Random 15

I had that dream again. You know, the one with the labradors and the three masked gunmen? I'm sure I've told you about it before. It always seems in retrospect like it should be somehow amusing, but it never is. At the time it's impossibly nightmarish, a catalogue of terrors escalating to harrow the soul.

When I woke up it was raining, of course. It always rains in the valley.

I no longer clearly remember my life in the city, my life before. Sometimes it seems as much a dream as those slavering dogs, prowling the corridors of my mind in search of blood. But I still remember a little. I remember it not raining.

There's something about rain, you see. Something irksome and pointless and mundane. It's like mosquitos or acne, a crass shorthand signifier of the real. All those droplets, so impossible to falsify, so pointless. Perhaps it is just from living here in the valley, under clouds corralled by the gloomy mountains into this ceaseless downpour, but I have come to doubt my senses. A pimple or bite is suspect; a raindrop is a signed confession.

If you built a dreamworld, some shabby fantasy masquerading as reality, if you wanted its inhabitants to believe in it, wouldn't you make it rain? Wouldn't everything be dirty and unkempt, wouldn't the streets be filled with litter and every dark corner rank with lurking menace? I think so, I really do. I think you'd bamboozle us with grubby detail to distract our attention from the threadbare underlying fabric, the lack of sense and logic; the lie.

That is what I have come to believe, since moving to the valley. This whole thing is a scam, a shabby, low-budget fraud. I have grown afraid to push too hard against the walls, in case they fall over like the flimsy painted flats I'm sure they are. I walk around in constant trepidation, my every move tentative, anxious above all not to break the illusion; not to let anyone know I know the truth.

I do not understand the purpose of all this fiction, but I shall. As long as I pretend to know nothing, as long as I go along with it all, my opportunity will come. All I have to do is play my part, not let slip.

All I have to do is play my part better than you.

Sooner or later, my friend, you will give yourself away.
Posted by matt at December 16, 2005 11:09 PM