An excerpt from "Obligatory Road Trip Book," something I've been working on for a friend.
Almost a year after the trip, I had a dream.
We were going through the deserts of New Mexico again, this time in daylight. It’s odd my mind chose to fixate here, because we barely spent any time at all in that state—after passing the crux of weirdness that was Roswell, we passed out of the state pretty quick. But something about the dream—you know, that implicit and wordless transfer of information, the mental “elevator pitch” if you will—told me it was New Mexico. Scrubs, desert, a little badlands and some mountains in the distance. I could feel the heat and light of the place.
In the dream we weren’t in our trusty Passat, but instead in some kind of red-leather-upholstery, Oldsmobile type of deal. Again, I don’t know why it’s just these details that were swapped out. Was it a kind of mimicry, with small screw-ups from my subconscious, or do the changes mean something? Who the fuck knows, man. I don’t take stock in dreams; as far as I’m concerned, they’re the unconscious equivalent of a fart. The only useful function they serve is creating pictures, concepts and scenarios your feeble waking imagination can’t attain. Stretches of the brain, scenes and worlds you would never have conceived of before, because you’re limited to the reaches of your perception. Dreams, luckily, are not very concerned with reality.
Enter Mitch.
I’m calling him Mitch because the dream wouldn’t give me a name for him, a real name—the dream only told me that his name was generic enough not to cause concern. Again, specificity was not the strong point here. We were getting into the car after making a pit stop at a tiny, sun-beaten restroom somewhere in the New Mexico flatness, and there was Mitch, sitting and grinning
Supposedly, dreams can’t show you the face of anyone you haven’t seen somewhere in life. This makes sense—no matter the power of the human mind, it’s just not clever enough to conjure up a whole new person, right down to the follicles and pores. But I think this guy was the real deal. One hundred percent computer-generated, if you will, a flawless CGI insertion into our story. He sat in a mysterious middle seat that had somehow appeared in the front of the old car, along with himself. And he was grinning, as if he’d been waiting for us to come back.
You can probably see where this was going.
Mitch was Bad News. He was that creeper who shows up at the beginning of a horror movie, uninvited, to foreshadow the shitshow that’s about to start. He’s the shapeshifter whose head pops open at some point in the story. And he knew it: he was acting the buddy, the pal, sitting between Sergei and the Nymph and cracking jokes. None of us laughed. With that sort of instant narrative telepathy of dreams, we all knew something was up.
We drove in silence for a very long time.
Eventually Mitch asked us to pull over beside a seedy, abandoned motel. We did. He took Sergei aside and they had a brief conversation, Sergei smoking like a chimney and Mitch just smiling, and smiling. Finally Sergei comes over to us and says he’s going around the back with Mitch for a while. He doesn’t seem worried, or angry, just calm and lighting up another butt. Even in dreams, presented with a horror movie cliché in the flesh, Sergei was suicidally determined to be unruffled.
The Nymph and I are scared shitless at this point, so we both agree to wait by the car. Sergei goes around back with the smiling guy, who by this time had teeth so big you couldn't stop looking at 'em even if you wanted to. This is all typical spooky story stuff, right? You’d expect Sergei to end up dead and the chase to begin: me and the Nymph on the run in the dying New Mexico light with a monster in tow.
Nope. Nothing of the sort. We waited for hours, till the sun was getting low, nervous but afraid to leave. There were no sounds—maybe the dream’s audio department lost an MP3 or two. But eventually Sergei comes around the front, wiping his hands on his pants, and says “let’s go.” And we go.
I don’t present this thinking it’s a super fascinating delve into my head. Woop de doo, you had a dream, good job buddy, do you want a Snickers? But I do present it thinking, despite how afraid we both are of Sergei sometimes, this is the kind of thing even your unconscious expects from him. It just fits. He defies expectations, whether he’s supposed to or not, in reality and in fantasy. And whether we like it or not, he’s miles tougher and more strange than the other two of us combined. Crude, he might be, but he damn sure is effective.
And so we drove on, and the dream segued into someplace and sometime different, the cast shifting and changing with the random and unfathomable needs of the night’s visions. On to a remake of “John Dies at the End” with puppet animation, and something about my dead uncle Ward. All these things revolve, and all these things come back, playing over the mind’s eye. Things that might seem irrelevant or stupid rise again, from the muck of our brains.
And some experiences never go away.
