Goines On: Nightmare

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Goines seemed to have to race his electric toothbrush to cover an entire quadrant before the device’s 30-second beep. He supposed that perceived time was very slow this morning because he had gone deep into dreamland in the hour or two before arising. His psyche probably couldn’t have delivered the quartet of dreams any other way than by sedating him – otherwise he would have woken himself up to escape them.
    He was glad he couldn’t remember much more than working at a desk (doing what?) in someone’s (whose?) cluttered apartment (or college room?), a cleaning man (?) clumsily (?) touching the fly area of his pants while rearranging something under the desk (rearranging what?). Goines remembered reprimanding the man for touching him, and he supposed this part of the dream was provoked by the Icelandic episode of Trapped he and Mrs. Goines had watched the evening before, in which one of the Polish plant workers grabbed an African worker’s crotch. (A man’s crotch, not a woman’s pussy.)
    But was it really a quartet of dreams? The cluttered-desk dream was the only one he could remember anything of as he ground coffee beans in the kitchen. But later – when he was in the garage putting on his walking boots, in which he had left his orthotics the previous day after returning from spotting the turtle because he had thought he would go back to take the turtle somewhere after consulting with Mrs. Goines – he remembered he had dreamed about the turtle as well, a dream depressing with its images of destitution, exhaustion, lost habitat. Empathizing himself into that forlorn turtle lying in the middle of a hot road had been a nightmarish experience.
    The volunteer George hadn’t found the turtle the day before, or any sign of it, and Goines was going to return this morning to the road in front of the clubhouse to look for it himself, just so he might know, and maybe ease his mind. It occurred to him to wonder whether George might even be thinking Goines’ call had been a prank, and there was no turtle. If so, there was likely no way George would come back a second time, even if Goines could locate it.
    As he walked, he planned how he would search. He would examine the ground along the side of the road the turtle had seemed headed toward, for signs of its dragging itself off the pavement into the weeds. But could Goines even spot any signs? He didn’t have the eyes of one of those Indian cattle rustlers in his friend Ed’s book. But he had to try.
    Nothing along the roadside caught his attention, so he walked a few feet into the weedy area between the road and the boundary of his own development and made an arc along the road. Still no sign. Then he walked in a few more feet for another arc. And there it was, only 20 feet from the road, in a shallow depression to the left of a big green electrical box, which had already been installed to serve the dwellings that would eventually be constructed on that side of the road. A thin band of denser vegetation lay only a hundred feet farther on. Had the turtle been unable reach it? And today a man on a tractor was beginning to clear brush from the area….

    The turtle looked much as it had the day before, its nose seemingly pressed into the far wall of the depression. At least it had made it off the hot pavement yesterday, even before George arrived less than two hours after Goines’ initial spotting. Had the turtle been in the depression ever since – for over 20 hours? Was it dead? Goines didn’t go around the turtle to try to see its eyes, telling himself he didn’t want to disturb it. But he knew he simply couldn’t stand to look into the poor creature’s eyes. Goines would notify George again, prank or not, and then come by again later that day to see whether anything had changed.
    On his walk home he wondered, if the turtle were indeed dead, whether George would see any advantage in performing an autopsy to try to determine its cause of death – the proximate cause, for the general cause seemed obvious: the housing development had destroyed most of the turtle’s habitat.

Copyright © 2019 by Moristotle