THE BABOON DREAM THOMAS E. KENNEDY "The houses are haunted By white night-gowns." -Wallace Stevens

They treat you with respect. So far. I would never have expected that. Or perhaps it's not respect. Perhaps it is indifference. Perhaps it is deference to the unknown, the not yet known. Perhaps they are still sizing me up. I thought I would be raped right off. Unless they are playing with me, letting me wait, win confidence, to let me gain hope so that it can be snatched away again. Why would they do that? In order to underscore, maybe, that true horror embraces no mercy.

I have not slept yet.  I do not know if I will dare. Or even if I can. My mattress is near the toilet bowl which is fixed to the wall, near the doorless doorway to the inner passages and chambers where I have not yet ventured. I do not know if I am expected to remain here only or whether it is permitted to explore this place.  I saw two that left today. Each took a pillow with him. Why a pillow? Were they going to sleep somewhere? Were they looking for a place to be alone so they could make love? Make love! To think of two such creatures being capable of an act called love! They were furtive and obvious. Even I, the "new boy," could see clearly they were planning something before they set out through the shadowy corridors where there were other men milling about.

The one known as the Cruel was approaching with his entourage, moving in the direction they were coming from. I wondered if he would notice them, see the pillows, stop them, invoke some unwritten unvoiced regulation, and descend upon them. Do what?  Something . . . not good.  I watched, eager to see, wondering why he was called the Cruel, what he might do, whether I wished for the humiliation of others, let it happen to them, not me, them, but the screen faded, and I was left alone to my own devices in the great vault to which I have been assigned with the others.

In fact, I was seated on the toilet. An indication of how dehumanized I am already.  So much for being treated with respect. A very old and crooked woman seated on a built-in brick stool alongside watched me with seeming interest. Oddly, I did not care. I defecated and cleaned myself, grateful there was at least paper, and thought, This loss of dignity has already passed. It cannot happen again because it has already happened. It can only worsen quantitatively, not qualitatively. This is how it is now. You defecate here in full view of anyone watching. You defecate and wipe and count yourself lucky if there is paper, and if you are watched there is nothing to be done about it.  The old woman seemed to take some prurient interest in watching me, but that was no concern of mine other than as an indicator of what might be expected here, what I might expect, what I might become in time, how unfine I shall be.

Now I stand by the edge of my mattress. It is wider than I would have expected, and thicker. I wonder if there are vermin in the wadding, beneath the filthy cover. Another man just entered this space and moved past me. He moved without a swagger, neither quickly nor slowly. He wore pale loose pants, like pajama bottoms, and blue canvas slippers, and a tight, three-quarter length jacket of dark leather, buttoned close around his tubular trunk. The leather jacket seems some symbol of status, of rank, a sign that a man has achieved some level, perhaps some measure of stability. He moved past me with a nod. Discrete but not unfriendly. He seems a potential ally. Or perhaps that is what he wishes to lead me to think, to put me off guard, prepare me to expect some freedom of fear before the trap snaps and they are on me.

I want to say this is intolerable, but I cannot say that. It merely is.

*

I am aware of something.

A man named Susquanna is staging all this in some way, and I am a part of it, have a part in it. I do not know how I got here or what is going to happen, but I do know that it has happened before and was considered a great success and continues to reap recognition and reward. I must feel my way forward to find out what happens—I must live my part in it. Others, it seems, have already traversed the entire production, but I wonder if it is always the same, if it evolves, changes, or is changed.

-Do you know Susquanna's new production? I asked someone today—a woman who it seems had been my superior years ago in the other life and her underling whose position I had snatched from him but who now, in my absence, has snatched it back. I don't know why they came here where I am. A mercy visit? Perhaps they are not here at all. Perhaps things occur in a multiplicity of dimensions here.

They were both familiar with the production.

-Excellent! she exclaimed.

-Excellent! echoed the underling. Bolt is his name, yes, Bolt by name and bolt by nature, and he affects a certain fashionable angst even despite the somewhat comfortable position he has regained—at my expense. Or in my absence. And what do I do?  I seek to cheer him, that he should take pleasure in his position, my irony being that his position is as unstable as mine was, could easily be reversed as mine has been, although I pretend to be unconcerned about my present straits.

After all. I am here to play my part in this.

They recall a scene.

-The dessert scene! exclaims my former woman superior.

-Excellent! exclaims Bolt dutifully.

