To make some actual money a friend said I should give Zoop Tests this weekend. Zoop tests do not exist, nor does this individual, who anonymously but enthusiastically appeared in a dream from which I woke earlier this day.
Zoop Tests are fun, easy, and delivering them pays well, according to the non-existent friend who was herself looking for work as a teacher. Zoop Tests are done one at a time with questions and puzzles put to 7th and 8th graders at privileged schools in Brooklyn. Later in the dream someone else asked if I wanted to do some other job this weekend, but I proudly said I could not. “I’m giving Zoop Tests!” “Ah, good for you! Those are fun!”
This dream occurred in the sort of compound whence most of my dreams are set: A combination shopping mall, living space, outdoor park, etc. It was all-in-one world within the world, a city of cities where a hallway might connect something like a small office to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which itself has passages to your kitchen or the childhood bedroom of a girl you admired from afar in the 7th grade.
A lot of people were around, including security goons who went around the place confiscating bottles of water.
I remember thinking of magic keys years ago, at the end of a particularly hellish night driving through Virginia. I was tired and depressed an account of my father’s recent death, these feelings exacerbated by pouring rain and a profound darkness that covered the land earlier than usual on account of what would otherwise have been a beautiful huffy-puffy cloud cover.
All motels were booked. I guess other travelers gave up earlier than I on driving in that nonsense.
I had to settle for a Motel 6. The walls of Room 203 were white. Everything was white. The crackling void of color hurt my eyes, which darted across white walls, white floor, white sheets, blankets, furniture and curtains. For its ascetic design the room felt essential. Mystery stains and stale scents gathered around me as wrinkles cover a face. Moments felt like years.
Entering the room I imagined that the motel clerk had given me a magic key, or that this was a magic door through which any destination desired is reachable. From the outside it appeared I was entering Room 203 at a Motel 6 in Norfolk, Virginia, but once entered I would be here in New York, either on this spot or in on the 99th floor of an as yet unbuilt ultra-luxury compound where I am the one and only resident.
…
Calls from 877-790-8062 just keep coming in. All kinds of annoying.
…
Going out and about again on this beautiful day. Yesterday’s 10 miles of walking had me sleeping like a king. I am King.
Room 203
