United Flight Room 23-B
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
United Flight Room 23-B
What is there to remember about a hospital room? Nothing. That's the worst thing about it. A guy named Gigi moaned some combination of the the word "yes" and "no" all night beside me, I found out my next door neighbor worked in the neurological ward at Roosevelt Hospital, I ate the pressed chicken in yellow gravy hungrily, and then they released me. My episode of "minor back surgery" was over.
I came home from surgery full of Vicodin and optimism, still pretty sore, and proceeded to take a few naps. A druggy nightmare I had last night stuck a tuning fork in all that optimism. In this dream I was the floor manager at a fashion show that went on for many weeks. It was spread out in a U shape, like a royal banquet within a massive tin-walled warehouse. Nervous, drugged-out models walked up and down the banquet table and were jeered more lasciviously as the festival progressed. There were feather boas and wadded slips, riotous color piled up everywhere like the inside of some exploded animal. With a sickening jolt I became aware of bulbheaded, vaguely human shapes crawling on their hands and knees beneath the tables, watching me and waiting to surface at the end of the show. Hence I tried keep the riot in a semblence of order so it wouldn't burn itself out. Everyone was drunk.
The culmination of the show was a movie premiere. The aisles in the theatre were tight and framed by a bead of tiny lights running along the floor on either side. The seats in the theatre were divided into long, densely packed rows of three, like the inside of an airplane. There were even emergency exits vacuumed to the side walls and the dim lights were all emergency red. Clever, I thought. The movie started; it involved bulbheaded people who communicated by telepathy and mostly talked about how middle class they were and about how no one else in the world liked them. When they had sex they did it en masse and their giant, fleshy heads melted into one another and just became a lot of eyes. The audience started to boo and throw popcorn at the screen. I thought: Michel Houellbecq's really outdone himself this time. Then a title came on the screen. It said "September 11, 2001." I rolled my eyes. More booing from the audience.
The screen showed a lot of people in a theater decked out to look like the interior of an airplane. Massive rocking shook the onscreen theater. The talent huddled against each other and wept as the whole environment around them shook. Their faces were tastefully cloaked in anonymity and they clawed at the seats and clutched their faces. Some of them prayed. On the other side of the screen, just behind me, I thought I heard Gigi moaning "noooo..." and an invisible lightning flash of hate and panic burned through the theater. A face on the screen appeared, red lit and grotesque in fearful peity, like a character in a Noh play. A medium shot showed a passenger vomiting that creamy Hollywood rope of puke which has become such a cinematic cliche. In front of me, an audience member produced the same pure line, then another one further down. "It's sick!" someone yelled, and on the screen, someone yelled "God help us!" Theater and screen spiralled and looped. The booing turned into screaming near me and the guy behind me started weeping and ripping the seat out of the floor. His face was red lit and ghoulish. The roaring from the Dolby Surround Sound became deafening and I had just enough time to think: first, they should have never pulled this prank; and second, they're going to break my back again. Then I woke up sort of shivering and squirting tears, afraid, and took another pill.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:08 PM,
