February 21, 2012 (daytime nap): As I slumber on the sofa sleeper, covered by a Mayan blanket, the slow whoosh of the heater kissing my forehead, I sense it. I keep me eyes closed, but know it’s there, hovering, deadly. It’s enormous; I can tell even by the stillness of the room, something huge humming just beyond the pillow above my head. I am tipped off by something in my subconscious that there is, in fact, a grizzly bear in my living room, some kind of escaped circus attraction. Slobbering and waiting for me to move. To hold an inner dialogue regarding how it came to be in my living room, making no noise, and how it had seemingly spared the other napping beings in the room would have been the most foolhardy waste of time. The cats and the mini dachshund make no move to flee or hiss or bark. So much for security.
Doomed, I determined to outline a plan of escape in my head. I knew this hulking thing was only waiting for my eyes to open to make a move. It was only sporting, I sensed he thought, to allow for some kind of fighting chance, what with our sizes being so grossly unbalanced, our killmodes being unbelievably lopsided. The plan I made was simple: in one grand movement, fold the entirety of the blanket over me, put one foot on the ground, and leap straight out the south-facing bay window of my living room, and try not to trip as I scurried away at top speed down Hawthorne Boulevard to some kind of safety. Someone with an elephant gun could save me, perhaps. Someone with a net, or some chains, or something else appetizing that wasn’t me. Or maybe a cop would see this huge fucking carnivore lumbering toward me down the middle of the road and give him a nice, quick ram to the side so I could get away.
So, I did it. I executed the plan. Covered myself with the blanket to absorb all that broken glass; landed out on the sidewalk of 46th Avenue just as the bear began to rumble an unholy guttural roar – its claws digging into my wood floors for traction to leap out himself, like the sound of icebergs hitting icebergs in the North Pole. I began to run as fast as I could west toward 39th Avenue, down the sidewalk and not in the middle of the road as I’d imagined. No one seemed to be paying attention. I didn’t look back, but could feel the fear building inside of me, some animal instinct to dart, evade, not be eaten alive. No one was looking because no one was outside. Not one car belched up the road. Not one pedestrian, not one runner, not one hungover punk ambled up the walkway toward the sandwich shop. I was alone.
I tripped on the blanket around 43rd Avenue. Just before waking up, I heard the coming of the claws.
February 22, 2012: I had somehow made it to Australia, holed up in some swanky lobby of some bourgeois hotel with a grand view of a sunsetting cityscape – everything swathed in orange, craggy mountains jutting at ridiculous angles unsupported by physics, usual geology. The ventricle streets buzzed with the blood-red cells of brake lights and green-yellow-red strobes, twinkling in the ether below like something alive, pumping life into some unknowable being. Everything moved away from me.
I sat staring at this vision, surrounded by people in bath robes all discussing some incredibly important plan of attack, probably some kind of shitty redux of a press gig where everyone ponders where to meet later, who to talk to, what to ask, etc., etc. But I wasn’t into it so I got up from my Indian-style sit (the window must have been all the way to the floor, so as to allow the full view of the ribald sights jittering in static cling outside, the shadows now sadly calling the sunset’s bluff and hiding til morning. Everything a red death). I went over to this funky yellow davenport to try and sit and write about this terrifying view, this nameless Australian scene, with those powerful Doberman crags out past everything, looming like bicuspids sweaty with hunger, to chomp us all to bits if the wiggling stopped. Ominous. Brutal.
I grabbed my blank journal from the back left pocket of my pants (I also wore a robe, but had pants on underneath, at least; I couldn’t say the same for the faceless automatons milling in my periphery), to document whatever was happening outside, just to write, to describe this frail beauty to my journal, and to me, so I could maybe remember something wholesome and pure for once, no matter the degree of terror it exhumed from my quaking hands.
I grabbed my pen from its weird crevasse in the folds of the same back left pocket, where it stabbed at a hole in the pocket just like in real life, and I wondered for a second if I were really dreaming, or if I had finally woken up to some strange hell, as a man waking from a coma, with amnesia and a strange face with hideous, strange people staring back at him must presumably feel. Forging on, I put pen to paper, ink to line, wrote, “I’m in Australia…” I noticed a black ant crawling and waving its antennae all over my left hand – the one holding the journal steady for my onslaught of journalistic output. I shooed it away, gently, where it flew sort of unpleasantly onto the adjacent couch cushion. Undeterred, it began its journey back toward the pulp of my left hand; I could see it plotting the route out of the corner of my eye. It was making me forget what I wanted to write about. It made me depressed for that singular goal of this little thing, to want to go over me to get to something else, that determination fueled by osmosis of memory, of a trail somewhere around here that lead home, or lead to food, or lead to the thing that would help him survive another day. And here I was flicking him away so I could write about this fluffy electric world, schizophrenic, panicked, handed everything on plastic and Styrofoam, never having to try, really, to do anything but exist. Never needing to climb a mountain anymore. I swallowed a lump of pity, but carried on, unaware of the correct, the moral and just avenue to take here. I was trying to live the only way I knew how, too.
I tried to write a little more, keeping a pensive, worrisome eye on the ant, who had now summoned a friend who zig-zagged to and fro behind the first, reenacting those same steps up to the meat of my hand, hesitantly now, pensive in its own right. “Somewhere down there, a girl I love is dancing around with a hula hoop by lamplight, bemused by the shadows on the walls…” then I stopped again. The crimson cloak of sunset had bid ado, and the reflection in the cross-room mirror displayed atrocious, soaring skyscrapers, alight with creamy neons. The be-robed cavalcade of faceless humans in the room were still huddling in strategic hunches, like old toga Romans scheming an assassination, maneuvering for takeover of foreign lands. The city looked like sharpened axe blades, dripping with tissue, grey matter, bone shard, muscle. The two ants were now joined by five or six more, all juking in staccato, lining up one behind the other with more en route up the façade of the couch, over the little seam of the cushion, lining up to go. Go where? To what? For whom?
I put my pen down and turned to look at the snaking line of insects on the couch. How no one else saw this development is a mystery of the lords of deep sleep, REM – our ancestors playing survival tricks on us for a strong evolution of the will to live, to breed, to send the message on that a life is a thing to behold and to cherish. The ants just stopped moving. Stopped waving their little wands. Stopped their Parkinson heads from bobbling. Stopped. Just looked at me. Silent, still. Determined. Wanting to go home.
I stood up to let them by, and watched as they filed past the divot left from my seating, up the arm of the right side of the couch, down the back of the right side, in perfect alignment, like brigadiers, noses down, following. The line then shimmied up the wall in the corner of the window to a small hole. One by one they disappeared into the little cavernous void. One by one they dropped into the waiting air beyond the frames and insulation and outside walls of the building. They seemed to leap, like sad humans might, into the big black, that final, rapid view a thing only those who want to see one more aching wonder yearn for. They looked like windswept seeds destined to shower mysterious soils beyond to keep it all moving.
Against the darkness, it was impossible to see them float away, down, and I don’t know the anatomy of ants well enough to know if they could have survived a fall of that height. Their weight-lifting capabilities are well-storied. They had a chance, I guess. But from that cell, that little window looking on the big world, some big anonymous Australia, with its big toothy mountaintops and its deserts and bush beyond, everything seemed possible.
Sometimes we all want a better view.
