Who needs friends when you've got vampires

Yesterday as I was stepping onto the bus, someone called my name.  I turned around and discovered two classmates from grad school who I have not seen in  a decade; they were accessorized with children who, as they are under ten, I have not met at all.  They now live in Maine, making chance encounters statistically unlikely.  Sadly the father of one friend passed away recently; they are in town this week for the funeral.

That was the beginning of a day so hectic that I fell asleep at my desk from 7:31 to 7:39, still not finished the tasks on my list.  Happily I got the second wind I needed to attend my favourite DJ's salsa dance and was invited to the after party at Fonda La Catrina, a delicious Mexican restaurant in Georgetown that last night hosted a fabulous local Cuban band.  (The musicians are local; the music is Cuban).

I landed in my bed at around midnight and had nine glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep.  All dream night long I ran into real and not-so-real people from my past.

***

I was in New York city visiting my real life best friend from high school.  Her apartment was in a new maze of tunnels under the subway system - all the highrises had been built up as far as they could go so now the city was building down. The advantage to the underground apartments was that they were cheap and very convenient to subway stops; the disadvantage was the rats.

My friend took me into her parlor, a sloping dirt-packed tunnel decorated with a single naked bulb in the shape of a "W".  The ceiling was so low that I couldn't stand and look her in the face but had to crouch and stare in her direction, while burning the letter "W" deeply into my retinas.  I began to have difficulty breathing and she pulled me out into the main hall where the landlord happened to be standing.  "Panic attack?" he asked, his tone matter-of-fact.  My friend nodded.  "Some people just can't handle the claustrophobia." He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, a gesture I decided to interpret as empathy rather than apathy.

I was a surveyor for a company that was building entire cities in undeveloped, supposedly unpopulated, areas all along the eastern seaboard.  I left New York by train, then took a powerboat and finally a canoe to reach the back swamps of Virginia where I was raised*.

The plans I'd seen the night before at my project meeting would have a catastrophic impact on my family's traditional way of life, on their whole community.  I arrived at dusk, and was eyed suspiciously by people peeking out from behind wooden shack doors.  The only woman willing to make eye contact was from an extended family of deaf-mutes.  She recognized me; I signed to ask where my family was now living and was directed to a trap door inside a barn.

When I reached the bottom of the ladder, my mother greeted me with a crushing hug, and began scolding me, "Where have you been?  Why didn't you write us to say you were coming?  You go off to school and then never return to visit..." then abruptly pulled back, her brow furrowed.

"People are coming to map and drain your swamps," I said, the words piling out in a rush.  I felt suddenly nervous.  "You need to call a town meeting."

She pulled me into the kitchen.  "Why do you smell different?"  She sniffed the air and pulled back again,  her pupils hugely dilated.  I tried to control my heartbeat, slow down the surge of adrenaline.  "You smell human," she whispered.  

My mouth had gone dry.  "I work for Eastern Regency," I said, "and they are planning to build shopping malls and playgrounds on undeveloped land all over the eastern states."  Behind my mother, ina huge living room lit by hundreds of candles milled about twenty of my extended family.  A few cousins had trickled into the kitchen to listen.  I recognized only one of them; I wondered where my father and brothers were.

My mother tried to shoo them out and simultaneously pin me in the corner of the kitchen.  I outmanoevered her and walked out into the living room, raising my voice, "I came here to warn you - to warn all of you.  A construction company is coming.  They are planning to build right here, on this land.  You will need to re-locate.  You only have a few months before it isn't safe here for you anymore."

Few appeared to be listening to my words.  Many were smelling the air.  A groundswell of murmuring.  I felt so stupid for not anticipating that I would have to address this first.

"I am one of you," I said.  "I grew up here; this is my mother -"  I pointed to where she stood, in the archway between the kitchen and this huge living room.  "I went away for night school and three years ago... I woke up and I had become human."

The murmuring turned into a roar of sound.  The circle of relatives closed around me.  I saw fangs.  Dark pools of eyes.  In the cacaphony I distinctly heard one of them say, "How did this happen?" and another, "When do we eat her?"

"Listen to me," I yelled, as loud as I could.  The crowd backed up just a little.  "I came back to warn you.  You are in great danger."

My mother was at my side now, using her broom to shove my relatives to the sides of the room.  "We are calling a meeting.  Go and get the elders.   NOW." The crowd scattered, each going to fetch their parents, grandparents.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  My mother was senior.  My family would not disobey her no matter how hungry they were.

She turned to me, her eyes black, fangs out.  "I'm sorry," she said, but her half-smile, the flick of her tongue to her teeth, sent a chill up my spine.  My heart sank.  I knew she was not apologizing for the family but for what was about to happen.  I would not get the chance to tell my story, as a honored guest.  Of course not.  As a child I remembered they only called meetings when strangers showed up.  The agenda was how to divide up the body.  Why hadn't I thought about this?  Blinded by loyalty?  Maybe becoming human had made me soft, forget my roots.

