Alleymanderous and Other Magical Realities Read online

  ALLEYMANDEROUS AND OTHER MAGICAL REALITIES

  by

  BRUCE TAYLOR

  Produced by ReAnimus Press

  Other books by Bruce Taylor:

  Kafka's Uncle and Other Strange Tales

  Kafka's Uncle: The Unfortunate Sequel

  Kafka's Uncle: The Ghastly Prequel

  Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity

  Magic of Wild Places

  Mountains of the Night

  © 2017 by Bruce Taylor. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/store?author=brucetaylor

  Cover Art by Carl and Lida Sloan

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ~~~

  To Carl Sloan and in memoriam to his wife, Lida, whose work graces the cover of this book: two of the most creative, visual artists I have ever met and whose interest in my work with magic realism sparked their imaginations and certainly fed mine. Thank you for your support, your wonderful art and years of friendship.

  Also to all the furry, four-footed “mew-ses” who have padded through my life, and especially to Flak who, when I was a child, was often there when no one else was. I learned a lot from you. Thank you, my little gray and white, yellow-eyed bodhisattva.

  ~~~

  Table of Contents

  Alleymanderous

  ...and other magical realities

  Bats

  The Bauble

  The Little Black Box of San Manuel

  Spiders

  Dilly of a Dally of a Day

  Eggs

  You Can Hardly Wait

  Icebergs

  Mother, Mother, Burning Bright

  Planetary Loves

  Growing Up, Rocked and Rolled

  Safeway Passion

  One Afternoon in the Sears Catalog

  Waiting

  Harborheights Hospital Psychiatric Inpatient Service

  Of Thumbs and Rafters

  Morality Play

  Fire

  Insight

  Insult to Injury

  Jessica's Place

  Metamorphosis Blues

  Movies

  Mr. Wetzel and His Wurlitzer

  Of Love, Beasts, and Burning Webs

  Satan Claus

  "The Ear of Ozone"

  The Mall

  The Well

  You Know Who I Am by the Song That I Sing

  Panther

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “To sleep: perchance to dream—”

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

  —Delmore Schwartz

  “To not respond to a dream is like not answering a letter.”

  —Arabic proverb

  “Dream? Waking up from a dream? Since when?”

  —Alleymanderous

  Alleymanderous

  12:46 am

  ...you get home, pooped from the New Year’s celebration. But it wasn’t the celebration that wore you out. It was being with your family, your grandmother, your father, sister and mother. You keep hoping each year it will be different but it never is. You remember the words of your therapist: “You always hope that it will change, don’t you?” Somehow, this evening, you get it. You truly get it: it ain’t ever gonna change. But you know, way down deep inside, something is gonna change. But what? Your mind swims at all the possible and alternate realities but out of all the possibilities: which one is the one you’re going to finally wake up to?

  You sigh, go to bed, and in a few minutes, your Maine coon cat, Alleymanderous, hops upon the bed, crawls beneath the covers, flops against you and purrs and purrs and you begin to drift...

  ...and then the fun begins...

  12:56 am

  ...you are in a bathtub and you look up to the blue tiled walls with the clouds floating in it and out from them, looking a bit like white shelf fungi that you find on trees in the Great Damp Northwest. You are in your clothes, and your cat, Alleymanderous, is sitting on the side of the bathtub with a giant black tarantula in his mouth. You do not like this. The water is beginning to harden like it’s Jello™. You cannot move. You look up at Alleymanderous and you say, “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  In the background, Beethoven’s Eroica is playing and when the music nears its crescendo, Alleymanderous drops the spider. It scrambles up your stomach, your chest, your chin, up to your nose, then up to your eyes. You want to close your eyes but you cannot. “No,” you scream. “No! Please!” The tarantula comes closer and...

  ...darkness. You are aware that it is growing light again. This time you are aware that you are covered by sand. You look around. The sky is pink and everything is covered by a light frost. “Mars?” you whisper. “What am I doing on Mars?”

  You also notice that your penis is exposed and you see a little point of light above. A minute later, a little spidery craft lands right near your penis. For a long minute, it is quiet, still. Then movement—a mechanical hand with a strange fixture at the end of it approaches your penis—to take a sample, you assume. You imagine the machine thinking, “Is it alive? Is there life in that strange, thick log?” You close your eyes. This is a dream. This just must be a dream. You want to wake up. Any minute you will wake up. You hope. And...

  ...darkness. The light. And you are sitting in the bathtub and are sitting in what appears to be red wine or strawberry juice or something. Alleymanderous sits on the edge of the tub with a book that has no title. He sits up like a rabbit and says, “Life is but a dream...”

  You smile. “...filled with sound and fury...”

  “Signifying everything,” says Alleymanderous.

  “Nothing,” you reply.

  “A tale told by idiots.”

  “Well,” you finally say, “have it your way. Just what is this dream trying to say?”

  “That this is life,” says Alleymanderous.

  “It is?”

  Alleymanderous nods. “The bathtub. The constancy.”

  “How do I wake up?” you ask.

  But Alleymanderous turns the page and does not answer.

