NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Flowers of golden rod spray the sun’s yellows up near Diddlie’s ceiling. On top of the Hoosier Cabinet the Red Queen browses among stems and blooms with her curved beak. Only this morning, Diddlie stuffed them, stalks first, into the tin flower drawer with built in sifter. The white enamel metal table is sprinkled with flower fragments in front of cupboards rising against the wall behind. She listens to young Serge read from his tablet while making tea for the guests in her kitchen.
“Milk and sugar Serge?”
“Ah, what kind of tea are you making?”
Her Majesty, flies down to a perch near the action, on the handle of Diddlie’s tall blackened ancestral kettle. Her claws grip the handle bound in heavy cord for insulation.
“Darjeeling honey, what else is there?”
Diddlie lights the gas under her kettle.
“You really want to know? … I mean there are teas made of Yerba, Chicory, Chamomile, Dandelion…”
“Yeah, okay Serge, you’re a little too clever. I didn’t mean literally. I mean Darjeeling is the best tea.”
“Oh okay, sorry, I like it with a little milk, no sugar.”
“Five times as clever!”
“What’s with that bird?”
“You want yours straight, right Fred?”
“Thanks, Did.”
The Red Queen flies off the handle circling the room, shrieking as she felt the heat. She settles back on top of the cabinet.
“Speak when you’re spoken to!”
She pecks at the flowers and at the top of the flower drawer and pulls on it, as if to break piece off for a snack, and then,
“Let me introduce you to that leg of mutton.”
“Leg of Mutton?”
“Serge, she is just flustered by the kettle heating up under her.”
“Can you answer useful questions?”
The red Queen breaks off and starts smoothing her wing feathers.
“Maybe that bird knows something!”
Serge was telling Diddlie about his latest online adventure, when I came in through the back door, as specified by Diddlie. in a text, earlier. He waves to me and goes on, reading from his tablet, as Diddlie prepares tea.
“The Mattress of Imaginary Murders, was a file found on line in 1998. It was the plain text part of a larger encrypted file posted by someone called B4. Nothing more is known. Efforts to decrypt the rest of the file have failed.”
Serge looks up at the Red Queen, who blinks but says nothing.
“Serge, did you drive here in your Mom’s car?”
“Yeah Diddlie, passed the test last month in the beat up old Volvo.”
“Congratulations!”
“Thanks Fred.”
“How did you find this weird file?”
“Oh, by accident, like so many things. It was through someone else. I mean she’s in like, Hong Kong! Well I think so. She tells me when she found the B4 file, it looked like a joke. Going on about the word mattress, and saying mattress is a female mat! That you will find a key under the mat.”
“You mean the key to the encryption?”
“I don’t know, maybe? I mean under the mat, what mat? under the word, ‘mat’ or an actual mat someplace? Or is it another kind of mat like a matted hair, or a cardboard mat, like in a picture frame, or what? So, anyway, after reading a while, Jasmine’s machine crashed. I mean we went back and forth on ‘Haddock’s Eyes’ on all this. Her Search history was wiped, and she didn’t remember how to get back. She said it took her hours to get her system back up, and that’s when she found the file icon on her desk top. Nothing added up”
“What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”
Diddlie turns from the counter waving a tea spoon in the air.
“Serge… Ah honey…Just a moment, what is, ‘Haddock’s Eyes’?”
“It’s an online message board, Diddlie.”
The Red Queen moves from behind the goldenrod, along the top of the cupboard, her head moving to track the spoon. She flutters her feathers without taking off.
Diddlie lifts the kettle, checks the weight and puts it back on the stove.
“They didn’t have whistling kettles when this was made. Queenie! You stay up there!”
The Red Queen whistles…
Diddlie serves tea and joins us at the table with her own cup.
“A message board?”
“Yeah, you can leave messages for people there.”
“Aha…”
Queenie takes off again, bumps into the pewter chandelier hanging over the kitchen table on its silvery chain and settles back on top of the Hoosier cabinet. A small grey feather, rocks in the air on its way down toward Diddlie’s cup. She waits to see where it goes.
“It won’t be the first feather tea I have drunk.”
The downy feather veers off from her steaming cup.
Serge catches a larger one out of the air and misses a second damaged one as it floats down behind his head.
“Serge, who is this girl friend in Hong Kong?”
