Tilting the Void

One of the best things about taking Zyrtec for my allergies isn't, strangely enough, its antihistamine properties. For some reason I find my dreams richer and more deeply colored, although my dreams have always been pretty strange and intense--those I can remember, that is. Lately though, they've been ridiculously superb.

Last night, I'd been apparently hired to apartment-sit for Kingsley Amis and Paul Theroux--never mind that the two of them don't live together and one is dead. They had an apartment in Mumbai in an underground structure that nonetheless had windows that allowed deep afternoon sunlight in. I had to take a rickety old lift with a flickering florescent light to get down to it. Once there, it was decorated like some 1969 idea of a sultan's palace; wide open floor plan, several sunken jacuzzis, sparkly mobiles and curtains, and lots and lots of paisley, as if Austin Powers had chewed everything up and then spit it back out in mauve and pink and orange and turquoise and bile green. Apparently, in my dreamworld, Kingsley Amis and Paul Theroux were, ahem, also FABULOUS.

Anyway, our Fed Ex representative from work came up to me and wanted to know what I was doing in his apartment. The room covered a whole floor and was divvied up between people, and the only way you could tell which space belonged to whom was by the colors of the sunken jacuzzis, which were also lined with inflatable plastic cushions, like children's floaty toys. I said, "Oops!" and told him I was looking after Kingsely's and Paul's place, over in the corner. "Well, don't wander too far," the Fed Ex rep said, fairly sternly, and I went on my way.

And that, as they say, was that.