Page 21 of Hanging and Burning

5.

IN THE DREAM I was sitting at the kitchen table in a strange house. A woman wearing a blue dress under a plain canvas apron was standing at the double sink, her backside to me. She had a nice backside. I wanted coffee and something else. Whatever else was, it wasn’t something to eat. I was about to ask the woman if she knew what I wanted when she turned around.

It was Caledonia, although it was also not her because she had become a Black woman since the last time I’d seen her.

“The bathroom is down the hall to your right,” she said, exhibiting that calculated smile of hers.

That’s what I wanted, a toilet.

It wasn’t a straight hall. It had sharp angles, sloping curves, and many open doors—none of which revealed a bathroom. After a too-long walk I found the right-side room, went in, and closed the door behind.

It was a nice water closet but there was no soap or washrag. Looking for something to scrub my hands with, I opened a drawer that at first seemed empty. But then I noticed, and was noticed by, two creatures on the unpainted wooden bottom of the drawer. They were ticks and to them I was survival. I realized that the entire bottom of the drawer was covered with hungry ticks, so I slammed the drawer shut. I was relieved for a second but then I noticed that one of the bloodsuckers was crawling on my left index finger. I flicked it away, but then there were ticks everywhere: on the mirror, on the countertop, on the floor, and on me. I started jerking around, jumping as I did, slapping the ticks from my clothes. This herky-jerky movement looked like some kind of drug-fueled mosh pit dance. I kept moving and slapping, glancing into the mirror now and then, a solitary witness to my private dance of futility.

Then, one time, the vision in the mirror was me but I was a woman slapping her breasts, killing or just batting away ticks. The dance was just as potent, but my mind was now obsessed with the fact that I had somehow become a woman…

There was also a cacophony of sounds. I was yipping and my hands were slapping, and the ticks seemed to be making some kind of insectoid mandible clicking and claw-foot scuffling sound in their desperate attempts to reach me, drain me. My feet were stamping and my shoulders bumping up against the walls now and then in the small room. At one point I slapped the mirror when seeing, thereon, a bevy of the tiny arachnid parasites that were preparing to jump at me. The looking glass shattered, but the sound of breaking glass did not abate. The tinkling, crushing, breaking went on and on and on… until I realized that it was a phone ringing, that there were no ticks, that I was still a man.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Oliver?” a man inquired. It was a gentleman speaking in a reasoned, well-mannered tone. The accent was upper-crust New York City.

“Yes.” It felt like there was a tick burrowing in my ear.

“My name is Lamming—Malto Lamming.”

“What time is it, Mr. Lamming?” There was a clock on the night table, but when I turned on the light I was temporarily blinded.

“Four oh four,” the sophisticated New Yorker offered. “I’m sorry to be calling at this hour but this is the first moment I was able to pay attention to my voicemails. I just heard Caledonia’s message a quarter of an hour ago.”

I sat up and said, “Hold on a minute, will ya, Mr. Lamming?”

“Of course.”

It was the first time in my life that I was leery of entering a toilet. The dream had truly unsettled me. The urination took way too long, because I was looking in every corner, wondering what me killing ticks and turning into a woman meant.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Lamming.”

“Not at all, thank you for not giving me grief about calling you at this hour.”

“No problem,” I said, and then, “So?” hoping to get to some kind of point.

“You told my niece that you’re working for Arman, trying to find his granddaughter?”

“That’s the hammer on the head.”

“Did he mention me?”

“No, sir. He once had an investment in a New York nightclub. When I was reading about that, I came across your name. When it came to my attention that there was a club with the same unusual name in LA, well, I decided to go there to see if anyone knew Twyla.”

“So,” Lamming said and then hesitated. “So… you weren’t looking for me?”

“I knew your name from the records on the Carnelian Oyster, but I only knew about your continued involvement when talking to Caledonia.”

“That sounds like you were looking for me.”

“No, sir,” I said, honestly.

“Then why go to the manager of the club? She wasn’t even born when it opened in New York.”