Max Mueller

Everyone thought I was fine. I thought I was fine until my square-jawed nemesis stuck his hand into the crotch of my gelatinous outer layer and tore me open revealing my naked core to be pale white, slender, sick with sadness, and finally sleeping. But that is the middle of the movie and I must start at the beginning. 

C- and I spent the first month alone in our new, unfurnished apartment. We got on all fours together and scrubbed the floors clean. We put spices in the cabinet and shared a pair of glass plates.     

Four weeks later, E- was idling out front with her U-Haul full of stuff. She asked me to saw her boxspring in half to fit it up the stairs. We put her family’s couch under the large street-facing windows, their wooden table near the tiled-over fireplace, their rug over the cheap wood floors, hung her family’s paintings to fill the blank eggshell colored walls - including a 19th century oil portrait of an elderly man whose resemblance to E- was remarkable - and plugged their kitchen appliances into sockets. She was a flurry of energy until she bounded up the stairs to her room, closed the door, and rarely emerged.   

C- and I were passing strangers after that. I was distracted by my day job I guess, and treated my time with L-, my Queen of film, like the height of my life’s calling. It took weeks for me to notice how haggard C-’s face had become. Without forewarning, she moved back to her father’s cabin in the woods somewhere. 

On her way out, I learned of the chronic stomach pains that had been preventing her from sleeping. They scared her. In time, the pains proved psychosomatic. 

The search began for someone to fill the space left by C-’s departure. After several applicants failed to meet our standards, B- strode through the door, looking appealing if only for his ability to relieve the financial stress of covering the vacant room. B- was an odd character. The apartment became a storehouse for his abstract paintings, which were composed of thick swaths of either garish or earthly hues arranged haphazardly on the canvas. One of his ‘sculptural experiments’ sat in the center of E-’s family’s table looking like a pound of rotting flesh harvested from the torso of some poor sinner. He’d paint and sing pop songs late into the night, sleeping downstairs on the floor whenever the desire overtook him. Conversation was always a labyrinthian affair. I’d march in with good spirits only to find myself lost. A phrase of his would hang in the air and try as I might, I could not find the words to respond. Then the far off bray of a minotaur would signal the necessity of an exit strategy. My routine assumed the contours needed to avoid these disconcerting little chats.  

Then he disappeared. 

While he was gone, I spent an evening curled up on the floor of the apartment encircled by B-’s artistic monstrosities and E-’s old money. The electric pain in the air and the faith shaped pit in my squishy center were lighting me up, making my bones iridescent and giving my skin the impression of a Chinese lantern’s paper. I watched Paprika. The music alone, and her playful ability to slip in and out of frames, characters, worlds - and yes the collapse of time and space - it was all so wonderful that I started to cry from joy. It was a movie about our dreams, those flecks of wildness that we carry around. We do not carry them alone. Later that night I wrote:

“It’s 1:30 AM more or less. I’m watching youtube videos of presidential candidate Donald Trump. I shut the computer and there is a subtle flicker that remains on my retina. My mind is desperate.

I’ve never met Trump. For all I know he doesn’t exist in flesh and blood. My contact with him is composed of light. Thousands of photographs, one after the other. It makes it look like he’s giving a thumbs up.

Where do we get these dreams, these desires to shape our environment in accordance with the unattended-to-worlds sunk in our minds as though there's a hidden organic substructure to physical reality? The well is poisoned. The poison flows from one to another. How does the poisoned well spread?”

Two weeks later B- returned. He was in Florida. My question, ‘why,’ only appeared to confuse him. ‘I was walking around,’ he said after a long pause. He would not hold my gaze.

Trump’s victory came as a surprise to me. It shouldn’t have but what can you do? I didn’t sleep the night of his election. I saw the Queen next to me, silvered with moonlight, peacefully in repose. She was dreaming of mobilizing the people, of universal healthcare, of the fight for a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. Her battle field was staged and Trump was only the enemy charging. 

We never talked about it but the longer I lay with her, the less I was able to sleep. She didn’t ask about it and I don’t blame her. That night my mind was pumping like a piston, scattering my dreams to the wind like so many butterflies. The thin thread of my belief in the country finally snapped. Now I only believe in dreams.