"Please mom," I said, my voice breaking. "I came here to help you.  That has to count for something."

She shook her head.  "You turned.  I don't know how.  But I can't change the ancient laws.  You are not one of us anymore."

My body filled with a hot sense of injustice, so familiar from childhood, but mixed now with  terror.  My knees threatened to give in.  I fought hard to push my feelings down.  I took a breath.  I had been at the top of my class in engineering.  This was just another in a line of difficult hypothetical problems requiring a creative solution.  "There are others with me," I bluffed. 

I prayed that my family's ability to smell a lie would be compromised by surprise and bloodlust.  It seemed to work.  "Others?" 

"Yes.  They aren't far behind me but we got separated.  I need to find them.  Otherwise it will cause chaos.  Fighting."

My mother nodded.  My lie was flimsy, utterly illogical, but thankfully instinct was her strong suit and for once I had the upper hand.  I knew how she thought, but she couldn't - never had - understood me.  She was hungry and bound by convention, and the thought of some of our community getting more than their share - more than HER share - was unbearable.

Somehow I convinced her that she had to stay and ensure the meeting was organized properly while I rounded up my supposed colleagues.  I slipped out of the main room, back through the kitchen, and climbed the stairs.  My whole body shook with adrenaline.  Outside it was full dark and crawling with vampires on their way to a meeting where they would decide who got which parts of my body.  It was a long shot.  I had no idea how to get out of this alive. I only knew I had to run.

*I did not grow up in Virginia and none of my relatives possess a drop of vampire blood.  

Evil rainbow clouds

In my dream, my wife and I were walking through our suburb on a day far too sunny for Seattle.  The lighting was perfect, the colors as vivid as a movie, post-edit.  Lush lime green lawns.  Robin's egg blue sky.

Clouds formed, discrete and pillowy, none blocking the sun.  They weren't the usual white; inside the colors roiled, an artificial shimmering shifting to red or black, like the rainbow refractions from a gasoline spill.  My wife said there was so much pollution that the clouds now were made almost entirely of rayon.

We strolled along the sidewalk, passing house after manicured house.  One of my cats rubbed her head on my leg and I saw that my wife had brought both of them along.  About three yards ahead a streaming puff of smoke scudded between the houses.  In its wake, three people ran, screaming.  A few seconds later, another smoke bomb.  More running.  More screaming.  The sound was muted, as far away as television, an unlikely drama unfolding right in front of us.  The peace shadow of front lawns was punctuated at every gap between houses by smoke and screaming.  One cat cowered behind my leg, the other sought refuge in my wife's arms.

Eventually the sky turned yellow.  The sidewalk ended at a sulfur refinery.  Without suburban houses to shield us, the world was choked with smoke and chaotic with panicked people.  We crouched a little to get into one of the giant concrete effluent pipes that exited the facility.  It was fairly clean and dry.  We walked along it for about fifty yards and emerged into a huge hangar.  Dozers and cats parked like toys in the cavernous space.

I felt sad, witnessing the world ending.  I wished we had left the cats at home; I worried they would get badly hurt.  I wondered what to do, where to go now.

Fabulous and fiery, cut and colour

The first half of my dream was spent in search of a bathroom.  After waking briefly to use a real bathroom, I found myself back in my hometown writing a poem.  All I remember now is that I had constructed a beautiful metaphor comparing my city to a diamond.

My dream town and the actual city where I was raised have only the most superficial commonalities - the existence of a sewage system, roads, and electricity.  The city of Edmonton harbors just shy of a million inhabitants; my dream hometown was a bona fide town, complete with quaint, columned town hall, a working ice cream parlor, and the kind of Main street which boasted the only traffic light for miles around.

"Charming" is a term that will never be leveled at the suburb I grew up in - an advancing cancer of row houses unchecked by the vast stretches of midwestern Canadian prairie available ever southward.  And in the diamond metaphor, Millwoods aka South Edmonton would more likely be imagined as the eons of crushing pressure which, rather than transform coal into gems, was merely escaped as soon as one acquired a drivers license and/or admission to a far away school.

Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for the alternate universe in which my family relocated to some adorable hamlet in the southern Ontario landscape.  I have never lived anywhere with fewer than 100,000 people (and that is already a little sparsely populated).  I was once offered a job in small town Michigan, population 11,000, and had a full-blown panic attack on the freeway driving home from the airport after my interview.  All that closeness, the limits of social and geographical terrain.  I felt I couldn't breathe.

Life has a way of making you eat your words, so it's always possible I'll spend my golden years in a place where everyone knows your name.  For right now I'm dreaming of an assisted living facility in the middle of some elephantine city where the bus can take you downtown.