i was at a birthday party or family vacation or something. there were a lot of people i knew and a lot i didn't in one large building that had a lot of rooms branching off a main hallway. it was supposed to be new york and also my elementary school building at the same time we were socializing and living it up- some old family friends were there, called the Heiderers. their daughter, arianna, was there, with a friend anne, who was this sort of mountaineering tour guide. this building was right in a valley between two peaks. then a corpse was found just a fraction of a mile up a trail that wound up one of those peaks. it was the body of a young man who anne was supposed to give a tour to. she was questioned over and over about her involvment in his death but she had not yet led him up the trail, she didn't know how he'd gotten there several guests had taken tours with her and found her an exceptional guide- the news of which i noticed infuriated a red-headed doctor who was at this party. when i overheard this doctor telling his assisstant he had brought the man up the trail, and that then he'd brought it back down to act as if he'd 'discovered' it, i rushed back to tell arianna and anne about what had happened our private conferences were delayed by various friends milling about, so we decided to talk in the air ducts. i told them what i had heard, that the doctor had killed the man, but at the other end of an air duct tunnel a group of midget sized or pygmy men dressed in red with square helmets were also talking, and they were the doctor's minions when i had told my friends who the guilty party was, we went to escape through the duct again, only to be confronted by the minions. for some reason i can't remember exactly, it was very important that, after we fought the square-helmeted minions, we learned that only a woman could expose and stop the doctor. this was illustrated by bisecting lines and highlighted circles over the corpse and my two friends and i... like a sports commentator drawing on my dream i got shot. arianna got shot. arianna recovered but i died. everything went dark and sort of clothy like the inside of a coffin i could also see my own funeral at the same time, where my grave was being buried underneath a huge tree everyone was dressed in black. anne was nowhere to be seen. somehow the tree made shapes- it would twist in the breeze so its leaves and branches warped- and it made a shape like ovaries, and i returned to life and sat up in the coffin everyone was happy, but not amazed. except me. i kept crying and telling people how it had felt getting stuck on an existential thought and just picking at it until the brain rotted. that's what my death had been like apparently. horrible as it was to me, no one seemed to care. my mother, grandmother, brother, and his friend went to the mall, where people kept giving away baggies of free stuff like halloween/christmas specials my mother disappeared. i started having a post-death crisis and went looking for her. my brother told me she'd gone to 300 and 5th street, in SoHo allegedly. i started to walk there but realized, as i was in the mountains, i had no idea how to get there in boulder, the mountains are in the west so you always know you're direction. when you're IN the mountains though you don't get that compass fortunately there was another family walking near me and they decided to rent a passing airport shuttle. i couldn't figure out how to pay them to get on, since all i had was a 5 dollar bill and a single in my bra, which i offered but no one noticed. the shuttle headed the wrong direction, and i thought we're probably just going the long way around. but no one ever asked me where i wanted to go oh wait at the funeral, the contact showed up it was a french contact. the contact helped rat out the doctor and rounded him and his cronies up. and he got hella busted