In the Queen’s inner kingdom she was not a Queen. Perhaps she was a Gentle Warrior and I was merely a member of her small battalion. All of our dream selves fuse in ways we cannot comprehend. My creations color hers and yours and so on and so on, for we are all connected. When the Gentle Warrior said, in the shower, that I had become like an extension of her body, she may have expected that I too felt her to be an extension of my body. But it struck me that I felt her statement alone to be truthful and that I was losing myself in her.

When I returned to my own apartment, all in a fog, B-’s father was there. I’d later learn that B- was being taken to a hospital to treat a mental illness that I assume is schizophrenia.  

Let me be clear, B- was not a well man before Trump took the country but following the hospitalization his bizarre behavior noticeably intensified. I’d pay for utilities and upon asking after his portion of the payment, I’d be met with a barrage of insults in the order of, ‘I think you’re a piece of shit.’ But the check for the appropriate amount would usually surreptitiously slide under my bedroom door days later. Following one of these baffling one sided arguments he stomped out the front door and disappeared for 48 hours. When he returned he had developed a limp and he vomited all over the bathroom walls, leaving it to harden.   

It was too much for me to handle so I moved out of my own room and in with the Queen. She took me in gladly. E- weathered the storm by continuing to hole up in her bunker until the day she cooked an ill timed frozen pizza. 

The shit hit the fan when she was still pre-heating the oven. I imagine her slow dancing in her unnecessary apron, humming Frank Sinatra’s rendition of ‘That’s Life’ to herself, as she so often did. B- must have heard the commotion. When he reached the doorway to the kitchen, he lingered there, moving his weight onto the balls of his feet, his body limp and swinging, as though a noose was around his neck. E- probably said something like, “I see you B-,” just to steady her nerves. 

Then B- dropped into a squat and started jumping up and down shaking his jazz hands to and fro. He was chanting over and over, “There’s evil in the house. There’s evil in the house. There’s evil in the house.” 

E- pushed past B- and beat a fast retreat to her room. This time, though, B- broke the apartment’s sacred covenant of the closed door. H banged and screamed and generally tormented. Did I mention that B- was over six feet tall and built like a bear? E- called the Queen and I. We told her to come right over and spend the night if she needed to. She did, woke up, rented a U-Haul, and moved herself out of the city, back to where she came from. 

You may think that Brian was crazy. But there was Evil in that house. And there’s Evil that hangs like a white cloak over this whole land. It’s the Evil of the hordes who came here searching for the Promised land and sought to destroy a whole other way of life through theft and genocide. When I’m quiet - which is rare - I can hear the earth crying. These Evil hordes, they were ‘learn-ed’ which they took to be the central strength of their civilization. What went un-noticed to them was their true ‘genius,’ their desire for domination at the expense of human life. It is here that you can observe the poison pouring into the communal well of dreams. Or, more likely, the poison had been in the well for centuries already. Or possibly even millennia. If I don’t keep my whits about me at all times I become crazy. The dreams, everything I’m holding for myself and everyone in my life, start marching through my streets. 

My father - The Father - and I shared a bottle of wine and a late night conversation turned to this review of Paprika. I bent in appreciation as he brought to bare the best of logico-rationalism on the subject. 

“When you say dreams, what do you mean? Because there’s many different interpretations of that word,” He said.

“Well, that's the thing. I don’t really know,” I replied. 

The Father’s Dream Delineation

Dreams 1: Hopes and aspirations
Dreams 2: The waking unconscious.
Dreams 3: They happen when you’re sleeping. 

“This is by no means comprehensive but as you can see, they are all very different,” said the Father.

“Yes. I suppose they are. But, at the same time I feel that they’re not. It’s an intuition, not a thought really. Maybe the connection is that they all happen on the margins of everyday life. Or something.” 

“Hmm. Maybe you mean:

Dream [dreem], noun, the non-rational.”

“I think so, yes” I said. 

The Father found this interesting.

A world that exists free from the pollution of poisoned dreams, what does that look like? It staggers the mind to imagine.

