Month: October 2022

I am in an indoor pavilion. It is all on ground level with several quaint businesses all open to a central gathering area. There are a lot of warm wood surfaces and a glass ceiling that lets in a lot of beautiful sunlight. There is a cafe, of sorts, where a couple of musicians are performing for a dozen small tables sparsely populated with people having drinks. I am sitting at one of the tables in the back. I’m with a woman who is like my wife, and a person I don’t know, and also she is Katy Perry. Katy Perry isn’t exactly Katy Perry, she is more petite and her face has angular features—but she is still Katy Perry. 

I have to go to the restroom. I leave the table and navigate an obvious path to the restrooms. The door opens to a nondescript hallway with few options and I follow it. It ends at a door. I open it and enter another type of building then navigate the hallways there. This leads to a restaurant kitchen and I make my way through it and out the back hallway. The door out the back hallway open to an enormous outdoor greenhouse where a large tree has fallen over and its trunk is hallowed out. To get to the other side I crawl into the tree and downward. It is tight, claustrophobic, I am aware that if it were even a little tighter I would have failed here. When I exit the tree at the bottom I turn right and head down a sleek futuristic hallway. There is a door and I open it. Each door opens to a new type of environment that, at first, seems  like it will be unnavigable but, through a combination of limited paths and intuition, are easily navigable to the next area. Eventually, it is clear that I am at the restroom and I am able to pee in a urinal. 

On the way back I become aware how unlikely it is that I will find my way back. I recall the complex labyrinth that lead me here and it seems impossible to make my way back through it in reverse. Still, I soon find the fallen tree. It is too small now to crawl through the center. There is a path along to the left of it that leads up the incline. I am much relived for this, I didn’t think I’d make it back through the husked out hull of the tree again.

When I get back to the cafe there is a group of tourists dancing at the edge of the cafe. The band blocks my return to our table at one end of the room. The line of dancing people blocks me at the only other possible way in. I wait for them to finish. They have large, round, soft butts, and they shake them in unison in such a way that no one could fit between them. I have no choice but to wait for the song to end. 

It ends, and I notion to them that they did a fine thing there. The mood of the cafe seems to agree and everyone generally throws energy at them that says, “That line dancing big booty thing you did there was awesome.” 

I squeak between two of them and make my way back to our table. Someone is just leaving the table having talked to Katy Perry. I ask her what that was about. From her response it seems like the person wanted to talk to her, or ask her something unrelated to her celebrity—they didn’t recognize her. I said, “That must be really nice for you?” She nods but I continue explaining my point—that interacting with someone who doesn’t know who she is must be really nice. I am genuinely empathetic. I am realizing how odd that must be after so many years of stardom. It must be refreshing and grounding to interact with other people as just another person, and not as Katy Perry. She nods as I continue to belabor this point. I’m really proud of myself for thinking I’ve found this inner empathy for a celebrity, I feel like I’ve really done something good here. Idiot.

We get up to leave and end up in an interior parking garage pick-up area. There are few people here. I realize that the androgynous person with Katy is now jealous of something. They pull me close and start to kiss me. It is a closed-mouth kiss on my lips. They hold my head still and firm against their lips and start to rotate us around in circles. They make a humming-kissing sound like a grandmother does when kissing her grandchildren, but this goes on and on and on with the two of us spinning in circles in place. It is getting ridiculous and people in our group have lost interest. They start to depart in their cars and still I am locked in this circular kissing embrace. 

When they let go of me it is only the three of us—Katy Perry, the companion, and myself. Everyone else has gone. Despite the spectacle of the eternal circular kiss, it is clear that Katy Perry is interested in me. She and I talk without talking. We converse in our minds about all manner of things and experience a large chunk of time together in a brief moment. We are then in wonder and adoration for each other, missing each other, pining for each other—as if we have been in wanting of one another for too long. 

The companion is now gone, I don’t know where they went. 

Katy and I are alone, which is both fabulous and terrifying. Terrifying only because I don’t know how to get us out of here. I can’t remember where I parked my car, or if I brought my own car. I realize I can use my phone to order us a ride to anywhere. My phone is not my phone, though. It is narrow, and skinny, and the operating system is standard text that I can’t read without reading glasses. I realize this is not my phone and start to panic slightly. There is a sense that the phone is the only way out of here, there is no ‘next anything’ without it. I touch it, I flick at it, I try everything. It does nothing familiar. 

