Tag Archives: Anna Spence

I knew Mohammad G. Warblanket all his life, from the days of his boyhood until the afternoon he asked me to kill him. 

Like all people in my dreams, he arrived fully-formed with a backstory, a home life, friends and aspirations. Most of these I don’t know since dream people tend to take their shoes off at the door; I only know they come from somewhere by the dust on their soles. Mohammad G. Warblanket was a specific, embodied person with a local habitation and a name. He had a head of floppy black hair that hid his keen, dark eyes, and nimble brown hands that often did not know where to be. He kept them in his pockets a lot, which got him reprimanded by his mother who didn’t want him to grow up to be a subversive. But, like most dream people, he was also a jumble of jump-cuts, sudden gender changes and a colourful pastiche of attributes and qualities that accreted or flaked off of him as the narrative required, all of which makes perfect, coherent sense in the logic of the dream. In this way, he was very much like a real person. I grew to love him, I admit, which was a problem, later.

For his part, Mohammad G. Warblanket remained oblivious to me as I moved through his world, assuming various identities, as one does, or floating above him and his gang of friends as they loitered in the streets of the unnamed city. His friends were motley sketches of types supplied by my brain’s stock of dramedy characters—sassy best friend, sarcastic second-best friend, brainiac, asthmatic, schemer—but they were good-hearted and boisterous and, if they quizzed Mohammad G. Warblanket on his unusual collision of names and origins, they forgot to care about the answer in favour of a good game of spies. They could tail a commuter in teams of two from the mouth of the subway entrance along the crowded sidewalks of morning rush-hour traffic. They particularly liked to follow stout women in pantsuits and track shoes who kept their 3-inch pumps in their briefcases. These ones never made eye contact with anyone and, because of their determination, experience and stature, were master navigators of crowds, a sufficient challenge for a pack of pre-teens looking for adult-adjacent diversion. Mohammad G. Warblanket was good at tailing commuters but often got bored before they reached whichever blank-faced glass office building that swallowed them up.

It was a good life for a boy—nothing wrong with it—but Mohammad G. Warblanket was restless, squinty and jittery in the glass canyons of the city where the invisible sun sent beams that ricocheted at unexpected angles from the faces of adult architecture and into his eyes and other shadowy places. It was one of these ricochets that distracted him from his game of spies and led him to the storm drain.

Now, every kid—even a dream kid—knows that Stephen King had decades ago made storm drains off-limits to children due to the not-quite-sufficiently-imaginary threat of Murderous Clowns and, of course, the very real danger of drowning. So, even as he lay on his stomach to wriggle feet-first into the narrow opening of the storm drain, Mohammad G. Warblanket knew that this was the point at which the jaunty soundtrack of his youth would gain an ominous cello undertone. With all of this in mind, he left his Spider-Man backpack on the curb so that future detectives would have a clue.

Having squirmed through the impossible-to-squirm-through grating until he was hanging by his fingertips over the waiting silence, Mohammad G. Warblanket was committed to the venture. His Muppet-thin arms weren’t strong enough to pull him back up into the ricochet light and there were no footholds or rusty ladder-rungs in reach of his sneakers. So, he let go. He let go and fell down and down and down, away from the familiar nowhere light of the city, through a clinging nowhere of the city’s forgetting, through the underside stink, until he cracked the surface of the water and fell through that too.

It was not the murky, smelly slough of storm runoff that he expected, but a vast, greeny, translucent ocean, fretted above his head by a Mediterranean blue sky tatted and woven on the intricate patterns of the distant waves. He hung in a space colonnaded by load-bearing sunbeams shafting between the blackness of outer space and the blackness of the deeps. In between, in the cool blue space where Mohammad G. Warblanket floated, was the underwater tiger colosseum.

It was very similar to the Colosseum in Rome that we’ve all seen in pictures: a circular stone structure girdled with tiers of rounded arches diminishing in size but increasing in number as they moved upward. Like the Roman counterpart, this one was also broken, half of the top two tiers sheared off by the great, dull scythe of time. Unlike the Roman Colosseum, the tiers descended infinitely downward into an atavistic darkness.

I watched from a distance as Mohammad G. Warblanket swam awkwardly toward it, shoving the sea out of his way with ungainly sweeps of his skinny arms. As he approached, there was a churning arrival of beasts. Tigers swarmed out of the colosseum’s arches by the dozens, the hundreds, in a great hurly-burly of stripes and tails and teeth and claws. They swam with an elegant, fearsome grace toward Mohammad G. Warblanket, who tried to turn, flailing, kicking, wild in the eyes. I willed myself toward him but found I could not shout or budge, sleep-paralysis being what it is, and could only brace for blood.

But the tigers bared their teeth in laughter, and turned joyful somersaults and twined their tails in fellowship as they surrounded Mohammad G. Warblanket who, quick to shed suspicion, stroked their stripy, flowing fur and kissed their broad noses. In a great shifting of momentum, the tigers reversed the lithe fury of their swimming and took Mohammad G. Warblanket with them into the colosseum. I, who still could not move despite my special status as the dreamer, was left alone on the street in the nameless city, dripping and cold.

Mohammad G. Warblanket’s family and his friends looked for him up and down the streets of the nameless city. They put up posters and made a hotline and went on television to plead for information on his whereabouts. I knew his whereabouts, but, since underwater tiger colosseums were not real in this world of my own construction, I was discounted as a crank and my many messages to the hotline were deleted. 

