I had another of those horrible dreams, and I lay abed for a long time trying to find the words to clothe it in.  He was taking me to see his new house.  He and she had bought a new house, and he was inordinately proud.  He'd been talking about such things for weeks, but they'd closed on this one and made a first payment.  She'd be there, but he considered it no big deal.
    When we got there, she was indeed there and a redheaded older woman with some association with her was there also, and they gossiped and paid me not much notice, as she paced, waiting for something.  The house was all blond wood with bars of chrome as accents hither and yon, out in the infinitesimal courtyard walled in glass, and behind the wetbar and in nooks and crannies and alcoves.  Plants with enormous leaves were stashed behind the chrome bars in places, making a lovely contrast.  The place looked lived in still, the old occupants not having cleared out yet.  He'd mentioned on the way over that the closets in the bedrooms were extraordinarily big, but I wasn't taking those chrome barred steps upstairs to go see.  That would have been too much.  The woman with her was catching on, and I tried to be essentially invisible.
    Then it was a celebration of some kind in the community, something akin to Easter, something full of whites and very pale pastels, and I was to wear some sort of absurd costume consisting of a small bedsheet with candy glued on top, like the children were wearing, but I was set up to wear it with no underwear, and I had no additional clothes to don.  And he caught me alone and made comments I didn't want him making here and now, and she, approaching, heard them and began to be upset, but I threw a new context around them and kept the danger at bay.
    He was throwing me into risk, and it was fearsome, and I resented it.  He wanted to break everything open, but not cleanly, rather with maximum scandal.
    In between these I wanted to escape but found the way difficult to make on my bike, with medians of grass that looked so convenient but might as well have been miles away with the erratic and speeding traffic between me and them, and I couldn't tell which street I'd come in on, and kept striking out in one direction only to realize that wasn't it and have to turn back to my origin.
    Then I was in the back of a pickup truck, in a camper shell, again her presence close and oppressive, looking out the tiny window at the house I could not escape.  I was being brought back again.  And inside the camper shell it was white, glaring white.  I was still naked underneath that sheet, and wanted only to be clothed and then gone.
    Then somehow it degenerated into a war movie, the kind in dreams where we are in the movie and yet he says things like, "This is one of my favorite movies."  And I knew terrorists would strike where we were, and we were in a tank, and there was a radar screen that showed not only the enemy without, but also the enemy that my deception was, within. I didn't want to be found out.  And there was shooting into the crowd, a crowd again dressed in whites and glaring pale pastels that were almost white, but they didn't spatter blood, they spattered shame, and I didn't want it getting on me.
    There were textures that ran below the narrative, that ran below the action.  He always takes me where she is.  He throws me in her face and makes her labor not to see me.  He always walks the line of revelation, and it is up to me to keep the secret, so unfair that it is because this is his deception.  His need and hunger are present there, but none of his love, none of his decency.  It's as though the one in my nightmares is the anti-Rebar, the negative image, the bastard that men often are portrayed as but he is not.
    I think this character is really Wally in disguise.  I don't think this is about new shit coming up; I think this is about old shit not laid to rest properly.