And in their recall, the scene plays out with me in the lead. There, it seems, I am a technical trouble-shooter. Susquanna is having trouble with his machine, and he contacts me here in this dark shadowy place for advice, help, technical support. There is some confusion, some uncertainty, about who is who. Am I me? Is he me?  That is how it is here. Do not expect identity.

The dessert scene plays out. He has a technical problem with his machine, and I advise him, and he—now me—with utmost discretion for one locked away (me, of course, but I am momentarily he), he asks (or I ask), -Now you have helped me on more than one occasion, and I greatly value your support. I would like to reward you somehow. Perhaps a gift of some sort. What might I give you?

-Dessert, I (he) pronounce(s).

-Ah! say(s) he (I). —Just a dessert? Or a just dessert! And he (I) describes the dessert. It is what I (he) wish(es). And it is a putrid concoction too nauseating to describe, yet somehow not so, somehow transcendent.  And a multi-lingual pun: Fish in the dessert. Diabolically clever. Poisson in the dessert. Poison in the dessert. Fish in the desert. Horribly rotted, reeking. This is the most revered, celebrated scene, for it took something almost indescribably disgusting—a mixture of the sweet and the barren, the deadly and the nourishing with a symbol of love gone rotten like something forgotten in the refrigerator—and created beauty of it all—even commercially viable beauty which, after all, is the trick. The secret to Susquanna's success.  Why it is he who plans while I am planned. Yet, I dare say, I am closer to the beauty than he for I am a part of it, even if my very existence depends upon him, and even if he reaps the reward. Or is this all pitiful bravado on my part?

-I despise you, Susquanna.

-I am despised, therefore I am.

*

The others here move about like shadows.  I suspect they are already dead. Perhaps this is The House of the Dead by F. Dostoevsky. There are even tiny wry literary jokes here.

What is not amusing is the fact that I yet must sleep, and the thought of it evokes terror.

*

There is no music here. No music. And I begin to understand that it is the absence of music, the absence which defines the special nature of this place, the absence of tones, of rhythms, of harmonies. They move stiffly. Even the symmetry of their bodies is unmusical. Who are they? Are they some other species?    Other than whom? Than myself? Then, of course, I would be the alien.

*

Who is Susquanna? Does he even exist? Or do I imagine him? Perhaps this is a dream.  If so, am I the dreamer? Can a dreamed man have consciousness? Can a dream exist so palpably? Yet, how palpable has it ever been for me really? Things happened and were gone like vapor. In the moment, it always seemed real, true, anchored by its palpable weight. Yet in the past, unreal. The memory of a dream.

And now . . . this.

*

I shall have to sleep sometime.   Others sleep in the vast shadowy room. No one seems to move about, but perhaps they are waiting for me to sleep before they emerge. I sit on the edge of the mattress and stare into the shadows.

In some ways, this is not as bad as I might have feared. I can do this.

But if I don't sleep, will I be strong enough to face tomorrow?

*

My father is here. I saw him today out in the corridors beyond this room. At some point, I must have slept, though I did not lie down. I must have slept sitting. Perhaps I slept with my eyes open. Dream-free sleep. Or did I dream? Did I dream that I was sleeping? Or that I was awake?

I only know they were moving about again, and so I guessed it must be day. The night here is when they sleep and the day is when they move around. The light, if you can call it light, never changes. Only the vapors drift, as if they have a life of their own. They drift and images blur as they drift past, come clear for the moment they are past, then blur behind the next vapor. It is as if each spiraled cloud of vapor is a living creature of some sort, swimming in the atmosphere of this place.

Today, then, as I sat trying to be invisible on the edge of my mattress, I peered through the doorless doorway into the passages beyond, and there, amidst the moving figures, the floating mist creatures, I glimpsed my father. He is shorter than I remember, still big-bellied, yet somehow narrow and tubular as all the others here. He has no coat of leather. His shirt stretches across his belly, tight at the buttons, but his face is strong, his nose, his jaw, his gaze level, not sharp, but clear, strong, yet not without emotion. It was as though he meant to tell me something with that gaze, a statement too complex for words.

Perhaps he cannot speak. After all, he is dead.

*

Susquanna has not made himself known to me today. I come to doubt his existence. Perhaps he is nothing more than my own delusion. How much simpler it would be to know the name of the author of things. How naïve to expect to. I recall that there are some who will not speak the name of the creator. He that Is sort of thing. I am Who am and so forth. An awkward dancer floats past swinging a putrescent fish, singing tunelessly, Yawa! Yawa! Yawa yawa jing jing jing.

