Nervetime

The funny thing about nervetime is, you can travel as fast and far as you wish, but you can't get any faster than nervetime. Sometimes, I think that by getting naked maybe I could push myself a little more, or maybe if I put watermelon rinds on my feet. But the sad fact is: you can't escape the nerve.

There is coffee everywhere. A big torrent comes down from the sky and sometimes it's just java java java for days on end. I'd drink it, but I got rid of my stomach. I had to put my bowling ball in there. It wasn't worth much anymore, it was so full of holes, my stomach, that is. The ball has holes, too.

I can feel it pressing up under my ribcage and nestling my spine. I take the ball with me everywhere. Sometimes I bowl all night. I can bowl for free if I bowl in the twilight hours. I don't care about the score. I just keep pitching that ball over and over till my arm goes numb and my mind focuses around the moment the ball hits the wood and the crash of pins at the end.

When I'm done bowling, I go to the forest and sit. The forest changes all the time. Sometimes it's an old mattress. At those times, I can almost feel at peace. Of course, nervetime is spinning inside me, whirling and shouting. But at least I'm not the one shouting anymore.

No, you can't get faster than nervetime. Dream poachers know this and calibrate their weapons to it. The Big C has a spark gun, caked with sleep goo, that he keeps tucked into the back of his pants. It has a beetle embossed on the side. Roars like Godzilla when he fires it. Puts on a good show. Shocking, but harmless. It's good enough to allow him to do his fancy manuevering in dreamtime. He comes back sometimes, his pockets full of pineal glands, whatever he can find, and just starts grinning that three-toothed smile. "Trident," he calls himself. Nobody else calls him that though, "Trident, you sure surprised those dreamers is what you did. Scurry into their holes, hiding in the cuckoo clocks. It's like catching dodoes, they are so darned slow." He starts to pretend like he's running, but he's not getting anywhere. Then he falls down and shrieks. Several other poachers bust up laughing.

I can't hang with the poachers for very long. I get this queasy feeling where my stomach used to be. So I duck back behind a bookshelf in the forest. I can feel myself tripping and falling for a second, but then I just sit down in an old oak chair. It has arms, so I just sit there for a second, like a pregnant lady.

THIEF

I want to tell you why we go to dreamtime. I want to tell you these things through a swarm of flies. I want to give you something you can take back with you to dreamtime or where ever it is you came from. But if you can't hear me through the screaming, just let me know.

Dreamtime is everything nervetime is not. Dreamtime is the soft silky lining, a place that just gives. I don't know how many times I've shown up and wouldn't you know it, someone won the lottery. Senor Cacahuate calls this "the Monty Haul." The dreamer is standing there in the midst of all this shit, maybe trying to figure out how they got so lucky. I love that look. So I grab as much stuff as I can while the dreamer is staring in disbelief. Much of it falls apart in my arms as I am gathering it, but the point is to get as much before you can head back to nervetime. Something is bound to make it. The other day, it was an old Superman comic that I got off this fanboy kid. I made him cry, sure, but he won't remember it. Chances are they won't remember the dreams when we poach them. That's just how poaching goes.

I try not to poach. Poaching is just so, unchallenging. Besides, it's rarely productive. I'm more of a pilferer. I like to sneak in right in the middle of the dream and make off with a can of nuts or something. Something I can use. No disturbance, no big deal. And nervetime is just that slightly much better. At least as long as it lasts. Stuff comes apart here, too. It's not like dreamtime where it just poof goes away. It kind of decays, turns into the sludge, mixes with coffee and balls of hair.

I get confused too, don't worry. You will occasionaly have a storm of fiery birdcrap, for instance. Don't be alarmed. You just have to react before your internal shitstorm incapacitates you. Changes happen fast.

All the same, you see the familiar faces and places around. Then there's also folks and animals wandering around, setting things up, tearing things down, passing through in their beepbeeps. Like the forest that wasn't here a couple weeks ago make out of cheap old furniture. It was a street not too long ago and from where I'm sitting, I can still see some of the clues. For instance, if I dig a little bit deep I could probably find a sewerlid and make a trap or just get down in there and wander around. I used to do that, wander around in the sewers. There's a peace down there that is rare to find in nervetime. You can also find Spiderwater there. You can get a lot for it if you can collect enough. Coyotes pay top dollar for that. Spiderwater may not taste like much, but you'd know what I was talking about if you had some.

