Illusions

In a wee-hours dream, I mistook the air conditioner's motor for rain.

If that constant, thrumming Hhhhh had actually been the rain, it made for a solid down-pour the likes of which I've heard sustained nowhere but waterfalls & it inspired a deep, mammalian terror for the sheer unnatural length of it. Holy, holy, I was thinking.
Everyone below will drown tonight.

I was half-asleep, listening to this as lightning strobed the room. A layer of fear buzzed on my skin like a static charge: What terrible hubris, I was thinking, to have suggested that location or money could do anything but delay the hand of God. And then, with that burst-spring of comedy that too often accompanies my private emergencies: In the morning we’ll just tip the building & sail it out to the Java sea with pairs of every ex-pat & twelve of every vermin! When I finally forced myself awake & to the window: it was not raining at all.

I switched off the AC, feeling foolish. E sleeping undisturbed. A soft, piratical Tom-Waits muezzin was chanting alone, his minaret become a lighthouse: “Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein…”

Concluding from our window view that the city appears dry—which it does insanely appear—may be a little like when C & I went camping around Lake Superior & blithely peered into the black southern sky remarking, "Huh, no northern lights"—the entire half-dome of sky in silent flames behind us.

The morning paper didn't arrive till evening, the delay its own headline.