The sky was clouded over again, the fish on top of the ice. I broke through the kitchen table and made it outside. I breathed in the plants. They smelt jealous, like death.
There was a fire, beside the water. Or maybe there wasn’t. I can’t quite be sure. Anyway, I decided it was the utmost necessity to go there. So I put on my blindfold and gently tiptoed through the grass.
I felt something on my feet. It was snakes, or was it mosquitoes? They were biting at me. I became tattered, unsure and disorientated. I saw a bone. I scratched. I tore my skin of. Then I saw someone.
It was that Finnish woman with the bad temper. She stood in the middle of the garden. She blocked my way, her arms folded. Her eyes were cold and hypnotic. The blue sky made her look like cardboard.
She said that she was not, under any circumstances, going to clean my room. So I spat in her face and pushed her to the ground. I put on my boots and jumped on her head until it was a beautiful shiny red pulp.
I then took my skipping rope and started swatting the horseflies. They gather frequently, in this swamp.
...
It is now dusk and the clouds are turning pink. There are a few boats on the lake, but no-one is in the cottage.
The wood is getting rotten. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like, to be a piece of rotten wood, all wooden, and rotten. But then I get bored.
Sometimes my eyes sparkle like diamonds. Sometimes I have to pull them out so that I can hear better.
It sounds like Portishead. It smells like shit. The grass has tangled up the white chair.
Sometimes they drive me mad. I get this sad feeling in my solar plexus, like I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t. At least, not until I’ve got to the bottom of the garden.
There’s a light flashing somewhere, across the lake. Maybe it’s flashing inside my head. It makes me want to blink. I look up just in time to see an airplane.
...
“What did you say?” (We were standing beside the smoke under the tree).
“Well I can’t say really, because she’s my friend, but I had a dream about it”
Her skin began falling off. It was all rotten and smelt like the dog corpse I keep hanging in my bedroom. I keep it hanging there, just to remind me, you know, of mortality and brevity and such matters.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and hold it up to my nose. It fills me with the sweetest feeling of ecstasy, Like looking at the stars over a lake.
My lantern, my dream, my deathless trance. Nature running naked through my field of bluebottles. They stick to my hair and my face.
“But what did you see?”
“Well I really don’t know, but you know, if we were talking right now, in a dream it would feel exactly the same. So you look out for dream signs. You ask yourself several times a day – how do I know that I am awake?”
Then, once you are satisfied with your conclusion you get out your lantern, and you go outside and submerge yourself in the darkness.
You submerge yourself in the darkness and you walk down to the bottom of the garden. And then, you breathe in the lake and the stars.
You breathe in the lake and the stars, and the breeze and the night flowers. And you ask yourself again “Am I dreaming?”
And if you still do not reach a satisfactory conclusion you console yourself with the fact that you have, indeed, made it to the bottom of the garden.
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