“She is not exactly a girlfriend. I don’t know for sure, I can’t read Chinese characters, but someone told me her character means Jasmine and that seems feminine. That’s how she signs off, even though everything else is in English. I don’t even know if she is a girl…She could be anything, a hacker, a kid in Latvia, I mean like a bot or something, even an!”
“Why should an intelligence agency talk to you?”
“Diddlie, they don’t know who I am…You know, like, they might be unintelligent!
”Wrong as usual.”
“Yeah, okay bird! Any way Jasmine thinks the link was designed to erase itself once it was opened.”
“So, nobody knows anything.”
“Well it’s not quite that bad.”
He goes on reading from his tablet.
“Mattress out on the street, discarded, sodden with dreams, spilled out in breath, blood, snorts, snot, sweats, snores, coughs, tears, belches and farts, seeking all means of escape from the body over fifteen or twenty years of sleep.”
“Serge, wait a minute, wait…Okay, she goes by Jasmine, so who are you?”
“Oh! for this, I am Earl Grey!”
“For this? Really! Who else are you?”
“Oh, I use a bunch of screen names, like, ah, Rowland Macassar, and ‘Telford Menai’.”
“So nobody knows who anybody else is.”
“There is a lot of uncertainty, but you can figure stuff out.”
“Is Earl Grey from the tea?”
“Well, Charles, the second Earl, was Prime Minister of England when they abolished slavery. That’s the big deal. I did a paper on him. Any way that’s neither here nor there.” He reads on.
“It is stained and sags in the middle with two long shallow depressions next to each other on its surface, like a slumbering couple.”
“Serge, Serge, hold up a moment…is that the dream mattress in the picture? Did you see it?”
“No, I am only reading what Jasmine sent me.”
“You mean what she wrote to you?”
“Well, whatever…she sent it along with about five other messages, but that doesn’t mean she wrote it.”
“Five times as clever!”
“Oh hush, Queenie!”
The parot flutters and scratches the top of the cabinet under its claws.
Serge sips his tea and reads on.
“These are no ordinary murders. Remembered dreams escape into conscious mind and have no need to go anywhere else. These murdered dreams are forgotten, with nowhere to go. Forgetting is self-defense against the criminal element sneaking up! Carl, fracked the unconscious with his alchemy! Use that krater and you’ll be pushed out of your own skin, as it were, into some unaccustomed shape. You have to do your best to explain it away, but ‘sources’ will have their say.”
“Carl? Who’s Carl?”
“I think he’s a psychoanalyst or was. He’s dead now.”
“Sounds like he is in the oil business.”
“Well you know, they are talking about an alchemist’s krater, like a mixing bowl for bringing stuff up to the surface…you know, like subconscious stuff.”
“Oh, this is way too obscure Serge…”
Serge nods and reads on.
“Fitful sleep, troubled sleep, deep or shallow, sleep like a tide that comes in high and deep, flooding the streets and floating secrets out of people’s private lives into the public flow of the flood. A low tide sleep drains the beach. Isolated dreams dry out as their pools of coagulating images evaporate into anagoges, waking dreamers with longings pulsing in their blood. Elastic moments they have been trying to forget for years, stretching out of the Bakken Shale.”
“Well whoever it is, they fancy themselves as literate!”
“Is that what you call it Fred?”
“Why, don’t you see, child—”
“Queenie, why don’t you come down from there, huh?”
Queenie flutters down to Diddlie’s arm, then up to her head. Diddlie puts her hands up to the top of her head.
“No, not on my head honey, not my head, okay?”
She settles on an orange in the fruit bowl. Digs her left claw in and samples the ooze.
“Well, I am thinking of the metaphorical beach, the water, dreams, and so on. It all goes together.”
The back door opens, and Hank and Helga Dumpty come in quietly with two neatly bound bunches of goldenrod, put them on the table, and sit down. Diddlie gets up to put the flowers into the sifter drawer of the cabinet and serve them, while Serge goes on reading and takes no notice.
“It takes a certain sense to know these mysterious fields trapped in the psychic pockets in the matress foam. Not all sleepers leave them behind. A certain configuration of time, space and mind can persist outside the body and dwell in her.”
Diddlie is standing by her stove regarding the cabinet. She doesn’t look over at Serge.
“…dwell in her?”
“Yeah, in her…This is mattress not mat, remember?”
