World War Two Skirmish

I was losing my nerves and on the verge of going AWOL, jumping off the train in enemy territory and fending for myself in winter with nothing but the clothes on my back and in my rucksack, a Walther P-38, some K-rats, and a half-empty bottle of Cognac. The rocking of the train we sneaked onto didn't help to assuage a fear that was veering into terror, nor did the fact that it was black as Hitler’s soul in our ass-numbing and kidney-tenderizing box car, a palpable darkness illuminated only when the ruddy glow of a cigarette flared up to reveal the floating head of a devil staring vacuously into perdition whenever one of us took a drag. My platoon was heading into Axis-held territory, given the task of halting the retreat of local Nazi command and its escort forces; we were part of a brigade advancing up Italy that met with unexpectedly fierce resistance as we approached Tyrol. We haven’t had any leave time since that weekend we spent pillaging and fornicating in the Eternal City nearly six weeks ago and as a result our morale was straddling the edge of a bayonet, mine especially because the mantle of command had just recently fallen on me and I was reeling under the burden of responsibility. Bedraggled and bleary-eyed we stared at each other, faces sunken into hapless ghouls radiating sullen resignation, smoking cigarettes and sipping on flasks and bottles. I was sharing my sergeant's flask of whiskey, my psyche gritting its teeth while with eyes the color of dragons’ scales I tacitly made a pact with him that I'll somehow keep it together long enough for us to piss away our filthy lucre on whores in Venice. Or long enough to die.

Dawn didn't so much break as it desultorily slunk over the Alps, creeping through a thick slate-colored mist that congealed in white pools on the ground — and froze our asses off. It wasn’t even the end of the year and already it felt like February: to stave off frostbite I commanded the platoon to do jumping jacks for five minutes at the top of every other hour. We deboarded the train last night in the inglorious manner of tramps and marched overnight to set up an ambush at a sprawling country estate adjacent to one of the roads the Nazis were expected to retreat along when our parent battalion attacked Verona to the south. The world was a forlorn shade: white with frost and mist, bleak, cheerless, and still and cold as death itself. But things were going to heat up and liven up soon enough and I wasn’t going to live long, let along make first lieutenant, by staring idiotically at impromptu German military parades: weapons and ammo had to be distributed and squads concealed in tactically advantageous positions. The tactical bit was a frustration because our intelligence was nigh useless: two hour's of a gaggle of brass in starched uniforms and smelling of Old Spice® delivering in crisp militarese in front of maps something to the effect of "You're fighting Germans! Somewhere! Who have guns, and maybe other stuff!". My mind’s horizons were darkened by images of us getting run down by a mechanized infantry troop. To make matters worse, we were running low on rifles and ammunition and only had two bazookas with five rockets between them, so even two tanks — or just one Panther — could roll over us and chew us back into primordial soup with their machine guns. But, no time for morbid ruminations, especially since the Krauts would certainly oblige me. I sent alpha squad to a position behind two abandoned trucks and a low stone fence in front of the manor, armed with a Beretta, a Tommy gun, and one of the bazookas with two rockets; command squad bravo lay in wait closer to the road in a small stone building, wherein I was armed with my Walther P-38 while the other two each had a Beretta sub-machine gun; in an old stable on a low rise farther out from the road squad charlie lurked in an old stable with the last of our Garands and a bazooka with three rockets.

After we finished our preparations — clearing fields of fire and setting up obstacles in the road to slow the enemy down — we sat down for a break to eat some rations and have a smoke, when a bird call signaled us approaching enemy forces. One: good, just infantry. Those Krauts were no fools, though: a small platoon of them flitted like riled hornets from cover to cover in twos, wisely operating under the assumption of a trap. Despite their vulpine tactics it was just a protracted skirmish and we prevailed without suffering any casualties. At its conclusion I assembled squad leaders around me, about to assign men to strip the bodies of weapons and ammunition, when I heard two bird calls just as I made out the telltale rumbling and squeaking of tanks. We wasted no time in returning to our positions, and just in time: as soon as my squad settled into our firing positions the dark silhouette of a tank became visible in the mist not more than fifty yards ahead. A moment later a jet of smoke lanced out from alpha’s position followed by a thud and an explosion, igniting a chattering furor of small arms fire and sending soldiers scurrying into my line of sight. We shot them down as soon as they rounded the burning Panzer IV. My elation drained down into my boots, however, the instant I saw a Panther bypass the wreck and head in our direction while firing its machine guns at alpha’s position. I had to keep my squad mates from fleeing, knowing full well they’d get cut down before they made it halfway to any cover: “Wait, damn it!” I screamed at them as I hastily tied a couple grenades together and slathered mud on them. I instructed the them to circle the building opposite the Panther as soon as it was about to pass our position, to attack the inevitable soldiers advancing behind the rolling cover. After they left I leaped and ran up to the Panther — pissing myself as I saw a machine gun swivel toward me — pulled the pin out of one of the grenades and shoved the bundle into a space between one of the rollers and the tracks, then leaped immediately back to follow my squad mates just as a burst of machine gun fire struck the ground where I stood just a second ago. Time froze and a wall of sound struck me numb as I almost tripped over one of my squad mates holding his leg with one arm and trying to raise himself up on the other, teeth chattering and eyes already glazed over like a marble head stone, thrashing his other leg in vain to gain purchase on a ground made slick by a steaming pool of blood; beside myself with fury I roughly shoved the surviving squad mate aside and emptied a clip into two Germans directly in front of me, my heart beating in time to the flashes erupting out of the muzzle of my gun. I glanced back at the Panther and saw smoke explode out of its cannon just as a bazooka from squad C's position slammed into it; my adrenaline dove from fight to flight like an attacking Thunderbolt when I saw the stable collapse into a smoldering heap at the same time as a wall of flame blossomed up the front of the Panther. Just as I was about to break into a run I saw another arc of smoke crawl out from the rubble of charlie's position and slam into the Panther. Secondary explosions in the Panther hurled the main turret into the air like a crumpled paper cup toward the road and opened up a chasm of towering flames wreathed in diesel smoke, flinging me into the stone building behind me; “Someone survived!” I thought giddily as I blacked out.

I came to feeling arms hoisting me up onto my feet and turning me around to a corporal’s beaming visage. Men were pouring out of the manor and from the now-burning stable; I counted, only one casualty! And we took out a Panther! Looks like we’ll be drinking up my Cognac tonight. We sat down and slapped each other on the back as we opened up our rations and passed around cigarettes, white as sheet rock, covered in grime and soot, but grinning like kids at a baseball game. As the ringing in my ears subsided and the blood started returning to our faces I was about to review the tactical situation and resume our interrupted corpse-pilfering, for though the sun was already westering (where had all the time gone?) there was at least two hours of daylight left — the day was by no means over — when out of the corner of my eye I detected movement. Without thinking I crouched behind the burning Panther to fire on ... oh, my God! What have I done? There was four of them, perhaps the owners of the commandeered estate stealing away the moment they deemed it safe to; a young man in a black coat crumpled at once to the ground, causing the rest of the family to run across the road toward the field, the keening despair of a woman splitting the air like a knife tearing through a burlap sack while I stood dumb with incredulity and rapidly escalating remorse, my arm still outstretched holding my smoking Walther P-38. A hand fell on my shoulder and when I slowly turned and saw the mournful expression on my sergeant’s face the dam of self-reproach broke, its waters pulling my body down onto a bale of hay as they flowed in rivers out of my eyes, wracking my body with sobs as I dropped my gun and covered my face. Sweet Jesus, I shot a child! More refugees filed past us down the road, most of them on foot but a few piled onto horse-drawn carts, not even noticing us. When I pulled myself together enough to look up I could see columns of smoke in the distance where our battalion was advancing. Suddenly, among the refugees I spotted a silver Mercedes laboring through the muddy ruts followed by a couple SS officers on motorcycles, whereupon I immediately picked up my Walther P-38 and turned to fire on them. As did my entire platoon; this is what we came here for.

