Dream Spores - 14. Earth Expedition

Earth Expedition

I think it began with a crime scene and an eggplant. The crime scene happened to be the kitchen of Bochum's Renaissance Hotel. I don't know what happened there, but the investigation was being taken care of by someone else who was present, I think. I had to cut up an eggplant and some other vegetable, pin them on top of each other and bake them in a little mounted oven above the workspace. I recall sifting through the metal trays below the station to find one that was the appropriate shape and size.
Marshmallows played a role as well. A waitress and the investigators talked about them and handled a bag of them that she had taken out of her station, and I was given a few that I was supposed to use for my dish.

I thought of you. I was squatting in a huge, dark hall that was wet, dirty and cold, with my travel backpack full of packrat stuff, necessities and clothes sitting near me by the wall, and a foggy jab of 'I'd rather be with you' rippled through me. I tried to remain inconspicuous and to be overlooked by the workers bustling about this place. They must have been dockers, because when this little girl, who was apparently my friend and companion, urged me to go on we found ourselves on a huge ship moments later.

It was brand new, very large and serious on the outside, and extremely roomy and serious on the inside. It had blue-carpeted hallways that were numerous, sometimes wide, and often so long that the natural grey light from outside misted up your view before it could fathom the end. It was a floating congress center, the very serious-looking maître-d' told us.

Well, not us, specifically, but rather a group of people that the girl and I had just planted ourselves in. We quickly dispersed. It was best, and entirely possible, to stow away on this ship as long as we didn't know what it was really about.

The girl was were she was supposed to be, it seemed. She had some kind of mission. She was serious and fired up and I asked her whether she was sure about it (whatever it was). The thought crossed my mind that we might have to go off and looked outside at the landscape and the weather. It was rocky and snowy. Not really arctic, but definitely wintery, wet and challenging for any hiker.

I turned to her.

"It's snowing," I informed her in a cautioning tone. She was doing stuff that children do; some gymnastics of juvenile boredom on the railing; swung herself up to lean forward on it and looked at the rocky shore with a focused half-squint.

After a few seconds of silent assessment (or rather conversing with an entity only she could connect with) she told me that it was alright, or didn't matter. Then she said something like "She's here," or "Look, there she is," nodding and pointing out and down at the passing slabs of ice and the snowy rocks sticking out of the water.

I'm sure she meant her mother, a powerful being that appeared before my mind's eye as a beautiful, darkhaired woman of undiscernible age for a second, as I looked down at the rocks, like a mermaid reposing in the foam one moment, then suddenly disappearing in it the next. The girl told me again to look, and this time what I saw in the unnaturally clear water was a shark. It was coloured like a great white but had the lithe, long, skinny shape of a smaller kind (that would only live in very warm and calm waters, maybe in a coral reef). The water was not shallow and warm, but still it was clear and pristine like mild swimming pool water, and just as calm.

My view panned over the shark that I could see as clearly and brightly as if it weren't underwater at all, and over a protruding, icy rock that the fish was lurking by. There was a hapless seal lying on top of it, its head just jutting over the edge of the rock. It was obvious to me what would happen to it.

The image of the silent goddess flashed through my mind again and then the panning view repeated itself. It was almost the exact same picture; the shark was still by the rock (watching it or just swimming away), the movements of the water and the snow were an exact repetition of what they'd been before, and the seal was still there, in almost the same position. The only difference was that it was turned over on its back, stretched out with its head tilted back over the edge, and with a strangely clean, dark red cut across its throat and a disconnected and rather picturesque, cartoony puddle of blood pooling out from underneath its body.

It struck me as expected, natural, and eerily strange, unlikely and artificial at the same time. (Not a hunt; rather an assassination.)

(The girl was obviously an echo of the "Ea" character in the film I watched last night, "The Brand New Testament".)