Beware, if you love me, stay away from me. Don't wake me up or you'll be sorry for this. The midday creatures must be wary of coming twilight. I see your tender ears getting ruddy even from an iambic pentameter, what if I switch to my prose.
This story has happened who knows where and when. The history, washed in blood, is silent no matter how hard the executioners would twist its arms, but I know it was the difference between a story and a history that caused this text. It almost always happens, though.
"Hi," she said.
Neitherland nor eitherland. An everyday sort of town where fire-breathing samovars drive around the streets.
"Hi," she said louder, shaking my shoulder.
I wish I could say I was sleeping. Alas, even half bottle of bourbon on an empty stomach was not enough to take down the one who hasn't slept for almost a week. 172 hours, to be precise.
A cheap pub, a black and shining as a shoe-polish barman, talking over latest trends in porn industry with a local drunkard, and a young little waitress with such open and simple face that I shuddered at the complexity of a question she addressed to me.
"Are you going to eat?" she asked, and I hastened to agree as she would agree an hour later. They always agree.
I think her name was Secile, a promising name that tasted like a lollipop but, in general, nothing special: rosy cheeks, thick ankles and a traditional small-town lustfulness together with a willingness to show off. Her flat at the edge of the town turned out to be as small as a cat's forehead, as Japanese say. There was a cat, though.
Some people sleep just because they are tired. Poor little Secile. She had faked an orgasm at least three times and now was sleeping what they call the sleep of the dead. To sit, to smoke and to look at her without any thought of what you are looking at. Human thoughts are similar to ripples on the water whereto we throw the pebbles of memories, the memories that would never turn into the dreams again.
When your life depends on proper discharge of duties, you discharge them in the proper way. That's why they wouldn't let me close my eyes not for a second. They had no direct evidence but, as one famous dreamhunter wrote: "A suspicion shall be sufficient justification for torture". His writing had survived several editions before the justice run down the writer. They tortured me too but what could I say? In a world where any dreaming is banned, you'd better keep your eyes open, especially if the chief state mnemonic is looking right into your face. As popeyed as Zeus and as monosyllabic as English adjective, he was famous for exploring the dreams just as a pathologist dissects a corpse. "At the speed of plight," he liked to tell about himself. "Golden hands," the others called him. All the silver thumbs always grow from the golden hands at the speed of plight. He did not succeed very much. "I am a kind of a radio on the sunken submarine, where, in the freezing darkness and fear, seamen call for help to the ones above," that's all he could get from me, according to the minutes of the interrogation that I signed without a second thought.
I heard, a fox can gnaw off its own paw to escape from the trap. I've sacrificed my sleeping. "He wouldn't last five days," said the prison doc, giving me the injection of insomnia, but I lasted a week and escaped my jail through an underground passage I dreamed when they had slackened their vigilance for a moment.
A sleep and a dream are similar to each other as gold and bald, as brilliants and brilliantine. A law-abiding citizen, throwing himself from time to time into the physiological state of rest and relaxation, relaxes and rests instead of creating by the devil's instigation his own reality, thus challenging the sole Creator. "O ye proud dreamers!" it was written in the full of euphemisms and dark places federal announcement addressed to the creatures like me, "wretched, weary ones! Who, in the vision of the mind infirm confidence have in your backsliding steps, do ye not comprehend that you are worms, born to bring forth the angelic butterfly that flieth unto judgment without screen? Why floats aloft your spirit high in imaginary worlds? Like are ye unto insects undeveloped even as the worm in whom formation fails! In the name of mercy we shall punish you, in the name of love...*"
In the name of love and so on. In the name of love to his miserable life, a sleepless sinner must take precautions not to create suddenly, accidentally, unintentionally a new reality made out of himself just as a Chinese swallow makes a nest of its own saliva. Because as soon as the dreamer, mad from insomnia, closes his eyes just for a moment, the imaginary things rush to come true and to give him away like the above samovars nearly did or, say, this little pretty bunch, consisting of three-four hairpins and a Melchior broach which, quietly buzzing, is circling over me like wasps over the sleeping Mars.
Did she wake up? No, just turned over. Sometimes it's hard to be a cteis, giving all your love to just one morpheme of Morpheus, to the literary dreams with prologue and epilogue. In our sleep, we are not surprised if an accidental lover consistently turns into a cigar, a fire hydrant and, finally, an entwined with wild grapes Doric column, but if it came true, it would be something sensational.
