On molesknees, I crawl through Nervetime. The dream poachers collapse to the floor. Their eyes dart about wildly in confusion. One is moaning softly, "It is raining, raining coffee." They have no one to lead them, with the Big C out of the picture. Their artificial morale fails like a tower struck.
"Come this way, while they are awake. We haven't much time." My guide beckons, a bipedal coyote in a bowling shirt.
It is a long hallway, overgrown with velvety brambles. The walls are papered with purple moss. I walk on raw nerves. Birds live in the walls in nests of old medical journals. This finch is an expert on the extractions prepared from the kidneys of pigs.
We travel along nervetime, sloshing through a stream of coffee. I am overwhelmed by an attack of anxious yawning. Orange smokerings burst from my mouth. I fall slowly and do not notice how I came to lie in a pile of moldy grapefruit skins. The sweet, sour, bitter, fetid aromas waff to my nostrils with painterly strokes.
My guide leans over me, pointing at my forehead, drops of coffee fall from his leathery fingertips and drip to my skin. I blink in and out.
"You are a strange man who becomes incapacitated when asleep."