Dreamer. Shame. Rhesus in Hell. No Warrior. Little Boy Blue. Voices of Women. Humpty Dumpty Electronics

…I dream often there is a woman in my bed. This is not an erotic dream. This is not a wish. This is not prediction, nor is it necessarily memory. The woman that is there, she’s vague, she changes, I reach for her sometimes. This reach is not with hunger; it is not sensual.

This reach is a question: who are you?

This is my hand on the pillow beside me in the dark waiting to see if that other hand will fall upon it, waiting to see what that will mean.


…And with this sickness comes shame.

I think when I wake in the night with the bed empty save me that were there a woman, I would not want her to hear me breathing in the way I must now breath; I would not want her to see me sunken, if indeed I’ve sunk.

I would not want her to feel on me fever.
Clamminess.
Fear or fatigue.

I would want to hide myself from her. To draw a line on the bed, a big bed capable of maintaining halves.

A relationship based on conversations, thoughts, distance.

Sort of like the one we share.

…In a book I was gifted (thanks MT) there is the true story of a Russian scientist who was able to plant the brain of a rhesus monkey in the abdomen of a dog. The brain was properly hooked up to blood lines so that it kept alive, insensate, but vital, full, we can imagine, of thought.

Full, we can imagine, of terror.

And how quickly madness must fall on one like that, robbed of all sensation, lost to all new experience, with only memories on which to dwell, a sort of Hell, maybe the very thing.

Leave it to our species to bring about that awful reality, the sort of thing no accident of nature, cruel as those accidents can be, could ever create.

…And at the gym I am ashamed too, this one the faculty gym, my workout so thin, so quick, so easy as to not justify a trip to Bally’s.

Faculty gym, I’m packed in warm clothes and lifting very little.

A man asks me about the book I’m reading. High Life.
Is it good?

I see him looking at the book but I suspicion that he is looking to see how much weight I’ve lifted.

I want to tell him, By the way, I’m quite sick. I usually lift more than this. More than you lift. I can be strong. Like a warrior.

…I dreamt last night of such a scene. I’m in a restaurant with a woman named Michelle and the man in the booth behind me, he is elbowing me, his arm draped on my side of the seat. I push and shove but I know that I am weak. He is with a family, his wife, maybe, along with his sister or some other girl.

There is another man with him, a short man, plump, older, matched with the second woman.

We rise up, ready to fight, me and this man and this other man, the three of us.
And I’m aware that I’m sick.
I know that I am weak.

Michelle, she watches, sort of excited.
And the women at the table of the two men, they want it too.

The short man, he grabs me from behind. I think of all the things the real me could do, the ways I could hurt him.

The other man, he begins to try to strike me.
I’m slow, but quick enough.
I get free. I land blows. They are not powerful. It will take an infinity of them to render either man damaged.

This is like Milton’s War: we can fight only to a draw.

…I dream also of buying a hat. A black knit cap to keep my head warm. To mess my hair.

…Coming home, I see the little boy on the second story balcony, the same boy I saw yesterday. Alone. 2, maybe less.

As he did yesterday, he totters to the rail and screams at me.
I wonder where he learned to scream, if it’s what his parents do, those people behind the open door and closed curtains.
Or if it is just organic to him.
I’ve never seen a child scream so and so bravely at a stranger.
But now I see he is semi-smiling. I try to imagine he likes me.

All around the steps are his things: two shoes; a car; his toys.
I carry them up and put them outside the door, feeling winded, wanting to rest. At the bottom of the stairs, there is one more toy, and I think to leave it, reach my apartment door before I must go back, lift it, take it slowly up the stairs, leave it on the pile of his other things.

He’s not screaming any more. He’s only smiling.

…And now, for my day of rest.
Movies.
Max Payne, 2.
The football game tonight.

…Men suffer sickness poorly, though we pretend and sometimes think the opposite.
Most women, they known, if they’ve lived with a man, that in fact he is very baby like, very child like in his weaknesses as they relate to sickness, and to other things.

It is no different with me.

Yes, we avoid the doctor, but that is only another sort of weakness.

…I’ve known always how my body works.
Sickness comes down on me hard, there is the cycle of it, and then my body repairs itself.

For the first time, I don’t trust it.
My faith has been corrupted. People are making me believe that I really have to be easy, have to be careful, that I won’t stop being sick if I don’t stop being active.
That you can’t work through it.

I realize, it is the voice of women that has gotten into my head. They are telling me things to scare me. Not of death or anything heavy, but just of being sick sick sick for some long time, sick and in need of all kinds of medical attention.

I don’t feel all that bad. Tired, certainly. Easily winded, yes. Sore of chest, ok.
Coughy, yep.

But: this is much less debilitating then the hard core flu, not so hard to deal with.

But these women, they are subverting my plans, modified as they are, for some kind of life beyond convalescence for the next few weeks.

These women, the voices of women, sounding wise, telling me their tales and sharing with me their cautions.

Is that what women do?

But of course, I don’t talk to men. Not really. Not often. Perhaps they’d do the same.

Where is that person that says: This is all peripheral. Do as you please, if you can, and it will pass.

…So it’s all new to me, these fears, this lack of faith.
I’m trying to find my place in this sickness.
Trying to find how to operate in it.

It makes me think of the older men I know, like my father, who live off of pills and who live with the side effects of pills, these men whose bodies betray them one way or another over and over.

It almost makes me believe in that as my destiny, as the destiny of us all.

And some of these voices, they come from women who have known me some long time, who have known me when I was young, when I was completely unbroken, when it was impossible to get anything but a passing bug, when I would never age.

…and my home computer is broken, and men in India can not save it, no matter how I plead with them, how I pay their company, how I shout.

…And school, it starts up in a few days, one class on Friday, no worries.
My apartment un-peopled, just barely inhabited by me, my life not lonely nor full of over alones, but still it will be nice, that old kick, that instant audience, that captive group…