His eyes burned red in the wall-length mirror. Fine airborne plaster particles were the irritant. Not recognizing the public bathroom, the traveler knew he was at a place in sleep where he stopped willing his thoughts and they started willing themselves. He glanced down at the splashing tap, and over dribbled pages of his open journal lying beside the sink. He was writing earlier, but the runny, now marbleized ink was illegible. (It was not uncommon for him to be illiterate in his dreams.) Dabbing his eyes, the suitcase was lastly noticed; torn pages from the journal were heaped in it. He tossed what remained of the intact book into the compartment and fastened the lid.
The suitcase trundled behind him; its wheels hung up on cakes of plaster along the corridor. Aiden gathered he was in that most dreaded of places: an airport. It was empty and, going by spackled drywall, still under construction. An announcer’s voice crackled over the intercom, but the traveler knew where he was: He was in Los Angeles, where halved hermaphrodites and Paleolithic tar pits dotted a fearful phobic map. Dusk here was known to turn Pompeii red, and spilled down from Benedict Canyon in disquieted, erythrocytic shades.
Stopping at a window, the wary dreamer spotted people amassing on the tarmac below—they pointed at the sky.
Something more primal than the perilous drop gnawed at his reptilian stem. The runway beyond the gawkers was as wide as a football field, and stretched over a crystal-clear horizon. The effect was one of parallax, where, as on the Moon, a lack of atmospheric distortion makes it difficult to judge the size and distance of landscape features.
The tops of Aiden’s feet began to itch; the septum in his nose tingled. He felt tremors of an airplane still too far away to hear and, in not wanting to confront the enormity of it, advisedly melted away from the scene.
A single rental car was parked on the parking lot; the out-of-towner dragged his suitcase over the disobliging blacktop toward it. Sunshine turned to shadow on the back of his beading neck before the task was completed. He did not look up to see what blotted out the light, but his sense was of something winged, colossal, and frozen in place. It was not passing in front of the Sun, but the Sun was passing behind it.
Shoving his luggage in the backseat, the motorist sped off in search of an exit. His means of transportation better compared to a soapbox coaster than an automobile, in that gravity more than combustion propelled him. The scenery through the windshield was similar to an effect seen in old movies, where a moving background was rear-projected onto a screen behind a stationary car. He needed to get to the other side of town where the skyscrapers were, but it was impossible to judge the skyline’s distance given the briefness of seeing it between concrete parapets. In one glimpse the buildings were small models situated close and cleverly camouflaged to fool the eye. In the next, they were immense towers hurling shadows onto The San Gabriel Mountains miles away.
There was little time to fret over the frightful panorama since other cars, like corpuscles slithering over his fenders, urged him forward in a stampede. He needed to stay the course to arrive at his friend’s hotel, which required a trip into the hills.
Aiden knew the LA City map well, at least from the Ten freeway northward to Mulholland Drive. Unfortunately, each boulevard sign in passing was composed of randomly arranged characters of the alphabet:
ABCDFEGHJIKLNMOPRQSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFHGIJLKMONPQSRTVUXWYZ
At first palm trees were sparse, but shortly they became behemoths packed tightly together. The circumference of each could not be closed as an idea, although their height offered the more daunting prospect. Fronds of these prehistoric ferns appeared sutured together, and allowed only a few pencils of light to escape.
As his climb continued, the road darkened more—not from trees but from a stifling haze the violet color of iodine. The narrow byway became nearly vertical, which required Aiden getting out and pushing his feeble mode of conveyance through the thick smoke. Vehicles in the opposite lane resembled comets of crumpled steel dropping from the sky. He heard them before he saw them, and each showered him in a hail of black ice.
Initially the cover was presumed to be a fire burning in the hills, but on reaching a clearing, the whole city was under the same bluish-brown cloud. The phobic man, abandoning his car, crouched to minimize his vertigo. Scenic magnifiers were spotted around a terrace. These identified his location as the Griffith Park Observatory.
Drawing courage, he scanned the western edge of a cliff in search of the Hollywood sign; large freestanding letters broke through the smoke in a greeting:
HOLLYGHJIKLNMOPRQSTUVWOOD
Something peculiar lay at the base of the H. Aiden knew instinctively it was a carefully folded coat weighted with a purse. A magnifier, he was certain, would confirm his suspicion about the body of leaper and doomed actress, Peg Entwistle, being lower on the face, but he turned instead to the Planetarium.
He limped inside, seeking relief from his excitable state, and found a scaffold-of-a-telescope peering through a crack in the high dome. Here too he need not look through the eyepiece to see on what it was trained. Gaseous objects were visible through the parted dome doors, each sufficient in radiance to burn away the encircling miasma. Falling stars dissolved as a notion when the pinchers of Scorpio appeared, and then the ragged, variegated edge of the Trifid Nebula—
Aiden was staring at the nine planets aligned in the Zodiac.
The sleeper broke his paralysis; sweat was spread thin like glue under his tee shirt. He clung to the corner of his still spinning mattress. Shadows coupled to his packing boxes were too high on the wall to be placed there by the gibbous Moon. Yet even before separating his window curtains, Aiden knew he was squinting into the glare of headlights. His car had been left unlocked, and the ever-opportunistic neighbor seized on his inattentiveness to switch them on.
Kicking off his covers, he charged outside to deal with the situation, and spied his wicked persecutor snickering from a kitchen window. The miscreant was backlit by a bare bulb, and his dark mouth dipped into the semaphore of the janitor’s dream:
THESUNISALREADYUPSHITHEAD
The false awakening was a temporary setback, but half the day was gone by the time Aiden pried himself from bed. He staggered to the refrigerator, rough and pasty-tongued from his pills, but forgot about having finished the soda the night before.
He crossed back to where he had been rocking in place earlier and gently removed the photocopies of his coworkers from the wall. The ends of the Scotch tape were folded and the keepsakes placed in the last of the major boxes to be sealed up: the one containing magazine clippings of beautiful women.
He admonished himself one last time. “The next time I will ask you out…”
Checking the hallway for his lurking neighbor, the apartment dweller tiptoed down to the bathroom for a shower. His best friend was in town from LA, and the two were to rendezvous later for coffee.
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Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.