The Narrative Image

It’s benign most of the time. You’re warm. Through your eyelids, you can sense sunlight gently streaming in the window. You’ve been talking to your dad, and though your dad died decades ago, part of you knows that this is all a dream, and so talking to dead people isn’t all that strange and neither is the sensation of floating in a white, cozy cloud. It isn’t until you open one eye that you begin to freak-out. “That’s not my chest of drawers,” you realize, “and that’s not my carpet!”. Your other eye pops open.  “This isn’t my bed!” and, “This most certainly isn’t even my room!  I’ve been drugged somehow and kidnapped and I can’t move my arms!” Just as the panic rises and you flop out of the bed tearing at the tangled industrial-strength king-size bed-cover, you remember, just before you hit the floor, that this is a hotel room and you’re on a business trip. Except, I’m not in a cozy warm cloud. I’m lost in the Antarctic huddled in a blanket made from an unzipped sl

From my supine perspective in the giant mosquito-net house, the snoring noise emanating from the S.E. corner is, by deduction, Kip, who must have migrated from his chair sometime before dawn. But it is the heat-lamp-like beams of the sun that have prodded me from unconsciousness as my body begins to glisten like greasy chicken on a buffet island. I shed my sleeping-bag cover and risk the mosquitoes outside, seeking shade. Outside, I see Rico’s sleeping bag in the shadow cast by his cot. Whether he got there by accidental tumble, instinct, or conscious strategy is uncertain, but I’d guess some mixture of the last two options. The inexorable advance of the sun prods us to action (even if it is sluggish action). Our sleeping accouterments get folded, stuffed or rolled. Beer cans are policed. Cookware and plates are cosmetically cleaned under a less than rigorous paper-towel protocol. The bags and boxes and ice-chests are re-sorted into the vehicles. Finally, the appropriate lures are