DREAMBOOK  2


July 24, 2008

In a huge, dark, crowded train station or transportation hub – L and I going to New Hampshire, but I don’t have the right papers – I have my passport but it needs to be renewed.  I go to an office to have this done. Small, dark, shabby space, people in old clothes on benches with bundles, like a refugee center. In an inner office a thin Chinese woman has brought a bag of groceries for a co-worker.  Long wait.  Another woman in the office draws a plastic curtain on a rod between the refugees space and the offices. I am finally admitted; a kindly Asian woman deals with the problem in a [different] crowded and shabby office.  She collects, and gives to me, the usual gift package you get on these occasions – some booklets, trinkets, stickers.  I insist I don’t want it but she presses it on me, ironically, cheerfully. One item, a bottle of something – liquor, shampoo – breaks as I leave, and leaks, spreading smelly liquid everywhere.

Anyway I am then on the train – L is gone. More crowded and cluttered darkness.  A young girl (also Asian!) lies asleep across some boxes, midriff bare.

Arrive in a huge city (New York?) and walk out of the station with a woman who offers me some standard piece of wisdom, which I wittlily reverse (can’t remember what the wisdom was). It’s pouring rain, and I now understand that my luggage waas left somewhere in the station.  I go back in, searching for the baggage claim area.  Another glassed-in information booth.  Annoyed, moustachioed man at the window is no help.  Then it’s somehow later and I’m sitting in a waiting area of dark benches. A little girl with a tiny black dog (at first I can’t tell if it’s real or a toy) like a pug, with tiny, needle-sharp teeth.  A woman next to me warns the child to be careful, but she’s unconcerned, and puts her hand in the devil-dog’s mouth.

Then I’m back at the information booth and the moustachioed man, and am angrily sent away – “wasting my time”—and I find a woman at another window (the place is all windows) and she kindly points out that this is not an information window at all – do I see a sign that says “information? And I do not, but can she help me anyway? She ponders my problem, and a friendly schlubby guy with red hair  says he can help, casually goes off and gets my bags for me and gives them to me at the exit from the station.

So I’m on my way again, now going to Northampton, in Massachusetts, and the trip is delightful – I am all alone in a kind of Scenicruiser car, looking out at the bright day, passing along through green trees into a country landscape.  I feel good.

Is that what all those dreams of dark cities full of inexplicable errands and defeats are trending toward, this escape?

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