Eyes opened with warm, sodden hands. I could see myself. I was surrounded by hard porcelain walls that seem supple, rubber in nature, yet they still hold the room up. Water still poured tenaciously from the faucet onto my fingers. It was hot. Not too hot, just right for washing temperature. I was by myself, but I could hear soft, gentle music playing through the walls. I had no idea where I was, but for some reason I knew exactly what to do. My body seemed to carry my mind throughout this marble and gold lined latrine. I moved to the threshold to the room in my corpse. I paused, and then proceeded to open the door.
I was greeted with a boisterous setting. There was too much to comprehend at first glance. My eyes scanned another fancy room. Statues, intricate moldings and door frames, a large stair case that didn’t appear to have an end, a fountain with mythological creatures and Gods, I could go on forever. The importance was what was taking place in the center of the room. There were small curtained tables lined up in a circular fashion. Each table had a candle in the center of it and a male and a female on either side conversing, yelling, staring, scaring, snaring, sneering, watching, speaking, exchanging.
The question in the back of my mind forced its way to the front and almost exploded out of the front of my skull. What on earth is going on? My eyes scaled to the large banner that was hung on the wall in front of the tables. Speed Date, in large bold letters, brought to you by Johnny “The Love Doctor” Ramage, it read underneath in script.
“Speed Date? This ought to be a riot,” I thought to myself. I laughed.
Before I could finish organizing my thoughts in a manor in which I could understand them, a large bell rang throughout the room shattering my current thought of finding relations between the concepts of speed and dating. The low murmur of talking ended but the sound shifted to the fumbling of chairs and the thumping of hard-soled fancy shoes against the marble floor. As if some greater force shot across the room, all of the men stood up and began to move about. The men did not talk to each other. The only thing that was exchanged between them was daunting looks of the eye and hostile stares almost as cold as the floor beneath them. Once the chaos cleared, they had found new homes at a different location across from a different woman.
I scanned the room with my eyes like a scanner carefully scanning an important document that would be mass produced by the hundreds. Until I noticed the table at the end only had one tenant. My body began to move again and I advanced toward the table. I tended to find my way by going where I had to go.
As I got closer I began to study the woman sitting at the table. She looked abnormally fragile yet she had very pronounced features and sat there as hard as the porcelain statue that was on the wall to her adjacent. I was close now, time to smile.
“Are you always late?” she asked while staring off.
For some reason my lips would not move to answer her. I walked around to the other side of the table and seated myself. I reached across to shake her hand and greet her with my name, which escapes my mind right now. She responded by telling me her name, which doesn’t escape me right now. Samantha. Serious Sam my mind told me. I couldn’t tell if she was yelling her name at me or if by some chance the previous man at her table somehow turned her into a verbal lion, a very monotone lion at that. Regardless I felt like no matter how light I acted she was going to respond with a cold, hard, textbook answer. I don’t remember asking her of even annunciating the words, maybe I didn’t, who knows, but she told me her profession. Science teacher. This wasn’t a shock to me. I could imagine myself falling asleep in her class.
The way she responded reminded me of lessons on motion from back in grade school. I recall learning about motion and its underlining parts. “For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.” She would say something, I would answer. The ideas of motions and causes scattered throughout my head like a puppy in a new home. Apparently we were involved in conversation. My body was just telling my lips to move like when a ball strikes another and tells it to move. Its just transfer of inertia or in this case words to lips.
I knew she wasn’t right for me. Serious Sam was too serious. She was like a ball in motion with no mind of its own strictly following the proven laws and rules of science rather than acting out from her own behavior and humanistic qualities. Like a raindrop in a rainspout. She had nowhere to run, or drip for that matter. I reckon she was probably asking the exact same questions and giving the same responses to all her victims. She was so used to rattling off cliché answers to questions and questioning my somewhat interesting answers.
“So what’s your number one quality you look for in a man?” I asked hesitantly.
“I wish for eternal happiness…” she replied with a blank stare. It echoed throughout my empty skull. Her head bobbed slightly when she spoke that almost made it seem as if it were hanging from a string. I also noticed that she didn’t blink much. Unless of course she was blinking at the exact same time I was. This was highly possible.
