When Winifred got home from work I had already started dinner and it reeked of garlic throughout the apartment. I asked her how her day went and she said: ugh, I’m afraid it’s going to remain something of a hostage situation for so long as I remain alive. Winnifred spent some time with her meddlesome aunt Gladys yesterday evening and her tongue has been a little sharper than normal since. I guess the question of children and when we’re going to have some came up again…but the answer remained: we are absolutely not having any children ever. Winifred told Gladys that it’s immoral to bring children into this putrescent and mouldering world. Why?!, exclaimed Gladys. Well it was certainly immoral to bring you here, snarled Winifred. To her credit, she didn’t feel great about it by sundown.
Neither Winifred nor I drink alcohol anymore. You could say we developed an allergy. For a time she experimented with mocktails, but it really was all very frou-frou and saturated in silly ritual, especially since I would probably prefer a glass of tap water anyway. We always keep coffee, tea, Coca-Cola, and Pellegrino. I like sugary breakfast cereals and Winifred doesn’t really approve. She was born in Medicine Hat and comes by that small town toughness real natural. A few years ago we went to see Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley at Country Hills, and when Rooney Mara came on the screen for the first time in her period sideshow finery, I turned to Winifred and said that she and Rooney Mara betray a bit of a physical resemblance. I thought it flattering and gentlemanly. Her lip curled slightly. Yeah, she said with mild disdain, because we’re both so farmy.
Winifred and I each consider ourselves specialized connoisseurs of Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction, and following the dinner I basically botched but which we finished off most of, we decided to throw on the new Blu-ray of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel that Amazon delivered earlier. It’s adapted from a Strugatsky brothers novel that I read a long time ago but distinctly recall to this day being by far the zaniest and most odd thing I’d ever read from those august filial noble notables. The movie is like Twin Peaks, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dario Argento’s version of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one tight little motherfucker of a blunt. It made me delirious and I couldn’t really follow it…but it was fun. Crazy purples and blues and reds. When the weather is nice, we usually like to sit out on the deck during all or part of sunset, Winifred dutifully making sure she’s got on the proper viscosity coat of sunscreen, which is not something I’d be inclined to fret over myself. I don’t take a lot of precautions and never did. I was the touring bassist with a popular rock ensemble for awhile and one time a significantly younger musician came up to me before the set and asked if I’d forgotten to put in ear plugs. I never use them, I told him. The music doesn’t sound as good. The little brat looked at me with absolute terror and nausea. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon.
Believe it or not, there was a time where I had made such a great big mess of things that there was almost no coming back. I was a pariah and I stood out like Big Bird. As I watched Winifred sleeping, almost tranquil and not yet snoring, I quickly realized how grateful I was to have had her to cushion my landing and recalibrate my settings. There was the sound of a branch lightly slapping against the bedroom window and the commencement of steady rain. I was reading in a science magazine that was lying around about synchronistic movement and mirroring between creatures. In interrelating, creatures develop an “automatic imitation bias.” It helps build trust, empathy, and collaborative spirit. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel isn’t really a science fiction story. It has the kind of comedy and magic you find in classical antiquity, but it’s really a story about people snowbound at a very remote and very absurd hotel in the middle of nowhere that is also a madcap museum, and then Agatha Christie stuff starts to go down with the bodies piling up and the suspects shape-shifting. Well, I guess it is science fiction after all, isn’t it? It’s openly suspected that many of these chameleonic hotel guests and suspects manqué are actually extraterrestrials.
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