Smoke and Mirrors

Cold wars produce bad losers.

I go home.

VI.

News at Ten. And here is Abel Drugger, reading it:

VII.

The corners of my eyes catch hasty, bloodless motion—

a mouse?

Well, certainly a peripheral of some kind.

VIII.

It’s bedtime. I feed the pigeons,

then undress.

Contemplate downloading a succubus from a board,

maybe just call up a sidekick

(there’s public-domain stuff, bawds and bauds,

shareware, no need to pay a fortune,

even copy-protected stuff can be copied, passed about,

everything has a price, any of us).

Dryware, wetware, hardware, software,

blackware, darkware,

nightware, nightmare . . .

The modem sits inviting beside the phone,

red eyes.

I let it rest—

you can’t trust anybody these days.

You download, hell, you don’t know where what came from anymore,

who had it last.

Well, aren’t you? Aren’t you scared of viruses?

Even the better protected files corrupt,

and the best protected corrupt absolutely.

In the kitchen I hear the pigeons billing and queuing,

dreaming of left-handed knives,

of athanors and mirrors.

Pigeon blood stains the floor of my study.

Alone, I sleep. And all alone I dream

IX.

Perhaps I wake in the night, suddenly comprehending something,

reach out,

scribble on the back of an old bill

my revelation, my newfound understanding,

knowing that morning will render it prosaic,

knowing that magic is a night-time thing,

then remembering when it still was . . .

Revelation retreats to cliché, listen:

Things seemed simpler before we kept computers.

X.

Waking or dreaming from outside I hear

wild sabbats, screaming winds, tape hum, metal machine music;

witches astride ghetto blasters crowd the moon,

then land on the heath their na**d flanks aglisten.

No one pays anything to attend the meet, each has it taken care of in advance,

baby bones with fat still clinging to them;

these things are direct debit, standing order,

and I see

or think I see

a face I recognize and all of them queue up to kiss his ass,

let’s rim the Devil, boys, cold seed,

and in the dark he turns and looks at me:

One door opens, another one slams,

I trust that everything is satisfactory?

We do what we can, everybody’s got the right to turn an honest penny;

we’re all bankrupt, sir,

we’re all redundant,

but we make the best of it, whistle through the Blitz,

that’s the business. Fair trade is no robbery.

Tuesday morning, then, sir, with the pigeons?

I nod and draw the curtains. Junk mail is everywhere.

They’ll get to you,

one way or another they’ll get to you; someday

I’ll find my tube train underground, I’ll pay no fare,

just “This is Hell, and I want out of it,”

and then things will be simple once again.

It will come for me like a dragon down a dark tunnel.

THE SWEEPER OF DREAMS

After all the dreaming is over, after you wake, and leave the world of madness and glory for the mundane day-lit daily grind, through the wreckage of your abandoned fancies walks the sweeper of dreams.

Who knows what he was when he was alive? Or if, for that matter, he ever was alive. He certainly will not answer your questions. The sweeper talks little, in his gruff gray voice, and when he does speak it is mostly about the weather and the prospects, victories and defeats of certain sports teams. He despises everyone who is not him.

Just as you wake he comes to you, and he sweeps up kingdoms and castles, and angels and owls, mountains and oceans. He sweeps up the lust and the love and the lovers, the sages who are not butterflies, the flowers of meat, the running of the deer and the sinking of the Lusitania. He sweeps up everything you left behind in your dreams, the life you wore, the eyes through which you gazed, the examination paper you were never able to find. One by one he sweeps them away: the sharp-toothed woman who sank her teeth into your face; the nuns in the woods; the dead arm that broke through the tepid water of the bath; the scarlet worms that crawled in your chest when you opened your shirt.

He will sweep it up—everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow.

Treat him well, if you see him. Be polite with him. Ask him no questions. Applaud his teams’ victories, commiserate with him over their losses, agree with him about the weather. Give him the respect he feels is his due.

For there are people he no longer visits, the sweeper of dreams, with his hand-rolled cigarettes and his dragon tattoo.

You’ve seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. Some of them walk the cities in ragged clothes, their belongings under their arms. Others of their number are locked in the dark, in places where they can no longer harm themselves or others. They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. It is worse than madness. They will tell you, if you let them: they are the ones who live, each day, in the wreckage of their dreams.

And if the sweeper of dreams leaves you, he will never come back.

FOREIGN PARTS

The VENEREAL DISEASE is disease contracted as a consequence of impure connexion. The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection,—consequences, the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring,—are indeed terrible considerations, too terrible not to render the disease one of those which must unhesitatingly be placed under medical care.

— SPENCER THOMAS, M.D., L.R.C.S. (EDIN.),

A DICTIONARY OF DOMESTIC MEDICINE AND HOUSEHOLD SURGERY, 1882

Simon Powers didn’t like sex. Not really.

He disliked having someone else in the same bed as himself; he suspected that he came too soon; he always felt uncomfortably that his performance was in some way being graded, like a driving test or a practical examination.

He had got laid in college a few times and once, three years ago, after the office New Year’s party. But that had been that, and as far as Simon was concerned, he was well out of it.

It occurred to him once, during a slack time at the office, that he would have liked to have lived in the days of Queen Victoria, where well-brought-up women were no more than resentful sex dolls in the bedroom: they’d unlace their stays, loosen their petticoats (revealing pinkish-white flesh) then lie back and suffer the indignities of the carnal act—an indignity it would never even occur to them that they were meant to enjoy.