secrets – Stephan Writes

Last night I dreamed…

Last night I dreamed I was sleeping (yes, sleeping) with my girlfriend on a couch, and she was in her bra and panties. I know because I was trying not to walk her, even though I was slipping my hand inside her bra, to hold her boob. I like to hold that. But she did wake up. I think I didn’t want to wake her up because I had this feeling that she didn’t know she was where she was, or didn’t know I was there, or something.

Anyway, after she realizes I’m there, we have a little bit of time to snuggle, then we hear sounds. Turns out the place we were sleeping in was like the back room of a dentist’s office, or a medical office, or something. People started moving around and opening doors and getting papers ready, so we decided to leave. I was worried about her being exposed but she had a full suit of clothes on. I did too.

We went out and ran into some kind of professional group. I ran into someone who knows me, and he covered for me by saying, loudly, “Sorry to miss you at our golf game this morning!” I guess I had been caught not going. I believe lying there with someone else was more important than anything else, so I guess that’s why I tried to stick around. *

But it wasn’t really a golf game I’d missed, it was planning for an assasination attempt on the Canadian Prime Minister. We were supposed to be pretending it was a simulation, because I’d been hired by the Canadian government to help them brainstorm possible assasination attempts, so they could prepare for them and create contingency plans.

That said, I had also been hired by the Japanese to take out the Canadian Prime Minister, or had turned spy, or something. I’m not even Canadian, or Japanese, so I’m not sure why either of them would have showed up.

So we continue fake / real assasination plans, and as we went along, I had a briefcase of Canadian bills, hundreds, which amounted to something like a million Canadian dollars. I was planning to switch briefcases, not for an empty one, or even one with other money. I was going to put my old underwear in, a la The Big Lebowski.

So my underwear was all dirty, so I needed to wash some. While washing my underwear I got a call from the operations expert in Japan. But now he’s actually in New Zealand. He tells me we can’t go forward, at least not with him paying me, so they’ll have to back out. I say, that’s okay, I’ll sell the story to The Guardian.

I decided to go there on my own. I grab my bicycle and start to bike across the ocean to London, where The Guardian’s headquarters are. I see some whales and seals and dolphins way out in the ocean. They’re friendly.

I get rained on, but the rain is not water, it’s Ocean Spray, the Cranberry Mist juice, or whatever.

I change my clothes once I get to the other side. Don’t want to show up to my wedding smelling like cranberries and whale backwash, do I? Turns out, it’s not my wedding, but my best friend from elementary school, whom I haven’t seen in 30 years. I ‘m there to stop his wedding, because she’s not good enough for him. But on my way to the church I get distracted by a pub that’s showing the Rugby World Cup.

I go in to have a pint, and end up staying three hours. When I come out it’s dark and the fireworks are going off – they’re celebrating July 4th as well. I’m a little confused. They tell me that they celebrate American Independence because they’re actually glad to be rid of us. I start to prepare a defense then get interrupted by Kermit the frog’s live stage adaptation of The Vagina Monologues.

Weird, right?

***

* Note – Everything up to this point was real. I really had that dream. After is just stuff I made up, to see how weird of a world I could make.

Outside Magazine “Terror in the Wild” edition, page 52

My father’s e-mail didn’t make much sense…

He sometimes gets in these kids of moods, where he will, for weeks at a time, rant about an Atlantis cover-up, or the Moon landing being real, or the fact that those ancient civilizations that left us all their writings in the pyramids really weren’t from another planet. Each time, I dismiss him as a bit of a nut, but every once in a while he’s got a little ring of truth to it.

“I’ve got the key,” he wrote, and that was it. No Hello, no good bye, and no explanation of what kind of key it might be or how it could be used.

So I wondered, is this something I need to understand? Is it a way for me to be a part of the bigger elements of this world? Or was it just a hoax of his?

I considered, briefly, that it might even be my brother spoofing him. Ted’s done that before, pretended to be someone he’s not through e-mail, to try and get me to go to the Appalachian trail with my long-distance girlfriend, or to get me to think I’ve won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes, but this seemed too simple for him. He liked grander, broader schemes, and this one didn’t look like that. I believed it was Dad, then, and decided to reply.

“Oh, yeah? Key to what?”

Even though it had been a couple of hours between when I sent my message and when he’d first sent his, he replied almost immediately. He must have been at his desk, “working”, or whatever he liked to call all this research he did. Old books, old magazines, ancient journals and maps. My father’s basement looked like someone had emptied the Chicago Public Library archive into his room without bothering to organize anything, or even stack anything on shelves. I pictured him, sitting there, hunched over his ancient iMac, green screen and all, typing away at me. Six hundred miles away, lounging in my bed, laptop open on my lap, a stark contrast in experiences almost as strong as the contrasts of our environments and personalities.

“The key to the future,” he wrote. That too was all, in that message. I wanted to call. I wanted to talk, directly, because I could see where this was headed. Fifty messages, back and forth, over the next two hours, would just infuriate me at the man’s lack of focus, at his undisciplined approach to the world. I’d be sitting here, racking my brain trying to understand, to comprehend, to figure out if what he was saying was, or even might be real, or whether he’d finally lost it and we could safely deposit him at Shady Acres to a nice, relaxing retirement. It would do me no good to call, though. He’d disabled his phones months ago, in the belief that the radiation from the handset was making him sterile! Ha! As if he could, or would want to, get someone pregnant again at seventy-five. Why would he do that? And if he wanted to, who would sleep with him? All those are beside the point, but useful in illustrating that my father was not always altogether “there,” and so I would need to play along. Play his game of back-and-forth email tag, teasing meaning out of him one or two sentences at a time, wondering, questioning, probing, when all I really wanted to do was go have a run, and a nap.

I replied, “The future of what?”

“Of Humanity,” he replied. “It’s not looking good for us.”

“When has it ever?” Okay, a little snark, but when you’re frustrated at the imposition, you can be allowed some.

“Well, it was all good up until 53 years ago.” Then that message stopped. Before I could reply, another came in. “When you were born.”

Oh.

Shit.

He knew.

Tag: secrets

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