“Oh right…mattress space time, or something.”
The White Rabbit opens one of the cupboard doors and walks along the white Hoosier table with its back to us, nosing the flower fragments. Diddlie picks him up, with straw in his fur. When he raises his ears for a moment, a long stem with a sharp bend in it catches on her sweater.
“I had to bring him in from the car port when it got so cold.”
He has trailed straw along the table. Queenie hops down to pick up some stems.
“Serge, this is dream physics!”
“Well, maybe Fred…like, what’s dream and what isn’t?”
As he goes on reading, the back door opens again, and Lark comes in with Augie, followed by bel Vionnet and Steve Strether. The table is full, and they have to stand around behind us, holding their bunches of goldenrod like candles at a service.
Serge reads on.
“Floating in the atmosphere, which may be jammed and scrunched into words, by those retelling their ambiguous dreamy ‘rememberings’. “
Serge stops reading and looks around.
“Who are all these people?”
Frank Vasari carries in a load on his shoulder, and stumbles into Boris Tarantula as he bends down to introduce himself to Serge. Frank hangs a chrome car bumper on the wall by the table. It has stickers on it. ‘Elect Macadamia’ which is real, some, such as “I like Ike” are Trompe L’Oeil.
Diddlie greets Daisy as she hangs her bowler from the top of the Hoosier cabinet. Queenie pulls out the blue sticky from the hat band.
“Queenie! Give that here!”
The bird turns away out of reach. The room is so crowded Daisy can’t move around the cabinet to try and get it back. Diddlie gives her half a cup of tea with two lumps of sugar, and spoon in the saucer.
“Sorry honey this is all I have left.”
Her cup rattles in its saucer and the spoon falls on the floor as Paula backs into her trying to make room for Chuck to get through the back door.
Queenie eyes the sugar.
“Did., help me get my sticker from Queenie, will you?”
Chuck Newsome squeezes through the back door. He has a goldenrod stem behind his ear like a pencil sharpened down to flowers.
“Oh, is he retelling his dreams, what a bore!”
“No Chuck, that’s not it.”
“So, what’s going on Fred?”
Diddlie stands on a short stool to make an announcement, as Queenie lands on her hand protected by a golden oven mitt.
“Did., I don’t see my sticky. Has she eaten it?”
“Okay people, just let him read, okay? He’s got to keep reading people, okay!
Serge goes on.
“The name recalled by the dreamer, when awakened, is not the name of its secret self, enciphered in brain’s ‘mindy’, ‘thoughty’, meanderings. Name is… Name is called…. Dream is…Dream”
Someone else is trying to get in the back door. The wind is up, and we can see snow through the kitchen window.
Albrecht is in the doorway. Starts brushing snow off his jacket, but the crush of people makes it impossible. It just rubs off on the others as he pushes in toward Diddlie.
“It’s getting too crowded in here!” The window opens.
“Congressman Bean is here.”
Joy Flack shouts through the window, pushing a bunch f goldenrod through the gap.
“Shut the window!”
Chuck Newsome reaches up to push it shut, but one of the lights fall out.
Boyd Nightingale is standing next to Serge, looking over his shoulder at the tablet. Tatiana is on the other side with her face pressed affectionately next to his. They read together.
“The kitchen, the bird, the crush of the crowd, the floor, and noise, even the condensation on the kitchen door has all been around before. All repeated in the dreamer’s unconscious feathers parroting down and down and down past the white rabbit’s pink nose…”
People are crowding in from the corridor opposite us at the table.
The Planks have nailed a sign above the entrance to the corridor, saying, “Maximum Capacity 31!”
There is no room for Werner and Tron to get off the step ladder.
There’s Rank Majors and Sherman Shroud gesturing to Mrs. Shroud who is up on the cabinet with the Red Queen, painting her claws with purple nail varnish. Diddlie is trying to make herself heard by photographs of Derwent Sloot and Mr. Ramsay, but she is drowned out by the crowd. People push down the hall and into the crowded Pie Shop where Mrs. Rutherford is playing chess with Pam Dirac. Theophilus Gladstone wakes up from his sleep.
“Where is Mr. Wordsworth?” He goes back to sleep with his head on the table.
Queenie has settled back on the kettle, now cool on the stove, showing off her purple claws. Serge and Tatiana are lost in a kiss.
“Can you do subtraction?”
