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The Tunnel she's following a trail of dead doornails down a train tunnel with no end and no side doors to let her out. the tracks hum with a constant fear of a train inevitably coming from ahead or behind. light's splashing all around in searchlamp patterns, enough for her to see all the garbage, pet carcasses, and homeless people along her path. there is a smell in the air that just plain doesn't want to be identified, it's a smell that the fear clings to, like hair to a finished popsicle stick dropped on the carpet. there are times when she wavers, she forgets about sex, which is something she feels is odd to be thinking about at a point like this...not sex as in fucking, no, but sex as in gender, and she goes into a little rant with herself, stemmed from kathy acker anti-idealism, and the meaning of being and fact of being a woman, in the 90s, even though she wasn't a woman, or a man, or even human at all, but very very confused, and not just a little bit disoriented...the concept of time and year repeating and chasing down tunnels in her mind, not unlike the tunnel she walks, runs, and stumbles down now, before it was a concept that made some strange sense, one second, in order, follows another, and once that second is passed, cannot repeat itself... theme songs are cycling through her head. she doesn't recognize any of them. they're all showtunes, and give the tunnel this eerie, trashy feel to it, like being backstage broadway, if the backstage of broadway were transplanted to the 42nd street of former years: bare breasts and cat calls, masturbators, exhibitionist, ambiguous, same-sex pimp/whore couples...all of it sprinkled with a smattering of refuse, empty bottles and beer cans, used condoms and needles, ragged porn mags and flyers...'west side story' or 'cats' or 'showboat' trilling distantly away, carried over air that smells the worst combination of sex, liquor, dirt, grease...the smell of that one sin that is the most satisfying sin in the world because it combines all others into one simple, terrible act... but this thought, in her head, it passes all in a few seconds, like it never happens... and suddenly: the tunnel opens onto a stage, parisian opera house style, circa late 19th century. a young eddie murphy hands her a microphone as she stands wide-eyed, taking in the largest crowd she's ever seen, laughing down the last of eddie's performance as he creaks off the stage in his tight leather outfit, a la 'delirious'. she doesn't know what to do. the crowd dies down, and begins to watch her, expectantly, so expectantly she can feel her own energy being drained. she feels panicked, she feels as if they can't have entertainment, they'll have her soul...she tried to laugh inwardly at her melodrama. it doesn't happen. she's beginning to sweat, smell the anxiety on herself, knees shaking mic slipping in sweaty palms, stomach flipping... she throws up. the audience pauses, then laughs, loudly, harder than they did at eddie, who's glaring at her from stage left. she stands up, she looks confused, completely bewildered, and experiences a lack of comprehension so profound it borders on insanity, and just as she is about to scream, two stage hands, turtles, wearing mechanical pants, actually, come onstage, and carefully escort her off stage left. eddie smacks her hard upside her head as she passes by, one of the turtles shoves a cattle prod into his chest, and he is instantly descended upon by two dozen bats, pulling his finely coifed (but smoking) hairdo out of his head in a series of disorganized knaps. something cold and gelatinous is applied to the back of her head, with gentle pressure. she sees a large turtle eye in her peripheral vision. she doesn't understand any more than she did in the tunnel, maybe even less. through curtain ropes and lighting wires, fake walls and racks of clothes, down a narrow hallway, to a shiny wooden door with a small brass knocker, which opens slowly as the turtles near it...she's lain down on a clear, air-inflated mattress, filled with feathers that bounce with the breeze coming through the bed's intake valves. the effect is like the flattened version of popping popcorn in a fishbowl... she lays on her back, notices the turtles are of the snapping variety, and realizes she's tired, and her stomach is settling down... eyes heavy, brain near to burned out, she falls asleep, listening to the soft hum of the air in the mattress feathers, flitting against its walls... maybe hours, or a few days and nights later, she wakes up to a dull pain in her hands, and darkness when she opens her eyes. she's laying on her side, in what feels to be slightly moist dirt, not quite mud, but not dry either... her hands feel strange, and she brings them close enough to see...her breath goes away. index finger, middle, and ring fingers all gone...grafted to her palm in their places, bic pens, black ink, medium point...the pain was at the base of where each finger had been, and where each pen now is...she felt the tears well, run down her cheeks, cut through the dirt she thought she left behind... slowly her breath came back, slowly she turned her head around, and saw, in front of her a small trail of doornails, and off, in the distance, and maybe a little obscured by her own uncomprehending eyes, the mouth of a tunnel...