The family and friends had almost given up hope when a detective found a Spider-Man backpack on the curb above the storm drain, MOHAMMAD G. WARBLANKET written with black laundry marker on a tag sewed into the inside pocket. Men in city worker coveralls came and lowered themselves on a rope with a winch down into the dark mouth of the sewer. They called for Mohammad G. Warblanket as they descended, their voices echoing in the confined space over the hissing of the slough in the tunnels. After a long time they winched in reverse, bringing up with them the limp, almost-but-not-quite drowned-body of Mohammad G. Warblanket, formerly missing child and imminent temporary media sensation. The sunlight ricocheted off of the lenses of the news cameras as they stared at his small body on the stretcher and his sneakers sticking out from under the blanket and his blue-cold eyelids as the EMTs wheeled him to the ambulance.

When he woke from his waterlogged sleep, Mohammad G. Warblanket told the doctors and his family and his friends and the news reporters about the underwater tiger colosseum, about its arched entryways and the acrobatic joy of the aquatic tigers. Hush, said the doctors. Take your meds. And his family said, Don’t mind Mohammad. He’s been through a trauma. And his friends said, Yeah man, sure, man. And the news reporters got distracted by a ricochet and went to stare at that instead. But Mohammad G. Warblanket told them every day about what he had seen in the sea down, down, down below the nameless city. He told them every day for a whole year. Until, at last, he hushed up about the underwater tiger colosseum. He said other things to fill up the silence and to keep the doctors and his family and friends from staring, and none of it mattered to him at all.

He’s cured! said the doctors who wrote papers about him in peer reviewed journals. Look at Mohammad, our brave, very normal boy, his family said. Welcome back, weirdo, said his friends without looking up from their video game that had replaced the game of spies because their parents didn’t want them to end up lost and strange like Mohammad G. Warblanket. The news reporters said, It’s a real triumph of the human spirit, and then segued to a new tragedy.

And this is where Mohammad G. Warblanket started his sleepwalk, a dreamless dream nested in my dream like an emptiness wrapped in an improbability. I watched him sleepwalk through adolescence where he smiled and laughed like other boys. I watched him sleepwalk through adulthood where he was swallowed up without resistance each day by a blank-faced glass office building in the nameless city, his eyes turned away from the ricochet light.

And so it went.

Until one day, when the sun was beating down on the blank face of the office building, Mohammad G. Warblanket looked up from his spreadsheets—the spreadsheets were tracking profits and losses, except that, instead of numbers, Mohammad G. Warblanket had filled in each square with one of the colours that Microsoft Excel allows so that the spreadsheets were actually rainbows—he looked up from his rainbow spreadsheets—no one else in the cube farm had rainbow spreadsheets, a fact that the manager pointed out, since they were not in the business of rainbows, so that needed to be fixed or else—he looked up from his irregular rainbow spreadsheets, and he looked out of his dreamless dream and into mine and said:

Help me.

What? I said. This is as irregular as a rainbow spreadsheet.

Help me die, said Mohammad G. Warblanket. It’s your dream. You can do it.

No, I said. No. I was attached to Mohammad G. Warblanket. I’d known him since he was a child playing spies on the street. I loved him and I wasn’t ready to wake up yet. You’re not even supposed to see me, I said. It’s very irregular.

Fine, said Mohammad G. Warblanket. Fine. And he turned off his computer without saving his spreadsheets and he left his cube and went down the elevator and down the street and down the steps to the subway and down the line to the end and down the riverbank and into the swelling floodwaters.

What are you doing? I said to Mohammad G. Warblanket.

What are you doing? said the city workers who were busy piling sandbags on the banks of the river to stop the flood. You can’t do that here, they said. It’s very irregular. And the foreman called the police.

The police came and rushed out to the palisade of sandbags. Come out of there, they shouted through their bullhorns. Come out of the water.

No, said Mohammad G. Warblanket, the water rising up and up around him. I don’t think so. The water was murky with disturbed mud and pointy and stabby with debris—trees and bits of houses and sharp memories.

The police drew their guns and pointed them at Mohammad G. Warblanket. CHOOSE LIFE OR WE’LL SHOOT, they shouted.

This made Mohammad G. Warblanket laugh. He laughed and laughed as the floodwaters rose and rose until he laughed the river right into his lungs and into his brain and the police pocked the raging water with their bullets but there was only the river and Mohammad G. Warblanket was gone.

Oh, well, said the police, putting away their guns and their bullhorns.

Oh, well, said the city workers, going back to stacking sandbags.

Oh, I said. Oh!

And I waded into the river. I went into the river and under the river and I held my breath so that the churned-up mud and the stabby debris couldn’t get into me, and I swam down and down, following the load-bearing sunbeams, down and down and down, until I came to the underwater tiger colosseum, where Mohammad G. Warblanket, ten years old again, hung in the colonnade of light.

All the tigers swarmed out to meet Mohammad G. Warblanket, their teeth bared with laughter, and they surrounded him and took him into the ancient place through one of its many archways. But when I tried to follow, the tigers turned on me.

This is not the way, they said through their fierce smiles. This is not the way for you.

Why? I thought at them, but could not speak because I was holding my breath.

Because, they said, pity in their growls. You won’t give up the air.

And they swam away, into their underwater colosseum, and although I tried and tried, I could not see inside.

photo by Dario Veronesi and Tim Marshall (via unsplash)