M. T. Anderson by Feed Page B

I thought was a dream, with me at a great site where all the games were free and you could play anything. So I was thinking different even about pretty dumb games like
Turbo Checkers,
because if you can get anything for free, what the hell, so I started one of them, which was this fantasy game, and I was putting on some elf gloves, and stringing my bow, when I could feel that someone was nudging my feed. They were nudging it, like with their cheek or nose.
    In my dream, I asked them who they were.
    In my dream, they told me they were the police. They asked me if I was a victim of the hack at the Rumble Spot.
    In my dream, I said yes.
    In my dream, they told me okay, go back to sleep.
    In my dream, I said who were they really?
    They said that they were going to be running some tests on me, and that I should think about something else.
    I said that they weren’t the police, so who were they really?
    They said, here is the lizard you have always been wanting. We took the liberty of giving it a nice new collar.
    I asked if all these games were mine.
    All yours, they said. All yours. Good night, sweetie. They’re all yours. Take them. All yours.
    In my dream, I thought they were the hacker group, the Coalition of Pity.
    But when I woke up, I didn’t remember that for weeks. What I remembered was just the games, which, once I was awake, I couldn’t find, and the elf gloves, and the bow, and the lizard that was all mine.

. . . AMURICA: A PORTRAIT IN GEEZERS . . .
    . . . I remember, as the last forests fell . . . at about that time, we would see hawks and eagles in the cities. People walked outside more, back then. The temperature usually didn’t get above a hundred. There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings.
    I remember seeing the hawks perched on street lamps, during those last days of the American forests. They had come from the mountains, maybe, or pine woods that were now two or three levels of suburb, but the hawks sat in our cities like kings. They would not look down from their lampposts as thousands of downcars went by underneath. It was like they sat alone on Douglas firs.
    I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you’d stumble on them — these princes of the air on common rooftops — the rivers that burst through city streets so they ran like canals — the rabbits in parking garages — the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.

It was maybe, okay, maybe it was like two days after the party with the “never pukes when he chugalugs” that Violet chatted me first thing in the morning and said she was working on a brand-new project. I asked her what was the old project, and she was like, did I want to see the new one? I said,
Okay, should I come over to su casa? I’ve never been there,
and she was like,
No, not yet. Let’s meet at the mall.
    I was like,
Okay, sure, fine, whatever swings your string,
and she was all,
Babycakes, you swing my string,
which is a nice thing for someone to say to you, especially before you use mouthwash.
    So I flew over to the mall near her house through the rain, which was coming down outside in this really hard way. Everyone had on all their lights until they got above the clouds. Up there it was sunny, and people were flying very businesslike.
    The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.
    Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the
Oh? Wow! Thing!
had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool. Violet looked great in her low