Stranded in Detroit

I'd met a girl online who lived in the Detroit area and had traveled to see her, but something went horribly awry and I ended up not only all alone in an unfamiliar place but under menacing circumstances, with nothing to my name except the clothes on my back and a few dollars in change in my pockets — and no ID!

After having barely escaped a perilous situation I found myself aimlessly wandering down streets lined with houses in an old peripheral suburb of one of Detroit's satellite cities, hoping to find an arterial before night waxed morning. After nearly an hour of walking I came across what I sought running along the depression of a small valley below me and lined with the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls ubiquitous to the soulless and uniform materialistic American culture that always strikes me as bleakly alternate-universe Soviet. As I descended toward the busy avenue I saw a crowded bus stop on the other side of the intersection and decided to see if it would take me downtown, hopefully to where I could inquire about shelter for the night, a meal maybe, and certainly at least a blanket since I would most likely be spending the night outside. After we shuffled aboard and sat down a diminutive, stern-looking young black lady stood in the aisle near the front and prattled away in a martial tone about rules, privileges, and expectations of what I soon realized was a residential reintegration program for street people. "Very nice," I thought, "but I want to return home, not settle in this benighted burg."

I deboarded with the other passengers, partly out of curiosity and partly to try to bum a few drags off someone's cigarette, in a large parking lot surrounded by low cinder-block buildings that may have been barracks or an elementary school. Suddenly I found myself back on a bus, squinting through brilliant morning daylight occasionally occluded by freeway ramps threading their way above an industrial sprawl lining the river we traveled adjacent to, making out as my eyes adapted to the glare a massive conglomeration of skyscrapers I took to be downtown Detroit beyond the icy blue water. White clouds raced alongside us in a dark azure sky; a brisk but pleasant spring day seemed to be foretold. I was almost out of money and had gotten nowhere in search of meals, blankets, or even puffs of smoke and my eyes felt gritty like they do when sleep deprivation and undernourishment set in — to be honest, I hadn't tried very hard: the coldness and barely-bridled animosity in this city and its people scared the shit out of me and I avoided speaking to people for fear of advertising the presence of a flailing quail to hungry foxes lurking in the vicinity.

The bus stopped in a parking lot beneath a large freeway ramp and in front of a modern-looking square building in front of us. Most of us deboarded as it was clear this was a stop where drivers may take brief breaks in order to pollute their lungs or relieve their pothole-bludgeoned bladders and bowels. On looking at the building ahead of me I saw "Justice Center" spelled out in crisp brass letters above the glass double doors of its entrance and I cringed inwardly as I saw the miserable traffic in and out of that dismal and sinister institution. "No way in hell am I sleeping outside in this city!" I thought to myself as the patina of prevarication encasing me the past couple days cracked open and fell to the ground. "I'll sooner hazard the perils of the road before I let this awful place have its way with me." The driver returned and started up the engine and I made my way back to the bus with the other passengers.

First Day of Summer Vacation

It was the last day of school for the year and we were having a pot-luck party to celebrate the coming of summer vacation. Something about the atmosphere about it felt like high school but the classroom reminded me more of the Russian class I took at Portland Community college; the air was warm and the sunlight filtering through the pollen felt almost syrupy.

For some reason I slipped out of the room to go to the locker room to take a shower, perhaps because I'd gotten food spilled on me. It was just down the hall and consisted itself of a narrow hallway lined with lockers, the showers small cubicles the size of bathroom stalls branching out of it. it was cramped and there was no room for me to drape my clothing on the towel dispenser, it already being covered with another's clothing. The air was thick with steam and the smell of sweat; I made do somehow and took a quick shower in a tiny stall more suitable for being in a motor home than a school locker room. The football team, or some kind of group of burly ass-grabbers, was out in the locker room filling it with a merry cacophony of accusations of gayness and boasts of athletic and sexual prowess.

