I had a very intense dream of being about 35 and married, to Allison. We were still in love. There was … a dinner, at a casually formal place far beyond my means; Italian maybe, or neo-something fusion.
I was still very much at home in her circles of art and intellect.
I was still deeply uncomfortable in the same circles, from the standpoint of easy wealth and the assumptions it brings.
An old friend of hers, someone my brain invented just for the dream, had got me very high on the best weed, and then entrusted my wife and I with the two most precious things in his life, his Cadillac and his heir, and expected us, me really, since I was driving, in the rain at night, to deliver both these treasures safely to … Winnetka.
The car was brand new, of course. The child, preternaturally serene and respectful, was about ten.
I was having a silent and almost invisible panic attack, or bout of paranoia (and that part is no fiction at all), brought on by the combination of top-shelf marijuana, and the Responsibilities, the … expectations of my competence for the job.
I had pulled the Caddy into a gas station, somewhere in the well-tended suburbs west of the city. I was stripping myself of the big camel-hair car-coat I was improbably wearing. I wasn’t there for gas, but ostensibly for coffee, and really and truly for a moment of marginal stability to clear my swimming head, and produce … results.
***
Partly, this is my brain digging deeper into older traumas, now that the more recent ones have been … palliated and perhaps nearly cured.
Partly, it was trying to prepare me for the current non-dreaming mission, where the ten-year old is a cat, and the destination is a trailer park in Denver.
I still have to pack, and crate her, and get us safely north six hundred miles by, I don’t know, 24 hours from now I suppose. A quarter after two with the same dark heaven above, today and yesterday and tomorrow, inside the dream and outside it too.
That sky and the Narrative Self are what don’t change, and there’s a chilly comfort in those truths.
And you’re right to notice that the same pattern repeats elsewhere:
It occurred to me that her real-life child is himself a man of 35 this year.
I imagine that his infernal geometries look very different from mine.
But of course that too is only imagining.