By Jim Knipfel

It was a Tuesday night—no, more accurately it was Wednesday morning—and the dreams were after me like they hadn’t been in a very long time. I’d been dreaming a lot in recent weeks, but this was above and beyond.

The phone call had come earlier that night, just as I was about to start brushing my teeth. Though the news was unexpected, something in the back of my head had been telling me for the past days that it wasn’t. Not really. So, after hearing the news, I remained strangely calm. I called Morgan and shared the news with her. We talked for a while, then I went and brushed my teeth and took a quick shower. I was surprised at how casual I was feeling. 

Guess when you’ve been through it so many times before, you almost start getting used to it. Or maybe it was just a kind of shock, who knows?

Principles? I’m too old and sick for principles. Something else was at work in my head—and it took the dreams to reveal just how simple and basic it really was.

Once sleep took over, the mind went about the dirty work. 

I was in The Most Dangerous Game, being chased through a thick forest by a man wearing a safari hat and carrying a rifle. I wasn’t alone. There were maybe a half-dozen strangers running through the forest with me, ducking behind trees and huddling behind rocks. Every few minutes someone else was picked off.

I awoke feeling calm, even bored, but far too awake.

My cat lay curled atop the blanket at the foot of the bed. She chirped, stood, stretched, picked her way up toward my head, chirped again, then lay back on my hand. I don’t understand it, but it almost always works. Within a few minutes, I was asleep again. It’s a trick of hers. She’s a strange one.

I was living in my grandma’s house with her and a few other people. I didn’t recognize them, but in the dream (of course) I knew them quite well. In real life, my grandma lived in a big, creaky, scary old house in northern Wisconsin. The house creeped the hell out of me when I was a kid, but I liked being scared. This was pretty much the same house in the dream, though the rooms were arranged differently.

I stepped outside and began walking. When I returned a short while later, the house was ablaze. Completely engulfed in flames. Everyone inside the house, I learned, had been killed. 

Although the loss was terrible, I had no place else to go. I continued to live there in the charred remains, sleeping on a burnt mattress on the floor. There was no roof, there were no walls. Just some ashen timbers and a scorched floor. I’d make due, I thought. I had nowhere else to go.

Again I awoke. And again my cat, who was once more near the foot of the bed, came over to sleep on my hand.

This happened three or four more times over the course of the night. The alarm went off, as usual, at about 4:45. The music was brash and galloping. My eyes opened slowly in the dark. 

This time it wasn’t a dream, but I still remembered all the dreams I’d had with a clarity that surprised me. And in that clarity, I saw how goddamned obvious they had all been. All of them, in a way, reminded me of something Morgan had suggested last time all this was happening. It was a fable, really, just off the top of her head about a guy on a ship. The ship sinks, and he makes a raft out of the flotsam. But the raft breaks apart, and he grabs on to a plank to keep himself afloat. But then the plank gets smashed too, and he ends up bobbing around there in the middle of the sea, clinging to a splinter the size of a toothpick.

I lay there for a few minutes, groggy still, thinking about the dreams and the implications of the phone call. 

The fact that the cat was still on my hand when I awoke told me that I couldn’t have been sleeping that long between the last dream and the alarm.

After fighting the notion for a bit, I sat up. Then I got ready and went to work. I wasn’t sure if that was the thing to do or not, but I did it anyway. 

What else could I do? There was work that needed to be finished. 

So I put on my coat and went into the office, same as always. I sat down at my desk, scanned the news wires and then started typing. I wasn’t sure at that point exactly who I’d be turning these stories in to, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they got finished. That was my job.

Later in the day, C.J. Sullivan sent an e-mail, which read, “We will survive Armageddon. And afterwards, we will write for the Antichrist’s alternative weekly.”

One thing’s for goddamn sure. I’ve been here for about 13 years now, and working for the Press has rarely been boring.