I’m in the city where I went to University. But it’s as if I have just arrived because I don’t know where anything is. I’m standing on a foreign street corner in the dark of night. Someone has organized a dance – it feels like a prom – at some location but I don’t know where it is. I’m baffled by the address I’m meant to get to. A bus has left me at this street corner. And I know I’m close but there’s no people and no road signs and no street lights and it’s very nearly entirely dark. I take a few steps north and worry that I will get lost. I take a few steps west and return to my original spot. I’m paralyzed for fear of making a mistake but I can’t stay in the place I’m at either. I’m already lost. That’s pretty obvious. Being lost already and what all this means.

I’m in a school. I’m carrying around an exam I forgot to hand in. But I’m not terrified. It’s all pointless. A secretary is really busy but she doesn’t care. It’s all pointless. She has a date and she wants to get out of there. She answers multiple phones. She puts two industrial cream-colored phones together, end over end, so that the two people on each phone can talk to each other. It’s like a cartoon. She’s eager for her date.

A school hallway and a dance to get to. The women are dressed up fantastically. One looks just like Shania Twain in that video with the veil and the crystal dot on her head. I’m wearing shabby clothes and I haven’t got any shoes but I’m still meant to go to the dance.

None of the boys are dressed terribly well. I think that I might be able to find some shoes in some school locker but I can’t and I don’t. It doesn’t matter either.

The secretary is dating an impossibly older man but he seems nice. I make it to the dance, or rather to an antechamber before the dance. The antechamber is a tiny bathroom with tiny fixtures and water fountains that only come up to my knees. I want to clean up but I find it impossible. A line forms for the bathroom. Nobody seems to mind that everything is miniature.

I go in to the dance. I don’t remember dancing. My mom is there. We’re sitting at a table with some people. One of those people is Rob M. from high school. For some reason Mom calls him Christ. She has completely forgotten his name. Nobody seems to mind that either. Except I do. I try to tell mom what his name is but she doesn’t get it and insists on calling him Christ which perhaps she thinks is short for Christian which isn’t his name either.

Charlize Theron is the secretary dating the very old man. She play wrestles her elderly suitor for our amusement. The old man has a bunch of plastic toys in his pockets. Nobody knows why. Charlize also exposes his unnaturally tree-sized phallus. Nobody blinks an eye.

I don’t remember dancing. I don’t remember having a good time or a bad time. We leave. The sun is setting but it’s quite a bright warm sunset.

Wasn’t it pitch black before? How can the sun be just setting now, I ask people. Nobody cares.

Somewhere else. I’m settled firmly into a particular life. On TV, I see an old friend I have lost touch with. Once, we were very good friends. He is being interviewed. He had appeared on an episode of Wonder Woman once, he discusses in an interview which should have been impossible but nobody cared. They show a clip from an episode I have never seen. He’s in it. He said it was fun but he didn’t want to do it again. During the interview, M., that’s my friend, talks about how he started writing children’s books. He introduces his delightfully charming son. I didn’t know he had had a son. I lost touch with him just after he got married. I dream that I miss him and want to see him but I also dream that I am envious he had a wife and a son and he’s on TV selling children’s books. I wait for him to mention that I had inspired him but of course he doesn’t. I wait to find some way to find him but there isn’t any.

I’m driving a car going somewhere in a hurry. It’s an old rusted clunker of a car. I don’t remember who my passengers were except people in a hurry. The car slows. More and more. As if driving were fighting inertia and friction and clearly losing. It was not terribly different in feeling than those dreams I used to have as a child where I’m walking on marshmallow floors and it takes forever and every step is work. I pull over. But, mysteriously, I’m on a freeway now, and I pull over to the wrong shoulder through lanes of traffic. A cop stops us. My tire had blown out miles back. He was mad I had pulled off to the wrong shoulder. Unsurprisingly the other three tires were brand new. I don’t know how that one turned out.

What was odd about the whole thing: nobody cared about anything. Nobody noticed anything but they seemed all the more cheerful for it. And all the more successful for their cheer, as well. For me, meanwhile, everything had become incomprehensible and hostile. A dance with no shoes. A car with a broken tire. Am I paralyzed in life for fear of making the wrong decision?

SS