The Broken Monsters

Plotnik is sitting on the living room sofa, wrapped in a blanket. It must be 3am. He hears Ducknik walking up the stairs to check on him. He wonders if he should tell her about this dream that was so disconcerting he's been unable to close his eyes again. He has gotten out of bed to try and keep from disturbing her with his tossing and turning.

"Hi, baby," he says as she walks into the living room.

"Are you OK?" she asks.

So what's the answer? No, I'm not OK, because that was a really scary dream. Yes, I'm OK, because I know it wasn't real.

"I don't think I want to know about it," she says. Plotnik doesn't blame her. He doesn't want to know about it either. Duck turns and goes back downstairs.

"I'll be there in a minute," Plot lies.

Ducknik's theory about dreams seems right to Plottie. Dreams are loose wires, disconnected thoughts, fears and random observations, stitched together in your head like a bad screenplay. You see them on the big screen, as it were, so they seem real.

Well, they are real. But they're like a Chinese menu, one from Column A, one from Column B, one from Column C. All those synapses fired off in your head at some earlier time, and now here they are, randomly reassembled, in living color, filling you with amusement, or dread, or maybe even pleasure.

But how pleasurable is even the best dream you ever had?  "The Home Run Dream," as Ducknik calls it? You woke up. The pleasure is gone. It was a dream.

But the bad ones linger. Those fears you didn't know you were feeling, those intimate dangers, those tiny rooms you're afraid to go into, the houses with the leaky roofs, the admonishing voices from beyond, the exams you forgot to study for and you can't remember where the test is being given, and you forgot to put on your shoes or your pants.

And that awful disease.

And the children you love.

And how small and powerless we really are.

In the paper this morning there is John 'Shit for Brains' Edwards's pathetic mug. Blow it all away. Clinton. Blow jobs in the Oval Office. Coltrane. Heroin. Whitney. Coke. Michael. Painkillers. Every paper, every morning, nameless people acting out senseless crimes. Mass Murders. Suicides.

The neighbors always say: "But he was such a nice man. A good neighbor. I can't believe it."

Each of us, same dream, different components, a different solution for the basic fear.

Have a dream like the one Plotnik had last night and maybe it makes sense. You do what you do to achieve some kind of protection. Immoral, nasty, hurtful, you don't care. At least it will keep you awake. Whatever happens next is better, right now, than having to try to close your eyes and go back to sleep, where the broken monsters are.