I had volunteered to look after the plumber’s dog that a girl was looking after because it had been left out of his house (her neighbour). She was in a new relationship with the plumber and was nervous about me looking after the dog, especially with my casual approach – ‘He’ll be okay, sure, I’ll look after him, don’t worry’ … But when we left a dam we had all visited, just a small distance away, the dog was nowhere to be seen.
A small Indian pilot offered to search for the dog from the sky, so I got in his plane. I’d used him before to film a TV commercial and at that time I had stopped him ‘dropping in’ on his brother’s property to show it to me. He was proud of his brother’s property and wanted to show it to me to boost his own image, and I kept telling him it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t impress me, what would impress me would be getting the job done. He sulked all day on that shoot, and now once up in the sky he took off flying very low over houses and telling me we were going to see his brother’s property now, he wasn’t searching for the dog, the dog was not his worry, I had to see his brother’s property …
I kept trying to argue on behalf of the dog, and I petulantly wouldn’t wear any of the headgear or safety harness or any of the other gear … ‘If you’re going to crash and kill us, it won’t make any difference’ I said – somehow thinking it paid him back for absconding with me …
At some stage we stopped, landed, at a settlement of normal houses, with palm trees and pebbly drives, etc., where either a woman, young, or an aspect of himself (he was rather androgenous) showed me how she peeled off two lines of poetry from herself each day like worn fading scales, peeled them off in one piece, an opaque couplet, to always let the new growth through … it was presented as part of being female … I held two lines on a piece of paper on my hand and watched as they faded away, including the jelly-like substance they were on. At one stage, they were like a translucent fish, dead, and yet by the end they were simply liquid running off the page in the glittering sunshine.
When we were in the sky again, I noticed the Indian pilot’s hands: they were absolutely double jointed at the wrist. He saw nothing unusual in this and showed me other parts of his body were double jointed too – elbows knees ankles … I was freaking out and he was laughing at my reaction, and never paying attention to where he was flying …
Then I woke up, damn it. I still don’t know what happened to the dog. That was my big worry when I woke up. Now I keep trying to keep the dream together to type it out and somehow apply to my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment