From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 11:01 AM Sixteenth post Eocene (part 1 of 2) This is the seperating chapter before the last "meta" group of chapters. It starts with the usual stream-of-conciousness from the narrator. He seems to feel that his body is being moved, he doesn't know where. He defiantly thinks that though they can do anything to his body -- turning him over, repairing bits, etc. -- they can't catch/find/get through to him, because he's in charge, in command, invulnerable. Of course he's wrong, a bit later when he's being moved he's bumped around, and it hurts. But right after saying he's invulnerable, he starts railing against "a typically dirty piece of underhand undercover unclothed misunderstanding by the evil queen herself." (Andrea, clearly -- who else?) After another double-entendre "how could she stoop so low?" he says she tried to rouse the barbarians against him; a bit later, that she tried to "raise a rebellion." "No chance, of course, but there you go." he assures himself. What is all this about? Well, it seems likely that Andrea has tried to wake him up by actually having some kind of sex with him, there in the hospital bed, and that his mind turned this into his fling with Arrol in the dream. A rather unpleasant mental picture, but all the evidence seems to fit -- in the last chapter, the narrator's view of the room is whited out, until Andrea turns the camera back towards him after the end of the Arrol scene (is there an actual camera/monitor directed at his bed? I can see why she'd want to turn it away during that bit), and the chair is moved and, most significantly, the bed is messed up a bit. Thus all the "rousing the barbarians", "raising a revolution" language; she's tried to pull him out of his dream by involving his body directly. The evil queen in the first barbarian dream survives by appealing to the innermost fantasies of young men and causing lust in them, while the familiar is going to get rid of all of all that. I originally identified the barbarian with the body and the familiar with the mind; it appears that they may be even more specifically the narrator's body and mind -- his mind wants to stay in the dream, and therefore perceives Andrea, who appeals to him physically in the real world, as an enemy. In the second barbarian dream, Andrea, this time as herself, told the barbarian not to kill the narrator, and she appeared to be about to tell him not to bring the familiar with him before she got cut off. Anyways, he's moved physically, it hurts, and he ends up in a new place. He jokes about how he hears voices and that's an "impregnable defense", then says he's been raped -- in the alternate meaning of the word, of being looted and carried away, ostensibly. But this also refers to what Andrea has done, for he says "I'll stitch her up. No, sorry, that's not funny, but I mean! What a dia-fucking-bollockal liberty, eh?" In the second barbarian dream, the barbarian says that if a kiss will wake Sleeping Beauty up then what he's going to do will make her really lively; Andrea has basically done the same thing. Maybe his fears about being sexually dominated weren't so far off. The narrator assures himself that it meant nothing to him, or her, probably, then goes on to express what seems like resentment about her being "a woman of letters"; the demanding sentence at the end of the stream-of-conciousness is "she got her degree". Note that this is the first time the repeated, demanding sentence at the end hasn't been a location, first it was "the dark station" then "ghost capitol".