own father’s desiccated youth.
It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that
it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the
grip on his soul’s throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes
unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to
cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted
tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around
in the kitchen, making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed
he’s supposed to eat with postcoital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about
they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to eat with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises.
Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and
go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself
for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with
cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day
will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going
to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and
sheer.
So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have
gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago,
as an unhappy youngster.
As a nod to Orin’s own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some
sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night’s had started with a wide-angle shot
of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy
person—Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a
teaching pro in the Carolinas—when the dream’s screen tightens on him and abruptly
dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there’s
the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface
and air, and after some interval the dream’s Orin struggles up from this kind of visual
suffocation to find his mother’s head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza’s, the Moms’s disconnected
head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow
by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet’s
own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it
side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he’s still staring at, into, and
somehow through his mother’s face. As if the Moms’s head was some sort of overtight
helmet Orin can’t wrestle his way out of. 2 In the dream, it’s understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the
phylacteryish bind of his mother’s disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night’s Subject’s
note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head with both
hands and tried to sort of stiff-arm her, though not in an ungentle or complaining
way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The apparent amputation of the Moms’s head from
the rest of the Moms appears in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is
no evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base
of the round pretty head had been sealed, and also sort of rounded off, so that her
head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, attached to his own head’s face.
The Subject after Bain’s sister but before the one just before this one, with the
Ambush scent and the hearts over i’s, the previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty
Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous alimony
and penchants for
It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that
it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the
grip on his soul’s throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes
unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to
cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted
tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around
in the kitchen, making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed
he’s supposed to eat with postcoital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about
they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to eat with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises.
Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and
go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself
for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with
cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day
will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going
to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and
sheer.
So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have
gotten worse since the trade to this blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago,
as an unhappy youngster.
As a nod to Orin’s own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some
sort of competitive-tennis situation. Last night’s had started with a wide-angle shot
of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some Academy
person—Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a
teaching pro in the Carolinas—when the dream’s screen tightens on him and abruptly
dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light, and there’s
the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface
and air, and after some interval the dream’s Orin struggles up from this kind of visual
suffocation to find his mother’s head, Mrs. Avril M. T. Incandenza’s, the Moms’s disconnected
head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow
by a wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet’s
own face. So that no matter how frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it
side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he’s still staring at, into, and
somehow through his mother’s face. As if the Moms’s head was some sort of overtight
helmet Orin can’t wrestle his way out of. 2 In the dream, it’s understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the
phylacteryish bind of his mother’s disembodied head, and he cannot. Last night’s Subject’s
note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head with both
hands and tried to sort of stiff-arm her, though not in an ungentle or complaining
way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The apparent amputation of the Moms’s head from
the rest of the Moms appears in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is
no evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base
of the round pretty head had been sealed, and also sort of rounded off, so that her
head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, attached to his own head’s face.
The Subject after Bain’s sister but before the one just before this one, with the
Ambush scent and the hearts over i’s, the previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty
Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous alimony
and penchants for
Similar Books
