…and so, as I was spraying, cousin, “spraying” you see, jeez sometimes I crack myself up, we orphaned you without meaning anything by it, left you behind in that bus station toilet, nothing personal, we just forgot, having such a big family and all. We had all gone to town to see one of those horror movies where northern folks get massacred by backwoods hicks so inbred, as I should know, that their females can reproduce by what you call parthenogenesis, no joke, while the males sodomize farm animals and unfortunate Yankees who stray onto their property. Southern pride notwithstanding, we love those pictures about swamp-dwelling, murdering crackers, by my granddaddy’s crusty asshole we do, never seen a roll of toilet paper in his miserable life. Not that we’re much better off. Damn if we ain’t shotgun-shack poor. Why, just the other week, me and Clem, my half-ass brother got the other half bit off by a gator, had to bear-trap a couple of tourists wandered into the swamp, probably sight-seeing or whatnot, to get some money so’s we could keep the electricity on, otherwise we might fall down the hole in our parlor room where we shit and piss and other things, snicker. Yankees they was of course. Screamed like coons on fire, yes they did, before Clem put ’em outta their misery by blasting their brains with daddy’s good old rifle what once went off whilst our common sire was picking his nose with the barrel end of it. Clem’s got the gift of doing business with that piece. He’s got other gifts, too, like being able to draw you into his dreams, sometimes you don’t know you’re even in there until a zombie or suchlike comes after you or the planets start moving in funny ways. But shooting’s his speciality, even if he’s got no more than two fingers, the other eight being bit off by our dear mother in the fires of holy passion whilst they was at the business of making three of our half-brothers, two sisters, sundry half-and-halfs, as we call ’em, and them such that live in the cellar, don’t rightly know how to go about describing them or how they got that way. Sometimes they send up vibrations like they was angered, though mostly they leave the rest of us be. All family freaks considered, though, there’s not a fag among us, even if sometimes it can be difficult to say when we’s all in the dark, which is most nights, our troubled standing with the state power system being what it is, and because there just ain’t enough tourist gold, as Clem likes to say, to keep the lights on as much as we’d like. We can make fire with our eyes sometimes, but nobody’s ever got rich doing that, least that I know. Which puts me in mind of those redskins used to live back here in the swamp with us before they got themselves plumb flush with them casinos, seems a white man can hardly get his due in this sun-don’t-shine state, God bless the confederate dead and them of us who’s among them with our good lord, including my little sister, sent up to heaven by our daddy’s squirrel-stick of a rifle went off whilst he was having his way with her, didn’t know the thing was loaded no more than he did when he was digging for that nostril meat he loved more than the family dog’s hind parts. Blowed his head so far off it went straight through the roof of our home and outhouse, which weren’t no loss, the rest of him putting us in Sunday dinners for weeks, waste not whatnot, fried in a pan of possum fat and we got us a feast, woulda been the envy of the neighbors if Clem hadn’t got to them some years past, sucked them into one of his dreams and left them there for the zombies most probably. We’d never been on good terms with those folk anyway. It was them or us. Sometimes we get mad at Clem for disappearing walking food when we’re half-starved. Meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat, like the cannibal guy says in that movie we went to see back when we left you in the bus station shitter. He planted ’em in the ground up to their head, fed ’em till they was fat, then harvested ’em like turnips. They didn’t have a jew’s chance in a Baptist pitch-tent of worship. We tried to do much the same with a tourist fella called himself an anthropologist. He made for good company for a time, though, till he finally got us all agitated with his funny talk. He was yakking a blue streak whilst Clem and I was conferring on whether to use the ax to split him down the middle or fillet his pasty skin with the hunting knife and use his hide to fix up the roof where daddy’s head went through. That anthropologist fella kind of sounded like the guy gave me your address, name of Dealer. Odd type he was and not to be trifled with. Even Clem felt a queer horror of the man. Seemed to blink in and out before your eyes as you was talking to him. Called us metaphysical mutants, at least I think those were his words. Anywhat, he conveyed that you might appreciate a holler from your kin folks, sorry again how things turned out. Hope you don’t—
***
So ended what remained of the letter. I think the reader can appreciate from it not only something of my origins and heredity, but also the uncanny reference to the Dealer, still a figure of my dream occasions at that time but one that now filled my mind with a chilling perplexity, particularly with respect to mental phenomena transposed within a physical universe. This feeling was greatly deepened in the next session I had with Dr. O. I mentioned that I continued to have dreams of the Dealer, in at least one of which Dr. O’s name arose in a context I could not recall. Instantly, my therapist and guru went pale. He was also quite obviously at pains to force out his next sentence: “Did the Dealer say anything about an all-new context?”
“I believe so,” I said. “He almost always does.”
At these words, Dr. O visibly shuddered and the file on me that was on his lap nearly fell to the floor. He recovered the folder, however, and hastily wrote something before straightening its pages and securing it in a metal drawer. We then moved on to my meditation instruction, employing a new technique that was supposed to be more effective in quelling my incessant cogitation and, in turn, lightening my demoralized state as a human being who, like most human beings, had no focused idea of what it meant to exist in the world but had to get on with things in any case, whether demoralized or, ideally, in a more or less complacent manner. Roughly speaking, these are the only two ways one can exist, whatever one’s context in the universe, and whatever destiny has dealt you within that context, as I later came to understand more profoundly. Actively seeking an all-new context was, of course, quite another matter, and quite an unusual one.
Following my meditation practice that day, Dr. O sent me packing. That is how I thought of his manner toward me as I reflected on it later in the day. Dr. O sent me packing, I said aloud while standing at the kitchen sink in my one-bedroom apartment. He was practically pushing me out the door as I was asking him if he would rather I did not speak of the Dealer in future sessions. In a haughty tone, he said that whatever I determined to speak of or not speak of in our sessions was entirely my decision. Once outside, I heard the door behind me slammed shut and locked.
***
Despite Dr. O’s seeming dismissal of our discussion regarding the Dealer as well as the business of an all-new context, I continued to have dream occasions in which both played a central role. One of them took place in a setting I had often frequented in my dreaming life. I viewed this visionary environment much the same as I did the Dealer’s “chain of galaxies” showroom, which is to say that it seemed to me an analogue of the waking world, however superficially at odds they appeared. In these dreams, I would always be in what I can only describe as a multi-level bazaar, a marketplace without borders that was filled with what seemed an infinite number of crumbling structures of all shapes, many of them with odd, unnamable objects arranged behind warped windowpanes—contorted blobs and twisted figurines contrived and aligned to forbidding effect. And everywhere there were carts with grotesque merchandise dangling from canopies with a leathery appearance, a dried and cracked material that I knew to be human flesh. Both above and below me were dark expanses of jagged stairways and corridors, fragile walkways between tilting towers, and undulating ramps that spiraled down into shadowy depths and upwards into shadowy heights. It was on one of these ramps high above me that I spied the Dealer, who called my name in a reverberant voice. I moved toward him but realized with frustration that I had no idea how he could be reached. Then suddenly I was
standing before him. He started walking away from me, gesturing over his shoulder for me to follow, yelling over the din around us, “I got this place cheap. Much better than my old one, don’t you think?”
I had to agree with him, if only because the shambles surrounding us was just a pile of my own dream manifestations. On that occasion I had a fixed awareness that I was dreaming, which has its benefits and drawbacks depending on how much control I can exert over my surroundings. In the next instant, the Dealer and I were sitting on crates across from each other in what appeared to be a storage room for a manufacturing plant of some kind.
“So,” the Dealer began. “Your all-new context. Should we proceed?”
“I can’t answer to a mystery. And would my answer make any difference?”
“Not really,” he said. “But I don’t believe you will object to what is on order.”
“It shouldn’t matter whether I object or not. I’m lucid at the moment, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Nevertheless, you could lose control just like that,” said the Dealer, snapping his fingers. I knew he was right, so I refrained from making a fuss. The last thing I wanted was to find myself crawling through an ever-narrowing tunnel with some monstrosity at my heels. “However,” the Dealer continued, “I absolutely know you will not object.”
“I object to all things but one—euthanasia by anesthetic. You know that, among other things about me.”
“Yes. Not even a generation from the swamplands where you and yours fermented into the metaphysical mutants you are. But you are more advanced than they. And you have followed all instructions to the letter.”
“In your dreams I have.”
“Actually, they’re your dreams. But why split hairs?”
“What about my all-new context?”
“Well, it’s not all that new. If you’ve noticed, things have been trending in a certain direction in that…other world, so to speak.”
“I’m a demoralized metaphysical mutant. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I guess there’s some satisfaction in being right. I’m just the Dealer, so what do I know?”
“I don’t want to be right. I want to be dead.”
“You’re guaranteed that. But I know what you’re saying.”
“So?”
“Ask Dr. O the next time you see him. He’ll fix you up. The world needs metaphysical mutants like you to get where it’s going.”
“And where is it going?”
“Ask Dr. O. He’ll fix you up.”
“Where is it going?”
“He’ll fix you up.”
***
That was it. I lost all control of my lucid dream occasion and awoke with the Dealer’s mechanistically repeated phrase about being “fixed up” resonating in my mind. And the word “demoralization” was laid bare as the euphemism it was for the spectrum of astonishing harm our species had ever endured and its trending in a certain direction all the more strange and excruciating. Such as it was with our individual lives—from their initiation to their end—so it was with a universal process of disintegration and derangement. As above, so below…and as below, so above. There was magic in things after all, or so it seemed—a metaphysical ideal of the immaterial devolved into appearances. What mockery that I should be part of this movement, a mutant designated to mutilate further the wreckage of the cosmos. Nevertheless, while all signs indicated the substance of what I had experienced, the real still remained as good as a guess. It always has. Yet the nightmare obtains sure, and sometimes may be shared.
Hours later, I was still possessed by the blackest demoralization I had ever known. As the sun rose that day, its harsh light glaring upon the cityscape beyond my apartment window, I wanted nothing more than to meet with Dr. O. Why I desired this meeting was past my understanding. He had done little or nothing so far to help me aside from arranging for me to work at temporary jobs for which I was completely unsuited. But he was familiar with my dream occasions featuring the Dealer. This fact made him the only person with whom I could share the demoralization I now felt due to my latest encounter with this figure. Of course, in the most recent session during which I mentioned the Dealer and my dreams about him, Dr. O dismissed the matter. But he also sent me packing. And he failed to notify me of his new address, which I found was a walk-up above an old house that was inconveniently situated close to some railroad tracks where the noise and vibrations of passing trains were a regular occurrence. Thus, I could only conclude that Dr. O wanted to be rid of me as a client, which was no great revelation. For my part, the only reason I made it my business to find him time and again was my need for a means to live in my one-bedroom apartment. But now I wanted nothing more than to avail myself of Dr. O’s mental health services.
Because Dr. O had not provided me with any way to otherwise contact him, I was forced to show up at his office without scheduling an appointment ahead of time. Nevertheless, he politely, though not enthusiastically, said that he could make some time for me before his next client arrived. When I stepped inside his office, which was actually just a small and sparely furnished room, I was shocked to see that the place looked as if it had not been cleaned for some time. Similarly, Dr. O was slovenly dressed and conspicuously ill-groomed, his signature natty appearance nowhere in evidence. I could not pretend that his transformation had escaped my notice.
“I’ve been ill. Please have a seat,” he said, waving a limp hand toward one of the chairs in the room. Dr. O settled himself on a sofa but did not sit in his usual cross-legged posture. “What brings you here?”
I told him about my dream occasion with the Dealer and my subsequent state of demoralization. Considering his previous dismissal of this subject, I suppose I should not have been surprised that he ignored everything I said. Instead, he seemed to sink deep into himself. Then he started up with his usual therapeutic and spiritual hogwash. The homily he delivered was an apologetics for pain in the world, a mouthful of emptiness that he seemed to have adopted specifically for me as a demoralized wretch and potential suicide. He said something about the diversity of sensations that we might call good or bad, though in reality they were more akin to musical tones that collectively produced a cosmic work of music. Already I was growing impatient with this hackneyed metaphor that I supposed was Dr. O’s attempt to portray disease and agony in human life as no more than grace notes in the ultimate harmony of existence. It was all just so much rationalization, of course, but his words did not contain the usual force and refinement Dr. O customarily mustered. Indeed, he spoke in an embarrassingly diffident and awkward manner. He actually stuttered while talking of humanity’s cries of misery and the yowls of ecstasy, the whole racket of the world, all of which fused into some kind of magnificent symphony. And he gesticulated all over the place as if he were swatting away a swarm of flying insects attacking him. Finally, he fell silent at the obviously tired and borrowed nature of his dharma speech, as he might have styled it. Then he altered his rhetorical strategy. At first his words were no less tired and borrowed than before. Although he was no longer gesticulating, he continued somewhat awkwardly, more haltingly I would say, in the transmission of his message.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Just admit it. You’re a fraud.”
Dr. O smiled sadly. “It took you all this time to notice that? Usually, I’m spotted for what I am after three sessions, six at the most. But you let me run your whole life. It just got to be too much, even for me.”
“That’s why you started moving around? So I couldn’t find you? Come on.”
“Okay, so you’re not as stupid as I thought you were.”
“You always knew what I wanted. I thought if I waited long enough you’d oblige a longtime client. I knew you had the resources. That’s why you were avoiding me.”
He fell silent and just stared into my eyes. “At first that was the reason. I didn’t want to do it. You know, morals and such. And you were really beyond saving. ‘Demoralization’ was your word, but I knew i
t was something far more pathological than that. At one point I thought I might be able to do something for you. Then I came to my senses. It was that Dealer business.”
“Don’t tell me that a few of my dreams put a scare into you.”
“No. It wasn’t then. It was when I saw him sitting on the lid of the toilet seat in my bathroom one morning. He was sort of blinking in and out. I thought that you had infected me somehow with your insane dreams. I sidled out of the bathroom without turning around. When I reached the living room, right on that spot just behind you, he was standing there. I seemed to be trapped in a humdrum horror movie, but that’s not how it felt.”
“And he said things.”
“Yeah, he said things alright. Now look at me. I’ve turned into you.”