In the Virtual Bank Line

At the beginning of the night, I was curled up around the Pirate. I found myself poking him in the chest because I was dreaming that I had given him a shirt (or vest or something) and it had installed some software in his operating system. I was looking for which button on his body to poke in order to bring up the "Settings" menu so I could remove the software that installed itself.

In the dream, I ended up closing my eyes tight and putting my forehead against his back. Then, when I pushed at his flesh, the menus would pop up before my tightly-closed eyes and I could remove the program.
Later, I was back at my computer, doing some other work. I was in a big, sunny apartment in a dining room whose north-facing wall was nothing but a bank of windows, letting in beautiful afternoon light and a view of the tops of other buildings. The television is on, and I'm looking up from my computer screen occasionally to see the television, although I can't tell what program is playing.

Then it's time to go to work. I'm performing with a troupe of comedians. We do Monty Python-like physical comedy - silly walks, skits dressed in drag, etc. We also do acrobatics using long poles that are used variously as pole vaulter's poles, punting poles, shepherd's crooks, etc. On this day, we were out deep in the woods, practicing our thing. A little crowd of forest-folk gathered - elves, gnomes, trolls, etc. After our practice, one of the trolls came forward and asked us to come to his house to perform for his wife who was always very sad.

We followed him to his house, a cave in the side of a mountain not far away. Inside, there was furniture made of branches without the twigs removed lashed together with rope of dried grass. Everything seemed to be covered with a wild, fringey, sandy-colored moss, and as we crawled into the dim cave that was lit by a few candles, the troll yelled "Wife!"

A little patch of the sandy-colored moss moved, and we realized it was the hair of a little tiny woman. She was human-looking, but small and fragile and sad. Her hair was wild, as thought it hadn't seen a brush in years. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was pitifully thin.
We walked in and began performing our act. After about half an hour, she was smiling weakly, and we stopped. The troll had been making lunch for us, and while the others were eating cheese and bacon and fruit, I was talking to the wife, who was dressed in a collection of rags.

"Who are you? You don't look like a troll."

"No, I'm not a troll. I'm a person just like you. Well, not just like you. I wrote about my life. Would you read it?"

I nodded my head enthusiastically, curious to see how a human girl ended up married to a troll. She took a pile of light-colored dried leaves that were tied together with dried grass and untied them. As she untied them, I could see that they were covered with writing in dark-brown, watery ink.

"I used very strong tea for ink and a pigeon's feather for a pen. I didn't have anything else."

I pulled a candle closer and read her story. It started with a woman in her early twenties in Northern California. She had family and friends, she had graduated college and was looking forward to getting married and having a family. She began having hallucinations of living in a cave in the forest, the wife of a scary troll. She was terrified of the hallucinations, which began coming with more and more frequency.

The woman finally went to a doctor. After many tests and stays in lonely white hospital rooms, the doctor told her the truth. She had brain cancer. Not one tumor, but three, growing at an amazing rate. These weren't big lumps that could be scooped out like ice cubes out of a cool drink. These were spiders, whose many legs were winding, searching, grasping at everything they touch. The doctor tells her that the hallucinations are because of these malicious spiders touching the parts of her brain that want to be somewhere else. The doctor doesn't understand that the world she inhabits in her hallucinations is not one that she likes, even a little bit. It terrifies her.

She becomes unable to drive, as the hallucinations begin coming on suddenly and without warning. Then she becomes unable to leave the house. The last memory she has of the other life is of her mother at the hospital, telling her that she will come to visit every day. She closed her eyes on the world where she had been a child for the last time, and when she opened them, she was back here again. She had never been back.
She was trying very hard to be happy here. She was trying to adjust. She tried very hard not to be too bitter. Every day, she wrote a little more, determined to keep her other life real, to keep it close to her. She looked for ways back, but she knew that it was useless.

The other players in the troupe had finished their lunch and wanted to leave. I hand the leaves back to the woman and leave, looking back to see her crying after us. I want to cry too, because I realize that what this means is that I am a character in another person's hallucination, and that thought makes me profoundly sad.

But I don't have time to be sad, because I have to pick up my two children and fly back home to San Jose with them. I hurry to the airport, and I get there half an hour before my flight. As I'm running up to the terminal, my children are also running up yelling "Mommy, mommy!"

They are followed by my father and stepmother, and by my mother. I take the girls' hands because we need to run for the plane, but my father says that he wants to take the girls for a drink in the airport lounge first. He leads them down hallway, telling them "Come on, your mommy's just being silly. Come away from that hysterical woman." I am furious because my parents do this to me all the time. I get angry and yell at the girls to come with me or we'll miss our plane, all the while glaring at my parents.

I open a door that I think will take us in the direction of the planes, but it turns out to be a conference room. I go in and see a closet door that has a sort of garbage chute in the bottom of it. There is a fire in the garbage chute, and as I come in, the flames begin licking at the closet doors.
I look around and see a complicated sort of box with a fire extinguisher in it. To get to the fire extinguisher, you had to pull three handles. One sounded the alarm. One activated a lot of safety systems that unlocked stairwell doors and pressurized rooms to keep the fire from spreading. The third handle opened the door of the box. I took the fire extinguisher and tried putting out the fire, but it was just too big. Other people came into the room, and as they took over, I grabbed the girls and left.

We made our plane and landed in San Jose. We got off and went to the parking garage, and as we walked by, a fire broke out in a trash can. I clasped the girls' hands a little tighter and started running as fast as I could with the baby holding my hand. Then we're home, and the police are questioning me. They are telling me that I set the fires. I apparently set the airport fire so that I could be the hero and put it out, except that it got out of hand.

I argued that I hadn't even stayed to put the fire out. That I saw it, alerted people as was my duty, and then left, not even telling anyone my name. That's hardly the action of someone who wanted to be a hero. They asked me to explain the fire in the trash can, and I told them that I had no explanation whatsoever. They were questioning the girls, planting ideas in their heads. "Your mommy put a lit match in the trash, right?" But the girls wouldn't say anything but the truth, no matter how leading the questioners tried to be.

The questioners were leaving as my alarm went off.

****
The fire incident reminded me after I woke up of the time that I was really sick with fever, and everything that I had touched - the clothes I wore, the sheets and pillowcases I slept on, ended up with little burn holes in it that we've never been able to explain. The Pirate says I'm that powerful, but I don't know what to