-What is the meaning of this blasphemy?

And of course others hold that there is no name to speak, only process, process so vast and strange as to be beyond the ken available. Yet to comprehend even that could then be mere surmise.

I think.

Of what use are these thoughts? I do not believe my own mind. Perhaps I am delirious from lack of sleep. Perhaps I am merely delirious. Perhaps some bit of my mind has gone bad, and I am still in the world that I always knew, but now can see it only incompletely, as I see this place, while others around me see it clearly, see me, pity me, care for me.

Perhaps the twisted old woman who comes to sit and gaze with her strange eyes on me is my caretaker, one of my caretakers. Perhaps she is not old and twisted and strange at all, but normal, and I see her as through the grimy windows of my faulty eyes.

*

Today I sat for hours—what is an hour?—staring at the palm of my hand on which lay a long, loosely coiled strand of black human hair. I was at once amazed and horrified by it, touched simultaneously by hope and by despair. It was, I knew, a strand of hair from a woman, and it embodied a truth that seemed within my grasp if I could but step beyond the threshold of horror. Hours dribbled past. I stared at it. With fear and with dread, I stared at it. With hope.

*

The Cruel came to see me today, flanked by two of his attendants.

He stared at me for some time, his face so devoid of expression it was frightening, as though he gazed with utter dispassion at some meaningless object. I trembled.

Finally he said, -You are nothing.

I nodded. What he said was true, became true as the words were formed by his mouth.

-You do not even know what nothing is, he said, or what it means to be nothing.

This was true. He reached for me and as he reached my fear was so great I lost control of my bladder. His fingers closed around my nose and drew back sharply from my face. I screamed. The pain was rending. He had torn off my nose and held it, a bloody raw lump, in his fingers.

-You see? he said. -If you knew what it meant to be nothing, you would have felt no pain. You still have a lot to learn, my friend. You still have a lot to learn.

Then he reached again and returned the nose to its place, and my face was whole again.

-You see? he said.

I nodded.

*

Who sanctions this?

*

I slept last night. I dreamed. I do not know if I dreamed. One by one, the others rose on their knees from their mattresses and crept slowly across the floor towards me. It was horrible to see them coming so slowly from all directions, descending upon me. Still on hands and knees, they surrounded my mattress and peered at me with shining strange gleeful merciless eyes while I dreamed I was an antelope on a huge plain, bounding away from a hunting cheetah. My flight was doomed.  It was only a matter of time before the cheetah overtook and felled me, before one of its claws hooked into my flank, and I stumbled, and teeth were at my throat. But then, all at once, I was the cheetah; I was the teeth sinking in through the muscles of the throat so that blood smeared my maw red while baboons watched in a wide circle around us, hopping and jabbering.

Then the dream faded, and I slept blankly surrounded by the others peering at me. Or I dreamed them as well, for if I was asleep how did I see them, and if I saw them, how could I be asleep? Unless things are other than I have come to think.

Off in the corridors, my father watched silently, gazing, and one of the baboons, his eyes so strangely human beneath the ridge of his brow, spoke: -It is but a vapor, he said, that appeareth for a little time and then is gone.

Then my sleep deepened, and I found the relief of not existing for a time.

Until I woke again, to this place.

*

I remembered something today. And it was important. Someone. A face. It flashed on the screen of my mind for one second and was gone.

Her face.

And I understood that the hair had come from her. And that it was of more value than any certainty.

*

They are putting on a play. We are to play drunkards. The play is called Child of Drink and Sin.   We are to get drunk for the part. One of the great comic moments was assigned to me. I had a line: I love getting drunk. But I hate being drunk. I was only an under-study, however, and I never got to go on, never got to speak my line and so was not allowed to drink. The drink anyway was dust, yet I craved it, and still it was hilarious to watch the players stumbling about the stage, playing their parts, a moment's respite from the shadows.

It was a fairy tale about drunkards so some of the actors played children. They did not drink either, but only looked on, admiring the behavior of the drunken "adults." The Cruel had a role, too. He played the Great Benevolent Father and went about making a mystical sign on the foreheads of the other players. He received thunderous applause at the curtain.

I felt a hypocrite, for I despise and fear him, but I was on my feet even before any of the others, holding my clapping hands high to be certain he saw them.

*

What is true?

