Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof

I had a brief verbal dream in which someone mentioned a musician called Carlos Suede.

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In a later segment, I was in what I understood to be an "alternate timeline" parallel to our own. I was navigating a series of wooden platforms built high in the trees, accompanied by people who appeared to be standard-fantasy elves. We were menaced by a highly venomous creature with an extremely long serpentine neck and the head of a duck.

"It looks like a dinosaur!" I said, thinking of its sauropod-like size and long neck. (It was standing on the forest floor, with its head up at our level.)

"It turns out it is a dinosaur,' said one of the elves, "but for a long time we didn't know that."

"What did you think it was?"

"A duck. We called it tree-duck."

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Then came the main dream of the night, which turned out to be something of a nightmare.

I was just closing up my school for the night when I received a threatening phone call. When I picked up the phone, a menacing-sounding man with an English accent said, "Danny, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," and then hung up. It was not the first such call I had received.

What are the odds that some random guy making threatening phone calls in Taiwan would be English? I was being targeted by someone who had come halfway around the world for that purpose. They want the Stone, I thought. They don't realize I don't even have it yet!

I had to go up to the top floor to deal with some things but was afraid I might be walking into an ambush. Should I arm myself? But the axe which is the only weapon I own (no right to bear arms in this country) was on the top floor. Should I have a cop go up with me? But the cops here are useless.

I sat down on the ground outside the school entrance to think about how best to proceed.

After a few minutes, a White man in his sixties showed up and said he was there to repair the roof. Thinking about it now, it seems spectacularly stupid to trust a White stranger claiming to be a roofer just after getting a threatening phone call from an Englishman about the roof, but at the time I thought it was a stroke of luck, as it meant I wouldn't have to go upstairs alone. I let him in, and we started going up the stairs together.

When we got to the third or fourth floor, I could hear music coming from my parents' bedroom. (Needless to say, my parents don't have a bedroom in my school in real life.) We went inside, and I found that the CD player on their chest of drawers was playing. Something vaguely bluesy in a language I couldn't make out.

I took out the CD. It was plain black, with a single word in white cursive: either Symphony or some visually similar word. The music kept playing, though. I tried everything -- pressing stop, unplugging it, turning the volume all the way down -- but it had no effect. Then the music stopped on its own, and the Englishman's voice came from the CD player: "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof."

I thought he was trying to scare or impress me by showing he knew my full name -- but he got the name completely wrong, except for the middle initial and the patronymic suffix. It also seemed strange to use the full name but still say Danny instead of Daniel. (It reminded me of the L-plus-nickname crew: L. Frank Baum, L. Ron Hubbard, and L. Tom Perry.)

I looked out the window -- which, with the inconsistency typical of dreams, showed a ground-floor scene. I saw big boulders rolling down a hill.

"Those are going to hit this house!" I said. "Get down!"

We both got down on the floor and covered our heads. The building didn't seem to have been harmed by the boulders, though, so we both got up.

"Are you okay?" I asked the roofer.

"I'm fine," he said. "Just a bit frightened."

"Perfectly understandable."

I looked out the window and saw a Black boy of about nine or ten running away.

"Hey!" the roofer shouted out the window. "You have fun throwing rocks at our house?"

It was a ridiculous accusation. No one this side of Telamonian Ajax could have thrown rocks of that size. I also thought it strange that this roofer I didn't know from Adam was calling my school "our house."

We proceeded up to the roof. Though in real life both my school and my house have flat concrete roofs, this roof had the shape of a traditional Chinese glazed-tile roof but appeared to be made of unvulcanized gray rubber, like a kneaded eraser.

"When all of this turns to glutinous muckle, you'll need me to tile it," said the roofer.

"You mean this kind of roofing isn't very durable," I said. "How much would it cost to have the whole thing re-roofed?"

On the roof was something that I thought of as a "ventilation shaft" à la Star Wars but which looked more like the rooftop door Tommy Wiseau comes out of in the famous "I did not hit her" scene in The Room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door closing, as if someone had just gone through it.

I opened the door and looked down the ventilation shaft into a very large room like the interior of a barn. On the floor, which was quite some distance from me on the roof, I could see a few more Black children, including a girl riding a tricycle and a few boys running around.

"Hey!" I shouted to them. "I can see you! I can see you in there!" They ignored me.

In the corner of the room, to my left, was what looked like a miniature aircraft hangar. Two of the Black boys went in there, and I thought they were trying to "wake up" something that was inside. They then came running out of the hangar, and I could see something moving in the shadows that I at first took to be a very large Black man.

"My God," said the roofer, who had joined me at the door. "Look at the size of that nigger!"

Though it was still mostly hidden in the shadows, it quickly became clear that this creature was far too large to be any sort of human being. I thought I could see shapes suggestive of horns or mandibles and thought it might be the Minotaur or an umber hulk. Maybe even a Balrog.

At this point I woke up.

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Looking up the actor John Malkovich now, I find that his father's name was Daniel and that he had an older brother (d. 2011) who went by Danny.

