La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 36: December 1970

At the department store

I am in New York with P. We want to go to a department store whose roof we saw over the tops of some houses.

We’re in a car. I don’t know who’s driving. We have trouble orienting ourselves and eventually take one-way streets in the wrong direction.

We get to the department store and go into the elevator. The floors are indicated by a black needle on a circular dial, like on a pendulum. We arrive on the 10^th floor, but the needle says it’s the 2cd.

We get off the elevator. We’re in the home linens aisle. P. looks at beach and bath towels; she actually wants to buy sheet bleach or bleach sheets.

Almost everyone is speaking French, but with American phrases mixed in. I exchange some words with two men. Then two other men appear, young and completely naked.

They go down the stairs. One of their backs is covered in little dry round patches that overlap like roof shingles. I think (or say) “multiple sclerosis,” then I correct myself: “dermosclerosis.”

I leave P. to go look in another aisle. I take the elevator again. This time, the floor indicator seems to move at random; at first it calls to mind a wet wristwatch, then I realize there’s a double mechanism operating the arrow, the first corresponding to floor and the second connected to a clock. Indeed, there is not one but two sets of numbers on the dial, one set larger and in black, the other tiny and in red.

Getting off the elevator, I find P. At the foot of the elevator is a packet (a Moses basket) containing a purse that P. lost the previous night in the river, and two packets of sheet bleach, which consists of little white balls, sort of like naphthalene, that whiten sheets in the wash.