Dream

Last night, I dreamt that I was a young girl traveling through Europe. I was sort of naive, without very much of a plan, and waiting to have some “experience” that would let me go back to America and be all, “I just can’t look at things the same anymore, since I’ve been to Europe.” Eventually I met an older man of undistinguished nationality, though I thought for some reason he had perhaps been American once. We had a love affair, and eventually he convinced me that I ought to give up my plan to go to all the tourist-y European places and let him take me to see the “real” world. I had a sense that he wasn’t telling me the whole truth, that really, he needed to not stay in one place for very long. Maybe he had a wife, maybe he was a criminal. I was young and pretty unconcerned with it all, because I figured after a few months I’d go back to America and be very mysterious with my friends, discussing my older gentleman friend and hinting that perhaps he was a spy and had taken me on exciting adventures I could not relate due to diplomatic affairs.

I threw on my backpack and he threw on his stylish overcoat and we headed down to the bus station, which would take us to the train. At the bus station, he started to get jumpy, starting at each passing car, staring wild-eyed at each pedestrian who seemed to linger too long. Suddenly, he snapped. A large dark-skinned woman and her lover accidentally bumped into us, and he let loose an ethnic slur. A fight started, knives were pulled, and before long the whole thing had spread. White Europeans and ethnic Europeans spilled out onto the sidewalk, riotous, and somebody began to scream about setting fire to the whole block.

Just then, a sleek black car pulled up to the corner, and several men wearing stylish overcoats got out. My gentleman friend slumped when he saw them, then made one last dash at the dark-skinned woman, who was waving a knife menacingly. I could see he was trying to impale himself, but he was clumsy and fell right by her, into the arms of the waiting men. They pulled him aside and he leaned wearily against the car, giving me a shrug and a hand gesture that meant nothing to me. The men took chalk and drew a large rectangle around the fighting crowds. I stepped outside the line and they shoved me back in.

The next thing I knew, I was in a white room with a table and chair, being interrogated by several men in stylish overcoats who looked vaguely familiar. They asked me what I remembered. Everything was very foggy at first, but then I was able to describe a fight, though I couldn’t remember what about, and what street it had taken place on, or how it had ended. Suddenly, my gentleman friend’s face came to mind, and I asked what had happened to him. The men looked at each other, looked at me, then left the room. A woman entered, and the next thing I knew, I was in a white room with a table and chair, being interrogated by some strange men I had never seen before. They asked me what I remembered. There had been some sort of large group of people, was it a festival? Were they angry? Maybe… it came to me that it had been a fight. A fight of some sort. And there had been a man. Did they know who the man was? The men looked at each other, looked at me.

They tied me up and blindfolded me, drove for a very long time. Eventually they let me out at a large series of building in the middle of the woods. The sign over the doors proclaimed that it was The Academy. As the men led me to the main building, I passed some people I recognized as having been in the riot. There was one Indian man who had rushed into the riot as soon as the first person was injured, kneeling at their side, attempting to staunch the blood with one hand and fight off everybody else with the other. He was kneeling next to a cadaver with a bespectacled man kneeling next to him, asking him questions about what he would do, what he would have done to save the cadaver. As we passed, the Indian man looked at me, but obviously didn’t recognize me at all.

I was shuttled from one office to another as paperwork was filled out about me. I caught a glimpse of some of the information, saw various checkboxes, including “Medic” and “Memory Queen.” On my form, Memory Queen was checked. Eventually I was brought to a small dormitory room, pre-furnished, obviously recently vacated. There was a note from the previous tenant describing where I could find dishware and laundry machines, and how to jiggle the toilet handle. The handwriting was familiar, and I realized the note had been written by a woman my ex-husband’s family had known. Various parts of the note were crossed out in black marker with new sentences in an unfamiliar hand scribbled over it. The note would start to say, “Let me tell you a little bit about myself…” then black black black, then red pen scribbled over saying, “I was a Nazi spy.”

A somewhat elderly man came into my room and identified himself as the principal of the academy. The Academy, he explained, was where the Organization trained their agents. The job of the Organization was to keep worldwide violence at a manageable level. When events occurred that could have wider impact, they would send Agents to end the conflict while it was still small enough to be overcome. The Organization had started as nothing but a handful of combat-trained Agents with memory-wiping equipment. But after some years of study, they discovered aberrations in their procedures. There were Medics, people who would always launch themselves into a conflict to protect and save the wounded. The Organization was unable to predict who in a crowd would be a Medic, and unable to discover why Medics behaved as they did, but decided that all Medics from here on out would be collected and trained; what other qualities could you want for in an Agent than the ability to launch oneself fearlessly into a violent altercation for the greater good?

The Organization also discovered that certain individuals had degrees of immunity to the memory wipe. They had discovered no genetic or biological link, and these individuals couldn’t be predicted, with the exception that only women appeared to be capable of possessing the immunity. They called them Memory Queens. It was very rare to find a Memory Queen with complete immunity to the mind wipe; those few were highly guarded Agents. Most Memory Queens experienced some degree of memory loss or memory confusion, but maintained anything from concrete images to vague unconscious senses that easily turn into full-blown recovery with the right trigger. The Agency now only allowed Memory Queens to control the memory-wiping equipment on Agency runs as a control against any malfunctions; if everything went all to hell, the Memory Queens’ hard copies of tactical reports would be the only accurate information onhand.

My gentleman friend, he explained, had been an Agent on the run. And they always caught their Agents on the run. He left the remaining conclusion unsaid, that Memory Queens who had come into contact with the Organization became automatic Agents, and they always caught their Agents on the run.

He asked if I had any other questions, and I brought up the note the previous tenant had left. “I think I knew this woman,” I said, “before. But it says here she was a Nazi agent.” He looked at the note, blinked. “Yes?” “Well, obviously somebody scratched this out and wrote the agent part over it.” He looked at it again. “I don’t see any scratching out.” He crumpled up the note, put it in his pocket, and left.

I met my roommates, all Memory Queens, all very serious, hard-working young women, except for one. She always seemed to goof off, get nothing done, skip her classes, leave campus whenever she pleased. The general consensus was she was shtupping the principal. One way or another, I managed to piss her off. Suddenly the principal began to get very hard on my work, very cranky. The entire Academy, it seemed, was getting tense. One day, while walking to classes, bloody people began to run by me, screaming, stabbing each other. I ran into a building and found a teacher, who explained to me that this was a re-enactment of a genocide that had occurred in Africa. The African nation had refused the Organization’s help in some way, getting themselves blacklisted. Didn’t pay the right people. Something. An event occurred in one small village, a murder, and it triggered all the ethnic tensions, eventually culminating into a massive war that murdered thousands of people. The story was supposed to illustrate why the Organization existed — had an Agent been there, the initial event could have been suppressed, never escalating into genocide and war — but the re-enactment seemed to act as a pressure valve, a way to allow the students to beat and slash at each other in on a campus that, supposedly, did not allow violence or conflict. And, further, the re-enactment served the purpose of warning; here is what happens when you buck the Organization, and here are the barely-restrained Agents who will be coming for you.

I had found some evidence that the girl I pissed off had been erasing other Memory Queen’s report files. I thought this would surely get her banned from the Academy. Heading to the principal’s house, I nearly caught him in the act of shtupping the girl, but it turned out to be another classmate of mine. Here the dream descended into all sorts of dream wackiness that didn’t make sense. When I woke up and told my sleepy bear about it, he suggested that maybe it could go all David Lynch. Maybe I walk into the house to discover the girl the principal is shtupping is me.

End of dream.