Some Dreams He Forgot
where I'm hiding ("You fool," I think, "they'll kill you too when you're no use to them"), but the commandant just laughs: there's no need to pursue me because the doors form an airtight seal; I'll slowly suffocate. I sit on the concrete stairs with my head in my hands, and wake to the sound of his laughter echoing against the whitewashed cinderblock walls. Dreams in which all the white people have gone away, and I'm one of the leaders of this new world, where everyone's free. Then the white men come back from outer space, we welcome them to the world we've made, but they just say "We've come to take our planet back." They conquer us, execute many, imprison many more, and suddenly we're all slaves, when yesterday the world was ours. I'm someone's butler or valet, I'm walking down the corridors of headquarters on ari errand and I have to pee; I go into an executive men's room, which is strictly off-limits, whites only, but I can't hold it until the colored men's room. A white executive is in there, an important man, and demands to know just what I think I'm doing. "Boy, where do you think you are?" I've had enough. I smash his face into the urinal repeatedly, gouge out his eye with the flush handle, and then I'm running with blood on my shirt, hiding in the crawlspaces and climbing through the ventilation pipes. I pass rooms full of white people who could have been my friends, hear them talk and laugh like human beings, but I know that they'll betray me if they can. Dreams in which I'm in a burning building (how did I get there?) with Seth Green and three other young guys (ten years from now that name will mean nothing), and we're running down the stairs to get outside before the flames consume us. We reach a huge window two or three stories tall and they all jump out through the glass into the pouring rain, but I look and think that there's no way I'd make that jump, so I walk out through the door, where it's not raining anymore. We sit on the grass (it's night by now) and watch the building collapse, and one of the young men explains that they're on a tour of Moravian churches-there are only three in the entire country. I say, "But there's one right there," and dreaming ends.
* Dreams in which I'm in a bathroom where every man or boy is having sex but me, dreams in which I'm looking for the cruisy bathroom or bookstore where men have sex with men without talking, just down the street or across campus, just up a set of stairs in the dorm or library or classroom building that never end. The promised sex keeps getting farther away, I keep being waylaid by conversations or suspicious eyes, or I'm just walking, walking, searching until I wake up. Too many dreams in which I never get to sex.
Summer ZOOS
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