Echoes of a Nightmare

I had a dream the other night that I was a little old lady sitting in a shabby, one-room apartment reading about a man who had been offered all the money in the city to play baseball.

His salary was in the billions, but that didn’t bother her. Sports were the only form of entertainment the people had left in the dream world.

She was reading by candlelight because the cost of electricity had gone beyond her means. Only those with salaries equal to that of sports figures could afford power in their homes.

Sometimes those without electricity would gather around the places of the rich to bathe in the light that seeped out from unshaded windows, the way moths used to circle light globes in the days when there were still light globes to circle.

Dogs trained to sniff out light thieves would chase them away, but they’d return as soon as the mutts were out of sight. Sometimes the poor would trap pieces of light in old tin cans, but the penalty for such crimes was so severe that eventually the act was reduced to a minimum.

If they did manage to successfully steal a can of light, they were probably mugged on the way to their wretched shacks anyhow and their cans of illumination taken and sold for big bucks on the light black market.

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The world was topsy-turvy in my dream. I mean, it had to be. To imagine me as a little old lady was impossible enough. An old alley cat, maybe, but never a little old lady.

The dream wasn’t one that offered bits of this and that, but rather unfolded like some kind of futuristic “Blade Runner” movie. It was a world depleted of everything, more or less; what remained was at a premium.

Drinking water was right up there with electricity in terms of cost. It was so loaded with something called hexavalent chromium that people couldn’t drink it anymore, much less pronounce it. To correct the problem was cost-ineffective to the metal plating industry. Nothing was done about it.

A government report said it might be OK to drink the water but it would cause cancer if inhaled. Drinking while pinching one’s nose, however, caused so many strangulation deaths that the practice was discouraged.

You couldn’t even shower in the stuff. The little old lady that was me couldn’t stand her filthy body anymore, bathed in the tainted water and turned green. I dream in color, that’s how I know.

The only good water was so purified and filtered that just one bottle cost hundreds of dollars. Every once in a while, the little old lady’s son, who was a Ph.D. teaching history, would save for several months and buy his mom a bottle, but that didn’t happen too often. Teachers were only paid the minimum wage, which had been reduced to $3.22 an hour.

Water was so vital to human life that stealing it was a capital offense. Those convicted of pure-water theft were sent to Texas to be executed, where executions were now considered something of a spectator sport.

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It was not a nice world. The ocean waters were so polluted that the fish glowed in the dark. Some people caught them, placed them in bowls and used them as a light source. That wasn’t really adequate, however, because they faded quickly.

The world was pretty much vegetarian in my dream. Mad cow disease had become mad chicken disease and mad pig disease too, and in order to counteract those diseases, various chemicals were pumped into the animals, which made them healthy but eventually killed the people who ate them.

The reason for all this was those who were making big money in energy, chemistry, agriculture and industry had to return at least a 300% profit to keep their stockholders happy. Nothing was done altruistically. Profit was the name of the game.

In my dream we called for help from Washington, but the president said that if those of us on Social Security had invested it wisely instead of just taking it for food and rent, we would be able to afford flashlights and that would solve our problem. We should have listened to him in the first place.

Asked for help, our governor said that if we’d just be patient he would bring the leaders of commerce to their knees. But then guerrilla lobbyists kidnapped him and transplanted his brain with that of a hare and that was the end of that.

I got by as best I could as a little old lady, a little green old lady, that is, but I knew the world had gotten away from me and I was living not in the Information Age or the Electronic Age but the Greed Age. It was the end of life as we knew it. Thank God it was only a dream.

Or was it?

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at [email protected]