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Mitch Dreams of
Michael
Michael
That night, slumbering beside a contented Mary-Lynn, her emotional aura providing a low-level sense of safety and peace upon both of them, Mitch dreams. Mitch is on the roof of the San Jose Airport Hilton at nighttime. Huge searchlights, studded along the Hilton parking lot and airport access roads, strafe the low-cloud-ceilinged, post-dusk sky. I'm not gonna say the roof doesn't remind Mitch's dreaming subconscious of last weekend at the St. Francis, but it also doesn't doesn't, if you catch my drift. Mitch is barefoot, bare-chested, wearing a pair of weather-beaten denim jeans. The styling of them is old-fashioned, though; these are like the work pants Mitch's granddaddy would've worn back in the '20s.
"I didn't want to meet here, mon commissaire, but you've practically made it necessary," Standing behind Mitch on the roof is the fish-lipped frog-like man that Mitch met atop Mount Shasta two weekends ago, who he's taken to calling/thinking of as the Comte de St.-Germain. As the Comte says this, a vast Boeing 747 jumbo jet screams overhead, its belly white and its tail showing, instead of a Pan Am logo, the Anunnaki glyph KI.AG (the same one St.-Germain used twice on Mitch and Peter atop the mountain; the same one Mitch kept inscribed onto stone after his run-in with the Comte).
Jeff
Jeff
"Fuck you, Steve."
Michael
Michael
The Comte blanches, holds his hand to his chest in a mock-offended fey manner. "My goodness, such anger. Did you have a good time last weekend, then?" He looks away from Mitch for a moment, watching the San Jose airport runways which are somehow both far away (as they are in real life) and adjacent to the hotel in that inimitable dream logic way.
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch turns away from him, skips a flat rock across the pond. Or tries to, it barely hops once before sinking. "What do you want, Steve? You bored with not existing one way, you wanna not exist a different way? Who cares for you, you're nothing but a pack of cards." The second card he tries to skip, the ace of wands, does a better job and makes it two hops towards the far end of the runway.
Michael
Michael
"You're doing a very good job writing yourself a worthwhile story, mon commissaire." When Mitch turns back to the Comte (or more accurately when the Comte tries to poke his nose into Mitch's field of view), he is suddenly dressed in the raiment of the Rider-Waite Magician. No wand, pentacle, sword or cup though; and instead of the lemniscate floating over his head it's, you guessed it, a KI.AG again.
"You've felt what it's like to rewrite the world! Very well done, by the way. With the coin, I mean. I'm not sure even old Nola herself was ever able to bring back an uncreated human. Though she tried." A chuckle. "That old girl wished for Helena's Master Jesus to finally come to Mount Shasta and fuck her senseless and whisk her away on the Sixth Ray for decades. But then, you know all about wishing someone into your bed ... don't you."
Jeff
Jeff
"Yeah, yeah, we get it, you did the reading, you're Phylos the Tibetan and also Jesus the Christ and Neo the Plato and probably George the Weiss--" Mitch clears his throat. "Washington, too. You miss me, is that it?" Mitch flicks another card (major arcana this time, the sea serpent) at the hat but it lands a good foot, foot and a half away.
"Just want to hang out and shoot the shit?"
Michael
Michael
The Comte's magician robes whoosh around his feet as he walks behind Mitch; Mitch can sense the Comte reaching out to touch Mitch's shoulders from behind but the Comte hesitates.
"I'm only here to check on you. To make sure you, the spear thrown so many years ago, eventually hit your target. And for that reason, I vouchsafe you a prophecy, my son. To nudge you properly to where you need to be in order to destroy your very delinquent double." Another jet shatters the nighttime sky; this one has a California Republic bear on its tail fin, stripes in California flag red along its length, several observation bubbles inside one of which Mitch can faintly see a piano bar much like the Skyway Lounge. Along the fuselage, the weird-looking jet bears the legend, in bold Helvetica, "CalAir."
