17

DREAM OF THE BROWN LADY – 1ST PERSON ('BLAH)

I had difficulty waking up as a child. When I fell into a deep enough sleep, I could remain indefinitely unconscious. Every morning my mother-thing had to drag me out of bed by the heels, pick me up by the shoulders, shake me like a rag doll, and scream in my face in order for me to regain consciousness. Once she resolved not to wake me to see how long I would stay asleep. She told me she wasn’t going to wake me before I went to bed. “I think you might be a superhero,” she said, glancing hesitantly across the room at the ’gänger of the man she was dating at the time. The ’gänger looked at me and sucked in its cheeks.

One night I awakened at 3:14 a.m.—unprovoked. I was five years old.

I slept on the bottom of a bunk bed. On top was my collection of action figures, stuffed animals and malformed papier-mâché dinosaurs, the latter of which I made in art class. I didn’t like sleeping with them, but their proximity made me feel safe.

The bunk bed lay in a nook that extended into one corner of my bedcube. I had to enter the bed from a drop-drawer in its rear. About a half foot of space separated its edges from the walls. It was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, but I liked tight spots. My favorite pastime was to have my mother-thing lock me in her trombone case and carry me around the house, pretending to be on her way to a concert. Accordingly I pretended to be her trombone.

I blinked at the chainmail undercarriage of the top bunk, then turned on my side and blinked at the wall.

My mother-thing had digigraffitied the whole room. Digigraffiti was one of her many illicit hobbies. For a while she made a living doing it, defacing the exterior of Bliptown as a freelance advertiser and Littleoldladyville-sponsored artiste. After a few run-ins with the Law, however, she gave it up, restricting herself to the interior of our cubapt.

My bedcube was a panorama of ultraviolence, an animated gorescape that my mother-thing continually updated, adding new characters and methods of slaughter. Fairy tale beasts, witches, giants, elves, dragons, princesses, mermen and Rumplestiltskins attacked, maimed, dismembered and ate each other in an apocalypse of zombified wrath and ruin. My mother-thing believed she was carrying out three positive objectives by creating such a spectacle. In order of importance, these were: 1) satisfying her nagging, overdramatized artiste’s desire to express her identity through the production of art; 2) entertaining (and in so doing educating) me; 3) preparing me for the absurdist, ultraviolent way of life that lay in wait for me in the real world.

The digigraffiti didn’t entertain or educate me. It didn’t scare me either. All the screaming and bloodshed and hellfire just annoyed me. Good thing I slept like a corpse.

An old-fashioned duel between a centaur and a satyr unfolded in the section of wall before me. Vintage German warplanes flew across the orange sky in the background as the characters systematically paced away from each other, pivoted, and fired muskets. Both creatures missed their targets. But the centaur had heat vision: two flaming rivers of lava beamed out of its eyes and doused the satyr, who, as it caught fire and began to melt, stopped, dropped and rolled. The centaur put an end to this safety measure, though, galloping over and trampling its victim with gigantic granite hooves. As it was reduced to mulch, the satyr swore and complained that it hadn’t had enough time to live and accomplish its goals.

The centaur unleashed a piercing victory cry.

The Red Baron swooped out of a cloud and machinegunned the centaur in the back.

The centaur danced the dance of an electrified puppet as bullets riddled it. The Red Baron climbed back into the sky, came around and dropped a bomb on the cadaver. An excess of blood and body parts and internal organs blew apart. The Red Baron beeped its horn and headed for the horizon where a flaming green sun was setting. The sun turned out to be a colossal worm with dreadlocks and a beard that rose out of the horizon, opened its fanged mouth, and devoured the warplane. Storm clouds moved in. A burst of acid rain perforated and cooked the body of the worm, and when the rain passed, a tribe of vicious Amelia Bedelia androids emerged from a cave and fell on the worm, devouring its soft, molten flesh. They were followed by a pack of ligers that partook in the eating of the worm and also ate the Amelia Bedelias. Like the satyr, the worm bitched about its unfinished, soon-to-be-abbreviated life. The Amelia Bedelias, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to articulate any regrets…

As I continued to observe the narrative of mayhem, a feeling of anxiety and dread paralyzed me. The feeling was unrelated to the digigraffiti. I began to sweat and tremble, but I didn’t know why. Something was close. Something was about to happen. Not on the wall, but in real life. I started to hyperventilate.

