I woke up, laying on the futon on the floor in Nobu and Ri-chan’s apartment. Looking at me through the kitchen doorway was Ri-chan. Except, oddly, she was horizontal not vertical.
I parsed this with my mind, and realized she was laying in a bed, a fold-away old fashioned metal type, with the covers pulled up around her throat. Her nose was red.
“Are you sick?” I aksed.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Oh.”
I got up and we talked, I forget the details now.
At a certain point she mentioned that I should stop being silly - maybe I mentioned my plan to rehearse all day – that today I was going to meet the American husband she and Nobu found for me.
I thought this was a little odd. But, ultimately, perhaps for the best. I’ve demonstrated a profound inability to look after myself, and maybe it is time I found a sugar daddy to look after me. Being straight might be an initial inconvenience, but if Nobu and Ri-chan felt I could overcome that difficulty, well, I would try not to disappoint them.
Then my father arrived.
Fortunately, not as my new husband, that would have been a little grotesque. And given that I’ve been living at home for a year, perhaps a little to close for comfort.
He was in the kitchen to give me away.
Ri-chan was still in bed in the kitchen. She was demonstrating a staunch dedication to remaining horizontal.
Then a little man arrived. Think Gimli from The Lord of The Rings. Except dressed in modern safari-like clothing. He was to be my American husband.
So, there’s this gnome fellow. That’s strange to begin with. Maybe at this point I’m starting to think this is a dream.
I often dream waking up. That is, I often wake up and start going through my day and discover I’m in a dream not real life only at some point when things get really weird, then I’ll realize I’m dreaming and wake up and go about my day until something really strange happens and then I’ll realize I’m dreaming and wake up. And so on. Some nights I wake up all night long without ever actually waking up. I can wake a hundred times I na night like that. At it’s worst, when I’ve been having these cyclical dreams for weeks on end every night, I become very suspicious of reality and go through my day fully expecting strange things to happen and the realization of dreaming to strike. Perhaps this in part explains my ambivalent relationship to truth and faith and certainty and the other bedrocks of reality.
Anyway, my new husband is not unattractive at all. He’s short, a gnome I think, though now I think maybe he was more a dwarf. But he is quite handsome if you like bears. He’s a white bear, a polar bear. And he is dressed very nicely, suggesting he can take care of me in the way I am accustomed to, that is letting me sleep in the laundry room, or the closet, or the death room, or some such, and feeding me grape nuts and rice milk and chips and salsa and giving me some room to work.
What is strange about my new husband is that on his hat he wears the head of one of his victims. And on a rope around his neck he wears another.
At first I think he’s rocking some new hipster jewelry, because it looks almost like he is just wearing the faces of these men. But the faces are shimmery, almost like bad holograms. I don’t say anything because I am uncertain what this jewelry is, and if it’s new techwear, I don’t want to offend him. Maybe holographic adornments are his silicon valley gimmick and he’s got a VC fortune backing him in this stuff. It’s not unlikely, I’ve been in SF a long time now, and gnomes wearing the holographic visages of their beheaded enemies as an avant garde introduction to their new high tech jewelry and cosmetics line is not as uncommon as you might think living elsewhere in the world.
So, he’s a handsome fellow and he’s wearing these fellows’ faces. Strange, but I can deal.
So, we leave for a stroll, a few minutes outside the fam for he and I to get to know each other.
We’re walking around the streets of Rosemead, a suburb of Baltimore, holding hands and chatting. And I am now close enough to see that these are not holographic jewelry, but rather, the actual heads of his victims, shrunken and bewitched so that they can never firmly regain their appearance. They are ever-shifting, so that the power their likenesses hold are kept within, at my fiancées beck and call. None but he can ever again look upon the faces of his enemies. This strikes me as incredibly clever, he has not only stolen their lives and their heads, but he has also stolen their very images, the memory of what they looked like is his alone.
My fiancée fucks with very powerful magic. I am deeply impressed. But a little concerned now, because I’m wondering what happens if I piss beau off, right?
And then I notice that my fiancée has a roving eye, not for other men, fortunately, but for his enemies. Everywhere we walk he is watching all around us for his enemies. He is hunting. I realize my husband will never be still, never relaxed. He will always be on his guard, on the watch for those who have wronged him, or whom he has wronged. His life is a war with other men such as himself, hunters.
And then I heard the shower and I woke up and I had to pee and I thought,
“fuck, Nobu is going to be in there forever, what with his long, thick, black hair!”
And I began pacing and drinking coffee because I thought,
“fuck it. If I have to pee I might as well really HAVE to pee!”