It is the second Ice Age. London is under huge interconnecting domes. No one goes outside. We all wear sequin suits. The sequins are tiny, iridescent solar panels. A crowd of us come out of a cinema. I was too late to see the film, but the law is that you must go to the pool after leaving the cinema so I follow the crowd to the pool. People are swimming. No one removes the sequin suits, so the water is shimmering with diamond lights and reflections. I stand at the shallow end, watching, overcome by the beauty of the scene.

But then I notice a body, unsuited, lying on the bottom of the pool. There is hardly any blood, but the little there is won't mix with the water. Instead, it hovers, like a balloon on a string close by.

I point out the body to someone. There is a panic and I am arrested and accused of being a spy from Shiner Town. Everyone is afraid of Shiner Town. The people there, they say, are responsible for the cold.

Next I have been sent to Shiner Town by way of an underground labyrinth. Even as I go, I know I'll never be able to find my way back. Shiner Town is in the penthouse of a vast hypermarket. I climb flight after flight of stairs, and the higher I climb the plusher the surroundings become. There are rose pink marble columns and crimson velvet carpets. I come to an oak door. On the other side of the door I find, of course, not Shiner Town but Chinatown, and it's just like Gerrard Street only in a penthouse.

A dealer takes me to see The Empress. She is in bed having just given birth, prematurely, to twins. She is flawlessly beautiful and utterly without remorse. I am terrified.

To ingratiate myself I admire her babies. They are tiny finger-puppets dressed in sequin suits and silver pointed hats. I put them on my fingers. The heat of my hand animates them. They have wrinkled little faces, and, although they are newborn, they begin to talk to me.

They tell me that they are too small to survive in unheated rooms. The sequin suits are not enough. They need blood temperature. They make me take them, on my fingers, into the next room. This room is like a hospital ward, long and white. There are about thirty bearded men inside, all drugged, all strapped to gurneys.

The tiny twins tell me that the men are Sephardic Jews. They were chosen, the twins say, because their blood is warmer than everyone else. The blood is being siphoned out of their necks into tubes, then into pipes and then, directly, into the radiators which heat the twins bedroom. I can see this happening: the dark slow blood is the only colour in the white room.

The twins ask me if I am a Jew. I am so frightened that I tell them I am a Canadian. They're puzzled and don't quite believe me because, they say, my fingers are warm enough to keep them alive.

As I wake up I know where the dead body in the pool came from, and I know that I will never leave Shiner Town alive.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Cody doesn't say it explicitly, but she links the death in the pool with the vampirism in the ward, not by waking cause & effect, but because these (twin centers of the dream) repeat exactly--red blood in a big pale colorless space.

Freud & Jung thought dreams were apolitical. They were wrong. It's inescapable here, just as it is in the waking world: rulers and their entitled kids feed on a victimized class.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.53-4

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