"everything could be worked out so well"

i.
At six twenty am, while rosy-fingered dawn was leaking through the blinds in his bedroom, a man awoke and he shook the night from his hair.

“Damn”, he said,”I think I left my wallet in the truck”.

And he reached for his pants, which had earlier collapsed on the floor. They were typical of pants manufactured in the twenty-first century. They were made from “microfiber” and had a white band, with blue racing stripes, that ran along the inside of the waist. They were very nice pants and fashionable, too. Never needed ironing.

They had been bought during the height of discount season, but the wallet was not in them.

Neither was it on the nightstand.

From her half-sleep, his wife muttered something about his organization level, about falling asleep while reading French surrealist texts at two twenty three in the morning.

In order to avoid an argument, he found the book buried beneath a bundle of blankets, applied the pants to his body and stepped quietly into the larger world.

For a minute, he contemplated going outside, without wearing a shirt, to look for the wallet.

“Easy enough to do in this neighborhood”, he thought, then revised himself, thinking that he did not want anyone to see how fat he had grown this summer. So, he found a polo shirt to wear. It was in the laundry room and crinkled but clean and white.

He remembered the wallet, turned toward the front door. It was breezy outside.

The truck was unlocked.

At first he was certain the wallet was gone and a thread of panic was opened. Somewhere deep inside his body more than a few neurons sent a minute electrical signal to their friends and allies, calling for the body-wide release of substances guaranteed to make the heart pound and the mind race.

But, then, there it was, the thing itself, black and sitting in a black crevice, complete.

He grabbed the wallet from where it was, said to himself, “Fringecrest”, and went inside.

ii.
Where, after trying to read the news, which he thought reflected a world that was becoming more and more like a Kilgore Trout novel, and taking a few puffs on a cigarette that he had saved for two days, he fell into a deep sleep upon the couch where he sat.

In the dream he went into, he was driving two friends to a grocery store that did not really exist, on the eastern edge of Nob Hill, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two friends were humans that had died earlier in his life. One of them was a young man, the other, a young woman.

When they got to grocery store, which was in a shopping center that possessed a very complicated design, based on the positions of the bricks that composed it, they exited the truck and noticed how crowded the place was, filled with people and color and vehicles going to and fro.

They went inside and he immediately lost track of them.

“That’s okay”, he thought, “they seem to be excited about walking around and shopping”.

The brightness and activity inside the store were confusing to him, though, so he went back outside.

It was darker there and a storm was approaching. Inky clouds gathered on the horizon. They moved quickly and then hovered over the larger buildings of the neighborhood.

“Is that a tornado?”, a passerby asked.

Everybody started leaving the store.

The wind came up with the clouds and it started raining. People were wandering all over the parking lot. From inside the truck, with the windows rolled down, the man looked for his two friends, but did not see them.

In the dream, he did not worry too much about them, and was sure that they were happier where they were because they only appeared on random occasions in his dream world.

Instead, he was concerned about getting home. He was sure that the storm would wreak havoc if he did not.

As he turned onto the street with that chaotic thought anchored to his chest, he noticed one of his students sitting at the bus-stop. The student was holding onto a portfolio that contained a copy of the research project she never turned in.

A bus drove by and she disappeared into it, dissolving and being absorbed as it passed. The portfolio was left behind.

When he got home, while the storm was ebbing, he opened the portfolio and showed it to his partner. It was filled metallic seashells and wisps of fine white hair.

iii.
At nine twenty am, the dogs started barking because they had yet to eat. This event effectively ended the dream about spectral friends, busy food markets in the middle of the southeast heights, tornadoes over Nob Hill and poetically constructed though unfinished, research.

The man’s shoulder hurt from lying on it. He did not mind that because it confirmed that he was alive and awake. He never felt pain in his dreams and knew this from having his head chopped off numerous times while fancifully battling Ravana.

“Four days of this”, he thought, and smiled.

“Time to write”, he said, as he rose from the couch.