When I stepped back into the classroom, fresh from my ablutions, it had turned into a small cafeteria or a quick-service restaurant with a small buffet-like serving counter like in Subway. I was alone with my boss, who was a very attractive woman whose features I can't recall other than she was blond; I was even in a uniform that featured a red polo shirt. We were closing the place, she breaking down and cleaning the steam table as I was cleaning the dining area. People occasionally trickled in individually, causing her considerable consternation because we were already behind schedule yet it wasn't quite closing time and so they must be served. Contrary to my nature I was nonplussed and drifted blissfully and almost vacuously, like I was in a trance or still high from a bowl I'd smoked a couple hours ago.

Suddenly I was standing at a bus stop on the corner of SE Stark and 39th. It was still warm out but the sky was overcast and the wind had started to kick up into breezes that felt like the snorting of an excited horse. A couple guys in their forties or fifties — very white and blue-collar — walked down the street past me and crossed the intersection. The older-looking guy was holding eloquently forth on an amusingly irreverent description of the difference between Christmas and Easter, the particulars of which I can't recall; the younger was chuckling. Just as the older man stepped out onto the street he tossed his half-finished cigarette onto the sidewalk. I walked over and picked it up, still lit, to finish it and told him "Merry Christmas" and winked as he turned around briefly, grinning, then continued down the street with his companion.

The End of the World

I was standing outside my classroom working out the logistics of a drug deal with a chubby, dark-haired acquaintance of mine I'd been trying to find for some time; in this dream I was fifteen and back in school. Acquaintances of mine had all pitched in enough with me to score a bag, so considering how others’ money and expectations were riding on the successful completion of this transaction and how long it had already been taking I was impatient to get it over with. Just come over to her house near the Tigard Fred Meyer after school she said, she'd already bought the weed earlier; the directions she gave me were simple enough, I didn’t feel a need to write them down. That taken care of, I said I’d see her later and entered the classroom — I think it was a biology or chemistry class — to take a test. The room was medium-sized and lit feebly by a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, reluctantly illuminating walls the color of tobacco-stained teeth. I breezed through the test with ease, having had enough time to triple-check my answers, after which I handed both the written exam and a cassette I recorded earlier to my instructor, whose wild sylvan disarray of a coif and the matching brown slacks and sweater reminded me of pictures of Albert Einstein, only there was no spark of life or brilliance to this inert, melancholic figure. Just as I started getting my things together to leave I panicked, thinking for some inexplicable reason that I’d forgotten the cassette; I rushed past my instructor, who was still standing in front of the rows of rapidly emptying desks, a vacuous expression on his face, to search the desk I knew he kept our submissions in. I was relieved to see that I had indeed just lost my mind and it was right there on top of my test, along with thirty-one dollars. That was exactly how much bus fare was, and I looked sidelong at the instructor to see if he’d woken out of his trance, having in mind to steal the money so I could use my fare for something else, though as yet no clear image of a specific desire had formed. Never mind; I closed the drawer, leaving the money behind as I walked away, realizing my instructor could easily misplace my exam or fail it if he suspected I’d stolen from him.

By the time I arrived at the designated Fred Meyer it was already completely dark out, one of those late November evenings I always like; not one of the vicious, chilly sideways deluges you have to hold onto your hat in, but one of the pleasantly cool — mercury just north of brisk — nights speckled with intermittent patches of light rain tossed casually on mild breezes. It was wet enough to soften the sounds and smells of the world, cool enough for me to wear my favorite heavy flannel. As I crossed the parking lot I suddenly stopped short in my second panic attack of the day: I'd completely forgotten the directions to my ad hoc friend-cum-dealer's house! Not only that, but I didn't have change for the pay phone and hadn’t even bothered to write down her number; did she even have a phone? Jesus Christ! I snarled at myself in contempt as I jerked back into brisk motion towards the store, waves of anger resonating at high frequency through my body and evaporating into steam off my clothing. I paced back and forth near the store entrance, wracking my brains trying to remember just one or two of the directions, knowing that once my feet started marching in the right direction my internal pigeon will faithfully guide me the rest of the way to my destination. No dice; my mind felt like gelatin that had started to set, squeezing out even the most elementary thought was like trying to suck molten glass up a ten-foot metal straw. Once my fury had subsided and I accepted the fact that I wasn’t getting any drugs tonight, I stood with my hands in my pocket staring blankly at the butt cans lurking in the corners of the entryway, halfheartedly hoping beyond reason that a dry cigarette would materialize out of those fetid, tar-colored pools. Shaking my head to wrest myself out of my imbecilic reverie, I slowly walked back to the bus stop; best just to give up on the already-failed endeavor and catch the next bus home before my transfer ran out of time and forced me to continue the journey by foot, an hours-long prospect that filled me with no joy and a not a little dread. Besides, I though pursing my lips downward, my acquaintances can deal with disappointment, just as I can deal with their histrionics. Don’t we all do that stuff all the time, anyway?

