SUNDAY

Carmen wakes up having slept only lightly. Lying in the hotel bed she is just able to snatch at her last dream’s end and, by focusing on the last scene, is able to rewind and recover it. In the dream she had been in the CNS, trying to find Kierk. Or rather it had looked like the CNS, had all the surface appearances of the normal everyday building, but somehow everything was different. The building had the same relations, the same designs and shapes and hung scientific posters and corkboards, but there was something in the deep structures, some presence she could sense not in her base perception but rather solely through whatever apperceptive means she normally identifies intentionality, teleology, mind, life. So moving through the building she had also known it was a façade for something actually organic, biological. She had been aware of this but unperturbed and unfazed and her attention had been entirely on finding Kierk, hurrying after him to deliver a message, some discovery that she could not articulate now while she’s awake but had fully possessed in the dream. So she had searched through the hallways that were not really hallways and in the stairwells that were not really stairwells until she heard, around a bend, an elevator door ding open. Turning a corner she had seen in front of the elevator doors a macaque in its plastic box, set like a totem to greet the opening of the elevator. Carmen had paused, watching it from afar as it writhed within the box, the skullcap on its head vibrating obscenely as its body scampered about. And from the elevator had come the form of Kierk, a stooped and harried figure, cautiously approaching and leaning in as if to listen. For a while he just held an ear to the macaque’s lips, then with a sound as loud as a gunshot he had rocketed back sporting just the ragged remains of his skull. The bang itself had woken her up, but she had experienced one last inter-regnum which had landed her back firmly in the dream where she had been standing in shock facing the monkey down the hallway, Kierk’s legs splayed out as the elevator closed on them, and the monkey had oriented itself in his chair toward her and was now smiling in a way that only a human could smile.

The whole process of remembering the dream had taken a total of three myoclonic jerks.