Conversations with Guy Debord (4)

What was that smell? A heap of squirrels? Bag of moths? The closet was dark and buttery. A spider surrendered beneath my inimitable paw. What smell? A bat between my teeth?

I sat inside the upturned, plain lid of an HP Laser Print paper box. The bottom edges of Shelly's dresses grazed me. I licked my left arm.

My wet nose quivered. The silver smell of Gaulois! The great, creamy gauze of Guy Debord's cigarettes.

"Shimmy, tell me what you dreamed last night," he said.

The peck of his soft leather shoes on the hardwood floor. Frisk of my curled paw.

"I woke up underneath the ottoman again," I said. "It smelled like sulfur."

"The spectacle is a permanent opium war," Guy Debord said, "which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws."

"Debord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed."

"What were you dreaming about in the closet, on top of the upturned plain lid of the HP Laser Print paper box?"

"Two electrical utility workers were trying to fix an electric line that had been tangled by snaking banyan tree branches," I said. I watched Debord twist his Gaulois between his long fingers. With the tip of his gracious shoe, he touched the spot where my hindquarters meet the base of my tail. "In the banyan tree branch, one of the workers found what looked like a long, long black-and-white cigarette holder. It was really a wand of sorts."

"Shimmy, the economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy."

"Is that a chipmunk in the radiator?" I asked.

He didn't even bother to look. Instead, Debord crouched next to me on the floor.

"The White House," he said, blinking, "exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports."

"They knew what it was." I slapped Guy Debord's left shoelace in case it was a mouse tail. "In the dream, they knew. They actually were government police officers posing as electrical workers. They were looking for these wands."

"The War on Terror is a happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery, Shimmy."

"The devil is right at home," I said. "The devil, the devil himself is right in the house. The devil came here, talking as if he owned the world. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today."