I must have loitered at Fred Meyer longer than I realized, because the bus arrived just a few minutes after I arrived at the stop. During the half-hour trip home I reflected on the abysmal state of the world I lived in, how civilization had declined so far the half of the dry part of the globe that was still inhabitable to some degree was enmired in a morass of desperation, terror, violence, and despair. We weren't taught much history in school, in fact it was actively encouraged to skirt the subject: school was a half-hearted attempt to keep in motion the creaking wheels of an ancient education, now watered down to reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of business- and agriculture-related subjects. Perhaps it was hoped ignorance could be used to buttress the sagging bulwarks of our species’ morale? Being inquisitive and stubborn, I wasn’t about to go along with that particular program and so did my own research and came up with a reasonably complete picture of what happened. The day of reckoning had been a long time coming for us, the brilliant masters of the earth who couldn’t seem to apply rational cooperative self-interest to our use of the world’s once resources or in living with together; wars fought with terrifying weapons blistered and scarred vast swathes of the surface, so much poison was poured onto the land and into the air and seas that much of the world was a noxiously lethal cesspool, rising temperatures and melting ice caps turned a benign planet into a ball of raging storms of water and ice and fire and dirt. Even the gene pool was scorched and warped: not only had we exterminated millions of plant and animal species, but we in turn have become mostly sterile — less than one birth for every twenty people, with an average life expectancy down to the late twenties, if the more optimistic estimations are anything to go by. Worst of all was the plague that struck out of nowhere, transforming billions of living human beings into the walking dead; or so we called them, but they weren't the zombies from the ancient flat-screen films, but were eerily similar in personality and nearly as intelligent as they were when they were alive, though over years they gradually decayed into mindlessly violent ghouls. Needless to say, these horrors only fanned the flames of war that had already engulfed our dying world, but it was a fool's campaign because the ghouls were smart enough to fight back and with every fallen opponent their ranks swelled by one. Eventually we learned, and now the living and the undead live together in peace for the most part, an uneasy one here in the western hemisphere and revered in the much of Confucian Maoist Asia. To our credit, despite American tendency towards boorishness we gave the ghouls the same constitutional privileges and protections we enjoy, though how much use that unwieldy tome full of contradictions and loopholes is against prejudice is questionable. Not that it mattered, I thought grimly as I stepped down into the small lake that was my stop for three months out of the year: there won’t be a living soul left in a hundred years. Sure, rumors flew about research labs working on a cure for the disease and our infertility, but whatever remained of advanced medical science was dispersed in myriad small drug manufacturing labs. I was living in the End of the World.

