*****
I am walking along the side of a highway with some friends, and I want to show them where I played as a kid. We walk off the side of the highway into the marshes, and we walk to a beaten up grain feeder, covered in scrub and bushes. "This is it?" one of my friends asks. The dream is interrupted by me reading an email that is either complimenting me or making fun of me, I can’t tell. Then I am sort of both back in that highway marsh, and in James Millard’s room at night. I make my way through the room in the dark. I open the door and step out into a kitchen. Just as I close the door quietly behind me, I hear him start to stir. I quickly turn away and bump into Sandy. She angrily asks me what I’m doing. I tell her I’m looking for the bathroom. She says that she doesn’t want me wandering around and starts to lock the door from which I came. I push her hand off the door, angrily and she runs away crying as if assaulted. I follow her, yelling at her, and push my way past the door she tries to slam on me. She crumples in the corner of what looks like an airplane toilet and cries as I try to talk to her; first angrily, then more quietly. But whatever tone I take, she won’t listen. I leave the bathroom in disgust, and walk back to the kitchen. There’s a magazine on the counter which I pick up. The magazine is called Mode or something and Sandy is on the cover. Sandy Ana Kunz, it reads in big letters, and underneath it says, Our Woman for the Ages. I flip open the magazine, and see lots of pictures of Sandy, looking older than I’ve ever seen her. I flip to the front to read the editorial; apparently the chief editor of the magazine is Sandy’s boyfriend and he’s published this article to celebrate her. I flip back to the pictorial and article but I can’t find it. I flip back to the contents page to find what page it’s on, and I see a fiction piece by, as the editor puts it, "David Wallace Wallace Wallace." I get excited because I figure it’s a new piece by David Foster Wallace and flip to the page.
The DFW story is in fact a comic with illustrations from Jessica Abel, done in golden hued color. It’s a science fiction story, and a few pages of flipping back and forth leads me to conclude that it’s DFW’s homage/satire of the stories you’d see in Heavy Metal (it is heavily annotated with endnotes, no doubt justifying and explaining what he’s doing). I start reading, and sure enough, it begins with two aliens in an apartment about to have sex but the female doesn’t want to do it because it’s "that time." The story goes on to explain about how it’s the time of month when the woman sheds her wraith, the spirit of the unborn child within her who haunts the apartment by animating the large red coccoon hanging in the corner. The man insists that it doesn’t matter to him and that he loves the female alien (who is naked and has angel wings and, like the sky, is the color of gold to boot). And he starts trying to touch her and physically seduce her when the cocoon begins to rattle, like the sounds of mice scampering through a box of loose newspaper.
At this point, I get frustrated with the art, which is beautiful but has been distorted along the center and the bottom, as if we’re watching this through a video monitor getting interference. I’m sure this is DFW’s meaningful idea, but it’s getting me a headache. I put the magazine down.
Then I’m watching a TV show by the guys who created Rushmore. It’s been on for a few weeks and I haven’t seen an episode. I’m watching a very tight close up of the guy who plays Authority, a crew cut guy with dark hair and horn rimmed glasses. While I watch, he’s softly singing a song while tiny venetian blinds that look like American flags raise and lower behind his glasses.