I Get Killed by Hitler, and What Happened to the Walls

Alla fin trabocca e scoppia,
si propaga, si raddoppia
e produce un'esplosione
come un colpo di cannone,
un tremuoto, un temporale,
un tumulto generale,
che fa l'aria rimbombar!

--Rossini, Il Barbiere di Siviglia

I like to put the telly on when I'm trying to get to sleep. Something about the moving pictures gets me right dozy: TV on, rat off. Last night, I fell asleep watching Max, a film about a young Adolf Hitler. I fell asleep right in the middle, and had a dream where a grinning, ratfaced Führer chased me through the streets of Cambridge. (Go figure.)

"Jew! Jew! Bloody Jew!" shouted Hitler.

"I'm a godless Anglo-Saxon atheist!" I shouted back, and immediately became annoyed with myself for protesting based on fact rather than principle. "Get away from me, you paranoiac little gnome!"

We raced up a curiously deserted Grafton Street, our boots slapping and scuffing on the cobbles. (Cobbles? Is Grafton Street cobbled? I can't remember.) We passed the shop with the back massagers that weren't really meant for backs and the dustbin where my sister lost her Puff the Magic Dragon toy (it was later pulled out covered in vomit). We hurtled past the hamburger kiosk with the nose-burning mustard and the bench where you could eat your hamburger if it wasn't raining. Two ghosts were sitting on the bench--me and my mother, as we were thirteen years ago. They bit into their sarnies and their eyes teared up from the mustard, and then they disappeared. I kept running, but there was nowhere left to go. I'd reached the Grafton Centre, and the end of the road. The doors were locked and chained. I banged and rattled at them, but there was nobody inside. The fountain was dried up and cracked, and there was nothing left of Debenham's but a herd of abandoned clotheshorses.

"Help! Help!", I yelped, bulling into the doors with my shoulder. I jumped and butted and kicked, but the glass held. "Somebody! Let me in! Nazis are chasing me! Help!" I looked over my shoulder. Mr. Hitler was puffing and panting almost as badly as I was, but he was no more than twenty paces away. There was no time left.

"Why am I running away from you?" I said, calming down and putting up my dukes. "I can take you. You are a snivelly weasel, and I will kill you in an instant."

Adolf Hitler stopped running and put his hand in his coat. I thought he was going to pull out a gun, but he produced a road flare instead. He lit it, and it soared skyward in a cloud of red smoke. I watched it go. The sky was perfectly flat and grey, as it often is in Cambridge, and the flare looked exciting and dramatic against it. It rose in an unbalanced spiral, careening all over the place. Higher and higher it went, and I strained my eyes to see. It passed the average seagull cruising altitude (five hundred feet, or thereabouts), and ventured where eagles dare. Soon, it was lost in the cloud cover. I waited for it to come back down, but it didn't. Maybe it went straight through the stratosphere and into outer space. Maybe it's on Mars by now. But that's where it exited my dream.

When I looked back down, Hitler was no longer alone. A crowd of jackbooted Aryan Nation types had joined him, those shaved-headed neo-Nazis you get, the ones with the swastika tattoos and the shocking vocabularies.

"Oh, no!" I spat. Maybe I could've kicked Hitler's smarmy wee fascist arse, but I was no match for the American History X reject gang. The Nazis goosestepped around me, then over me. They stamped on my face and crushed my head. Then, I realized I was awake again, and looking at someone with his head crushed on the telly.

"That dream sucked," I told Stella. I like to keep her apprised of my dreams. She sits and listens with an expression that's either rapt fascination or glassy-eyed boredom. It's hard to tell with rats. They've got those inscrutable sorts of faces. "I got killed by Adolf Hitler and a bunch of wankers."

You can't die in dreams, said Stella. If you die in a dream, you die in real life too. She believes every urban legend she hears, that one.

"Sure, you can. I die all the time in my dreams. I've choked on cyanide, fallen off cliffs, been hit by cars, and become monster food on more occasions than I can count. I've been stabbed in various parts of my body, blown away with futuristic weapons, immolated, and drowned. And tonight, I was the victim of an atrocious (and inexplicable) hate crime. I don't usually die in chasing dreams, though. I usually escape. And sometimes, it all gets turned around, and suddenly I'm the one doing the chasing. I've chased Hated Enemy Steve a few times, and zombies, and--oh! This one time, I was in World War II, and I was chasing soldiers. I didn't get any. That's the thing with chasing dreams--they're generally just chasing. No catching. I don't like catching."

Picky, picky, criticized Stella, nibbling her left big toe.

"Yeh, says you, picking at yourself. Disgusting, that."

Stella didn't have anything to say to that, so I opened her cage door and let her out. I forgot to put the chair over the doorway, and she went in the kitchen, squeezing under the dishwasher. I had to sit there with my face pressed to the floor for ten minutes, screaming "No!" every time she started biting the pipes. I had a rat get under the dishwasher once before, and it did two hundred dollars' worth of damage. It also ate the telephone cable, several computer cords, and my tax receipts from 1999. Furthermore, I believe it may have peed in the top drawer of my nightstand (which I later sold to an unsuspecting neighbour).

Later on in the afternoon, once I'd had a chance to come to my senses a little (you know, have a shower, get dressed, stop talking to rats, all that sort of thing), I put my head out in the hallway. It was full of workmen, who were painting the walls, covering up the white smudges one by one.

Later still, once the painters had gone, I went out to try and mess up the paint job with fingerprints. They must've used some quick-drying sort of paint, though. My attempts at besmirching the hallway were unsuccessful, but my disappointment was mitigated by the fact that the places where the white blotches had been were still perfectly visible. Score one for...er...people who like defacing walls. (That sounded really, really pathetic, didn't it?)