red september

Last night, I lay myself down to sleep knowing I was in for strange, unsettling dreams.  The evening's unconscious musings did not disappoint.

In my dream, my entire workplace had gone on a trip to somewhere in Asia, though I know not where.  The buildings and people appeared entirely Western, though their language was strange to me, but geographically we were somewhere west of Guangzhou.

I had brought, along with me, my baby daughter, though my wife was nowhere to be seen.  I kept her safe and happy with a lot of help from my co-workers, who all adore her and were more than happy to assist, and a large supply of infant formula that I kept in my hotel room.

There was a side-trip planned, in which we were all to take the train and perform a play for the pleasure of the Tsar of the Russian Empire.  This was the centerpiece of the trip, even though it wasn't our main destination, because a good showing in front of the Tsar would do wonders for the prestige of my workplace.

I had learned my part in the play, and the day we were due to depart, I found myself nevertheless with a very full schedule.  My mother had asked me to stop by her home and help set up the new router she'd received from Verizon.  A friend was having serious computer issues and asked me to come take a look at her machine.  And, I was informed the morning of the trip, the rest of the staff had decided they would not be able to make the trip at all, and it was up to me to perform the play for the Tsar as a one-man show.

I was a little stressed.  I needed to learn at least a dozen new parts, deal with two separate computer incidents, and make it on the train with my daughter.  Faced with all this, I decided that my mom would have to wait.  She would understand.

I stopped by my friend's place and set to work on the computer, but what should have been a fifteen-minute job turned into two hours, and she grew angrier and angrier at the time I was taking.  I finally fixed the issue, apologized for my slowness, and hightailed it out of there.

I made it to the hotel, grabbed my daughter, and drove as fast as I could to the train station.  I arrived only to learn that I had forgotten two very important things:  my passport, and the baby formula.  I still hadn't even looked at the script.

My car, naturally, failed to start, and I abandoned it.  Instead, I ran back to the hotel, gathered all the supplies and my passport in a giant bag, and carried all of it, daughter included, back to the train station at a full run.  I strained and slowed under the immense weight of all the baby supplies, and onlookers pointed and laughed, but I finally limped onto the the train with everything I needed, and we set off for Russia and the Tsar.

On the way, the Russian Revolution occurred, and the Tsar was deposed.  When I arrived, all was in turmoil, and nobody knew why I was there or exactly what they should do with me.  As a suspicious foreign element, I was imprisoned until they could figure it out.  My daughter was taken from me.  I languished in prison for days, submitting appeal after appeal for my freedom, but nobody granted the political appointment of Warden ever survived more than a day without being executed for this or that treason.

I spent the rest of that dream trying to work out the tangled web of Russian politics to understand who was ultimately in charge, but even the Prime Minister changed on a regular basis, and my pleas continued to fall on deaf areas.

Instead of the rest I was due, I lost a night worrying about the vagaries of fake Russian political maneuvering, an American unhappily abroad.  I am not sure that I ever saw my daughter again, and a gulag was probably somewhere in my future.

I never got to perform that play.