Entree DM 153

I’m huddled in a crowd. I smell sweat all around me, I smell fear, the acrid scent of adrenaline. I’m dreaming in black and white; that’s odd, I always dream in color. The time is not now, it’s another time, early 1940s, I’d say. I’m wearing a ragged old overcoat, my face all stubble. The men, the adult men, many are stone-faced, staring into a void, others heads hung, some quietly weeping, some muttering prayers. Women are sobbing, wailing, holding children close to their breasts. A couple of little boys are roughhousing off to the side, seemingly unaware of what’s going on.

We’re standing by a railway siding. I see boxcars, open, empty, nothing inside, just space. I realize we’re in Nazi Germany, or perhaps occupied Poland, and I’m waiting for transport to a death camp.

The kommandant—I assume that’s what you call the uniformed personage barking orders—looks disturbingly familiar. I realize why: It’s my next-door neighbor. “Schnell! Schnell!” the neighbor keeps yelling.

That prick, I think, he’s everywhere.

Then he does something odd: He puts his hand to his face and starts tugging at his skin. The skin on his face starts bunching up as he pulls. It comes off. It was a mask. It’s not the neighbor’s face underneath, it’s mine, clean shaven.

He goose steps his way over to me. “Achtung!” he barks. I stand at attention. He puts his hand to my face, does the same thing, pulls a mask off, and shows me my real face in a mirror.

I’m not me, I’m him.

But I (the dreamer, that is) am still identifying with the trembling, quaking shadow of a man destined for the cattle car, despite the change of face. The one with my face, the robust, well-fed Nazi, is a pretender, a phony, a fraud.

Is the neighbor sending me to my death, or is it the other way around?

I’ve always heard that you can’t die in your own dream, but whose dream is this?

Danse Macabre

An Online Literary Magazine

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Adam Henry Carrière

Adam Henry Carrière & Lazarus Media LLC

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