Fading, Slipping

John dreams

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 16, “Fading, Slipping.”

Things, the pictures in my head, alternate unpredictably between swirling, like transition, and very clear images of something odd going on. I’m in a hotel room with a woman I have apparently just had sex with but there’s another woman there, a coach, a therapist, a succubus, I don’t know, and I’m running around the room looking for my ticket to a city I’ve never been to nor want to visit and certainly don’t live in. I think it’s in Iowa. The two women are packing up things with confidence but I’m frantic about my missing ticket and the poor progress I am making on getting packed up and out the door in time to make my flight, whose time of departure seems to be changing all the time.

“John, what is it?” the woman says.

And I have no idea who she is or how she knows my name or what she’s talking about. Why am I hustling so much?, is that what she means? Or What is that thing next to my shoe? Or What are we are all doing here, together in this room? It frankly doesn’t matter what she’s asking about because I don’t know the answer to either question, and then I realize it was the coach asking the questions, and I have to re-evaluate and I still conclude quickly that I have no intelligible response.

“Me,” I say, as if that means anything.

“Oh,” she says, as apparently it does mean something.

We’re interrupted by a loud bang and then suddenly from a corner of the hotel room the conveyor belt like you see at an airport that’s completely capable of taking all my luggage, and I reluctantly let it go because the airport departures clerk who has appeared from another corner of the room lets it all through without having as much as my boarding pass. For a microsecond a letter to the management of the airline begins to compose itself in my head, something something something the lack of training something something something senior management something, but now with my luggage all gone I’m more concerned than ever about how I’m going to find my ticket. I get angry briefly, or is it for an hour?, that I’m being asked to board without a ticket and boarding pass to fucking Iowa, where I don’t want to be and where the family I’ve spent the weekend away from at this stupid seminar emphatically do not live.

I turn around and the two women, succubus and tryst, are gone and so is all the luggage that had apparently been theirs. Now there’s a man about eight-feet tall and a tiny woman the top of whose head comes up to his waist, and they have a keycard to get into the room, my room, and they are puzzled but not upset at all that I am there. The man palms me a tip, ten dollars, and then like an automaton I exit the room, sans ticket, sans direction, sans everything.

I step onto a small beach and there are people around me, people I know, and I’m relieved at that at least, and I say hi to Sadee who doesn’t look up from her beach novel, but I can see the title, I, Oh, Want Something Else, and the man pictured on the cover has a bare chest that defies reality and the normal standards of male beauty and capability. Does he work out twenty-three hours a day? The kids, two kids, my kids, are in the water, and in the dream within the dream I am relieved that they are safely at the edge of the water, pleasantly playing with a bucket (Lolly) and a tractor (Grady). They look over at me simultaneously, wave, and say in unison, “John, what is it?” And it throws me, in the dream within the dream within the dream, where reality starts to kick in, and my only thought, my only perverse thought, is whether I should be addressing them more formally as well.

“John, it’s time to … ” and I can’t catch the last of what Lolly, I mean Laura, is saying.

“She’s right,” Grady, or is it—what is it formally, Gradus?—Gradus says and I’m not sure what to do about the unfinished instructions from these precocious children with the fancy names until I feel Sadee pushing on my shoulder in our real bed, telling me it’s time to get up, that I’d been mumbling, that I’d twisted around all night and she hardly got a wink, that it’s time for breakfast.