When I not came but fell out of my trance like a chick out of its nest, she was sitting on the bed and staring at me in horror.
"It's not what it looks like," said I, hastily returning to my human form, though l knew she was going to scream. She was screaming while I was dressing up. I still heard her screaming when I was far away from her house.
For my whole life I had to hide in the dark so the shade of similarity could obscure my unlikeliness. In sleepless world, the dreams are as horrific as a butcher shop in a vegetarian country, but sometimes even a capital letter, concealed amongst all these others, fancies himself an invisible one just because it is printed in black. Covering my tracks, I ducked several times into the driveways and then walked along an endless blind fence so long and fast that I had got a stitch in my side. I wasn't being chased which was good in itself, and the farther I moved away from the crime scene, the lighter was darkness: whether the dream, turned into reality, had sent the plenilune to help me, whether my brain, white hot from insomnia, was glowing in the night.
It was muggy. Electricity in the air forecasted a thunderstorm. The oblong puddle, I've stepped in, was full of moon. I looked around. It is inhabitant, my sleepless town. The lady, dressed up as distastefully as I could imagine, was walking her platypus with tennis rackets on its paws ("this is in case it snows," she explained); another one, according to local custom wrapped in black copy paper, was hold in the arms of her satellite whom I had just basically sketched. A country girl in the wreath of paper flowers drew my attention to the new dry coffins lined up under the moonlight in front of the entrance to the bookstore. "To see a coffin in your sleep is for a change of place of living," my mother used to say when I was a child, used to say before the dreamhunters silenced her. "In sleep, suffering is real but death is illusory," another Mr. Unpronounceable wrote**. "Dying is fun," the third dreamer bowed to him***. The fourth one, easily and recklessly reviving the imaginary things with a light touch of his hand - the crossroads, the trees, the houses, - walked through the crowd of phantoms and ghosts, moving towards the town square, where a hurricane-like celebration was twisting.
A dream as differs from reality as a fantasist and a jerk differs from a rapist, but the stage of a traveling circus right in the hurricane's eye seemed to be quite real. The chorus line, which consisted of black and white maids and mulatto girls in pink and blue, just finished its performance, and now the muscular beauty from a forgotten poetry was juggling eight, covered in a dried blood items, - catching and tossing them up the sky, where another show was happening: vagrancy of comets, explosions of supernovas, jellyfish-like copulation of luminaries: the Y-star was emitting the whitish clouds of interstellar gas, the X-star was passing through it and voila - another satellite, another platypus.
"The platypussy," the country girl happily said, pointing the finger at it, and I corrected her, corrected rather automatically than prophetically, but a minute later I was corrected too. The wiry old lady in polka dots chintz from head to toe, a sort of former starlets who сome out of the shuttle to buy souvenirs or ice tea or something else till the driver is in the toilet, professionally knocked out the bearded gaucho, who tried at full gallop to snatch her bag from her tanned wrinkled hands, and Secile turned over...
Perhaps, it was too much. Any movement of soul in this muggy world looks like a parody, let alone the dreamhunters who were just waiting for this to happen. The cigarette burnt my fingers, the cat sneaked under the bed, the lightning flashed and the dry canvas tent over the scene blazed up like a gunpowder.
They came from this flash - the ominous fins of the eavesdroppers who circle around us, the wet aprons of executioners, the curly wigs of judges and after them - the chief state mnemonic with his silver thumbs and transparent head, in which the knotty swarm of either worms or nightmares was disgustingly squirming. Yes, he's caught me up in the moment of crime, but my real crime lied elsewhere. Freedom, this is the real euphemism; death, this is the real dark place, and I was going to tell him about it.
At first to myself to make all who sleep the sleep of the dead to open their eyes. Then whispered, but in a sort of whisper that will shake all prisons of this world. And, finally, in a full voice, in the name of love. Beware, if you love me, stay away from me. Don't wake me up or you'll be sorry for this. The midday creatures must be wary of coming twilight, let alone the plenilune. I said, stay away! You won't? Well, I've warned you, bastard.
Notes:
* Purgatorio, X. 121-29.
** Gennady Barabtarlo.
*** Vladimir Nabokov.