It's a nightmare that's been recurring for years now but only after the bombing of Gaza beginning in October 2023 -- the so-called 10/7 -- has it taken on new living dead life. Images of despair and emptied longing, footsteps trudging from purgatory toward the open fire, screams. There's a sign over the gate, presumably Dante's, "The Truth Shall Set You Free." Bodies piled high like flapjacks at a Sunday morning IHop, flavored syrups drizzled and the smell of talcum powder or powdered sugar. Who the hell knows.
I was tellin' Ma about my dream in which zombies were rife, not just in the malls, like in Dawn of the Dead, but everywhere, mumbling "the System is the solution." And some disembodied voice was saying, "If you wish to understand: Believe. And you will know." Smelled like something Turd Blossom would have cooked up. Ma smiled, knowingly. She was an -ex. Ex-wife, ex-con, and ex-CIA (although, she once said, "You're never really out" to no one in particular, as she was just sitting there on the couch looking out into space. "Never really out," she'd repeat, "like with the Catholics, or riding bicycles, or Rock Hudson."
"Who's Rock Hudson, Ma?" I said.
"An actor. Let's just say he didn't quite make it to the LGBTQ+ parade of prideful sin."
I said, "Ma, what a bad dream I had of such sweet sorrow."
"Do tell, pray, prithee," she goes. "Goes like this: I had a vision: Three Jews dancing --"
"Jews?" she interrupted.
"I mean, Israelis, Ma."
"That's better," she intones.
"But, Ma, aren't all Jews Israelis if they wanna be?"
"What do you mean?" she says, pulling in her plate of fluffy pancakes, steaming and handsome in the morning light.
"Well, any Jew in America can move to Israel and be holier than thou, right?"
"I guess so."
"Like they have two homelands now, and if something goes wrong here for them they can skedaddle to Israel and do that Yemenite step and settle down in, say, an olive orchard of their picking."
Ma goes, "Rather crude, my little Jack O' Lantern, but it's true, there is verisimilitude in what you say. Born into dual citizenship. But you need to watch against unchecked paranoia and what you say about the Jews."
"No wonder they don't say much about the slaughter. Must feel nice to have a getaway space," I go.
"I wish I had a getaway space in Patagonia; a bedsitter overlooking the melting Anarchic snow."
She said, "You're 47 years old, why are you still calling me Ma, like some f*cking sheep?"
I chuckled and went, "I had a dream."
"Let's hear it then."
I dropped a tsunami of coffee down on top of the pancakes, slopping my t-shirt. The waitress give me a look, rebuking, unkind.
"Ma, I saw three Mossad men on top of a van across the river in New Jersey. Three men jigging on a van rooftop while watching the Towers burn, laughing, sharing a bottle of Manischevitz."
I was about to go on when Ma grabbed my wrist and looked around to see if we were being listened in on.
"Careful," she said.
The waitress swung by again with her coffee jugs. Was she a guy? I suddenly wondered looking at her. Not that I cared. And then just as suddenly I had a flash of poor old Alan Turing and the look on his face when he got that government order to get chemically unmanned.
I turned back to my mother. "And I've been reading about Gaza and how it happened and why what's going on now is going on," I said, with growing chords of Edgar A. "Never More," I go.
And Ma sitting there like a raven on my window sill with a broken wing said, "And?"
"Well, Seymour Hersh is wondering why Netanyahoo wanted to work with Hamas to begin with, given they were on the US terrorist list, and concluded, with other Israelis (Seymour is also eligible for dual citizenship), that Bibi wanted a handy excuse to wipe out the Gazans. On 9/11 NORAD was having a war game exercise, making defending the East Coast skyways against incoming enemies inconvenient. Israel had all its security personnel attending a rock concert, letting their hair down at a hoedown. Hamas was like al Qaeda --"
"--Pumpkin Pie, go easy. Tap the brakes on your racy little number," Ma said, stabbing a pork sausage, which sure looked good (I stupidly ordered a hash brown, which sure enough was soggy).
"Ma, did you know that al Qaeda means 'database'?"
"What do you mean, like as in 'disposition matrix,' but for dissidents? Oh, sure, I knew, but be more shushy, dear," she goes.
"And, anyway, Gaza is Iraq, and Trump is Halliburton."
"Halliburton?"
"He wants to build a Riviera along the Gaza Strip, after he arranges to bulldoze away the bones and debris and uranium depletions and fiberglass."
"You are insane, my sweet bobblehead."
"And Seymour says that Netanyahoo had plenty of warning about the impending event, like we had on 9/11, but failed, like we did, to act."
"You gonna eat that hash brown," she goes, pricking it with a fork before I could Yay/Nay say.
"We used the new pearl harbor event to declare We Are An Empire Now and spread our hegemonic menace around the world -- why, even, arguably, to the border of Russia."
"Now, son, why would we do that?" she said skeptically.
"China, Ma. They're gonna f*ck up our beloved middle class by disrupting the global reserve currency, one brick at a time."
"Au contraire. We'll f*ck them up -- just like we did Japan --"
"--Ma! --"
"You ever see that movie with Sean Connery -- Rising Sun?"
"Is that the one where Sean Connery gets in hot with the jacuzzis?"
"Er, no, dear," she rejoined. "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo."
"So, what, we're gonna blow up Beijing?"
"Not quite."
"Ma, they got that wall. Besides, we need a valid pretext. China has never been an expansionist power. See Wall."
"They started Covid-19 and then covered it up."
"But Ma, we paid them money -- moolah -- casharino to speedbag viruses until they screamed revenge, and then one broke out and WHAM!"
"Shhhhhhhh."
"Anyway, I had this dream that it was all a set-up, Netanyahoo wanting payback about his insider knowledge and that payback being bombing Sunnis and assuming ownership of all The Holy Land . And they're gonna build subways, Ma."
"Is that right?"
"Yeah, I hear they're gonna use the tunnels already there as a starter kit."
"Subways? What the f*ck for?"
"To go from the river to the sea and back."
She guffawed and I had an urge to stick an apple in her mouth, grown porcine since her "retirement." For a second she looked like Snowball from Animal Farm after Napoleon caught up with him.
"And also, I hear they have plans for tunneling all the way to the Death Camps in Europe, where children from Belgium and thereabouts will be summer-camping and watching Shoah on an outdoor screen."
"Jesus," said Ma. "What's that all about? Are you an antisemite? Holocaust denier? Are you even my son?"
"No and No, and Probably."
"Six million Jews, don't you remember?"
"Oh, I remember, we have had it shoved down our throats for decades. We can't teach CRT or the roots of slavery, but we must accommodate the Never Again trope. I remember, Ma. But do they?"
She got disgusted with me. Probably another one in the pocket, I thought. I didn't get a chance to finish my dream. Besides, she wasn't Freud, like I probably needed anyway. We were silent. The waitress hovered like the one from Five Easy Pieces that Nicholson deconstructs. After a while, Ma got up in a huff and got into an Uber.
"Be home for dinner by seven," she'd said over her shoulder. "We're having beef stroganoff."
She also stiffed me for the bill. I mean, it wasn't Mother's Day, and I was on a tight budget. The waitress slapped the bill down on the table and walked off, looking like an oompah bier garten maid, which I was kind of into at that time. I walked for ages, thinking, morose. And now they're in charge, I thought. When it got late, well after seven, I went into a bar and watched the mermaids singing each to each, hoping I'd find one to help out of her scquim dress that night. When the phone shook in my pocket, I ignored it. My prospect gave me a look and we went off to enjoy the evening's paradise.
