(diaryland) November 29, 2009 - 10:11 a.m.

OK, OK. I can do this. I've got 8,000 words left. I just have to play a three-hour gig today, and then tonight, I've got to buckle down. Here's the next chapter. It's dream sequence-heavy.

Chapter the Nineteenth

I picked up the cap and put it on. Yep, it still fit. Nothing else seemed to be going on out there, so I went back inside and pondered this event.

I plopped myself on the heavily clothed couch with a sprinkling of underpants in the rumpus room and kept pondering. Pondering, pondering, pondering. I did some wondering, too. I felt drowsy. The fabric on the hat seemed as good as new. I took the hat off and tried to rumple it between my hands. Would it collapse into a pile of dust? Was it brittle and/or would it dissolve into a prime number of toy soldiers? Was it indeed an evil cap decoy sent to murder me? Or had Vaughn Bourbon, King of France and Navarre, found it somewhere in the depths of the unseen universe and had simply thrown it back?

Nothing seemed to be amiss; it looked and felt like a seriously normal, run-of-the-mill hat, so I put the cap on again. Hey, maybe there was a chance that if the right thing came through the fountain in the right way at the right time, it wouldn�t die. It wouldn�t shatter and become something else. Maybe it would just be whatever it was supposed to be. Hey, maybe there was still hope for Vaughn. I didn�t want to be by myself with a mopey statue whose life was ebbing away. But, geez, suddenly, I was so, so drowsy. My eyelids felt like they would explode if they didn�t close right now. I started to lie down, and I took the cap off and threw it on the floor.

The feeling drew back again. I was OK again. One could say that I could possibly have had enough sleep recently. I�d had bad dreams. I�d laid there and drifted off with thousands of dried tears on my face. Yeah, sure, I hadn�t fallen asleep in the conventional ways, but there was no reason why I�d just had two attacks of severe drowsiness.

I grabbed the hat and put it back on. Yep, it was the hat. It was an anaesthetic. It was the exact same feeling I�d had when my Mum took me to get my wisdom teeth out at the hospital, when the nurse says, �Now, count back from ten,� and you start pretty confidently, and you�re getting through these backwards numbers pretty quickly, but by the time you get to, �five,� your eyes are out of focus and they�re covered in a shroud, and your speaking voice is now coming through gritted teeth, but you�re still giving it a good go because you want to show the nurse that for the first time in recorded history, someone can get from ten to one, say, �There. Ha ha! I did it, suckers!� and slip into unconsciousness whenever the hell they feel like it, not when the nurse feels like it. But, in reality, you never get past five, and the last thing you think is, �Fuck, man. I�m just as weak as everyone else.�

I wasn�t quite thinking that this time when I put the hat back on again; I was more thinking, aha, I�m onto you, hat, and your sleep-inducing ways. And thinking also that this hat was now rendered useless for what its job previously was, which was a hat to be worn whilst trucking experimental bicycles all over the country, and now this hat broke OH & S rules about what condition you were in when you were driving, even though this was a company hat, so I would STILL have to fork out the fifteen bucks for a new hat after all, goddamnit. This one was now only useful for putting on at one of the periodic staff meetings when the guys were wanting to play pool and they insisted that I play too because they enjoyed playing against a miniature person with shitty, disinterested technique. Yeah, it would be really handy then, I thought, as I went beyond the point of being strong enough to take the hat off again. I�d thought about the properties of the hat whilst wearing it for too long, and now I�d just have to go with it.

I did wonder how I was ever going to get the hat off again, especially if I was asleep. This hat could kill me, I thought. How nice it would have been if somebody else was around to take it off right now, or in about eight hours. I could open a sleep clinic, I thought, just as the transformation to the sleep state was completing itself, and my thoughts were no longer my own. I could put a little sign up in my front yard, as long as it was less than two square metres in size, and then I wouldn�t have to get a planning permit and the horrible lady across the road wouldn�t completely freak out, and then I could use the front bedroom as my workplace after a good vacuum, and I could help people out who couldn�t sleep anymore. People who had terrible feelings inside that stopped them from getting to sleepyland properly. People who needed to have the TV on because they didn�t know if they could be trusted to think sleepy thoughts instead of thoughts about the day where their lives changed. Where the best thing happened, and then the worst thing happened on the same day, which made the best thing seem infinitely worse than the worst thing because it was like a slap in the face.

Shit, I thought at that last moment. This is not the kind of sleep I was after. I tried to move my head in the slim chance the cap might politely come off my head, but I was paralysed. And then I was in dream world. Not the fun park in Queensland. No, rather the place it was named after. The place that Fuseli painted, and where old people who died of natural causes ended up.

The dream was this:

I was in a hall of mirrors. It was like the one you see in books all the time. It was huge, and it was exactly like how you expected it to be in real like, enormous in breadth, except the day outside was dull. So nothing but grey bounced off the mirrors, and everything was flat but deep, reflecting darkness, everywhere, framed by thin rococo gold curlicues, which were seeming to say, hey, we know the clouds are serious. We�re just here, trying to take the edge off, man.

There was a big chandelier above me that was like a missile pointed at my head. The grey reflections went on for nearly forever in every direction. Red velvet plaited cord was up on those bollard things like in banks on either side of the hall so this was more like a museum where you weren�t supposed to touch things. It occurred to me that the cord looked kind of stupid. Nothing else in the hall was red. They should have picked a gold colour, but maybe the unseen powers that be thought to themselves that it was better to ruin the vibe of the famous hall of mirrors with red cord all over the place then to have people think that some other, less obvious coloured cord might just be part of the design and then have people touching everything and leaving fingerprints willy-nilly in very hard to polish places.

