewater raft guide because my mom thought it would be cool. I'm in Korea on a suggestion — hell, if you ask my old design partner, he might agree I'm the most persuadable person you've ever met when it comes to -doing- anything (though not buying anything, I append — advertisement is like a butter knife to my frugal resolve).
Again, I don't say it with any sadness and hopefully no vanity — though perhaps part of admitting it does reckon with the sensation that I do feel somewhat - less than? when I hear people who do seem to dream and imagine this way — the same way I feel about people saying they love having a sister, when I never have. I don't feel bad for only having a brother — quite the opposite, I love him and our life together — but I've never had a sister.
This insight or thing-that-got-me-up leads me back to a comment a friend made after reading my book which is "I especially love the world it is in" which she went on to compare to a childhood favorite. When struggling with the truth that I could go no further last week with Scrap, I wrote: 'why do all of my stories of fantasy center around a -landscape- while my stories of science fiction center around around an idea?'
And I wanted to ask myself if I could switch that, and at that moment, a moment of frustration, of realizing I had no end in sight, I was hoping it would free me or loosen the grip of that failure on me, and perhaps it might’ve. I don’t know. I haven't tried it, and will, but just for now, in the wake of these other dreams and realizations, I want to connect this truth of my writerly activity with the truth of my personality, which is that perhaps my inability to envision the future for myself as a place to hope for or draw is tied to how I draw the future as a place on the page, or rather, that I can't.
And that admission makes me think perhaps I could change both.
•
Last weeks effort and accomplishment has me fixing the amount of page I'll give myself to tell this week's story. Two and a half hand-written pages. If it can't be done in that, I've gone too long. My reading has ranged mostly through articles revolving around the AIDS epidemic, the misclassification and blame associated to the gay community and particularly to Patient 0, who in fact was not Patient 0 but Patient O, for 'outside Southern California' - thus, as often, reading on how an accident spurs us to assumption, and assumption to action, action to repeated action, being eventually ritualized and that these rituals lay the foundation for society.
Let us break bread together, my brethren as we always have, except when there was no bread.
Too, my heart broke a bit reading about Kitty Genovese who was followed for many city blocks over the course of a half hour by her assailant who stabbed her multiple times and was never stopped by the nearly forty witnesses.
So I think I'll include some numbness too this week. An anaestheticism then.
Anaestheisa is one of those rare topics that makes me think strangely.
So l et's call it :
•
Oder Long's Favorite Numbing Needle
By Eric Westerlind
•
In the small town of Teragok-in-Turkey, which was settled on the shore of the Mentan River, the average day was a quiet one.
This was a town of people who knew each other and had known each other, and a town with few exits and entrances for people here or people from elsewhere. Sometimes a relative or a visitor, like Wen Carbunkle and her ailing father Fallo would come into town by the road on the hill, and usually they came from one of the two small cities, either distant Koto late at night, or closer Yotan around mid-afternoon, and usually they came by car. In Wen & Fallo Carbunkles's case, a red jalopy dumping smoke from near its faulty and outdated carburetor.
Usually they would be met by family, one of the 256 residents of Teragok-in-Turkey, because they would be spotted fairly easily as they crossed the ridge of the hill — but you've gathered rightly that the day we're talking about now, no one saw them come, and no one was waiting to help bring their suitbags in or to help the invalid Fallo from his seat in the back. Only his daughter, who was exhausted.
Where were the citizens of Teragok-in-Turkey and why, in the mid-light of the afternoon was no one around? One begins to feel a sort of ominous imaginative presence — a nasty possibility when one is alone but not expecting to be, and poor Fallo, the way he got down from the car and how his daughter helped him or tried - (she was so tired) - he fell and rolled his ankle on the way to the ground.
This is when Wen Carbunkle noticed the citizens.
A strange and unsettling visual, they were each and all behind the blustered glass windows staring out at the red jalopy and the withered man clutching his shin on the gravel. They were staring at her.
Were they there though? Wen's glance suggested she couldn't tell, pinching her eyes to see through the mud spatter while groping for some leverage under her father's hooked arm. This was the information center that she'd parked in front of, as always. This was where there were usually very friendly locals willing to speak to her in her native language, that usually came out to help her get situated and point her to her stay. She'd done this a thousand time. She'd done this a thousand times! She'd — someone should come—
There was a painted sign beside the door that was new. It was of a red jalopy. It was a red jalopy just like hers and she couldn't read what the rest said from here but she spoke to her father once she had him propped against the wheel and she strode to the door of the information center and she grabbed it by its handle.
Locked. She shook her moppy head unintentionally, kind of freaking out. She got up on the side of the mud-daub step and looked in the window and they were there alright, the usually helpful pair of people, but backing away, one of them holding their arms up in an x and the other glancing over and hesitantly making the same gesture. Wen tried talking through the window — please what's going on, she might've said — and tried the door despite her usually quite impersistent manner.
Her father meanwhile had tried getting to his feet again, not being totally helpless by his own estimation, but its hard to stand up in gravel with a blown-out ankle so he fell again.
Dad, said Wen in her language. Hang on. She tried to read the painted sign again and it was the more legible from here: there was a big X drawn over her vehicle. That much couldn't be mistranslated.
She got her dad up and looked around and explained best as she understood the situation, that they would need to find the place from the crap directions she'd written down because those people, she spat, weren't being helpful like they usually were, and her father asked why didn't she just knock. They got into a very familiar argument that dribbled out once she'd gotten him buckled back in and got her scrap paper out and the car churning up the gravel up following the one of the two roads that that tracked the Mentan River towards its source.
Now the town was mostly a bee and honey town so the afternoon is usually very important as it’s an easy time to handle the bees in this part of the world, but the hives were lonely and dotted the countryside without a soul in sight. Her father even even set his head against the back window and started to become aware of the strange circumstance — where is everyone? I think he asked — over and over.
The problem with a mystery like this is that you don't really want to know the answer because when you find out the answer, your problem isn't solved — you'll still be alone. Why won't they come out or why won't they let me in does not resolve into they come out or they let me in. And in fact, if Wen hadn't paid good money and committed to this Oder Long's needle, the real solution to her would've been to turn the jalopy around and rumble back over the hill, down through the quaint afternoon of these upper country hills — watch the Mentan merge with the Lower Cordelai to become the thick artery that eventually buried itself within the tombstone banks of Lake Oolad, just a half hour walk from her home. But she had paid and committed, and no matter how the citizens of Teragok-in-Turkey felt about Oder Long or about her booking him, no matter how many signs they might put out, she was too tired at this point to make that drive home. She came here for peace and she came here for tranquility, so she just kept her mouth shut relying on the fact that most of her father's questions were rhetorical, and always had been anyway, and that he'd never particularly needed anyone to respond
Easier to find than she expected.
In fact, Dr. Oder Long was even outside already - must've seen her come over the ridge. They together got the old man into a very comfortable room, floor to ceiling shelves and a beautiful brown leather recliner that her father took to without asking. Wen explained the doctor's IV easy enough though her father scowled some when Dr. Oder Long pinched his skin. She kissed his head and said I love you, Pop and he said get me a donut or something, they always have those, and this made her turn away nodding and crying and Dr. Oder Long came out with her, so to point her to a chair, allow her to, for the fiftieth time probably, make sure it wouldn't hurt and say no, no, no, in that comforting way of his. He won't feel a thing.