justwrite 14 november

In one of the dreams there are invisible gnomes and they only become visible when they take their hats off. They do this in The Back of the nameless café—which should probably just be called Wonderland because it’s as good a made-up name as any. Anyway it turns out in this dream that the tall lanky guy with red hair is not a dishwasher, but a wizard. Well, actually he’s both a dishwasher and a wizard. It seems that being a wizard doesn’t always pay the bills. This dream comes with a lot of backstory built in. It’s conveniently sensible. As the wizard washes the dishes he complains that there aren’t enough dishes for him to wash and he has to keep cleaning the same dishes: cups of hot chocolate and plates that used to hold cranberry cake. “There must be more to it than this,” he moans. The gnomes, unhappy at seeing their apparent leader so distressed, go out into the world in search of cups and stories. They put on their hats and vanish. Quick scene change to the Museum of Ideas. The coffee spills again. The saucer beneath it disappears, but no one notices. Eyes are distracted by the loud noise and the fuss. No one is counting, just blotting and yelping. The gnomes giggle and the dreamer sees herself at the table hearing them but not seeing them. There are other scenes but they melt. The wizard dances with the scarf lady and Dmitry Mikhailovych is perplexed. “This won’t do at all,” he says, shaking his head vigorously. He throws dishes at the wizard—with kindness, a gift, to keep him busy and to stop all this dancing in the office. The chess players can’t play and the beautiful new red-haired arrival, she of the high black boots and the equestrian style, is distracted. The distractor distracts and the contractors contract to bring in more chess players, so suddenly the center is filled with gnomes and chess pieces and when the train comes through the conductor is throwing tickets out of the window, yelling, “Join us! Stay on track! There’s no use in truth if you can’t have potatoes!” The profound message offered stays with Aileen and when she wakes up it echoes in her head until she writes it down and frees her mind: “There’s no use in truth if you can’t have potatoes!” She falls instantly asleep having written this down and dreams of sunflower fields, of living in Everything is Illuminated, but only the part with the old lady in the house in the middle of that field, washing white laundry that belonged to no one, keeping boxes of the past, ready for collectors and keepers and company. The sunflower fields that must be in the center, the south, the east, because they’re not in the west, they’re not hidden on the plains for viewing purposes. Then, for all intents and unmentionable reasons, the seasons change, and the rearrangement of the stage sends the seeds raining down, though the stalks stand tall, and little roundbacked women appear with sacks to attack the thick black collection on the ground. They gather to gather, then leave to stream out onto the sidewalks and to the corners, huddled into themselves and selling glass cups full of pocket fodder. The cold comes and the sunflowers go, the women remain, trained into stillness and immune to such tunes as the wind cries foul.