  “Maybe all these dreams are incarnations,” you say. “I have to go through all these life dreams until I come back to the dream that is reality. Is that it?”

  “Out, out brief candle,” says Alleymanderous.

  “So what am I to do?” you ask.

  Alleymanderous hands you a straw. “Eat, drink, and be merry.”

  Dumbly, you look at the straw, then bending forward, you drink and become drowsy, sleepy, and dimly hope that maybe next time...darkness...

  ...and slowly, the darkness becomes lighter and you finally realize that you are still in the bathtub and you feel a sense of relief—either you are still in the dream or you have awakened from the dream and are, in reality, in a bathtub where you must have fallen asleep. But you notice Alleymanderous dressed in flippers and an ingeniously designed face mask. He points with a paw to the water in your bathtub. You stare. “How’d the floor get tilted?” you ask, noticing that the water level dips down in the direction of Alleymanderous. Alleymanderous shakes his head and points up with his paw. High above, on what you thought was the wall, is an overflow. “What?” you ask. “What?” You’re in a bathtub in a bathtub?

  A
lleymanderous nods and manages to get the cleverly designed snorkel out of his mouth. “A bathtub in a bathtub, a dream within a dream. Boy you can’t help but get clean. Awesome, no?”

  “No. No, not awesome at all. How do I wake from a dream and back to reality and not into another dream?”

  Alleymanderous flips water up from outside the tub that you are in and says, “Some things are not known. Or knowable. Yet.”

  With dismay, you now indeed recognize the vastness of the tub that surrounds your tub. You even notice the bathtub ring high above. You vaguely wonder about the size of the creature that must bathe in this tub. Suddenly feeling very modest, you put your hand over your privates and ask Alleymanderous, “Aren’t you concerned about any of this? How can you be so calm?”

  “Because,” says Alleymanderous, “it’s not my dream. Besides,” he adds, as if all of this makes perfect sense, “I’m not the one taking a bath, although I don’t mind snorkeling or scuba diving.”

  “Then why the hell do you raise such a fit whenever I try to bathe you?”

  “Simple,” says Alleymanderous, “I can’t stand baths.” With that, he somehow manages to get the snorkel back in his mouth and flips over backwards into the water outside your tub.

  “Alleymanderous,” you yell, “how do I get out of this?” But he doesn’t answer and you close your eyes really tight, hoping that when you open them again, things will be different. And when you do open them again, even though you don’t notice any difference in physical sensation, you rejoice. You are not in a bathtub. You are outside of it, sitting in a chair reading a book and you rejoice. You look out the bathroom window and your heart freezes. Mars is impossibly huge in the sky. You look to the book you are reading. “Nope,” is printed on the page. You flip the pages. “No,” “Nyet,” “Uh-uh,” you read. You sigh. This does not look good. Then Alleymanderous walks in wearing Adidas running shoes, purple running shorts and a pale purple towel over his shoulders. He looks like he has been jogging, his fur wet and dripping, and you don’t think cats can sweat, so you then assume he ran through a lawn sprinkler. You look at Alleymanderous. “Now what?” you ask.

  Alleymanderous looks up. “Care to join me in a fifty yard sprint?”

  “This is insane,” you say.

  “Maybe it’s life.” Alleymanderous shrugs.

  “Life is insane?”

  “Life is a dream.”

  “Is dreaming insane?”

  “Maybe it’s life.”

  “This isn’t helpful.”

  Alleymanderous takes off a front shoe and licks his paw. He then puts it back in the running shoe and yanks the Velcro strip over with his teeth and anchors it. “Interesting,” he says, “how strangely logical dreams are. That you would even think of a detail like the Velcro strap to give credence to something like a cat wearing running shoes. Clever. Cunning.”

  “Diabolical,” you say, “very diabolical.”

  “Oh,” says Alleymanderous, “you don’t know how diabolical it truly is.”

  Suddenly, and with great foreboding, you turn and look into the bathtub. There is a large version of yourself, floating in the bathtub. On the head of that image, which has one eye gone, withered, sucked out like an egg, sits the tarantula. “Get me out of here!” screams the version of yourself. “Get this fucking dream over with! This is crazy!”

  “I’m trying,” you say. “I’m trying. I don’t like this any more than you do, but it’s like I can’t get out of it. It’s like I have to go through this damn thing to get past it!”

  “Do something!” yells the you in the bathtub. “This is fucking dreadful!”

  You look at Alleymanderous. “So what do I do?” you ask.

  “Like I said,” says Alleymanderous toweling himself off, “fifty yard dash?”

  “Maybe we can dash out of this dream?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” says the you in the bathtub, “but for God’s sake, do something before my visitor gets hungry again.”

  So you stand, take a step and...

  ...darkness. And slowly light returns and you are in another bathtub, but it is filled with steaming water. And that’s good, because the sky is real black, the stars are bright and there is a very bright point of light and you look around to a snowy landscape. Alleymanderous leaps up on the side of that bathtub. He is dressed in a space suit.

  “Uh, you know,” you say, “this doesn’t look like Earth. Pluto, a moon of Uranus, maybe, but not Earth.”