I walked up the river of mud our driveway always became during this time of year to find a group of kids on my front lawn, my little brother and his friends were gathered around a very bright young ghoul their age. Despite being wet and it still raining I decided to hang around for a little to see what they were up to; they were discussing their favorite subject, perhaps a favorite subject of pre-teens since the dawn of human history, which was the mystery of sex and birth. The ghoul was asking them all the questions, really, but none of her living peers knew any more about the matter than she did and so the conversation degenerated into outlandish conjecture and coarse humor. My curiosity satisfied I decided to go inside to change out of my wet clothing and relax. On my way down the stairs to my basement room I was met with the spectacle of another ghoul, this one a powerful heavyset man who was almost an idiot, battling one of the monsters that roamed the world, another legacy of our ancestors misguided application of their advanced sciences. In the wake of the relative peace that had descended on the world in the past few decades their numbers had been growing, which terrified us remnants because we long thought that they had been created sterile, ironic considering that their creators now are. He, who was in fact my grandfather, was skewering a large tentacle that had forced its way into the house through the garage set into the hillside with a makeshift spear fashioned from a fireplace poker lashed to a metal pole; I knew immediately it was the dreaded kraken, named after mythical sea monsters that resembled the recently become mythical giant ocean squid. His wife, another ghoul but this one a disembodied and rotting head perched on a thick mass of thin tentacles, was screaming hysterically about how we were all doomed. I knew I lacked the strength to engage in such combat, and honestly the selfish part of me figured that the undead were more fitting disposable front line troopers anyway, so I turned instead to my grandmother and tried as best as I could to console her by cradling her head in my arms.

After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to calm grandma's hysteria and realizing there would be no peace for me to have in my room for the better part of the evening I climbed back upstairs to grab a bite to eat and see if the TV had anything more entertaining than static to offer, the pangs of hunger beginning to settle desultorily in my stomach. On my way to the kitchen I glanced out the living room picture windows to see the undead girl bent over an oak barrel used as a flower pot, her pants down around her ankles and legs spread out while the living children excitedly stuck their fingers in her ass and vagina, pulling them in and out in a crude parody of the sex act, undoubtedly for her education and their morbid titillation. At one point she seemed to groan and a torrent of some kind of watery fluid gushed out of her ass onto the just withdrawn fingers of my leering little brother, whom I despised. Having been sufficiently repulsed and saddened by the scene to lose my appetite I instead headed out the back door to join my sister, who was desultorily swinging in the bamboo cage that was her playpen. She was a year younger than me, blond, and a perfect gothic Lolita counterpart to Alice Liddell of Through the Looking Glass renown. I had the deepest sympathy for her, for like her bright and colorful alternate self she was caught in a vicious and maddening current, only through a macabre negative of that other impossible world; we all were, but she seemed more powerless than anyone else I knew, and more innocent if such a thing existed or ever did. I always enjoyed reading about Alice's adventures in Wonderland, though much of it was vexingly incomprehensible to me. We talked quietly for a bit — she on the swing and I sitting a few feet in front of her on a wood chair — about things I don't remember. She was confined to that cage for her protection, though against what and how the cage protected her I didn't know and it seemed absurd and unjust, since none of the rest of us were. She was my only real friend in the whole world, and I loved her dearly.

Return to Switzerland

I was back in Switzerland, living there with my aunt and uncle in Wallbach, where we'd first lived before we moved to Brunegg. The how and why was never made clear to me.

In the beginning of the dream we were gathered outside around a patio set of two chairs and a small table, something smoking away in the black Coleman™ barbecue nearby. My aunt was sitting in a chair reading while my uncle was engaged in setting up some strange thing that jutted up into the sky that was being blown about by the wind and resembled the Pod (sculpture) on Burnside near Powell's Books but was probably a dream-distorted covering of some sort, because it was blustery and looked like it was going to rain even though we were in sunlight at the time. In fact, that was the strangest thing I immediately noticed about this dream: the initial environment consisted of us on a rectangular plot of green grass in a nondescript field of gray, and the sky was gray, too, and though where we were was in a brilliant wintry-seeming spot of sunlight, the sky was a nondescript roiling of darker gray. I saddled my large internal-frame mountaineering backpack on and asked my aunt for permission to roam around the village, leading me to conclude we must have just recently arrived, and she said that I would need to be back in one or two hours.