She appeared. I stopped breathing altogether.

The digigraffiti froze.

She popped up between the bed and the wall as if out of a jack-in-the-box. She made a sharp, horrifying noise that defied representation as she sprang into view.

She was about a foot tall. She was entirely brown and appeared to be made of chocolate. In fact, she looked very much like a chocolate bunny, albeit an emaciated one. A closer inspection revealed she had a human structure. Her hairdo was a tall pointy affair topped off with a bun. Tiny pince-nez sat on the tip of her horned nose. The skin of her face had the texture of a brussel sprout and her lips were knotted into a mad sneer. She wore a little out-of-date buttondown shirt and a shawl over her bowed shoulders. Despite being brown and possibly edible, she looked more like a librarian than a bunny.

It was horrifying.

But I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t scream.

And I couldn’t look away.

My joints left me. My bones turned to iron, my internal organs to brick. Paralyzed, I lay in my bed like a statue that’s been pushed onto its side. My body felt so heavy…I began to sink into the mattress. The bunk bed made cracking sounds. Soon it would cave in and crush me. I prayed for it to happen.

The brown lady…She didn’t flinch and her expression never changed. She was as harmless as a popsicle on a stick. Yet I had never been so terrified. Tears poured out of my rotund eyes as I stared into the miniature, empty eyes of a monster who I sensed was an incarnation of the Devil. I recalled thinking how it all made sense. My mother-thing experienced demonic possession and had to be exorcised regularly. I figured it was my turn.

Then, suddenly, my body came back to me. The digigraffiti reanimated.

I sprung into a sitting position and cried for my mother-thing, pretending the brown lady wasn’t there but eyeing her just the same. The logical thing to do would have been to sprint to my mother-thing’s bedcube for refuge. But I stayed in my bed.

My mother-thing didn’t come. Eventually my lungs gave out. I stopped calling for her. I turned and faced the brown lady.

I said, “Go, please. Go away, please. Thusly.” I didn’t know what the latter word meant but my mother-thing always said it when she wanted something. I’m not sure she understood what the word meant either, but I liked saying it. And it assuaged my anxiety. I started to whisper it over and over. “Thusly. Thusly. Thusly. Thusly.”

The brown lady stared at me.

I remained in bed. Now I began to whisper-scream for my mother-thing. Unless she was sitting next to me, she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. But I whisper-screamed anyway.

…She stumbled into the bedcube.

The thick locks of her hair were fastened in tinfoil, copper wires, scrunchies, curlers and other bindings. Drunk and confused, she walked forward as if her knees had been unscrewed, falling into the walls and then bouncing erect. I watched her through a chink in the drop-drawer.

She opened the drop-drawer, tried to crawl inside and hit her head on an overhang. She somersaulted backwards across the bedcube…

The brown lady stared at me.

My mother-thing got up and staggered to the bed again. She climbed on without incident this time, her breasts spilling out of her nightgown. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her breath stunk of Mad Dog.

I pointed at the brown lady.

“Oh.”

My mother-thing reached across the bed. One of her breasts spanked my cheek.

Snorting, she gripped the brown lady, pushed her down beneath the bed and gave her a crank, as if locking her into place. “There.” She kissed my forehead. She eased me into my pillow. “Goodnight, son.”

As she retreated from the bed, my eyes begged her to stay, but she didn’t see me, and then she was gone. I didn’t follow her.

I closed my eyes and fell sleep.

The next morning, I couldn’t look underneath the bed.

At breakfast I thanked my mother-thing for her assistance and asked why the brown lady was living in my room, how long she had been living there, and why I had never seen her before.

“Goodnight, son,” said my mother-thing, and passed out. The plate of soggy eggs and raw bacon she had been holding flew out of her hand and shattered against the ceiling…

I started sleeping on the top bunk, buried in a hill of toys and unable to turn onto my side under any circumstance. To this day I still can’t do it. The only position anybody will ever find me in a bed is on my back.

A few weeks later I found the courage to take a peek beneath my lower bunk. Nothing was there, of course.

I became a light sleeper. I woke up all the time in the middle of the night, even when I muted the digigrafitti. The slightest disturbance or vibration beckoned my consciousness. Sometimes my heartbeat was enough to rouse me. Once I woke from the sound of an ant stomping across the carpet of my bedcube.

The brown lady never returned. On occasion, however, I could see her silhouette in my periphery, lingering at my bedside…