SHORT: We'll Go Dreaming. [2005]

We'll Go Dreaming.

All of a sudden I awoke to find myself in Poland confronted by a duck.

I looked down at him and he stared back up at me. The silence was unnerving. I glanced around in confusion, unsure as to how I got here or what my exact purpose was. But the only visible sight was a blinding whiteness which stretched out for miles, the soft caress of sleet billowing against my face as we stood alone together in this unworldly vista. Shielding my eyes from the glare, I began to sense a higher calling, and found my lips moving involuntarily as I spoke in a subservient drone. ‘What is thy bidding?’, I enquired, the falling snow melting delicately into my skin to create a burning sunscreen which shielded me from the bitter chill. He cocked his head inquisitively, as if sifting through my soul with his small black eyes. After what seemed like an eternity, he opened his puckered bill and honked two phonetic syllables. ‘Fuk fuk’, said the beast.

The ground began to move backwards underneath me, creating a slippery treadmill which forced me to run, and before long I was sprinting. Clumsily, awkwardly, stumbling at first, like a newly-freed marionette cut from his strings and desperate to take flight. I didn’t know where I was headed, much less what awaited me when I arrived. But I was possessed, frenzied almost, rabid with the magnetic taste of adrenaline and an aching need to appease my self-appointed master. My travels took me far and wide. I forged new paths across rolling Arabian sandscapes, my silhouette undulating through the heatlines against a roaring desert sunset. I traversed broken walkways, bridges of fraying rope and rivers of hot coals. Slashed by scimitars, drenched in sweat, my person little more than an ailing mirage, I eventually returned to him with an offering: a mummified spiritual tome ensconced in the dust of ancient temples, and a chalice from which was drunk the fermented wine of once-sacred fruit.

Breathless and expectant, I held them out to him. Yet still he only stared at me, stepping quizzically from one webbed foot to another and arching his plumed wings. ‘Fuk fuk’, said the beast. And so again I turned and started to run, as if propelled by a force I could never hope to understand. My quest took me to a remote log cabin buried deep in the hills of a place called Netherworld and into the arms of Princess Agnieszka, the lone surviving member of a distant offshoot of the Romanov dynasty cruelly exiled from Upper Silesia in the early 1900s. With her I spent forty days and forty nights bathing in the waters of lyrical ecstasy. A gymnast of considerable agility and zeal, come evening she would lay me on the floor, slather her body in warm honey and use me as her Twister mat, the glow of a thousand candles gently radiating from her sensuous form. My beauty. My love. My one and only. And when our time together on earth had elapsed, so I obediently returned to the desolate wasteland of my initial calling, bearing a chestful of gold and a lock of her silken hair.

But still the beast could only stare. In a fleeting moment of madness I felt daring enough to question his will. What did he want from me, this tyrant, this tormentor? I knew only that in his words lay the key to infinite wisdom and the potential of salvation, of a sanctity that knows no bounds. But again he offered no answers and stood perfectly still, his mesmerising hold flowing through me from beneath the shiny surface of his pincushion gaze. ‘Fuk fuk’, said the beast. ‘Fuk fuk’.

I span on my heels and again fled towards the beckoning arms of destiny. This time my hunger was relentless, my determination paramount. I vaulted across gaping chasms, scaled jagged cliff-faces and howled in the darkness of underground caves. I crawled my way across rocky landfills littered with pitiless shards of slate, my lacerated feet begging for leniency as they bled tears of indignant rage, and fought for my life against brutal rapids whose unforgiving current swept me mercilessly downstream before catapulting me over the precipice and into the depths below. Choking on my last reserves of oxygen, my lungs brimming with silt and saltwater, I hauled my bedraggled frame back to the place of our first meeting, clawing pathetically at the snow as one hand scrabbled desperately to outdo the other. Atop my skull sat a jewel-encrusted crown salvaged from the splintering remains of a forgotten maritime disaster, which I proceeded to lift up with my blackened fingernails and place in front of him.

But again there was only silence, followed this time by a brief moment of recognition. The beast shook his head, arching his neck forward slightly to reveal what I swear was discernible as a glint in his eye. ‘Fuk fuk’, he said, and immediately I understood what had previously seemed so impenetrable. The clarity rushed through me with the destructive wash of a tsunami, purifying my senses and sweeping away the years of foolish doubt, the vacuous plughole inside me gurgling noisily until there was nothing left but the soothing drip of calm.

And so I died. Suddenly. Blissfully. At one with myself and all that surrounds me. No fear. No pain. Only the resonant quack of enlightenment echoing gracefully as I found myself falling into a bed of feathers, cushioned and protected forevermore.

C.C. 12/03/05