Category: Writing

I am in a Malaysian prison that has an enormous interior courtyard. It is just like a real Malaysian prison, except mine has a beautiful marble colonnade, with very attractive marble columns and a beautiful white marble floor (very slippery and a lot of fun), surrounding the courtyard. Well, the digs are fine but, nevertheless, a fight ensues … between the inmates and the guards. And, at first, the inmates appear to be winning. Then it gets serious and, in a far off corner, I see that some men in white uniform are entering the fray. It takes a short while to figure out what they have in their hands. Then, I see they are carrying crossbows and have already begun shooting people. Of course, it is time to retreat. After a short run to push off I slide on my belly the whole length of one side of the marble colonnade and even make it around the corner. Somehow I manage to avoid detection and survive the murderous mayhem that is cutting everyone else down.

Everyone gets off. I head for the stairs and arriving at them remember how long, how impossible they are. There, you can see them climbing along the wall, traversing the wall between floor and the ceiling that is probably hundreds of feet high. I head back to take the more conventional route, which involves negotiating a series of moving footpaths that have been installed for the public’s convenience. The system is simple. You get on a footpath that takes the name of your destination; get off wherever it ends, and continue to look for the footpath that names your destination. If you persist you arrive, eventually. I get on the path for Paris, and it escorts me to the other side of the hallway, where it proves impossible to find another path to Paris. Not very helpful. A bit like de Gaulle airport. I struggle on for a while and come to an empty cul de sac… an open reception area where no one bothers to stay, though the view out onto the sidewalk is quite promising, and makes me wonder how I have managed to become so ‘elevated’. However, I notice that the stairway leading down from this reception area to the station entrance is made of stairs each of which must be fifteen or twenty feet high. The precipice is impossible to negotiate. The architects have omitted to provide a way out. It’s, really, very frustrating. People appear to have found their way out, though. Or have they? The moving footpaths are empty, the novelty of it all having worn off. It looks as though the only thing to do is to get back on a train.

I am in the foyer of a large block of apartments in China. There are no people to be seen anywhere. There are enormous elevators with heavy, steel doors on the ground floor. The buttons to call the elevators are inconveniently located about seven feet above ground level. I suppose it must be nearly impossible for most people here to reach the buttons and I imagine that one person might have to climb onto another’s shoulders in order to reach them. The elevators, in any case, do not take people to different floors, but instead to different levels of a puzzle the purpose of which is not clear. One floor is a hallway with open rooms, like large cubicles, coming off it. Chinese men in business suits are lounging around the cubicles, seated on banquettes along the walls. Another floor is a decrepit restaurant where everything, the walls, the floors the ceilings, the wooden fittings are all painted with the same dark, cream-colored enamel paint, much of which is either peeling or chipped. Another floor is a series of increasingly claustrophobic, crowded rooms. The last of these rooms is nothing more than a portal into which I must put my head in order to see the interior—so that I seem to be in the room without being in it at all. But from this last room, I find, there is no exit.

The man in the red dress must go. I am not sure why, exactly, but he must go. I am not even sure that it is a dress. It looks like a dress. He is a man. I am sure of that. This is not the proper place for a man in a red… And I don’t know what he does. He walks around the airport with a clipboard or a bag, especially in that area where there is a narrow lane way between two streets, approaching people in the street, performing his duties. It is not an airport, or not just an airport; not, in any case, if there are streets and narrow lane ways. I work here. I don’t know what he does. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone knows what he does. He’s not important. He just dresses himself up, comes into work each day and performs his function—which can’t be a good thing. In any case, I don’t know and, perhaps, it is not my business. I am not his supervisor. It is not, strictly, my business, except that I am here, too, and I should know these things. I hate him. That’s it. I hate the red dress. I hate the way he dolls himself up. I hate the way he parades himself in the street pretending to be someone who has a function here, pretending to work. I could say, zeroing in on the very heart of the matter, that it is his redness that makes me red; but that isn’t it, really. It is really his hair. His hair that looks long, black, and like a woman’s, from a distance; but which I remember distinctly appears to be quite normal when viewed close-up. It is the effeminacy of the man that is so guiling. He is not what he seems. I hate it. I have not even met the man—I don’t know who he is—and yet I hate him. His red dress. His black hair. His thin, wily body. His indeterminate sexual presence. He is a man in a dress—a red dress—and I don’t know what he does. He works with me, and I don’t know what he does. I do not have a place to work—not a ‘place’ in the sense of an office, a definite place where I must go. This place, these streets, is where I work.

The blue-haired hero has just had a narrow escape. I am wearing a black suit. My blue hair, a deep, dark blue, is somehow still visible even at night. —Not a great feature, in the circumstances, but I seem to be getting away with it. And I am apprehensive to discover that there is another like me, with green hair, waiting in the dark, at the entrance to what seems to be the only point of escape. I have no choice but to follow him. However, the way he talks gives me some confidence that he knows what he is doing. He takes me into a large network of buildings, part of which is a prison, and part of which is a kind of military headquarters. The whole compound appears to have only a very few entrances and exits. As we walk along a corridor that leads to a courtyard, I realise Mr Green is hoping we will not be noticed if we remain calm. Up ahead of us, standing in the moonlight, is a small group of people talking to each other. They haven’t noticed us coming and, if we’re lucky, we’ll pass without notice. In a moment, we are right on top of them, almost a part of the circle they formed … and we move past. But a voice calls out, speaking in German, and we have to respond. Mr Green raises his hand in a gesture of acknowledgement but does not turn around. This won’t do, and voices are raised. A commotion begins behind us as we make the run for the door. We escape. Why we are not followed into the dark, I don’t know, but as soon as the door is closed behind us we are safe in the dark landscape outside the prison. We are at the rim of a shallow glen. Pine trees, in thick forests surround us, but for the moment we are still in a large clearing. I see, high up on the other side of the glen, the silhouetted figures of a small group of soldiers. We are headed straight for them. I hope that Mr Green knows what he is doing. He leads us so close to them I am afraid we are about to be discovered. When we are so close is it obvious we have been seen, it is also clear the soldiers are Americans and are going to allow us to pass through the woods. We walk by moonlight along a narrow, dirt path into a small town and finally reach Mr Green’s house. He leaves me standing in a stairwell of a building across the street from his house until he returns with a handful of money. He whispers to me while he peels a bill off an untidy pile of notes I know is all the money he has. But he has taken too long and we are interrupted by someone who takes us immediately to a town meeting that is already in progress. For a short while accusations are flying back and forth between Mr Green and other people at the meeting—but it all comes to nothing. Or, so I believed… One of the ‘Northerners’, a bearded, pale man, very old, gets to his feet and begins to talk about past injustices. The language he speaks has a strangely musical and physical quality. I don’t understand a word of it, and yet I’m sure I know, like everyone else in the meeting, what is going to happen. And I know it cannot be stopped. Someone shouts—“No! He is going to kill all of us!” Yes—that is what the old man’s incantation is doing. The sky opens up and a red light pours down on us. Mr Green and I begin to unravel in an orgy of signification, our characters peeling off us like rubber suits. Mr Blue was just a shell that has fallen to my feet. And I also am a skin, which is now peeling off my body and dropping to my feet. Underneath me is another person.