allowed him to partake of the first, but Shakespeare knew well the dark side of dreams.
Sometimes he is on a desolate stretch of moor, damp and furred with tangles of heather. (He supposes it is heather, remembering Macbeth.) Or perhaps he is on a high mountain, with barren rocks thrusting above dark forest. (He insists that he has never read Faust, but admits to having seen Fantasia.) Occasionally he stands naked within a circle of standing stones, huge beneath the empty sky. (He confesses to having read an article about Stonehenge.) And in this same Gothic context, he has another such fantasy, and he never speaks of its imperfectly remembered fragments to anyone—not to lovers, therapists, priests, or his other futile confidants.
It is, again (to generalize), a fantasy in which he is the observer. Passive, certainly. Helpless, to be sure. But the restraints hold a promise of power to be feared, of potential to be unleashed.
Hooded figures surround him, center upon his awareness. Their cloaks are sometimes dark and featureless, sometimes fantastically embroidered and colored. He never sees their faces.
He never sees himself, although he senses he stands naked and vulnerable before them.
He is there. In their midst. They see him.
It is all that matters.
They reach/search/take/give/violate/empower.
There is no word in English.
His therapists tell him this is a homosexual rape fantasy.
There is no word in any language.
There is only the power.
The stairway climbed inexorably as she led him upward into the building. Returning—and they always returned, he knew now—the descent would be far more intolerable, for he would have his thoughts to carry with him.
A stairwell door: very commonplace usually (a Hilton or a Hyatt?), but sometimes of iron-bound oak, or maybe no more than a curtain. No admonition. No advice. On your own. He would have welcomed Fire Exit Only or Please Knock.
She always opened the door—some atavistic urge of masculine courtesy always surfaced, but he was never fast enough or certain enough—and she held it for him, waiting and demanding.
Beyond, there was always the same corridor, circling and enclosing the building. If there was any significance to the level upon which they had emerged, it was unknown to him. She might know, but he never asked her. It terrified him that she might know.
There is innocence, if not guiltlessness, in randomness.
He decided to look upon the new reality beyond the darkened windows of the corridor. She was impatient, but she could not deny him this delay, this respite.
Outside the building he saw stretches of untilled farmland, curiously demarcated by wild hedgerows and stuttering walls of toppled stone. He moved to the next window and saw only a green expanse of pasture, its grassy limitlessness ridged by memories of ancient fields and villages.
He paused here, until she caught at his arm, pulled him away. The next window—only a glimpse—overlooked a city that he was given no time to recognize, had he been able to do so through the knowledge of the fire that consumed it.
There were doors along the other side of the corridor. He pretended that some might open upon empty apartments, that others led to vacant offices. Sometimes there were curtained recesses that suggested confessionals, perhaps secluding some agent of a higher power—although he had certainly never been a Catholic, and such religion that he recalled only underscored the futility of redemption.
She drew aside a curtain, beckoned him to enter.
He moved past her, took his seat.
Not a confessional. He had known that. He always knew where she would lead him.
The building was only a façade, changing as his memory decayed and fragmented, recognizing only one reality in a dream-state that had consumed its dreamer.
A stadium. A coliseum. An arena.
Whatever its external form, it inescapably remained unchanged in its function.
This time the building’s interior was a circular arena, dirt-floored and ringed by many tiers of wooden bleachers. The wooden benches were warped and weathered silver-gray. Any paint had long since peeled away, leaving splinters and rot. The building was only a shell, hollow as a whitened skull, encircled by derelict rows of twisted benches and sagging wooden scaffolding.
The seats were all empty. The seats had been empty, surely, for many years.
He sensed a lingering echo of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” played on a steam calliope. Before his time. Casey at the bat. This was Muddville. Years after. Still no joy.
He desperately wished for another reality, but he knew it would always end the same. The presentations might be random, might have some unknowable significance. What mattered