Epilogue

He woke up with a big fat drool linking his lips to the black-tiled floor of his home. Drowsily, with the slits of his eyes clamped intermittently at the ends by solidified eye matter, he got off his bed, stretching his arms, in effect creating a number of overlapping cracking sounds of limbs shifting gears and springing from disuse into activity.

He had had a big bad dream, only a faint shadow of which lingered in his mind’s eye. It was the stuff of fantastical flights of fantasy: the world breaking down, strange alien figues engulfing him, screwing with his mind and such. Bullshit.

The EPUU-ian teaching of dreams and their irrelevance came rushing back to him. He reminisced his initial lessons from Arbitron as a child, when he was lectured at length about the irrelevance and randomness of reveries, of the arbitrary mind process that ‘spat out’ or ‘spilled over’ some seemingly perceptible but eventually inconsequential chunks of information into his sensory-perception system. The bottom-line was that dreams, nightmares, visions and such were to be overlooked at the onset, and to discern or scrutinize or hold them in observance would invite nothing but misery. And that was that.

“Coffee, black,” Aseem fed his aural response to Arbitron by the vibration of his vocal cords and the simultaneous compliance of his jaw muscles, tongue and mouth; all of it happening, to the delight and amazement of the detached observer, at the very same time as his calf muscles, femurs and countless other localized bodily systems allowed him to walk across the floor, cover about four yards, and disappear behind the enclosure that was the excretion bay.

The day went on.

FIN.