And so I set forth down a gloom-enshrouded street, apprehensive of who I would run into and wondering what my old friends and acquaintances would make of me and my return. I was heading toward a landing on the Rhein I used to go to in summer to wolf down fish and beer in some kind of recurring weekend river festival, meandering aimlessly and looking around. Somehow, at some point I ran into Grenacher, an acquaintance I knew when I lived in Brunegg; only it wasn't the towering poster child of the Third Reich I knew, who used to masturbate on train windows when we went to go drinking or to buy hash in Zürich, but a strange composite of people I can't immediately recognize the components of. I was also in school again, apparently, because I was working on a speech that had to be at least three hundred words long. It was assigned to me earlier in a classroom by a bombshell of a Spanish teacher I had in St. Mary's, and since the subject of the speech was of our choosing I selected to do one about the future of energy production. The speech was going to be the basis for an essay on the chosen subject. I was working on my speech in the car Grenacher was driving, from where and to what destination, neither were clear, but we ended up at what I assume was Grenacher's house.

It was still blustery and the sky was darker and lowering menacingly, as we sat on stone steps leading up from the sidewalk to the back porch on which was piled precariously an assortment of what looked like junk. We must have had somewhere to go, because Grenacher was telling me to hurry. I was starting to bog down toward the end of the essay, and for some inexplicable reason I we both lit up long, thing cigars that burned slowly and fragrantly, more like shisha (hookah tobacco), and I ended up trying to write the last few sentences with the tip of my cigar, which ended up scrawling thick smudgy lines similar to crayons but a bit oily and the text turned out to be illegible. When I bitched about how hard it is to hurry when you're writing with a cigar tip Grenacher found a pen for me, causing a summit of junk to cascade down to the wooden deck. I only had a couple more sentences to go, but time was approaching so we jumped into his car and sped off while I continued working on the speech, getting frustrated with the pressure of a deadline and starting to have a hard time articulating myself in German.

We arrived at the school, meaning our destination must have been there and I was cramming an assignment that was due that day, in fact in a few minutes. The classroom looked more like a dimly lit bridge of a ship, as if the crew of Star Trek's Enterprise had settled on a romantic ambiance for a change of scenery. In the room small groups were scattered around and they seemed to be quietly arguing of fighting, though it was quiet and there were no overt signs of agitation or violence; it was just a feeling in the air. Grenacher had taken off somewhere and I was walking around trying like hell to beat my head through the block that was keeping me from finishing what was so far an excellent speech, counting my words and also counting the people in the room for some reason connected to the words and almost as if they were words in the speech. Andrea, a girl I knew in Wallbach who was a classmate, was there and followed me around interrupting, and though I can't recall what she was saying I kept losing count and she was making it impossible for me to complete my last sentence to my satisfaction. I told her respectfully to please leave me alone until I finished my speech, which she did, and shortly afterward I jotted it down.

Stoner Charlie

Charlie Brown and Linus were leisurely scaling an upward path of rocks protruding out of a shallow pool in a brick-paved plaza towards the large boulder in the center under the bright mid-morning sun. Charlie explained to Linus that earlier he'd found a couple hand-rolled cigarettes in a depression near the top of the boulder, Linus accompanying him presumably because he'd expressed an interest in smoking when Charlie Brown had a pack of Marlboros, that were confiscated by Charlie's mom. They were still there, and when Linus examined one he sniffed it and commented on how funny it smelled, whereupon Charlie Brown lit his and Linus' and inhaled, agreeing that it also tasted a bit odd. Undeterred, the both smoked their cigarettes with much hacking and coughing. Shortly afterward they both started laughing and holding a strangely incoherent and disjointed conversation that wasn't really a conversation at all.

