And suddenly in front of me there is a huge lake; never was there a lake here before, this is in the forest on the way home from school, and now… a gigantic lake. We stand on the path which once used to take us home, but now there is only a large lake, hundreds of metres across, along the shore of which children play with their kindergarten teachers, and on the quiet surface a boat passes by, sending waves in our direction. What the hell happened here? Was Al Gore right after all, did the ocean surface of the world rise forty metres overnight? We walk a long the shore and catches a glimpse of a group of drunken youths sitting by a campfire. The sun is high in the sky above, it’s April, maybe May, and it’s still too cold to go swimming, but here on the beach which was once a local ridge in a vast forest, a group of chavs sit and drink like it’s the Friday evening at the end of time – and maybe, just maybe, that is just what it is.
I am in a car. It’s raining. “It’s been raining for two days straight…” my maternal grandmother says. “It just never seems to end.” And from the puddles, and from the lake in the forest, I can’t help but wonder if it has been raining for three years. My grandmother drives like crazy, splashing through puddles, lakes, on the road and taking turns at far too high speeds. It’s a winding mountain road, unlike anything I have ever seen before; the road looks anything but Swedish. Paradoxically, our surroundings are bucolic villages and unexploited forests and rugged cliffs; houses painted Falu-Red, roads lined with country stores selling goods from local farms, this is not 2008, this is 1904. My grandmothers old 50’s car is a time machine. From the floor I pick up a telephone book. “1904?” I say. I didn’t know they had concrete and asphalt paved roads in the early 1900’s, but nonetheless…
A telephone call from a stranger, my grandmother picks up her cell, says something I don’t manage to hear, I guess I don’t care, but while doing so she misses a curve, we head out over the edge, through some wet rain-soaked bushes, and onto… onto a concrete roadway, a 1930’s autobahn hidden in a Swedish 1900’s forest; time paradox if anything, where the hell is it we are? The most important question, when are we? – A fragment from Back to the Future, reaching back through the ages. The road has clear white road markings, but seems to have been closed off, but there are other cars on the rainy road today, this rainy grey day, lightning lights the sky, it’s evening, maybe four or so, still May I’d say, and my grandmother says, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be alright, I was aiming for this very road.”
We get off the 1930’s rustic concrete autobahn with no central barrier and road markings stolen from Nagoya, pass by a 1940’s rural post office, and turn up a muddy unpaved lane to a big red house. Falu-Red again, brick excess. Three people stand at the door, apparently ringing the bell, as our car stops. “Who the hell are those?” Axel says. Axel is here? What the hell? I cannot help but feel so extraordinarily confused. What the hell is this insanity unfolding before my eyes? We get out of our car, it’s not raining anymore, but the sky is still ever grey. “Must be some telemarketers”, my grandmother replies to Axels query. “Well, door salesmen, I guess. Telemarketers don’t exist yet.” Tell me about it.
Something faintly familiar about that dress, that timid smile, such a confused out-of-place look on his face, and as it falls upon my heart like some asteroid or minor planet impact, I find myself so very confused. Kei? The black hair, the matching black and white dress, the stockings—I know where this is going, and I don’t like it very much. I try to say something as we walk up towards the figures at the door, but it’s impossible.
Change of scene. It’s a dark room, and we are alone. Him and me. No one else. I say something, I don’t know exactly what, but he can’t hear me. He turns his heels, sets course for the big double door. He increases speed, he runs, and I run after him, I scream something, but he does not hear, he ignores; it’s all the same, always, never nothing real, nothing matters ever, all boil down to the same churning pain, the same pressure in the chest, like a submarine volcano hides in there, building up pressure, soon we are ready, eruption my friend, spoil the world with hot lava, let the larvae burn. The doors close before I get to them.
I’m back at the car, outside the red house. It’s only me this time. He stands alone at the door, he looks at me, smiles; maybe he does see me after all? I walk up to him, but being unable to say anything, I just hug him. I cling to him. He walks without any trouble, I’m just a pestilent tick; a tiny nuisance. It’s as if I don’t exist. I cling to his back as he walks in to the kitchen and talks to my grandmother who sits there; apparently they also had plenty electric lights and kitchen appliances of the same kind as in the 1990’s in 1904. I whisper in his ear. Where do you come from? Take me with you. Take me away from here, I beg you. I want only you.
And he disappears. One second he is there, the other not. Gone. Not a single trace to be found. I look at their faces; I ask my grandmother and Axel something, they just say, “What are you talking about?” He was here, now he never was.
I’m back at the car. At the door, he appears again. The second time. I run towards him. I close my eyes and run, hit my head in something, and open them. A dark steel wall now towers up ahead of me, thirty stories tall and longer than eternity it stretches, impassable… everything so impossible, hope the first step on the road to disappointment; why do I bother even, why not just resign from life, give up, give in to the S in Suicide, so to say; references, references, The Torture Garden, vicious is life, six billion brain dead lunatics burning pictures of themselves in effigy, salvation just a joke, everything is nothing, importance of axioms…
I am at a table in a shopping centre in the downtown of my City of Dreams. The city which has no name; all names I can think of does not fit it, it’s Swedish in nature, it looks Swedish, all the districts have Swedish names… but something is different about it, it’s urban structure is nothing like anything Swedish ever was, there’s none of that mediocrity, none of that half-done and resigned atmosphere; along the industrial harbour a elevated motorway passes, nothing like that would ever have gotten past the drawing board in real Sweden. The city’s large and this shopping centre is bustling with life, I’ve been here before, in a past dream, It’s great to be back, it’s just on the edge of the old town, a few blocks east of the City Hall. We’re at a cheap McDonalds or something similar, a burger bar, and he is with me, on the opposite side of the table he sits, handsome as ever and no matter how gloomy reality is I feel fine for a mere fifteenth of a second.
The U.S. Elections does not bother me any more, there are no more worries of what mentally sick Ron Paul fans might do, all I feel is… ethereal fulfilment… temporary satisfaction… mortal sins in my book, but I just don’t care for that short second. He looks at me, so playfully, so not-real… a tear in my eye he wipes off with his silk gloves, he smiles and the world collapses in on itself, a gravitational singularity of awesomeness, kiss me, I say, kiss me, kiss me now and he does, he does, he kissed me, we kissed, and the world emerges from primordial soup and misty meteor shower… different, somehow, every colour enhanced, so clear, so alive, never so alive before, and I peek out the window, and despite the still falling rain it is the best day on dream-earth ever, may it never stop, may it never change back to reality… may it always forever be recurring…
The water rising in the forest lake, I don’t care, the world on the edge of nuclear war, and I just don’t care, I’m apathetic, you deserve nuclear war, you mortals from the realm of reality, your sensibilities offend me, you and your pesky Marijuana habit, you and your sex-addiction, you slattern, your trivial job piling boxes at Wal-Mart and testing rubbish games for Activision, you mean nothing… I am nothing… but for just one instant, I don’t care. Then the wondrous dream-word dissolves: the glittering green glass of the skyscrapers of downtown Dreamville, the commieblocks of the suburbs and the McDonalds and his pleased smile… it dissolves, dissolves into nothing, dissolves into reality.
And I wake up. It’s 03:20 – three in the morning that is, in case twenty-four hour clock confuses you – and I go to my computer and write it down, a horrid story from start to finish, a nightmare undulation throughout the universe; it’s time for New Year celebrations, it’s the last day of 2007… and I long to 2012, when Cthulhu again shall awaken and rule over his subjects and remove the pesky humans from power.