7/4/08

I was interning for the Red Sox. Not as a bat boy, but as a Workout Manager. Everyone is playing pickup basketball, including Big Papi, Kevin Youkilis, an attractive woman, and a distracted old man. He seems to be scraggly at best, white-haired, and wearing torn clothing. Something about the throwing of the ball seems to terrify him - particularly the woman. He stumbles backward out a rear-corner pair of heavy-set gym doors, always verging on screams.

There is a confused condensation of the crowd as people mill around like a Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Perhaps in the confusion, or in the blink of a mind, I have been grasped firmly between two burly guards who 'escort' me down a long passageway. The scenery rapidly descends into ironworks, grime, and heavy interlocking doors. I am shuffled down a labyrinthine set of passages before being brought through some final sphincter of a door into a vast, tall, open space.

Looking up, the room is simultaneously exterior and yet interior. Above, well-rounded steel, present though unplacable light, and the dull roar of thousands speaks to a dystopian futuristic, perhaps steampunk-esque setting. I am watched like a Christian in the arena - or perhaps a maggot introduced to an ant farm. I am marched down the runway, still held firm between two shoulders, for the door indeed ends in a long solitary corridor overrunning an endless shadow. On the opposite side, another such ramp leads down to a 10' circle of metal, whereupon a fallen body now lies.

The old man lies in a puddle of his own dried blood, a grisly chainsaw savagely wedged somewhere into the mass of flesh that he has become. A guard turns to my partner dressed in blue, lifts up another such chainsaw, and forcefully rams it onto the man's shoulder, forcing him into the position of a man of burden "at rest". The saw's blade rips through about an inch of flesh before stopping with a sickening crunch in bone. He seems to be armed.



"Is there anyone else here? Somebody's screaming - Please help me. Let's find out now that I'm not dreaming. Welcome to my damnation - Here it comes: The Real Me."