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The Tails of Alleymanderous
and Other Odd Tales
The Tails of Alleymanderous
12:56 am
. . .you are in a bathtub and you look up to the blue tiled walls with the clouds floating in it and out from them, looking a bit like white shelf fungi that you find on trees in the Great Damp Northwest. You are in your clothes, and your cat, Alleymanderous, is sitting on the side of the bathtub with a giant black tarantula in his mouth. You do not like this. The water is beginning to harden like it's Jello™. You cannot move. You look up at Alleymanderous and you say, "Don't. Please don't."
In the background, Beethoven's Eroica is playing and when the music nears its crescendo, Alleymanderous drops the spider. It scrambles up your stomach, your chest, your chin, up to your nose, then up to your eyes. You want to close your eyes but you cannot. "No," you scream. "No! Please!" The tarantula comes closer and. . .
. . .darkness. You are aware that it is growing light again. This time you are aware that you are covered by sand. You look around. The sky is pink and everything is covered by a light frost. "Mars?" you whisper. "What am I doing on Mars?"
You also notice that your penis is exposed and you see a little point of light above. A minute later, a little spidery craft lands right near your penis. For a long minute, it is quiet, still. Then movement-- a mechanical hand with a strange fixture at the end of it approaches your penis-- to take a sample, you assume. You imagine the machine thinking, "Is it alive? Is there life in that strange, thick log?" You close your eyes. This is a dream. This just must be a dream. You want to wake up. Any minute you will wake up. You hope. And. . .
. . .darkness. The light. And you are sitting in the bathtub and are sitting in what appears to be red wine or strawberry juice or something. Alleymanderous sits on the edge of the tub with a book that has no title. He sits up like a rabbit and says, "Life is but a dream. . ."
You smile. ". . .filled with sound and fury. . ."
"Signifying everything," says Alleymanderous.
"Nothing," you reply.
"A tale told by idiots."
"Well," you finally say, "have it your way. Just what is this dream trying to say?"
"That this is life," says Alleymanderous.
"It is?"
Alleymanderous nods. "The bathtub. The constancy."
"How do I wake up?" you ask.
But Alleymanderous turns the page and does not answer.
"Maybe all these dreams are incarnations," you say. "I have to go through all these life dreams until I come back to the dream that is reality. Is that it?"
"Out, out brief candle," says Alleymanderous.
"So what am I to do?" you ask.
Alleymanderous hands you a straw. "Eat, drink, and be merry."
Dumbly, you look at the straw, then bending forward, you drink and become drowsy, sleepy, and dimly hope that maybe next time. . . darkness. . .
. . .and slowly, the darkness becomes lighter and you finally realize that you are still in the bathtub and you feel a sense of relief-- either you are still in the dream or you have awakened from the dream and are, in reality, in a bathtub where you must have fallen asleep. But you notice Alleymanderous dressed in flippers and an ingeniously designed face mask. He points with a paw to the water in your bathtub. You stare. "How'd the floor get tilted?" you ask, noticing that the water level dips down in the direction of Alleymanderous. Alleymanderous shakes his head and points up with his paw. High above, on what you thought was the wall, is an overflow. "What?" you ask. "What?" You're in a bathtub in a bathtub? Alleymanderous nods and manages to get the cleverly designed snorkel out of his mouth. "A bathtub in a bathtub, a dream within a dream. Boy you can't help but get clean. Awesome, no?"
"No. No, not awesome at all. How do I waken from a dream and back to reality and not into another dream?"
Alleymanderous flips water up from outside the tub that you are in and says, "Some things are not known. Or knowable. Yet."
With dismay, you now indeed recognize the vastness of the tub that surrounds your tub. You even notice the bathtub ring high above. You vaguely wonder about the size of the creature that must bathe in this tub. Suddenly feeling very modest, you put your hand over your privates and ask Alleymanderous, "Aren't you concerned about any of this? How can you be so calm?"
"Because," says Alleymanderous, "it's not my dream. Besides," he adds, as if all of this makes perfect sense, "I'm not the one taking a bath, although I don't mind snorkeling or scuba diving."