*

The ancient crooked woman returned today while I slept. Tonight it must have been. She lowered herself to the edge of my mattress, and my heart oozed fear that she might crawl in beneath the filthy cover with me and breathe her hag's breath into my face. She reeked of stale tobacco and the rotten bits of food decaying between her yellowed teeth, but then she took my hand in hers, and I was startled at its softness, the tenderness of its touch, the way the fingers curled around mine with gentle intimacy. She became that touch then, and I no longer could see her, but perhaps that was merely because my eyes were closed, because I slept.  Perhaps she was not there at all, only an echo of a touch I once had known or only another image formed by thought, engineered for me perhaps by Susquanna to entertain those who fill his greedy pockets.

There was a whisper, too. It breathed sweetly in my ear, saying,

-Her face.

*

I do not wish to be here.

*

That face again. Her face. A flashed splinter of a second and gone. So beautiful. Her face. And I can almost remember. A feeling. That radiates from her face. To me. And is returned then to her. This is the most ingenious of inventions, no, of discoveries, a discovery. And it was mine. It could be mine. If . . .

If what?  What? Thought fails me, and I strike my own skull with my fists, but I cannot beat the answer from my own thick head.

-Too late, a voice whispered, and I opened my eyes to look, but there was nothing.

*

Today, as he moved across the room, the man in the leather jacket stopped and peered into my eyes. His face seemed suspended in the air. -They will come for you, he said.

I had no idea what he meant, but I asked, -When?

-Yes, he said.  -Perhaps. And continued his circuit around the room.

*

Now the fear returns.  I had begun to believe this was tolerable, that I could be here, that I could do this. A voice was piped in, stentorian, British, pronouncing, -The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, followed by dramatic military brass music, and I thought, Music! There is music here after all! But then the music was gone, and I could not be certain it had ever been there at all, and I gripped my temples, trying to consider, trying to understand, trying to remember something I could not at all remember.

Music? What is music?  A word. Two syllables. Music. The word is foreign to me. What does it mean? It might as well be some slime that oozes from a wound, and with that thought I remembered absence, an absence palpable as an abscess, full and aching, and the pain distending that eruption was fear. Yes, fear. And it was then the fear returned, or perhaps merely was remembered, always had been there, but forgotten for a time.

The fear is worse than fear. It is dread. And with such dread, this place is intolerable.

But there is no choice. I am here.

*

The baboon dream again.  Piercing human eyes. More than human. God-like. Perhaps it is a god. Of some alien creed.

I find myself praying it will speak to me. Instead, it dances. In embrace with the ancient twisted woman. Dance without music. Dance without rhythm. Their movements are harsh, grotesque, as they turn, circling the shadowy room, and the others, too, watch from where they sit on their mattresses, so I no longer can be sure the dance is occasioned by me, for me, or whether it is for all of us here, if Susquanna has dreamed this up for us, to mystify, to illustrate, or simply to assert his power, the force of creation which is perhaps all that he has to entertain himself in his empty life, his empty world.

In shadow, he holds us captive and sends a baboon to dance with a twisted old hag. Hag breath.  Susquanna, you exist as the breath of a hag. You reek. You are but a fume. I fear this place but not you, for you have no real power. You are a puppet of your own imagination, dance on its strings, we turn together in a galaxy of images, and we are not real.

The only truth is dread.

-I, he whispers, am dread, but so indistinctly I am not certain whether he said 'dread' or 'dead.'

-Dance for me, he whispers.

*

Today the Cruel returned with his henchmen and his empty face.

-We have them, he said.

-Yes, I replied. It was all I could think to say, but anger flared in his eyes, and -Yes? he said. -Yes? You say yes to me?

I began to shudder. There was no word, no attitude, no possibility of redemption. I hung between the jaws, the teeth of dread, and I shuddered, trapped in the instant prior to an extinction that would never come.

Speaking very precisely, he said, -I said: We have them. Consider that.

I nodded.

His eyes swept to my feet and up again to my face. He seemed to be surveying me, considering where to strike, and in the survey of his eye, past becomes present, and I am craven.

*

My father is there again, out in the corridors. Staring in at me, he telepathizes words: -It is not what you think. It is not what I led you to believe. It is utterly other than we had surmised. Yet so obvious.

Fury simmers in me. I send words back: That is too little too late, old man! You are the cause of this. I hate you forever!