Dreams became poisoned when humans decided to put the world to work for them. Animals were not to be lived among but to be used. The desire to improve upon nature created unforeseen problems. Thought was seen as the only means to save us from the problems created by thought. A Foucaultdian nightmare constructed itself from ideas, link by link, brick by brick. Dreams did not escape the colonizing force of work. They were forced to labor under the threat of the lash. Driven like horses and beaten into submission. If you enslave your dreams, don't be surprised if, when they’re released from bondage they come out weaponized and angry. 

Democracy, that crown jewel of our country’s ignoble lineage, is that not composed of false dreaming? To ‘engage’ in a democracy, we must survey a network of ephemeral relationships, construct an accurate topography, and place our trust in a human being’s ability to shape the abstract into greater harmony. The futility of this, even for a people with the purest intentions, is undeniable. We, as a people, are far from pure.

The word sad bearing no relationship with true sadness. Sad. The leader and the loved of this nation was dreamed into existence with the propulsion of history pushing him onward.  

Pen Prick, Oct. 10, 2017

Writing used to be enough
Until life lifted her skirt 
She said, no words 
Only flitting limbs
And colors that allure
I’m rounded on all sides
Rolling toward the orgy
A prick for a pen 

The persistent beat of this dream life bangs on. I was cut from service to the Queen, cast out to wander the east coast of this land as a migrant peasant. That’s when M-, the Prophetess - or Szamanka in my native Poland - appeared upon the scene. She found me dancing on the street, ‘stolen land, stolen land, stolen land,’ lisping through my missing front tooth. I, the human equivalent of a building demolition and she, a spinning top, bouncing off walls, wavering but still upright. She was exploring the deepest recesses of her mind, mistaking the shamanic powers of insanity for academic intellectualism. She’d taken herself off the anti-psychotic Abilify and initiated a year long manic episode, a journey which she recorded daily in a book. Her one moral credo was talk to your neighbors.

‘I only fuck smart men,’ she said, which made me smile. 

‘For me sex and life have more to do with the sensual,’ I replied, which made her smile. 

She spit in my face. Finally the truth. I spit back in hers. Oh Szamanka, Oh! I think she was still on her quest the night we met. She plied me with drink after drink till I was too fucked up to stand and coerced me into unprotected sex. Maybe our daughter will be able to talk to God as well.  

Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for opening my eyes.

Post Script 

A Dream I Had Last Night. 

I needed to get across town so I hailed a horse drawn cab. It was an open carriage and the wind blew my hair as I observed the pleasant clip-clopping of the horses pulling us through the graveled avenues of the city. The cab stopped at a street corner and a woman in a hipster t-shirt - colored with fashionable graypurple and fadedblue waving patterns - mounted the carriage steps. It took some time to recognize that the woman was in fact L-. She looked different. Her face was fuller and all around healthier looking despite the severe glint in her eyes that I’d never seen previously. Her hair was short and strait instead of rounded and flowing. The cab jerked into motion and the once charming sound of horses’ hooves became the rhythm of a nervous heart. L- seemed not to recognize me or even notice that a fellow passenger was sitting next to her. I kept glancing in her direction, trying to catch her eye. It seemed some unwritten rule that I was not to break the silence and invade her decided world apart from me. We sat that way for a long time. 

When the cab pulled up to her manor, she descended the steps gingerly with the aid of the driver and I saw her stride across the street. Spinning in her opened doorway she looked me full in the face. In that look I discovered I’d been wrong. She’d known it was me all along. She’d felt my presence at her side. She’d waited for me to talk but I never did. She was saying in that look, we share this burden of love. Then she closed the door. 

Post Post Script

I ate a pastry for lunch and skipped dinner so the bottle of wine spun me out of control. I was back at M-’s apartment for the second time, visiting the baby bump and catching up with my beloved shaman. 

“I’ve been doing some research since I last saw you and I think I’ve figured some things out. I want to share them with you because you’re open minded and our last conversation really got me thinking,” she said. 

She asked me to place my cell phone in the hallway in case of surveillance and proceeded to weave a yarn concerning Deep State corruption among Democrats, Illuminati finagling, and rapists sent by the powerful to neutralize the threat of revolutionary individuals. 