"Here is my prophecy, Mitchell Jefferson Hort, knight of History A, member of the Circle of Illuminated, retrocreator of the Emperor Joshua Norton, lover of the Scarlet Woman, recipient of the Arrow of Light, wielder of the activated Kusarikku Module, son of Huntsville. The first step to finding your double shall be when the saucers and the robots finally descend on the Gulf Coast. The saucers shall lead you to him," the Comte says from behind Mitch. During this typical villain monologue, Mitch can hear the Comte's robes are no longer swooshing, and his voice has ever-so-slightly changed, from its usual Gallic tinge to a flatly mid-American affect.
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch glances back over his shoulder towards Comte but doesn't turn around, then scowls and tries again to sink a card in the bull's-eye of the dartboard. This one is another major arcana, the mainframe; it goes wide and embeds in the little chalkboard intended for scoring.
"I've told you this before, Comte. You tell me to do something, I have to ask myself, should I not do it out of cussedness, or should I assume you know that I won't do anything you recommend, you would have counted on it, but then again, you also read your Phylos, you must have studied, and in your studying you would have learned that man is mortal and so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible ..."
Mitch raises yet another card (the page of lanterns), ready to throw it, but then balks and turns to face Comte. "Do you mind? I'm trying something, here." He gestures, indicating that Comte is standing too close, and interfering with Mitch's shot.
Michael
Michael
As Mitch faces the Comte ... the Comte's face is different. He now looks like this.
Jeff
Jeff
"You need a lie-down or something?"
Michael
Michael
"Imagination could be classified as the ability to create or forecast a future or to create, change or destroy a present or past," he says. He fingers one of the cards in Mitch's deck, standing very close to him in the process. The Comte pulls it out and it's the 2 of Cans. On the card is an image of an e-meter.
"What are you 'trying'? I like to believe I possess a questing mind, willing to entertain all possibilities." He hands the card back to Mitch.
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch glares like a petulant child, first at Comte and then at the card, which is the knight of cans.
"I am that I am."
Michael
Michael
L. Ron Germain's eyebrow goes up at the sudden metamorphosis of the card. "You're off the charts, son. Oh-tee three, easy. But you haven't been incarnated here on this planet to do mere card tricks, are you? You mean to change things. Place my masters on a lower stack, further away from your ... " he laughs hollowly, "perfect world."
Jeff
Jeff
"Thou sayest it."
Michael
Michael
"You should be careful how you shuffle the deck," as the Comte makes one last sudden change of identity, from L. Ron Hubbard to Ricky J. Potash from the Colorado Carnival of Knowledge, his voice now shifting from L. Ron's self-important bluster into the Brooklyn-inflected patter of the young stage magician.
"You gotta be careful which card you force, which one your fingertips had their eye on during the shuffle. You could be dealing yourself a bum card." Suddenly Comte Ricky has Mitch's cards in his hand, and Mitch sees him deal out three cards in rapid succession on a table that appeared out of nowhere: The old reliable Rider-Waite Devil comes first. Next, a Rider-Waite Lovers in which Mitch and Mary-Lynn are quite clearly the Edenic couple underneath a golden angel, arms outstretched, but with Archie's face; and The Mountain (maaaaybe even the mountain from the background of The Lovers? dream-Mitch considers), a major arcana card where Mt. Shasta, in cross-section riddled with golden dungeon corridors, has spinning whirring wheels representing the seven chakras superimposed on the mountain's face. At the crown, a shimmering gateway between Histories A and B gleams. Mitch looks up at the Comte; he is his old self again.
"See you in the funny papers."
Jeff
Jeff
As we fade to black: Mitch scoops the deck up and shuffles it, turning away from Comte and back to the board/bar/pond/runway. He rests his elbows on the counter and sags a bit, as he tries--once again--to master the card trick he's been working on all month.
Michael
Michael
As Mitch wakes up—not suddenly or violently; this dream was certainly weird but not jarring, violent, or shocking, I'd say—Mary-Lynn stirs and rolls over to smile at him. "Good morning, mister," she says. "Sleep well?" She puts her elbow on the bed and rests her head on her hand, looking deeply and affectionately, melting into Mitch's eyes.
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