12.19.14.3.7 4 Manik 0 Uayeb intention portal
Welcome to the dead days. I started mine off with a weird dream.
I was an adult in the dream, not sure how old, but with a friend of mine I'll call J. I haven't seen her in years; she moved out of state.
My great-grandpa (who died of emphysema when I was 11) was sick and I wanted to go see him. I had just been to see him with my grandma (his daughter-in-law; he was my mother's father's father) but I wanted to go see him by myself. And J drove me, but didn't come in with me.
When I saw him the day before, he'd been in a room right across from the nurse's station, right where you come in. But that room had someone else in it. I asked and they said he was in room 108, upstairs. The stairs were not at all hospital like. They were a great tier of riser-less slabs with many landings and 90 degree turns. I just looked at them. A doctor came up and said "she doesn't like backless chairs, she won't like those stairs, take the elevator." By backless chairs he meant the kind without back legs. (The pictured chair is from Ikea.)
I went up the elevator and found my Big Poppy (that's what I called him) in a room by himself. I thought he had had some kind of stroke or something. I sat with him and held his hand and he started telling me something (can't remember what) and in the middle of a sentence, with no fanfare whatsoever, he died. I sat there for a moment thinking he was just gathering his thoughts but he was gone. I saw his x-ray displayed nearby. Except that it wasn't a black and white regular x-ray, it was in full color and looked more like the scans you see on TV that they do of mummies. And it showed that my Big Poppy's sternum had been crushed into small pieces (how could he even breathe?) and many of his other bones--just about all the big ones--were also broken. I had no idea how the damage happened but he had been moving and not in any apparent pain. I went and told the "she doesn't like stairs" doctor that Big Poppy was dead and not knowing what else to do, went back to J's car. She had moved it from where I left her. I found her peeing in a public bathroom (a one-seater) but for some reason she had left the door open and anyone could see/hear her. And she was peeing really loudly. She laughed that I saw/heard her but wasn't really embarrassed.
We got in her car and went to some kind of meeting with a bunch of others, in a library or similar space, but one where we could talk. The "stairs" doctor came in and said he wanted to help us deal with our grief. But only I was sad; no one else knew my great-grandpa. Then he changed the subject and started talking about drugs. He put a bowl on the table between me and J (we were sitting across from each other). It had little packages in it, like origami, but tiny. He instructed us to take a packet, open it, and take the drug inside "to see what it felt like." So like idiots we all did. The drug was some kind of amphetimine (not meth) and right away we all got hyper. (Which doesn't happen when I take amphetimine based diet pills, but we'll let that slide.)
The doctor kept talking about the dangers of drugs but we were all high and ignoring him. J grabbed a bunch of the packets and took more amphetimine before anyone could stop her. She was acting really wild. The doctor tried to restrain her by grabbing her but she just kept going for the bowl. No one else knew what to do. He hauled her off and I left and went somewhere with my mom. Not sure if she knew her grandfather had just died.
We went to a used book/cheap book place. There was a really long table of books and we started looking. Some DVDs were mixed in. I found a 30 second "welcome to Stephen King's World" DVD and next to it was a weird medal. I couldn't really read it, it looked really old. Then I saw that along the top of the stacks were--toys? models? miniatures? don't know how to describe them--of the Inquisition. Like the Inspector General, a head Torturer, etc. Collect the whole set. The medal had come from one of them.
For whatever reason, my mom and I got on a bus. My mom started talking about J and how weird she had been acting when my mom saw her earlier. I didn't want to say that she was high. (No matter how old you are, some things you just can't say in front of your mom.) A guy I know from the ASC got on the bus and started talking to me. My mom knew him too, but not as an ASC person, and thought it was strange that we knew each other. In the distance I saw someone chasing J through a field. The ASC guy noticed and said something like "she's not feeling well today." And I thought that was an understatement.
I'm not sure what I got at the bookstore--I think it was a book, not a DVD. I remember a little of it. This dark-haired girl with a newborn baby was dressed in some kind of ancient middle-eastern costume (but I don't think she was middle-eastern). She was in a fight with someone. In full costume, with her baby also in costume and a little boy who was a friend of hers or maybe a brother, they were sitting on cushions on top of an advancing tank. A framework around them held billowing brightly colored silk like a curtain or backdrop, but those coming at the tank could see them clearly. The tank met the resistance on a bridge (a modern bridge, like the one over the Connecticut River on I-95, but not so high up) and the girl had to jump, along with the little boy, and throw her baby into the water. They all survived. The girl found a big blue piece of something floating and pulled herself on it. The baby and the boy just swam back to shore. It took her forever to drift that far. When she got to the shore she was dirty and muddy and there was a small fish in her shoe. She watched it flop around and thought she should put it back into the water, but she was too tired to move and it died.