It was almost as if she was reading from a script, I even looked down to the table cloth several times in search of a menu or outline. Somehow she managed to remain so structured and lifeless with her answers, almost as if she was following a recipe for an intricate dish of some sort to be severed at a five star restaurant.
“So what’s your number one quality you look for in a man?” I asked hesitantly.
“Place the cake pan in a cold oven. Turn the oven on and set it to 325 degrees F. Cook for about one hour, or until cake is golden brown.” I could imagine her saying.
All of this structure was expected from such a serious person.
Recipes are guidelines used to make a dish that can be followed as closely as the one cooking prefers. You can learn a lot about someone, by how close they follow their recipe. And that’s not to say that all serious people are good at cooking, but to say that all serious people follow their recipe exactly which makes them so “serious.” ‘Us’ on the other hand prefer to learn from our past experiences of burnt cookies and our shrimp tasting cheesecake with hopes of improving our cooking extravaganza every time.
Cake is done! But in reality it was the bell ringing again. My eyes opened wider. I began to move about the room again and had no recollection of saying bye to Serious Sam. I probably did and she probably said something I could have said before she actually moved her lips to say it. I was paraded around the room again by my corpse. It was quite obvious that we were getting towards the end of the rotations because all of the male figures seemed to be even more antagonistic than before.
My body took me to the other end of the room. For a second I thought I was leaving the event, but then I realized that my next specimen was somehow part of it just not expected at first glimpse.
“It’s Patty,” she stated sternly.
I looked around to make sure she was talking to me. Before I answered I couldn’t help but notice what she was wearing. Biker gear. I ran into the leader of the female Harley Club. Why was she here? Shouldn’t she be at the bar with the rest of the pack? I was beginning to wonder if this actually was a dream. Is this a joke?
I stuttered before I told her my name.
“It’s ok. I got the same reaction from the others,” she said dejectedly. “We’re going to talk a little, you’re going to laugh at me, then the bell is going to ring and you’ll be on your way. So how do you want to do this so it’s the least painful for both of us because you’re my 10th match today?”
I didn’t know what to say. Why was she so defensive before I could get one word in?
“So why are you mad at the world?” I asked a bit unsurely, yet sympathetic at the same time.
She went on to explain that men don’t take her serious as a woman or as a person for that matter. They instantly judge her for her leather chaps, jacket, bandana, chains, and loud hog. I learned just from hearing her talk briefly that she was to my surprise fairly intelligent and good with her words. If I were to close my eyes she would shatter my preconceived physical appearance image of her instantly. She was just an average woman under all her leather and tattoos. She was a victim of today’s society. Because she drives a Harley there is a ‘ready-made’ identity assigned to her as soon as she steps out the door in the morning. Unfortunately she’ll never shake that as long as she is ‘leathered out.’
Although I never really had a thing for biker chicks she seemed to be delightful and once I got over the chaps I didn’t mind talking to her, especially in comparison to the last disaster.
The bell rang once again. But this time I remember saying bye to patty and asking her for a bike ride sometime. She winked back and slipped me her number. She wasn’t ready for that. Who would have known the biker chick wasn’t mean, didn’t smell, was intelligent, and was in general a good person.
I got up and looked around. It was interesting to watch people interact. Some people were very abrasive with their words and demanded intimacy and connection from the person across the table, while others took the back seat and monitored the current situation rather than drove it.
I felt much more in control of my body now, in fact it should have taken me to my next destination but it failed to do so. I was controlling my legs. I was in control. I walked about the room taking in its beauty. It was astonishing how something as modern as speed dating could be captured in a room full of Greek architecture and marble. This sort of thing racks the mind. After doing an almost complete lap of the room I bumped into the refreshments table. I immediately went for the punch. My cup hit the liquid…
Black.
My eyes opened and my hands were soaking. I could see myself. I was again surrounded by walls, familiar walls this time. I turned off the faucet. I was by myself, but I could hear familiar music playing from my room across the hall. I knew exactly what to do. This time I carried my body to my room and crawled into my bed when I heard a crinkle come from my pocket. I reached in to discover a wrinkled, punch stained paper fragment with a phone number for Patty on it. I smiled to myself. I began to drift off again. I know that if I fell back to sleep I would most likely dream again and it would most likely be different. For a man Heraclitus once argued, “You never step in the same river twice.” That was one hell of a dream. I exhaled.
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