“The gutting of net neutrality was their way of destroying the one tool that had the power to expose them all.” 

She was deep onto fringe websites. 

I said told her that her analysis about the consolidation of that slipper force, ‘power,’ toward more and more organized methods of control, such as the State in the hands of the Democrats or post-national corporations in the hands of Republicans was astute. I agreed with the recognition that above our day to day reality there is a proxy war being waged among demigod-like mortals vying for greater and greater ordering of the behavior of whole populations. In the face of these forces, the need for the internet was created. I remained mute on the question of Illuminati backed tactical rape. 

My Szamanka, mother of my child, you were slipping away from me - no longer my last refuge. 

She showed me her endless list of palindromes and homonyms. Hundreds of pairings, looped in little blue letters. She was pointing out how they were all connected by a subconscious set of associations. For example, being chaste is an ideal to be chased. 

The conversation turned to art and the differences between mediums. Each artistic medium has its limitations and expressive strengths. 

“Except for writing, which can do anything,” she said. 

I replied, “Not everything. Writing is only words and words are merely dreams, right?”

Then I laughed generously and she became defensive, talking about the ability for fiction writing to develop the empathy of youngsters. We were lost to each other again.

I clarified, “Don’t get me wrong, ‘merely dreams’ is a realm of extraordinary power.” This lead, in some higgledy-piggledy way, to the dark heart of our coming together.

Back when she was 21, feeling outside of all joy, having what she describes now as her first Bi-polar episode. A session of ragged wandering had led her through a neighbor’s yard. She sat in their gazebo, she wasn’t sure why. Some time later - time was passing with a slippery inconsistency - she staggered into a raucous bar. The sounds, the colors, the smells, they were all miles away. It was then that the buried memory of her 7 year old self being molested on her neighbor’s gazebo came springing forth. That moment, had split her personality, causing the Dissociative (or Multiple) Personality Disorder that I now knew she had. As time went on, she came to feel that it was her father who molested her. When she brought this up to her mother, then her sister, she was met only with unwillingness to entertain the notion. When she brought up molestation, more generally to her father he backed her against a wall, placed his clenched fist in her face and said, ‘not in my house.’

I asked many questions that night. And didn’t ask many more. I asked her if she could describe her different personalities, which she chose not to do. I wondered if her outward personality, the one I’d met, was her Paprika or if her Paprika was cleaved from her and buried at age 7. I knew my Paprika was called upon to act as healer that night. 

We fucked in a different way. Gone was her playful sense of control. She only wanted me to fill her. She let me make her cum which, as she explained earlier, was a sign of great trust. ‘You fuck like a psychopath,’ she said. ‘I only like fucking psychopaths.’ 

Sex, for her, I was to learn, was a pained obsession, filling her mind with a barrage of unwanted thoughts and desires. ‘I know it has to do with my trauma… I became a slut.’  

It was all very disorienting. Maybe it was her relentless vulnerability but I felt a channel of pure love flowing out toward her that I’d never felt toward anyone. She asked me to spend the night and I agreed with the trepidation of anyone who has to be across town at 5am the following morning. We lay in various forms of spooning shapes until she rolled away and told me she was having trouble letting go. 

“What is it that you’re holding back?” I asked. 

She spoke about her father and past lovers. I listened, stroked her belly, tickled the top of her head with my fingertips, and said, “you’re carrying a lot.” 

“I feel better, thank you.” 

The barrier between lover and therapist was shot to hell and I was an animalistic love being found nowhere in the confines of any sort of description. I had the feeling that, for her, I was not but an instrument of her liberation - which, come to think of it, if I must be something, is an alright thing to be.   

Some small piece of it all - my support of a wild genius maybe - was a direct link to the Oil Company Manager who handcuffed me to a bed and slapped my balls without asking till I pissed blood the next day. She too wanted me around. I found myself eating dinner with her parents, having the calm realization that the Manager herself didn’t really know me. 

So, my corporate demigoddesses, my Szamankas, my Queens, I’m sick of searching all over town for myself. You have worn me down to your shuddering servant, your beam of light, your sex kitten, your pure white circle of love, the one who wants to find freedom through you and now knows he never will.