Dream Spores - 11. Syria Symbol?

So I was in a grassy plot right beside a big, old, dark red brick house that was probably a school or some other public building. This grass patch had a few tall, old trees in it and a bunch of teenagers in school uniforms where milling about and starting to organise a schoolyard game of sorts. Sue Silvester (the cheerleading coach from the Glee show) in her tracksuit and I were the responsible adults there to watch them, I suppose.

I noticed one girl getting left out and picked on and butted in to give some commanding instructions on how to set up the game, that were going to give that girl an important role of respect in it somehow. Then I turned away with an arrogant air of 'I'm such a good educator' and strolled over the green to a gravel driveway that was overshadowed by the tall trees. Sue Silvester came with me and we sat down on the edge of the driveway where there was a warm, sunny spot. I seemed as if she and I were a loving couple and we held each other.

A few views of country maps complete with names of cities and rivers dragged in front of my view and then the image of a plane that opened a set of trap doors in its belly. Thick, short, silvery lines of some hard liquid came dropping out and my perspective switched back to me and Sue sitting on the ground. I told her it would begin to rain now and we should open up an umbrella, and together we did, just in time. As soon as it was open and held above us the heavy water hit it. I was about to remark on our impeccable timing when I heard short, deep rumbles in the sky nearby. Thunder. I told her that. We shouldn't be sitting under trees with an umbrella pointed upwards in a thunderstorm, I told her, just as an army of small lightning bolts began hitting the ground around us. We ditched the umbrella and turned around to run for cover in the large brick house. But the lightning was so close and rapid that we just ended up lying flat on the ground on our stomachs to wait it out and hopefully not get hit. But my companion did. It wasn't Sue Silvester anymore, but a young man called Marco, though my relationship to him was the same, we were a couple of lovers. A small lightning bolt struck him right between the shoulderblades under his neck. It made him spasm and when he tried to get up it shot out through his upper chest, right under the clavicle. It left markings that looked like scars from deep cigarette burns or healed gunshot wounds.

I helped him up and into the brick building where we knew there ought to be a facility for medical emergencies, and a nurse took him from me and instructed me to wait where I was. It was a low, windowless wooden chamber that reminded me of a freight elevator. It even had an upwards-downwards sliding door that took up an entire wall. After a short while, the nurse came back and asked me for my papers for some bureaucracy, and I handed her my entire wallet to make sure she had all the information she needed. She disappeared behind that sliding door again.

Now it took slightly longer. When the door opened again a person I hadn't seen before stood there and asked for my papers. I asked them how Marco was and they asked me for my papers again. I said I didn't have any because I'd already handed them over to one of their nurses for the paperwork. I asked after Marco again, but didn't get an answer. The person said something that had to do with consequences of having no identification, and shut the door again. I don't know if they actually said that to me but I knew then that I was going to be deported. And the next time I blinked I was suddenly on a plane, looking out of the window at images of maps switching through imaginary bunches of countries, in white with some places highlighted in red, thin black lines marking the borders and little dots and squares marking cities and landmarks, with neat black script naming them. They all had similarities to real places that seemed to hint at the originals but none of them were.

Suddenly I was back in the wooden freight-elevator-room and the sliding door opened to a man in a suit who told me I had to take a German test in order to be allowed to stay in the country. I told him I was German and the only reason and didn't have any papers was that I had given my ID to a nurse because my friend Marco – how was Marco, by the way? Still no answer. The man pointed to my left where there now was a little rectangular pass-through in the wall with a ledge, on which sat a small plastic box with a stack of file cards. I picked one up and realised that this was this German test I had to pass to be allowed to stay in my own country. I almost laughed.

This was the first of many questions, handwritten. I looked up and around through the open wall-door, past the man, and saw that there was an entire parcours of these quiz questions throughout a labyrinth of hallways and small rooms, all rather murky and windowless, like the basement of a disused storehouse or something. I looked at the man again and now I did laugh. It was too ridiculous. So I thought fuck it, why not, let's take this German test, and read the card in my hand.

It was some German, some English, a lot of gibberish, and it asked me to correct the statement or the words it said. I gave the man a look and read the whole thing out to him very clearly and loudly and pointedly and interrupted myself to tell him that the card really did say that and that it was all wrong and stupid.

That's where it ended.