On the surface of this I am frazzled and confused. Deeper down I recognize this as the usual issue with my phone in this circumstance. These two levels of awareness cannot reconcile and I’m left to be deeply stressed and lost. On some level I am as sad as I possibly can be, I want the world to be simpler—I want for my ability to fix things to be more applicable in this situation. There is an awareness that all the things I do know don’t apply here. There is no way to leave the parking garage pick-up area.

I look at Katy Perry. She is unfazed by any of this.

We were on the road. We were searching, I don’t know what for. My dad was driving, it feels like he was always driving. The road was paved, but it shouldn’t have been. We moved smoothly over it. There was nothing smooth about us. My uncle, my dad’s brother, was in the car. The presence of my wife, but not her, was there as well. My cousins, my uncle’s boys, they were there too. 

In this way we rolled along the road slowly, all of us looking out the windows with no expectation of seeing what we were looking for. On the left side of the road the dirt hillside steeped up sharply and prevented any thoughts from venturing off in that direction. On the other side of the road we passed house after house, all tucked nicely into their rolling landscape of green grass and neat  tidy fences. Everything was so clean. So clean. 

I looked at my cousin and saw the sadness, the inevitability of our fates. My dad was awash with drunken swagger and his brother was stewing in quiet solitude, also full of drink. The cousins looked at each other. Everything was empty. The car was missing all its finishes like the back of a cargo van from the 70’s where the ribs and construction were painted over white—spot welding circles and all. 

Then I spotted him—Owen, my nephew, the thing we were searching for. He was stupidly trying to make himself smaller in the intersection of two fences, but he could not possibly hide in all the neatness. Two sections of perfect fencing came to a corner and Owen, all six foot one inch of him was curling his shoulders forward, trying to sink back into the corner. But I spotted him, I made him, I called it out as we rolled past and slowly all the drunken travelers in our car responded. My dad stopped the car. He started to reverse it. 

Owen moved like an elastic creature, moving over the fence and then from one yard to the next. His body bent, and curved unnaturally, over tall wood fences and down into yards out of sight. He was moving in the opposite direction, trying to evade us.

My dad continued backing up, down the road, a reverse chase. I jumped out thinking I’d be better on foot. Then everyone jumped out. Owen was hiding now, no longer moving, it was hard to know where he went. 

We were all spread out on the road, confused and searching. My dad had an expanding contraption that he expertly unfolded on the lawn of a nearby house. It was green. It resembled a portable play pen but grew into a large crooked box of an unknown material. It was a trap. The idea was to trap Owen in it. I knew this would work, that the trap would be successful. So I kind of gave up on the chase.

There was an oxygen tank in the car, the kind that sits alongside someone’s bed when they need added oxygen. It was in the road now and rolling toward my dad. He was frustrated, angry in a way that I was too familiar with. I was worried the oxygen tank might explode, it seemed like it shouldn’t be jostled around. My dad picked it up and threw it with his crazy angry gorilla strength. At this point, I knew we were all fucked. 

I watched the oxygen tank fly up the road past our parked van and hit a wall, then bounce back toward all of us. It hit the ground behind the van, in the midst of our group of searchers. Layers of it broke off and smoke spilled out. I knew it was going to explode. 

My wife was trying to crawl to me on the road surface, to safety. I motioned to her to keep crawling, faster, but to stay low.  Then the tank exploded and the chrome outer layers of it blew into shrapnel that flew straight upward. I was grateful for that. I thought the hot metal parts would fly horizontally into us and cut us to pieces. I watched the explosion lift up into the sky and begin to descend down toward me in long slow arcs of smokey trails. As they came toward me their speed slowed and I batted them away effortlessly. The oxygen tank issue was resolved. 

It was time to leave the road, the car, the whole pursuit, and get somewhere safe. I no longer cared what happened to Owen. 

I was trying to make my way to the Main Street, to where shops and people are. I am carrying my twin baby girls in my arms—but one is noticeably older than the other by a year or so. They both say different things to me, both appropriate for their age. They are getting heavier. 

I am moving quickly to the safety of the city street with a naked baby girl in each arm.  I am aware of  what they each say and I am in tears, but I need to get everyone to safety. Carrying them is warming me, connecting me, I am swooned by their simple love at this young age. 

My mom is walking alongside me in our group of people. We are all trying to get to the place, to the place where we will be able to rest and be safe.  That place is just ahead, it is Main Street in Pasadena. My arms are getting very tired and I have to give one of the girls to my mom to carry. She takes one of them without expression or words and we move on. I wrap both arms around my one naked baby girl and look toward the corner. 

It is right there. I am pretty sure we are going to make it.