Sometimes you find folks wandering in from dreamtime. The dreamers don't generally last too long. They catch immediate abuse and nervetime folks just don't know how to behave in a way that doesn't reduce things to small broken pieces. But you see some survivors here and there that have managed to get by just like us. Most of them are old. Some of these codgers are even funny or wise. But they can't slice through a moment and present some of its throbbing essence to you.

LUCY

Lucy wandered in from dreatime. I saw her saunter up the street, squinting into the sun. She walked like she was half dancing. And she did do some dancing,right on up to a stone-faced chinese man. I had seen him before, setting up a display of newspapers that was gone the next day. She seemed to be trying to entice the man, get some kind of reaction out of him. He just stood there while she smiled and waved her hands in front of him.

I was afraid of Lucy the first time I saw her. It wasn't just her provocative nature, but the fact that she was a dreamer out of her element. I mean, dreamers don't last very long in nervetime. Terrible things can happen here. They can't figure out how it works, so they get used up by some nerve demon's strange inertia. But Lucy seemed to be looking for trouble, the way she was acting. And I didn't want any part of that. So I tried to hide from her. But all I did was close one eye. I figured she wouldn't be able to see me if I closed one eye and squinted with the other. Hell, it works most of the time in dreamtime. I watched her like that as she tried to grab the man's hand. He wouldn't let her move even a finger. But what did she do as soon as she figured out that the Chinese man was going to pay her no attention? She headed straight for me.

I've always thought that I was a magnet of sorts. I seem to attract a fair amount of abuse in nervetime, only I can handle it because I've been here so long in nervetime. It must be my face. My face has a life of its own. I just can't control what it does. Sometimes I'm just tooling along and I don't know it but I've got my mouth open and I'm scowling or imitating somebody else I see. I guess it looks pretty stupid because people like the Big C are always telling me so. The C will slap my rubber face sometimes just to change my expression like changing the channels on a television. I wonder what I look like when I'm bowling?

Anyways, so Lucy heads straight for me and I close both eyes and stand there very still like a sculpture. I made good and sure that I didn't move or twitch for a couple of minutes to make sure she wouldn't see me and maybe walk right by. If you only knew how tough this is in nervetime when your nerves just scream and pulse and punch you from the inside. It must be the discipline of the bowling that allows me to have this kind of control. Most folks in nervetime don't even keep still when they take a piss. They just let loose, yelling about leather sandwiches.

Very slowly I open one eye and I detect her standing directly in front of me. I close that eye and wait another excruciating few seconds. I open both eyes slowly. She is still there. She is smiling.

BOWLING

When I saw her like that, I took off running. I don't know what it was. Self preservation is what I could guess. In nervetime, any attention is just plain bad. It's best that everyone ignores you, like when you want to take a dump except that I don't need to do that anymore.

I beat it straight to the bowling alley and begged Zone to let me start a little early. Zone squinted at me through his glasses. "You know the rules." He made me wait until everyone left for the night. Still, that Zone is alright by me, even if he is a pinhead. He just does his job, talking to himself, like, "Never any respect, not one ounce of goddamn respect." Who knows who he's talking about.

I just started straight in on it in a customary pair of funny shoes. These shoes are the best and I wish I could take them with me. I could outrun anyone in my own pair, including the C and all his beefy bull-headed friends. The shoes never lose. And these were fast like sliding on a watermelon seed.

That woman had scared me witless, what little I had. And I proceded to obliterate the rest. I bowled frame by frame, drowning in the crashes and the rumble. I didn't know how many pins fell. I didn't know if I was any good. And since there was no one there, I had no one to compare to.

I started to feel like I could return to the street without feeling like I would jump out of my skin. I didn't see any faces. I didn't hear any voices. I was traveling in one direction only, down that alley.

I grabbed for ball for the umpteenth time and Zone grabbed my arm. I looked up from my game for the first time. Zone gave me one of his famous looks. You never could tell if he was mad or nervous or happy to see you.

"Are you deaf? I said we gotta close."

"I heard ya," I lied. I mean I heard him, but I didn't. And now I couldn't even look at him. I thought I lose if I stared into his Zone eyes. Whatever focus of attention I got from the game, Zone had had a lifetime of. And that was too much.

"It's time to go."

"Yea, ok." I grabbed the ball and tucked it in my ribcage and left out the back.

I heard him yell something. I think it was, "Thanks, Zone. Sure, no problem." Then he said, "Asshole." Strange way to always be talking to yourself. That's just the way it is in Nervetime.