Dream (Sept. 1981)

I meet her again at a club -- an ultradecadent place, like the Park Avenue club but set in the future (1990?). We have made some sort of reoncilisation, but it is sad. For the place we share is decadent, the world stinks. This is apparently supposed to be a celebration for me, but all I can do is cry. She’s waitressing there wearing a short dress with a back cut so low it shows her bare ass. “Nice ass,” sez a burly customer, drdooling. I feel washed with water, tear-water, shame-water. It is night. The place is warm inside, but so hostile. The other waitresses say it’s a great job, they make so much money in a week that the club owners or the government has to put in controls -- a lid on their earnings. Everyone’s celebrating, but all I can do is cry. She is there, but a version of her that I know the least, the one most distant from me, though she says she has reconciled with me.

Then I get lost driving out to the beach, ending up on a very isolated shore, no human life in sight. To get to the beach I have to go over a waterfull -- not a huge one, really tiny and manufactured-looking, but still I’m scared. A sea turtle comes up and befriends me. He goes over the waterfall. I follow, amazed at how easy it is. Beyond is a forest. There are many tidepools of water about, hedged by blue-green stalks of sea-grass. The turtle disappepars -- I think I saw it burying itself in the sand. I wondered if it was dead. Then I walke dout to a beach -- a swamp of grass and water, the sea not deepening much for several hundred yards. Somehow I thought I was close to Melbourne Beach -- a roughness to the terrain, maybe feeling a pounding surf. Body-sufed in shallow water for a while. Began to get afraid -- no people around, who knows what is out there in the woods? so, against, my better feelings, I make my way back to humankind.