The roofer's line about the roof turning to "muckle" was almost certainly influenced by these lines of Spenser, featuring both muchell and mucks, which I had spontaneously thought of the night before and posted in a comment:

But minds of mortall men are muchell mard,

And mou'd amisse with massie mucks vnmeet regard.

After I awoke, my dream-thought of arming myself with an axe made me think of a comic poem my Russian professor had asked me to translate into English verse back in college. (This was not a class assignment, just something she wanted.) It was designed to make the reader think it was describing the Dostoevsky character Raskolnikov preparing to commit cold-blooded murder, with a surprise ending revealing that it was actually an ordinary student in an ordinary situation. I remember nothing of my translation and only a line and a half of the original:

. . . в руках -- топор!

О бедный мальчик! Безрадостные глаза его!

. . . in his hands -- an axe!

Oh, poor boy! His joyless eyes!

The joyless eyes in the poem, together with the rooftop scene in the dream, made me think of these lines from the Sugarcubes song "Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow":

He looks at me hopeless with tears in his eyes

Goes out of the window and up on the roof

Naked man, naked man calm down!

I-I'll give you some strawberry cake

When I went out in the morning, I felt a magnetic tug in the direction of Donutes, the coffee shop I recently wrote about in "Seven Eleven, dice, and crispy foam." I was not in the mood for baked goods and coffee but reluctantly decided that, like Calvin, "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul."

When I walked in the door, the first thing I heard was the background music: someone singing "In the game of love you have to roll the dice." Then when I went to the counter to order, the barista said, "Would you like to try our new strawberry cake?"

As I sat at my table under a framed photo of the Empire State Building, sipping my coffee, eating my strawberry cake, and thinking how unremittingly weird life is, I decided to try to find the "roll the dice" song I had heard by googling some of the lyrics. (It's "7 Years to Life" by Pastis.) I had typed in "roll the when Google suggested that I might be searching for "Roll the Bones - Studio album by Rush."

I know nothing of that band and had never heard of that album. Just four days ago, though, I had published a music-inspired post called "Rolling the bones," and earlier that same morning I had read a reference to Rush in the book The Heebie-Jeebies in CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. Rush was a Canadian hard rock band with no connection to the New York punk scene, but the author had written in a footnote:

A separate book could be written about the large number of Jewish performers in heavy metal, among them: Geddy Lee of Rush, who earned his stage name through his heavily accented Jewish grandmother's inability to pronounce "Gary" . . .

The first three tracks on Roll the Bones are "Dreamline," "Bravado," and "Roll the Bones." Bravado is similar in meaning to Braggadocio, the Spenser character who speaks the lines I quoted above. Here's how "Dreamline" begins:

He's got a road map of Jupiter

A radar fix on the stars all along the highway

She's got a liquid-crystal compass

A picture book of the rivers under the Sahara

They travel in the time of the prophets

On a desert highway straight to the heart of the Sun

Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone

We're only at home when we're on the run

On the run

Pretty synchy. The "crystal compass" is a direct link to the crystal ball theme, since Bill has identified the Liahona -- "the thing which our fathers call a ball . . . or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass" (Alma 37:38) -- with a Palantir -- defined by Wikipedia as follows:

A palantír ([paˈlanˌtiːr]; pl. palantíri) is one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

The "picture book of the rivers under the Sahara" suggests the pictures and map of rivers in "Lake Tirza, the rivers of Serbia, and swift Blue-Green Tara." In one of the dreams discussed there, a character thought a river might be in Africa and thus "under the Sahara."

A "desert highway" is a theme that has come up here repeatedly, including in the name of the blog, and most recently in "She's afraid of the light in the dark."

The repeated lines in "Bravado" -- from an album with a dice-themed name -- are:

We will pay the price

But we will not count the cost

The song I heard in Donutes has this chorus:

All this time you thought

We’d never pay the price

In the game of love

You have to roll the dice

My heart got seven years to life

Seven years to life

And here's the chorus of the title track from the Rush album:

We go out in the world and take our chances

Fate is just the weight of circumstances

That's the way that Lady Luck dances

Roll the bones

Roll the bones

Why are we here?

Because we're here

Roll the bones

Roll the bones

Why does it happen?

Because it happens

Roll the bones

Roll the bones

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Speaking of rolling the bones, I did. I dreamed those dreams with a trayful of shaken dice in my nightstand drawer -- which means that, as if this post wasn't already long enough, it's now time to try to translate all that bizarre dream content into the language of the Minor Arcana.

1. Two of Wands: Shows a man standing at the battlements of a castle, so he could be a watchman on the roof.

2. Seven of Cups: A mysterious all-black figure, and two snaky figures suggesting the tree-duck.

3. Six of Cups: A roof, and children.

4. Four of Wands: A dark shape on one of the roofs that could conceivably be a watchman.

5. Three of Wands: A man watching.

9. Nine of Wands: Ditto.

Stay tuned for the answer.

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Update (9:30 p.m.): I rolled 6, which is the Five of Pentacles. No dice, so to speak.

Why do I persist in attempting this when it should be obvious by now that I can't do it? Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones.