#30: This Way to Floor G (Dream Report: September 12, 2022, the severed branch)
From the instant of my formation to the emergence of an unanswerable question
Above: Long Beach, Washington (photo my own)
At the moment of my incarnation, I was conscious of little other than the urgency with which I needed to seize my spot before someone else did. The cafeteria tables were lined up in a great dirt lot, easy enough to navigate. But I hardly made it in time from the buffet to claim the last remaining space on a bench with those people about whom I knew nothing other than the fact that I needed them to be my friends. I set down my plate full of food next to a blonde woman whose head was turned away from me. She was speaking to the others, and all of them were looking intently at her. When I tried to identify their individual faces, I was confronted only with boiling and twirling pigments of white, brown, black, red, and blonde, as skin and hair bled across the boundaries which normally contained them, so that even eye color was impossible to identify. Who were these people? I still had no idea, but I needed to be with them.
But then I realized I was missing the food they were eating. I had brought the wrong items to the table. I knew that I ran the risk of losing my spot among these strangers whose friendships I craved, although I was dimly certain that the blonde woman next to me was a very old friend from the very edges of my adolescence, and yet I had no choice but to venture backward to the source of everything: the buffet. A force inside compelled me to leave the plate full of food at my precariously secured spot. I hoped no one would sit there, but I feared they would let someone better take my place. My legs carried me back toward the buffet which stretched across the lot. Behind me, hundreds of people talked and laughed and enjoyed themselves over their meals.
I was among the only stragglers still trying to fill their plates with food before the assembly started. I urgently needed a specific red and orange sauce for the fries I was suddenly carrying in a cardboard box. Or were they fries? I squinted down into the blurry mix of brown and yellow colors. They swirled together in my hands, occasionally revealing within them the dark borders which separated several crumbling, brittle components. I pondered the nature of this strange food for which my whole being had been so ravenous. All I knew for sure was that the edges were crispy and that I had a primal animal need for a very specific but entirely undefined sauce. But the employees running the buffet had dispersed, leaving the canister containing the coveted topping empty. I was running out of time; I was going to lose my spot next to the people at that table. I paced back and forth frantically, grabbing others by the arm and asking them like a lunatic: “Where is the sauce? I need to hurry!” But they lifted fingers to their lips and hushed me.
Hundreds of happy voices behind me went silent. Panicked that I would not be able to acquire the sauce in time, I glanced back into the still bodies. I tried to see the seat I had saved for myself, but dozens of crowded tables obscured my vision of the bench I had foolishly abandoned. Every head was turned toward the woman who had stepped up to a podium. Behind her was a stack of empty concrete highway overpasses. And beyond those quiet roads, which contained no cars but nevertheless emitted the muffled sounds of invisible vehicles speeding through the air, there was an enormous ocean glittering with bright lights. The glow of water and sun was beckoning me, urging me to run into its warmth and cold, telling me it was okay to let myself indulge in the waves, letting me know it was even the only thing that mattered. But all I could do was helplessly stare past the woman at the podium, my eyes captivated by the twinkling daytime stars, spirits who scampered atop the small waves. And it was in the middle of gazing into that infinite body of water when a disturbing realization struck me like a hammer to the jaw: I was at work. Utter horror overtook me as I pondered the financial consequences I might face for being late to my seat, and all my attention went away from the sea.
To have any chance of making it back to the bench, I needed to get to my car. Unable to fully control the glutinous urges of the flesh, I made one final hopeless attempt to acquire the sauce. When I failed, I simply tossed the crispy and cloudy fries into a garbage can. I gave them one final look, only to find that they had dissolved into the other misty shapes of rotting trash.
I walked swiftly toward the parking lot. Before reaching my car, I was stopped by the first person I actually recognized. She was among the hardest working employees at a job I hoped never to be crushed with again. And now here she was before me, this consistent member of what the principal triumphantly called “the late night crew.” Her soul given over to the Cause, she was more like a devout priestess than she was an employee with a life beyond the walls of the most holy workplace. She was one of the folks who came to work at 6:30 in the morning and had to be kicked out of the building by the guards after 8:00 in the evening when the facilities closed down. But then she continued working on the train, and finally even in her bed, before at last she would fall asleep only to wake up and immediately open her computer again. I shuddered and attempted to move past this cheerful nun, whose eyes often seemed to interrogate the rectitude of my own devotion. She grabbed me by the arm and smiled. “Can you believe,” she said, gesturing with disgust at the people in the dirt-lot cafeteria, “that they just spend all their time talking about work? About their jobs?”
I stuttered for a moment, startled by her unanticipated question. “I have to go!” I shouted in despair at her. “I’m going to be late if I don’t find parking soon!”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said with a friendly shrug. Smiling, she pointed at the group of men in suits walking toward us from the cafeteria tables. Behind them, the woman at the podium was uttering the most incomprehensible sounds, and all of my other supposed colleagues were silently at attention. “Those guys do nothing but talk about work. That’s all they care about.”
One of the guys in suits pointed at me and they all picked up their pace.
“I have to go,” I whispered to her, my mind delirious with dread. “I’m so sorry!”
The men’s knees bent forward as if they might run after me, but I never looked back. I got into my car and drove around the quaint neighborhoods which surrounded the dirt lot in which everyone was eating. I couldn’t even see that awful world anymore, although I knew it still lurked menacingly beyond the bright green yards full of giggling children, and I knew it was my mission to return there. There were people there I needed to like me. There were people there I needed to be my friends. And the employers giving speeches would take away my money if I was late. Anxious from the prospects of social isolation and financial destitution, I drove slowly past single family homes and duplexes, half of them flying American flags on their porches. Sprinklers sprayed water at the little kids who ran around in their lawns. It was forbidden, I somehow knew, to leave my vehicle next to one of these happy little homes. I followed the blurry and entirely illegible blue signs which my instincts suggested might lead to parking.
And then for the first time, there was a sign I could read, next to an arrow pointing to the sky: “Parking on Floor G.” Knowing it was my only hope, I followed the signs toward Floor G. Soon I was driving on an upward twisting ramp constructed with walls and support beams of sturdy concrete. But I was on a surface covered in dirt and gravel, and the dusty road seemed never to end. I felt the little rocks crackling underneath my tires. Clouds of disintegrated earth occasionally rose up around me, leaving splotches of tan powder on the glass. Keeping the steering wheel always slightly turned to the left, I was driving in circles spinning higher and higher. I was progressing slowly and cautiously toward the bright blue sky and the pristine white puffs floating steadily across it. I began driving faster, hoping to reach the summit as soon as possible. From beyond the cement barrier, a vast ocean cast stupendous visions upon my easily seduced eyes, distracting me from the road so that I nearly drove right off into the air.
I tried pulling myself together after a narrow brush with flight, but the anticipation of my own demise progressively overwhelmed my capacity for any other emotions. A hopeless situation was facing me. The road was growing steeper by the second. I was now driving upward at what felt like an 80-degree angle. It seemed as if I might soon be driving straight up into the sky, and naked terror surged through me as I pictured my car flipping backward. While blood rushed into my head as if I were already upside down, I mounted feeble psychological resistance against the relentless force of gravity that was now menacingly tugging at my spine from behind. I might drop at any moment, which forced me to speed up; keeping the car in forward motion seemed to be my only path to salvation. But even if I made it to the top of this strange twisting structure, how could I hope to safely descend? How could I drive down an incline so steep without my whole vehicle somersaulting violently back down toward the Earth?
That’s when I turned around the final curve of this treacherous concrete slinky. There I came face-to-face with an elevator just a bit bigger than my car. Its doors were already open, and its surface offered the safety of flatness I’d been yearning for. Yet I was afraid to enter into it, wondering what might happen after the doors closed behind me. Slowing down only slightly to prevent the possibility that I might start rolling backward, I glanced up at the large black block letters carved into the concrete over the elevator’s entrance: “This Way to Floor G.”
I could feel my car seeming to stall out. If I wanted any hope of survival, then I had no choice but to speed up toward the elevator. And yet everything inside me told me not to go inside. Yielding to my instincts, I suddenly turned the steering wheel hard to the left, smashed my foot onto the accelerator, and drove straight off the road and into the sky. I saw the glittering ocean and the clouds. I was plummeting toward the Earth, and I felt the godlike power of gravity tugging my body from hundreds of miles beneath me. I was moving faster and faster. I knew vaguely that at any moment I would be crushed by the explosive power of my car compressing into the celestial body below, but there were cyclones and tornadoes shredding through my chest and up into my throat. Their rage drowned out my fear, replacing it with the raw sensation of plummeting toward Floor G. Somehow I knew I would end up there in the end. And in the midst of the relentless storms that were thrashing up from my stomach and deep into my brain, there was only one coherent thought which I was capable of forming: What is on Floor G? Then, just before impact, I woke up in my bed in Brooklyn, the question still mesmerizing my mind.