Their friends showed up and asked them what they were doing, but on receiving no reply that made any sense from the giggling and gibbering idiots Lucy asked Charlie what the hell was wrong with them. Anyway, it was time to go to Charlie's house and so Charlie and Linus stumbled down to join their friends in the plaza and off they went. Because Charlie and Linus kept uttering the queerest and nonsensical things and kept giggling and chuckling, Lucy repeatedly scowled at them and the rest exchanged puzzled glances. Upon arrival at Charlie's house everyone gathered into the kitchen, whereupon Linus froze and stared dumbly out into space while Charlie started slowly jerking his head around with his eyes glazed and after sniffing some Comet started tossing it up in shafts of sunlight streaming in from the windows and oohing and awing as the lime-colored clots of heavy dust fell to the floor, commenting on how cool it looked. After a time wherein this and similar such antics occurred Charlie's mother returned home to an apartment that was thoroughly trashed and in the midst of which stood a group of children looking both guilty and worried looks, except for the mute Linus and Comet-covered Charlie, who on noticing her walked up to her grinning and held up to her what looked like a PC tablet that had speakers and proceeded to play a dissonant Ween-like song relating how in 1984 the doggies will get their revenge, rise up and enslave us, the lyrics to which he'd obviously made while in his delirium scrolling down the screen.

"That's nice," his mom replied in a surprisingly offhand manner considering the condition of the apartment and her son, "Now clean this mess up immediately!" Whereat Charlie's friends leave without a word, leading the still-entranced Linus with them by the hand. Time shifts forward into evening and Charlie, appearing to be back to his senses, nervously walks up to his mother sitting on an easy chair and reading a paper and asks her what it means to be high. Not even taking the paper down she replies casually that it depends on the kind of drug you're on.

Dognapping

Night had fallen an indeterminable amount of time ago and a light snow flurry was adding to the already almost ankle-deep sheet of snow covering the ground in a large slightly concave clearing in a forest, where I and around twenty others stood and sat in a large dispersed group around some picnic benches. We were waiting for food; all of us were homeless and it was meal time. When the grub finally arrived there was the usual murmur of complaint at the meagerness of the portions, among which I recall were what appeared to be burger shots. The dogs, however, that my less responsible peers insist on having for security and as panhandling props, didn't complain, though they certainly did beg.

At one point, and this is a section where my recollection of the dream is hazy, a couple dogs got into a rather mild tussle, and in the process one got loose and ran off somewhere. We all felt bad, or acted like we did, but meal time was over by then and it wasn't getting any warmer or earlier and individually and in small groups we dispersed to our respective camps and squats. For some reason I ran a ways, perhaps out of fear for my belongings or because I didn't want anyone to see where I was camping, through another clearing nearby, passing out of view of most of the group behind me and catching up with a solitary figure some score or two yards ahead of me. At some point I ended up eavesdropping on a small camp of about four traveling punk rock kids, which was probably near my camp, and they had the runaway dog there and were discussing eating it — though to their credit the discussion lacked enthusiasm.

The fun part: my awareness existing in two places simultaneously. I could see the owner of the dog, an old bearded man, looking for his dog with three charitable peers near the clearing where dinner was served, looking rather forlorn. The wind had picked up a little and the snowfall was picking up in intensity, promising a rough night for those who don't bed down early enough. He called the dog a couple times, but his voice was feeble, and one man put his hand on his shoulder and recommended that he save his strength and worry about bedding down for the night, on account of the weather. Meanwhile, I walked into the kids' camp and patted my legs and called to the dog by its name (an advantage to not being restricted to just a single point in space-time!), and the dog followed me, surprising the kids but eliciting no overt hostility from them. I jogged ahead of the dog, calling its name repeatedly and it gleefully loped after me; it was one of the most beautiful Malamutes I've seen and I'd fallen in love with it immediately. We ran into the search party on the other side of the clearing we were in, as they were morosely trudging back to the dinner clearing and presumably from their to their camps.

The dog ran up to the old man and licked his hand, wagging its tail slightly and he was overjoyed and thanked me. At that moment in the story a shift in time occurred and a small group of us homeless were sitting near a roaring fire, the man sitting with his dog and I all by myself near one of the punk rock kids, a girl I recall as being the one who expressed the most vehement reluctance to kidnapping the dog and eating it, and who looked miserable with both hunger and guilt. I though of consoling her, suggesting that she take and eat another similar, and apparently masterless dog (where did that one come from?) sitting nearby. I'm not sure if I was serious or if it was a cruel jest on my part, to rub some salt into the wounds in her conscience, but either way I thought better of it.