  Alleymanderous lifts his face visor. “True,” he says, “away from the bathtub, the air is a mite thin.”

  “When does this end?” you ask.

  “Are you sure you want it to end? How do you know that, if it ends, it won’t be worse than before? Maybe this dream is better than what your real life really is.”

  You shake your head. “I can’t believe that my life is, in reality, any worse than what my life now appears to be. Besides, I have to be dreaming all of this... I just have to be.”

  “Oh?” says Alleymanderous.

  “What do you know about all of this?” you ask. “Do you dream?”

  “Of chasing mice, yes.”

  “Doesn’t help me much,” you reply, sulking, looking around to the bleak landscape. “I just want to go back to where I was before.”

  Alleymanderous laughs. “Don’t we all? Oh, don’t we all? Oh, don’t we all have memories of those good times?” He laughs again and pulls his face shield down, securing it. And with that, Alleymanderous leaps from the side of the bathtub and you watch him walk away—soon to vanish in the vast snows and unending silent shadows.

  1:17 am

  ...you close your eyes and when you open them, you discover that you are sitting in a chair on the front porch. Alleymanderous is nearby, still dressed in a spacesuit. “Dream,” he says. His voice crackles as if coming from a two-way radio.

  “Dream what?” you ask.

  “Dream of the way it could be.”

  You laugh. “Good try, cat,” you say. “Good try. The dream ended in the 70s when Vice-President Spiro Agnew said we could be on Mars in 1986 and was either laughed at or told to shut up. Hard to say which.”

  But Alleymanderous stands on his hind legs, sitting as a rabbit might, puts his paw up and, pointing to the sky, says again, “Dream.”

  “Dream?” you ask. “The dream is dead, cat. The dream is—” A weird feeling comes over you and you shake your head. “What—” You close your eyes tight and then you feel a crushing force and a rough shaking. Just when you think you can’t stand it any more, you open your eyes and looking down, you see you, too, are dressed in a space suit. Nearby, Alleymanderous has already removed his helmet and without really thinking how, you reach up and remove yours. A door opens to another compartment.

  “Enjoy the ride?” asks Alleymanderous.

  “Whew,” you respond. “Space flight? Lift off?”

  “Yup,” says Alleymanderous. “You didn’t get sick.”

  You shake your head. “Actually, I don’t remember much.”

  “Just as well,” says Alleymanderous. “Can be a messy ride.”

  You both step through the doorway, and before you, a vast window and the scene is that of the Earth below, all blue and white and brown with land masses and water and clouds. Then, looking up, you see directly ahead and not far away, two vast arms of what appears to be a space station, extending outward from a central hub. And not far away, and also looking out the window, a painter, painting the view of the Earth below. He turns.

  “Like it?” he asks.

  Alleymanderous, still holding his specially-designed space helmet, looks to the painter, then at you, to whom he points. “Convince him.”

  You look to the painter. The art looks familiar—“Uh—” you begin. “Not Chesley Bonstell—”

  He smiles. “I know, I’m supposed to be dead, but—”

  You look to his art. “—uh—” you say.

  He
points. “Where we are, is 1955. My art has always been considered very realistic. Photo-realism is the term used.”

  You look around. “—uh—” you say again, “—uh—sure the hell is.”

  He returns to his painting. “My art ran in Colliers Magazine, 1954-1955. The public couldn’t handle the art and articles on space exploration and called me, Willy Ley, and Wernher Von Braun, ‘space cowboys’. People couldn’t believe space travel could or would happen.” He looks back up, a sad smile on his round face. “If the political will had been there, we would have been first in space, not the Soviets. And all that you see here would have been up and running between 1965 and 1975.”

  Alleymanderous sighs, sits on a stool bolted to the floor and looks out the window, feet up against the wall, suit-encased tail twitching. “—and Mars by 1986—”

  “Sooner,” says Bonstell, “much sooner. 1976, at the latest.”

  Alleymanderous nods. “Mars base in the early 80s.”

  Bonstell holds up a painting, Saturn as Seen from Titan.

  You nod. “I’ve seen that. It was in the Astronomy section of the Encyclopedia Americana I had when I was growing up. I used to stare at those pictures and dream—”

  Alleymanderous looks at you. “So you did dream.”

  You nod. “But I knew it was a dream.”

  “Even when we landed on the moon?”

  You nod. “Sure. We beat the Russians, but then we had Viet Nam—and when Vice President Agnew said we could be on Mars—”

  You watch. Chesley Bonstell puts his hands to his face. “It didn’t happen as I dreamed it—did it?” he whispers.

  You sigh. “No, it did not—and it’s probably not going to for a very, very long time—we live in a time of wars, wars, never ending, never ceasing wars—”

  Abruptly, his picture changes; the oils begin to run, then around you, the walls begin to sag, to melt, the plastiglass in the windows begins to bulge outward. Instantly, Alleymanderous snaps on his helmet, as do you. Then both of you are blown out the suddenly ruptured window, blown out a long, long ways away, and you watch the nearly completed Mars ship sag and melt and then dissolve, as does the wheel of the space station and the Bonstell-designed rockets and rocket cruisers. All melt, and then it’s as if they become like taffy—pulling apart, becoming unglued, then just evaporating.