"Then why the hell do you raise such a fit whenever I try to bathe you?"
"Simple," says Alleymanderous, "I can't stand baths." With that, he somehow manages to get the snorkel back in his mouth and flips over backwards into the water outside your tub. "Alleymanderous," you yell, "how do I get out of this?" But he doesn't answer and you close your eyes really tight, hoping that when you open them again, things will be different. And when you do open them again, even though you don't notice any difference in physical sensation, you rejoice. You are not in a bathtub. You are outside of it, sitting in a chair reading a book and you rejoice. You look out the bathroom window and your heart freezes. Mars is impossibly huge in the sky. You look to the book you are reading. "Nope," is printed on the page. You flip the pages. "No," "Nyet," "Uh-uh," you read. You sigh. This does not look good. Then Alleymanderous walks in wearing Adidas running shoes, purple running shorts and a pale purple towel over his shoulders. He looks like he has been jogging, his fur wet and dripping, and you don't think cats can sweat, so you then assume he ran through a lawn sprinkler. You look at Alleymanderous. "Now what?" you ask.
Alleymanderous looks up. "Care to join me in a fifty yard sprint?"
"This is insane," you say.
"Maybe it's life." Alleymanderous shrugs.
"Life is insane?"
"Life is a dream."
"Is dreaming insane?"
"Maybe it's life."
"This isn't helpful."
Alleymanderous takes off a front shoe and licks his paw. He then puts it back in the running shoe and yanks the Velcro strip over with his teeth and anchors it. "Interesting," he says, "how strangely logical dreams are. That you would even think of a detail like the Velcro strap to give credence to something like a cat wearing running shoes. Clever. Cunning."
"Diabolical," you say, "very diabolical."
"Oh," says Alleymanderous, "you don't know how diabolical it truly is."
Suddenly, and with great foreboding, you turn and look into the bathtub. There is a large version of yourself, floating in the bathtub. On the head of that image, which has one eye gone, withered, sucked out like an egg, sits the tarantula. "Get me out of here!" screams the version of yourself. "Get this fucking dream over with! This is crazy!"
"I'm trying," you say. "I'm trying. I don't like this any more than you do, but it's like I can't get out of it. It's like I have to go through this damn thing to get past it!"
"Do something!" yells the you in the bathtub. "This is fucking dreadful!"
You look at Alleymanderous. "So what do I do?" you ask.
."Like I said," says Alleymanderous toweling himself off, "fifty yard dash?"
"Maybe we can dash out of this dream?"
"I don't know."
"I don't care what you do," says the you in the bathtub, "but for God's sake, do something before my visitor gets hungry again."
So you stand, take a step and. . .
. . .darkness. And slowly light returns and you are in another bathtub, but it is filled with steaming water. And that's good, because the sky is real black, the stars are bright and there is a very bright point of light and you look around to a snowy landscape. Alleymanderous leaps up on the side of that bathtub. He is dressed in a space suit.
"Uh, you know," you say, "this doesn't look like Earth. Pluto, a moon of Uranus, maybe, but not Earth."
Alleymanderous lifts his face visor. "True," he says, "away from the bathtub, the air is a might thin."
"When does this end?" you ask.
"Are you sure you want it to end? How do you know that, if it ends, it won't be worse than before? Maybe this dream is better than what your real life really is."
You shake your head. "I can't believe that my life is, in reality, any worse than what my life now appears to be. Besides, I have to be dreaming all of this. . . I just have to be."
"Oh?" says Alleymanderous.
"What do you know about all of this?" you ask. "Do you dream?"
"Of chasing mice, yes."
"Doesn't help me much," you reply, sulking, looking around to the bleak landscape. "I just want to go back to where I was before."
Alleymanderous laughs. "Don't we all? Oh, don't we all? Oh, don't we all have memories of those good times?" He laughs again and pulls his face shield down, securing it. And with that, Alleymanderous leaps from the side of the bathtub and you watch him walk away-- soon to vanish in the vast snows and unending silent shadows.
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