Night Visions

Kramer versus Kramer . . . my money's on Kramer

The earthen passage sloped gently downwards before branching left and then gradually turning to the right. It had been dug in the soft brown soil, its walls looking as if they should collapse under the weight. But they held firm.

White rabbit territory. Kramer in Wonderland.

And then something or someone disappearing in the distance.

Follow, but not too close. Impossible.
The tunnels are long and many, each one splitting in two, then four, then eight, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, you too Brutus?

But follow anyway, into the warm, damp earth, mother earth, choosing at random which passage to take. Follow your nose. Follow the yellow brick road.

The roots are smaller now, thinner, with their soft hair-like ends breaking into the tunnel, brushing Kramers face as he walks like the streamers that hang in the darkness of a ghost train.
But no darkness here, just a dull greenish glow, with no visible power supply, lighting his path.

Onwards and downwards, like Kramer's life.

Down so deep the pressure has created diamonds which glisten and wait to be mined by the greedy.

And fossils, sabre-toothed tiger fangs, embedded in what looks now like granite as the walls constantly change. Ten foot femurs, rib-cages, pelvis's, backbones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

A complete triceratops. A dinosaur graveyard. A Jurassic Park three hundred fathoms down and made of rock.

Dem bones, dem old bones.

And skulls. The tunnel seemed to split into three, forming almost, but not quite, the eye and nasal sockets of a giant skull. Kramer walked in. Into the head of a dinosaur, into the eye of the tiger, into the mind itself. Electronic pulses, memories, pre-historic dreams of mammoths and mastodons still resonating within. Cro-magnon man on mogadon. Homo's erectus and sapien, meeting for the first time since they both left Africa, kicked out by the Piltdown Man.
Out of Africa, out of luck, out of sight and out of mind.

Out into more tunnels, blood-red like the inside of a giant's veins, cholesterol free, the product of a healthy diet and a clean lifestyle. Fe-fi-fo-fum.

And a heartbeat, not rhythmic, but interrupted by palpitations and missed beats, boom, boom . . . baboom.

That big baboon, gonna catch it soon. Inside the monkey. Inside King Kong. Safe and sound. Tunnels and galleries, honeycombed like the inside of bones.

Dem bones, dem white bones.

Parched like a steers skull lying by the side of a desert road, running, without deviation or hesitation through Death Valley. Dem bones, dem dead bones.

Charlie Manson country. Natural born killers. Passing through gold mines, natural born drillers and dentists, natural born fillers. Cavities and catacombs. World without end. Tunnels without beginning. The circle line. Eternity on a subterranean carousel.

Then light, light at the end of the tunnel, into the soil again. The Great Escape, starring Arthur Kramer, of no fixed opinion, as the tunnel king.

Scrabble in the dirt towards the exit.

A last exit to Brooklyn.