The Minotauress

press would bury him. But not Bill Clinton. He just made a simple error in judgment, so everything's okay. Never mind the ex-girlfriends who all wound up dead by ‘suicide.' Never mind the Tyson Food scams, and never mind that Paula Jones passed a battery of polygraphs. It's all okay because it's Bill. It's all okay because inflation is low.'

Ajax continued to stare bulge-eyed. 'I-I-I... like it!'

'And that's not even to mention Vince Foster, who had a documented affair with Clinton's wife, and who was found conveniently dead in Fort Marcy Park with a revolver in his right hand but he was left- handed. That's not to mention NBC news deliberately cutting out the interview clips of Susan McDougal admitting to a sexual relationship with Bill, nor to the same liberal news blackout of Roger Clinton admitting that he was Bill's major coke supplier, who later referred to him as a ‘Hoover vacuum' whenever cocaine arrived at the governor's mansion. But that's all beside the point, and so is Mena Airport and all the Arkansas State Troopers who passed repeated polygraph tests and Charlie Trie and Castle-Grande and the Lippo Group and no security clearances for Clinton's White House staff and Travel Gate and David Hale and 700 FBI files with Bill's fingerprints on them, and Whitewater records with Hillary's fingerprints on them, and all the other shit the press swept under the carpet. No, this isn't about any of that. This is about my nightmare.'

Ajax was dumbstruck. 'See? More of the real Dean coming out.'

Dean pushed the notion back. 'The dream, Ajax. The nightmare.'

Ajax took another hefty sip of the beer, winced. Then— 'This place you were talking about, where you drained the dead cows—'

'Well, not just cows. Steers and bulls too. Whatever died in the field.'

'Fine, fine. So where was this place?'

'On the ranch. It was just a processing warehouse, like any other. But this one was... secret.'

'‘Cos you didn't want the authorities to know what you were doing in there. Letting the cattle rot a few more days, letting them drain, so you wouldn't have to pay full price to the rendering company.'

'Right. We called it ‘The Dump' and ‘The Slop-Shop.' It was pretty gross. Sometimes you couldn't even walk in there without a gas-mask 'cos the air was so toxic.'

'The Slop-Shop.' Ajax reflected. 'A place where you deliberately drained ‘rendering bilge' from dead cattle.' Then he drank more. 'Can you remember the first time you saw the Slop-Shop? I mean, the very first time?'

'Well, yeah,' Dean answered. 'I was sixteen. I'd heard about it from some of the other field hands, so one day I simply decided to check it out for myself.'

Ajax nodded, looking at him. 'You were alone when you did this?'

'Well—' Dean's thoughts ticked back. 'No, no I wasn't. I took my girlfriend at the time.'

'And would this girlfriend's name be Arianne?'

Dean's further thoughts stopped short. He gulped. 'Yeah.'

Ajax held his hands up as if full of mystical answers. 'Then the answer's easy. Your nightmare was a classic symbol of systematized, reactive loss. Intervential and dissociative. It's textbook, man. It's in the DSM-III, the modern field guide for diagnostic and statistical mental disorders. You're a walking, talking case, Dean!'

Dean was not quite so elated. 'Great. But what's it mean? What's my nightmare mean, Mr. Freud?'

'It's a calling back,' Dean insisted as if it were obvious. 'Your current domestic misery collided with the fruits of your past. The ultimate psychological inner struggle—the real you fighting to break out of the encapsulation of urban life and conventional domestic order! Don't you see?'

'No,' Dean said.

'You dreamed of rendering bilge pouring out of Arianne's pussy! The rendering bilge is the target-symbol of subconscious connectivity to your true love! Arianne!'

Was it? Wow, Dean thought.

'She was with you the first time you saw the bilge, and she was with you the first time you fell in love. She was the final common-denominator of the direction of your real life. Then you move away, and it all falls apart. You're sitting in the middle of the pieces every day.'

Am I? Dean thought. Ajax was a long-haired, drunken fat slob... but this made sense.

'Want another beer, Porky?' the barmaid asked Ajax, 'since you drained that one in—what? Two minutes?'

'How about I drain my gila monster in your East African Rift cleavage?'

'Don't turn me on for nothing. You ain't got a gila monster, just a newt.'

'You sure about that, Lydia Lunch? My dick's got teeth, baby, and it'd bite all that silly metal shit off your dumbass goth zombie lesbo commie face and fill up my nail box. Why don't you get a life instead of another skull tattoo and another pile of coke up your giant peninsula-sized nose? You oughta shake some of that yeast out of your satanic pussy and start your own microbrew.'

'Hey, Knuckles!' the barmaid shouted over them. In one second, a four-hundred-pound bearded golem appeared, wearing a stained T-shirt that read I EAT AFTER-BIRTH FOR BREAKFAST.

'You know what I eat for breakfast, Abdullah?' Ajax posed. 'Your mother. Bet I sucked out a couple of your brothers and sisters and swallowed 'em like aspirins. But what the hell? Fewer crack babies is a good thing, right?'

Ajax was grabbed by the collar and the back of the belt, and thrown out of the bar. Dean slapped money onto the counter and followed the fracas out. On the street, he helped Ajax up. The wind of Lake Union abraded their faces.

'You really are the life of the party,' Dean said once Ajax got back to his feet.

'Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke,' Ajax murmured. 'And that big-tit, pink-haired Ho chi Minh cum-guzzler? I