There did seem to be a lot of hard to polish places in this hall.

I did a 360 degree turn and noted that there was absolutely nobody else around, so I went under the cord, partially because I was angry about its colour. I was really quite overblown in my anger about the cord in this dream.

The way I went under the cord was the way I went under pretty much everything in real life, which is to say, I found it pretty easy. But after observing a fucking huge candelabra thing, that seemed to be carved with infinite complexity out of wood, covered in putti and then plated with gold, I looked in one of the billions of rectangles of mirrors they had lying around in all the walls, and the reflection was of someone else.

Behind all the grey, I could see that the mirrors themselves were blotchy and warped the reflections of whatever they saw, just very slightly, and I began to feel sick.

So I went back under the red cord in the hall, and I was back where I was allowed to be, but nobody came up to me and chided me, and nobody was around at all. It was very weird. I felt like there should have been at least five hundred people in there with me, and that wouldn�t have made it look crowded.

I was starting to feel pretty uneasy, so I ran down the grey hall through to the end, and I found myself in a salon of war. I didn�t like that much, either. People on horses set into stucco; yuck. It was all a bit too violent, but in a flouncy way, which made it repugnant.

So I moved on.

I walked through countless rooms, and they were all chilly. Still, there was nobody else around. I assumed that I was going to be the only person in this dream for the whole time. I walked into a long, thin room with red walls. The walls were completely chock full of portraits, all full-length ones, covering the span of two hundred years, all above my head. Everyone in the pictures were pointing at stuff. They could be pointing to a portrait inside the portrait itself, or at the kids who were also in the portraits, or books, or just even concepts. The men who stood alone in their portraits were most likely pointing at concepts. Things like victory, providing heirs, doing deals that got them a bit more territory; stuff like that.

The, down the other end, the thin far wall contained more mysterious portraits. Portraits that came from the depths of the past, and that looked like it because they were all a bit brown. Everyone looked so austere, except for a portrait of a very young lady who had a tiny mouth, her hair in two buns at the back of her head, and looked kind of upbeat. Underneath the portrait was a little brass plaque that said, �Juana the Mad�.

I felt like this lady was related to me. Like, she was my dad�s dad�s dad�s dad�s dad�s dad�s mum�s mum�s dad�s mum. And, in fact, not everybody, but nearly everybody in the paintings in the room were related to me. Even the silhouette picture of two people that somebody was pointing to in one of the paintings was related to me. Even the concept of victory, and the concept of providing heirs, and the index fingers pointing at these concepts were related to me. I could feel it. The feeling was very much like somebody having explained how an air conditioner unit works to somebody else when that somebody else had previously wondered about how the hell they worked for their entire lives, and now they thought, �Ah. My life is complete.� It was exhilarating.

Nevertheless, I couldn�t stand here in this crowded portrait room forever, I thought. Each portrait was clamouring for attention. So I wandered around some more, and eventually found myself outside. I�d come out a side doorway and had no idea where I was. The landscape was rigorously and mathematically divided, but from my vantage point it looked like a chaos of diverging lines. This garden only really worked from a couple of official viewing spots.

Still, there was nobody around. I couldn�t even hear a bird�s call or a fly�s wings. Nothing zip. I could usually hear stuff in my dreams.

I walked between avenues of planched trees and found myself in the avenue with the hedges behind that I recognised immediately. The cream walls were the same, everything was the same, except it was empty. It was the spot where Vaughn Bourbon had been shot.

There was no bloodstain on the ground, and nothing giving off the vibe that the ever had ever happened. I couldn�t tell if I was in this place before the event, one year after, which was pretty much the timeframe since the event, or whether this was just a dream version where nothing ever happened.

I got a shiver. I could tell something was looking at me over the far end of this garden; the side of the garden that wasn�t shown in the photograph I�d gotten off that French news website that I�d saved as my desktop picture.

It was my statue, standing on a huge marble plinth, a metre and a half off the ground. And it was slowly waving, like it was trying to say, �Stop it. Stop dreaming this.�

And then I woke up. The statue was there, in real life, bent over me. It had taken off my Biff�s Fleet sleeping cap. Thank Christ for that.

Its mouth was shut. It eyes were looking somewhere else and its arms were moving away. It turned around to go.

�Hey. Thanks so much for that,� I said. I felt so woozy.

It turned back around and looked at me. There were undies all over the floor.

�Uh,� I said. �Um, look, seriously, thanks. I really appreciate that. I could have been stuck there forever.�

It didn�t say anything but it came a bit closer. It was only just beginning to look less like a statue again.

�Hey. One question � were you really there that day?�

It didn�t give me a clear answer. But maybe it was just a statue of Apollo that you could find meticulous copies of all over the world.

I stood up and we hugged. My heat came to about chest height, but that was cool. There was no sound of a heart, and my ear against the marble started to ache.

I got a shiver.

And then, something appeared in bold in my e-mail on the computer screen. It was a new message. It was not from the Acephalus Support Group. It was from an unknown sender.

�Oh, hey, I�ll just get that,� I said, and the statue let me go. I went over to the computer to open the message, my heart beating pretty fast.

I never saw nor heard the statue leave.