Notes from the Future: Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise

I was in the car, falling asleep; there were people outside, a lot of them. Veronica was out there, showing them some ideas via American Sign Language. They were going to do something to us, but Max was there guarding us from them. They were scared of us and they let us go. So we went down the road that was spiraling around the hillside and we came out on Crow Canyon Road. It was much longer than I remembered, and we had to stop at an inn for the night. The road was incredibly bumpy. The floors in the inn were bumpy and the bed kept bouncing around. It hurt, and I cried out. Then someone put a blanket over me and it stuck me in the leg and I slept deeply the rest of that night.

Veronica and I left the next morning and Max had gone ahead to scout. He sent word via small black pigeon that the way was clear, and we met him on the road to Fairview. We drove up that road, but there was a herd of goats high on a hill and lonely. The goatherd was a puppet and looked like a young Elliott Gould.  There was no way to speak to him, because we were not also puppets.

In fact, we were the only people with no strings on them. I felt sad for the others, but they would not listen. I tried to cut a lady's strings for her and she began to bleed, screaming. Everyone looked at me like a monster; the blood was spraying from her strings like I'd nicked an artery. An old man -- her husband -- demanded to know what kind of person I am. Didn't I know that a person's strings are what tie them to this world? Didn't I know that cutting someone's strings is murder?

I didn't know.  I'd never seen people with strings on them. We were in a community recreation center on the road to Fairview and it was also a grand ballroom in the Beaux Arts style. Everyone noticed that we didn't have strings and they backed away like we'd grown scorpion claws. Outside the window, the moon tried to consult with the sun, but he would have none of it. The ground began to shake and things shattered and there was loud beeping, but the people in the ballroom just started chasing us.

We hid in a 1947 DeSoto in a driveway behind a pile of manure. There were peasants sculpting the manure into stakes to kill vampires. When they saw us, they pointed the way to Fairview. When we reached the intersection and turned right, the entire Bay Area looked normal from the Hayward Hills. There was no smoke, there was no fire, there was no ruin. I looked at the digital clock in the car and couldn't read it, and Veronica kept trying to make me look at her. But the blurred, shifting numbers of the clock were very important. Significant. They meant something. She was saying I should remember a number, the number of universal something ... but she was distracting, so I leaned closer to the clock, closer and closer and then I remembered that the clock means I'm dreaming and I wake