May 16, 2003

• I had a dream this morning. This is the second half of it.
  
  I was at this old, old house that resonates with a couple of real-life places. The first is my grandparents’ old house in Nashville. It’s a lovely expanse of upper-middle-class built in 1919. It got sold while I was in my early 20s, and most of my experiences there were before my teen years, so my memories of it are that it’s a huge mansion with about a zillion secret places. That’s one of the places. The other is another from that side of the family, Echo Lodge, which I’ve ‘blogged about before. It’s a log cabin from about the same time period, built in what was then the rural countryside, but what is now the edge of encroaching suburbs.
  
  So this dream house is about three stories tall, and has many layers of basement. I have moved out, but I’m visiting my old housemate there. She hands me a phone handset in disgust and says, “Here, you deal with this.” She’s wearing a bathrobe and is going back into the kitchen to make breakfast.
  
  A man on the phone tells me that someone is going to have to pay the back bills for the utilities. I used to live in this house, so I’m worried that my name is still on the bills, even though I know it’s not. I tell him I’m not responsible for it, and I have no idea why I’m talking to him. He keeps insisting that someone has to pay.
  
  Eventually, she comes back out on the second story balcony, and is watching me talk on the phone, sipping coffee and grinning. I have paperwork for the bills spread out around me. The man has materialized there on the porch, and is telling me that someone has to pay.
  
  I see my housemate turn around and adopt a very serious pose. The man looks up at the sky. It’s gray and forceful. “It’s a tornado!” I say. None of us can do anything but freeze. The tornado starts pounding the house right next to where I’m sitting; it sounds like a really really forceful spray wash. The paperwork flies around.
  
  Finally I break from the trance, and yell over the din, “We have to go this way..” My housemate knows what I’m talking about, but the man has to be guided. We go to a very steep stairway, that’s more of a ladder that’s an escape route through the walls of the house. It has raised rails, so we can slide down them without going step-by-step. We get to the bottom and we’re engulfed in blackness. The power’s out, and we don’t have flashlights or candles.
  
  I imagine what it would be like to be trapped under there. My housemate and the man have run off, and I’m separated from them. I picture the whole house collapsed overhead, and me stuck in this dark place for days, groping around in the pitch black.
  
  Then, somehow, I’m outside with my two friends. We’re in a dense fog, such that we can barely see each other just a few feet away. We’re looking to find a way back to the house to see what happened, since the storm is obviously over.
  
  We pass a big green truck, parked by the road. It’s got places for masses of people to sit in the back, ostensibly to be transported away from disaster areas. (The joke my mind is playing on itself here is from ‘Soylent Green.’) The truck driver is smoking a joint and smiles at us and waves. (More green.)
  
  We make our way to the house. It’s the only thing left standing, at least as far as we can tell in the fog. Whole sections of siding have been removed by the tornado, and by rescue teams. There are possessions poking out of these holes: lamps, oven mitts, furniture, money.
  
  And there, on the balcony, is the owner. He’s on a cell phone. He’s arguing with an insurance agent. He’s saying that SOMEone will HAVE to pay….

  • 4:24 pm
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