THAT DAY

No news of my car, which was stolen last week. Not a disaster--it's summer, I can bike for now. The financial loss hurts, but what I really dread is shopping for a replacement. Wait and see. They find most stolen cars--eventually.

In the meantime, make a list of tasks I can do without a car. Plow through my mom's updates on my father's condition, and send my very first email, telling her the reports got through. My dad sounds slightly stronger, but then he could hardly be worse and survive. Paralyzed! It doesn't look good. In any case, I can't visit him til I get the car back. Or another.

Rewrite my call for an organization to build alternative, ergonomic musical instruments--add sections with three new chromatic designs. Send my friend Mark the revised proposal and my first (successful) attachment--a photo of the Coil, my mock-up of a helical keyboard.

My housemate Alder asks me to try putting little locks on our windows, but I try one and they don't work well on our sills.

Alder has bad car news too: her transmission's dying. At least $1500 she doesn't have.

Amazing how much misery a hunk of metal can cause, just sitting there!

THAT NIGHT

I'm trapped in a Disney film. I'm in my parents' house. The four people living here are packing to leave. The main room's all heaps of sleeping bags and gear. They're going to another world! They show me the secret door. It leads to a beach on a large bay. Pretty country, but they say it's inhabited--by monsters. They ask my help with one. A harpy slipped through the gate into our world, stalked the neighborhood, and kidnapped at least three young women. Holding them for ransom! And if we don't pay... for food.

A friend and I go through the gate to face the harpy. Scared, but remind myself this is a Disney production. There'll be some way out, I just have to find it.

First view of the harpy is not encouraging. She's a modernist interpretation--Disney figured an abstract version would save them animation costs, for one thing. A moving, living steel-pipe assemblage like a giant Calder mobile, rising from the waist-deep water of the cove. I expected her head at least to be quasi-human, so we can talk, but it's all abstract steel: disks for eyes, a metal megaphone for a beak. Yet she speaks in a human voice. A cold, amused, ironic voice.

And now the harpy turns her blank metal eyes to me. I steel myself. I don't know what she'll hit ME with, just that it'll be personal and painful, to get me to collapse without a fight. Remind myself "This is Disney, so there's a solution. Find it." Because around us, tied to steel frames a yard or two above the tide, are the kidnapped girls.

Beautiful girls. All three of them are hot. I have to be honest with myself--I didn't come out of altruism. I'm here to impress them--win their hearts.

But I can't let the harpy know; she'll use it against me. All of us. So again I steel myself to think: "Deny your feelings. Be cold as her. For now."

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Parents' house, packing to leave = my mom's email said if my dad improves he'll go to a rehab center for months of physical therapy.
• Other world = death, the spirit world. Or the Web! Is the door email?
• Living steel rack = hospital machines keeping my dad alive, and the exercise/torture machines of physical therapy.
• Harpy = just finished a dream-painting of a hawk-woman, fierce but basically attractive. In contrast, Greek harpies were beautiful-faced but filthy and vicious: a deliberate mix of sexy and disgusting meant to disturb. Here, a third kind of harpy: cool and abstract, metal, amused, with emotional viciousness replacing physical.
• Artificial intelligence, threat to devour women = I just read THE MACHINE, an early science fiction story by John Campbell--a reply to EM Forster's THE MACHINE STOPS. The world's infrastructure wakes up, sees it's hurting humanity by being a nanny, so... it just quits. But folks have forgotten how to raise food! Within MINUTES, men are killing women to eat them! Absurd story, as extreme as my mom's view of men--all sexist morons. And that suggests what else the harpy might be: my mom, nagging me to come visit my dad, telling me I'm cold and uncaring and irresponsible. The steel harpy's cool digs are very much my mom's style. She got it from her mom, though Grandma was less subtle. Subtle as a bomb.
• Married gay man = a prediction: discrimination will end. In this future, gay-baiting is so archaic that even a cannibal harpy won't stoop so low. Either that, or the dream's just pointing out my mom's politics are quite progressive... in between taking hostages.
• Taking lovers or potential lovers hostage = to punish my disobedience, my mom's implied I'm irresponsible, unloving, don't deserve love. Which is itself irresponsible, unloving... and undeserved.

Mom or not, what's this harpy doing in my life? I think it's keeping me single! I'm afraid to get attached to anyone, because this cold steely creature inside plays on my worst fears--loving someone and then losing her, just as I'm losing my dad. Better to steel yourself not to care.

A NOTE FROM 2006

They found my car a couple of days later, beat-up but drivable. Now I could go see my dad in the hospital. Or so I thought. I couldn't even talk to him--broke down in tears. And he couldn't talk--conscious but totally paralyzed. A couple of months later he died in the hospital.

It's been six years now, and I'm still single. Never solved the harpy problem.

It's not a Disney world.

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