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 sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges, and professional athletes
who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright — she thought the figure he’d trace without thinking on her bare flank after
sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he’d mailed her child an expensive toy
and then had his phone number changed, he’d awakened from a night of horror-show dreams — woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm,
unrefreshed and benighted of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner’s chalk outline
— he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow, wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and
sipping hazelnut espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom’s south wall, something
horrific called ‘INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING MATRIX
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 sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges, and professional athletes
who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright — she thought the figure he’d trace without thinking on her bare flank after
sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he’d mailed her child an expensive toy
and then had his phone number changed, he’d awakened from a night of horror-show dreams — woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm,
unrefreshed and benighted of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner’s chalk outline
— he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow, wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and
sipping hazelnut espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom’s south wall, something
horrific called ‘INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING MATRIX
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