My sentiments do not stir him. He continues to peer in at me, and I see that my words are meaningless to him. He has some purpose. His gaze is aimed into me, at some place only he can see. His eyes would key some lock to a place he deems essential for me. In that moment, I understand something: He means me well.  He has something he wills to give to me. It is his purpose, why he wanders there close to these chambers, why he looks across to me, into me. But what he sees I cannot see, and it all might be another of Susquanna's imaginings, a trifle from his bag of tricks, a shiny worthless little toy he amuses himself with, playing at significance.

I can almost hear him trying to imagine that my father is in hell and has secured an opportunity to save me, but Susquanna's imagination instantaneously turns its back on that cliché. A father would sooner sacrifice his son than himself.

*

The baboon again. This time he stands apart conferring quietly with the leather-jacketed man. They glance over at me, mindful that I have noticed them, and fall still, turn and go their separate ways.

But one thing I know:  I am betrayed.

*

The baboon only comes in a dream. Yet he brings a truth: betrayal.

*

The leather man stops at my mattress today and asks, -Did you like your gift? Perhaps it wasn't what you wanted.

Before I can formulate a response, he moves on.

*

Always new absences to discover: there is no fire here. Neither fire nor light. Only gloam. Dull fish-belly white. Fish again. Poisson. Poison.  Love. Poisoned love. Fish in the desert, poison in the dessert. Riddles. Riddles. And across this space, the baboon sits, his back to me. He glances over his shoulder at me. I can see, by the twitching of his shoulder muscles, that he is doing something with his hands. Despite my curiosity, I decide to ignore him. But he looks again over his shoulder at me and snickers, and I am unable to maintain my indifference.

Pretending not to see him, I stretch my arms and yawn and begin to saunter about the room, as if idly, aimlessly, looping this way and that around the mattresses, circling in from behind the baboon. I feel that the eyes of the others are on me with their strange glow, and I experience a fearful sense that all of this is designed for my benefit, or for my humiliation, that a whole, shall I call it, world has been created with the intention of manipulating me. For what purpose?  Perhaps with some illustrative aim. To illustrate what to whom and why? I loathe these questions. It seems I could sabotage the whole process by turning back to my mattress. Clearly the object here, the entire plan of this moment is for me to come up behind the baboon and look over his shoulder at what he is doing with his hands, whilst I pretend not to be doing so, and I am playing directly into this fate and am aware of that fact and have the power to sabotage the moment, yet I continue to play my role, continue to circle forward as if aimlessly, though focused clearly on my goal, and even as a voice inside me whispers urgently, Go back! Go back! Spite them. Spite him. Turn your back on Susquanna and return to your mattress and sleep. Sleep now, sleep deeper, deeper . . . But who is this whisperer?

 Perhaps it is Susquanna himself playing me against myself, playing my will against my curiosity.  I am only a few steps from the baboon's twitching back now, time to decide. I glance out to the corridors and see my father there, watching me, and no words coming on his gaze, and it occurs to me—from where? from whom?—that Susquanna is running out of time, yellowed brittle time, that all of this will soon be done, and that he drives me toward the completion he seeks to achieve, his satisfaction.

Everyone is gathered for it—the Cruel, the leather man, the twisted old woman, my father—all assembled to see me perform the moment for which I have been created, and I understand then that it is vital for me to surrender, to wish to fulfill that performance, to complete this.

I step forward to the monkey's back and look down over his shoulder. He tilts back his face and smiles up at me. In both his hands, he is holding a long, slender, shiny-pink tube. His palms glide up and down its length. I see that its base is attached to the fork of his thighs.

Now he turns his face from me and becomes himself, alone in the grip of his movement. He begins to jabber and then his body seems to freeze in convulsion, head thrown back, and from him emerges a figure, lathered in blood and slime, standing upright on two legs, hair plastered to its skull. Its eyes open and stare at me. I see it is a woman. I see its face, her face, and our eyes fix upon one another as a half-remembered question opens within me, while all around the voices murmur in a groaning, grumbling chant: Love! Love! Love!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of The Copenhagen Quartet, which consists of four novels about the loves and seasons of the Danish capital, where Kennedy has lived for over 30 years. He has written 20 books. Kennedy's stories have been published in more than 100 literary venues. He has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart, Gulf Coast, and European prizes, the Charles Angoff Award, and the Frank Expatriate Writers Award. His 11th novel, A Passion in the Desert and his 3rd story collection, Cast Upon the Day were published in 2007. photo credit: Alice Maud Guldbrandsen