Summer's Lease: Mysterious Quantum Forces Unraveled

by Rudolfo Carrillo

I dreamt I went to a party in the Northeast Heights. Esta accion was up on Montgomery, near Morris. For those of you with an interest in psychogeography, that vecindad is where my brother and I delivered the Albuquerque Tribune in the late nineteen-seventies.

Some of the houses around there were awfully deluxe, and now and then we'd run into a pool party complete with roast beef sangwiches and mimosas. We soon found those were the types of habitations with owners likely to tip around the holidays, especially if the paper was laid out by the front door, neat and regular.

Otros chantes thereabouts were shambling testaments to the fragility of the middle class with cars parked on the lawn and porches that smelled of dog shit and Coors Banquet Beer. You'd more likely get bit than collect, so we usually let those customers be until the Albuquerque Publishing Company cancelled them for non-payment.

Anywho, my dream wasn't anything like that because the fiesta que estoy describiendo took place in a high-rise apartment, but you could still see the Sandia Mountains from the balcony, sabes? I did not know a soul there. I mostly spent my time in one of the bedrooms staring at a wooden cabinet that somehow seemed familiar. In the hallway, folks were admiring the carpet and talking about a bat flying around the light fixture.

When I looked away again, the place was empty. Even the murciélago was gone.  I checked the refrigerator for pizza and sat down in front of an oversized plastic television set with a cold slice of Godfather's. Star Trek was on. It was the episode where two planets are waging war by computer and the losers have to self-disintegrate. Kirk and Spock destroy the computers in the end; fear of real war brings peace. Bárbaros, that's some cold war shit, I said to the dreamworld as I got up to leave.

Outside it was an emergency because the entire building was on fire. Everyone from the party was standing on the corner watching the flames wag their tongues like hungry leaves all around the doors and windows. Since there were a number of cool ranflas parked nearby, I picked a nineteen-seventy-one Saab 96 with pneumatic controls and switches designed specifically for underwater use, and I got the hell outta there.

The sun was just flickering back on as I made the corner of Morris and Lomas Boulevard, turning west toward our headquarters, where I let the old car float away and promptly crawled back into my sleeping skin. I was waiting for the alarm to sound.