Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る)


In this dream the drifting consciousness of The Dreamer is sometimes sheltered within the mind of Apolinar Yerena or that of his second son, Ricardo (and sometimes outside those stable boundaries.) Fumi Kimura is to be a witness to her own funeral. She has left all of her property to the disposal of her unscrupulous neighbor, a long haired jackal with curly locks, named Caterina Chakal. With Fumi's disembodied spirit hovering over the proceedings, Chakal informs Poli that the funeral will take place inside The Truck, in which Fumi and her parents hauled their flowers and cacti to market for the last twenty five years.



From the outside, The Truck looks just as it did during Fumi's market days. Inside, it is much larger than it appears from without. (It's the same width as it was, but twice as long.) Where before there were shelves on the back wall behind the cab, now there are shelves running along both sides of the interior. On the right hand side are seven bronze urns labeled with raised characters in Japanese.



Cati tells Poli that only one of the urns contains Fumi's ashes and that the other six are empty decoys. If Poli (or Riki) can guess which one contains Fumi's remains, The Truck will belong to him. Though he considers this game beneath his dignity and inappropriate to the solemnity of the occasion, he walks unhesitatingly to, and places his hand on, the correct urn.



When the curly haired Jackal, who walks upright on her hind legs, realizes that he's seen through her and past her schemes, she flashes her false smile, which is intended to disarm her enemies. Poli is instructed to drive this Truck, whose interior keeps growing longer, to Fumi's garage on the hill above the greenhouses.



The Dreamer is now within Ricardo, among the mourners of The Funeral; and separate from Apolinar, who is driving the vehicle in which the ceremony is taking place. The shelves of The Truck (those not occupied by the urns) are filled with potted succulent plants of many varieties native to Mexico, some of them dying and others flourishing, but all of them uncared for. The mourners are grabbing plants off the shelves as keepsakes, while a Buddhist Monk chants instructions to Fumi's spirit from The Book Of The Dead.



While the others grab plants, The Dreamer takes hold of the bronze urn with Japanese characters that Poli chose as Fumi's. (Cati didn't realize that Sr Yerena can read Japanese!) When The Truck stops inside the garage, which unlike in reality is here underground, The Dreamer dodges The Jackal's attempts to stop him and takes off running with Fumi's ashes. The rest of the funeral party and Cati chase after him as he runs out into the light and up to the top of the hill. When he reaches the summit, Fumi's urn disappears, as do the people chasing him and he returns to the garage. In the cab of The Truck, he finds a hairy little succulent in bloom, a type of calencoe, sitting on the dashboard in a small green plastic pot. He takes it with him when he goes; but as he wakes, he hears Cati telling Poli that she doesn't remember giving him permission to take The Truck.


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