She points at the cake.

There are patterns on the icing. Repeating patterns, embossed in the light brown sugary glace. Everyone turns silent. The rest of the tinfoil and the bag is removed, hurriedly.

There’s a footprint in the middle of our delicious chocolate cake. It must be at least a size 13.

His career had started when he was just a kid, maybe 15 years old. Most folks feared him at the time, especially adults. Some wild, unexplainable force within him made them avoid trying to parent him, moralize over him or otherwise have anything at all to do with the crazy little brat. He also held bad company. And one perfectly sunny day the gang of juvenile delinquents decided to rob a bank. Buzz drove the getaway car.

The robbery itself was a complete disaster. Their fast’n'furious escape made history, though. TV-channels followed Buzz by choppers, while people driving home from work u-turned and joined the chase along with the police. The highways turned into a chaotic mess. Back home, Buzz’s mother sat pale faced, holding her breath and wiping her tears, watching the stunning, Hollywoodlike car-chase imagery on her small TV-screen. Nothing had prepared her for this.

In a small but slick office somewhere in L.A., an agent stared at his big, wall-mounted TV, grinning. It was the kind of grin that holds promises of wealth, money and power. This man had a vision, and the vision was Buzz.

Immediately after finishing his six months sentence at a juvenile home, being bored out of his wits, Buzz was contacted by the L.A. agent. Contracts were signed, hands shook and golden career opportunities spawned - for both Buzz and the agent and his fellow big shots.

Buzz spent his first couple of years in Hollywood as a set worker. Sometimes he appeared in low budget movies, doing nothing significant. His agent bought him some impressive wheels on his sixteenth birthday, to ensure that his interest in cars and talent for driving kept evolving. It did. Buzz really loved cars. Getting Buzz a drivers licence wasn’t easy after the notorious car chase, but impossible? No. There are few things in this world that the red hands of a scrupleless lawyer can’t fix.

Around his 18th birthday, Buzz got his first serious work assignment in Hollywood. It was an action movie; budgets in the sky, high end actors, fast paced script. The car chase scenes and action sequences were going to blow people off their seats in the theatres. Buzz did nothing to disappoint neither the audience nor his agents, the producers, or the shady big guys who had put their money into the production. His driving was like nothing they had ever seen. He drove like he was possessed. He didn’t care about the details in the script, he just did his own thing and it was bigger than real. The camera crew driving alongside, behind and in front of Buzz were having tremendous difficulties following his crazy moves, but still, pretty extraordinary footage were recorded on tape. And that was an understatement.

Buzz’s career just went boom, he became stupendously rich in no time, married and separated from a dozen or so glamorous models and actresses, had five children and like the most natural thing, found his place right at the top along with the real big names. His mother, had she been alive, would’nt have believed what he had achieved, but then again she didn’t much put her faith in anything but Jack. She had died while Buzz were at the juvenile home.

Buzz was no longer just the best stunt driver in the world, he also starred in movies where he had the leading role. A mini-series were made, where the main character’s background was loosely based on his own life story. Buzz sparkled.

But of course, it didn’t last.

One day during a break at the set of his latest movie, Buzz fell asleep in the sleek, blue sportscar that he was using in one of the many action-packed scenes. But not while he was driving. No, he just sat there, engines off, contemplating. The set was a bridge, it was built entirely from scratch for the scene, and the car stood parked right under the foot of the bridge.

One of the set workers, a young, bored, blonde Hollywood wannabe, managed to slip inside the black, mean looking car that, in the movie, belonged to the bad guy. He desperately needed to take it for a spin. I guess you could say it was a bad career move.

Coming towards the foot of the bridge at an insane 118 mph, Blondie screamed as he spotted the parked, blue wonder. There was no way of avoiding the crash. He hit the brakes, but only a split second later he slammed into Buzz. Blondie got split in two by the safety belt His upper body went right through the window and hurled through the air. Buzz’s blue car got it’s entire back and right side peeled off - in fact the only things left after the massive impact were small parts of the roof, dashboard and windshield. Oh, and the driver’s seat. With Buzz, miraculously, still in it. Alive.

Buzz never got back into a car again. He never spoke of driving anymore. He left Hollywood, he left the U.S., and after a few months, disappeared. His agent tried to contact him a few times, but he really couldn’t care less of Buzz’s demise. He was too busy being rich, stuffed and repugnant.

At the age of 53, the agent got killed in an ugly car accident at a crossing. In the other victims car, the dead body of Buzz, the amazing stunt driver, was found.

They both got their notepads out and activated their pencils. Their frosty blue eyes beamed across the room, bringing out secrets in the walls and details from the floor. My wife dared to ask what they wanted. They cut her off.
“We noticed the way you cut your meat. With a knife. A knife is a deadly weapon – how does that make you feel?”
My wife’s face went blank. What kind of answer did they want?
“Do you use knives on a daily base?”, they asked. “You seem to handle a knife quite.. well”.
“Excuse me, but…”, I started. The move they performed as they turned to me was indescribable. It didn’t really happen. Their focus was on me now and my jaw locked up completely.
“Yeee-es?”
“I just… knives are….”
“Yes!?”
“Ordinary… household… items…”, I stuttered.
(“Knives… ordinary… household… items…”), they wrote.

In the livingroom a few minutes later, they stopped by the fireplace.
“You have had an open fire in here”, they said.
“The winters… they’re cold”, I replied. My wife and our daughter were standing in the doorway. They were both non-apparent, the situation made them lose their grip. Nothing was real.
“Do you know how to start a fire?”, they asked my daughter. She’s 10 and yes, she knows how. She nodded, faintly.
(“Teaching… children… fire…”), they scribbled.

They turned on the radio.
“This programme”, they said, addressing the invisible guy reading the news, “What does it teach you?”
I couldn’t answer, I was dumbstruck.
“Is he telling you things you didn’t know? And if so, how would you know it isn’t a lie?”. The carpet in our cozy little livingroom had turned white. The floor sparkled and every smell turned into a stone cold sting.
(“Unreliable… sources… of… information…”)

They stared at a painting on the wall. I had bought it out of sheer curiosity at the market. The artist had freely and abstractedly interpreted a situation at a restaurant, involving an old man with a beard, a woman in a blue dress, a piano with empty glasses on top and a big toad.
(“Divergent… paintings… on… wall… “)

They spent an entire afternoon. Their notepads were full. Our heads were empty.
They placed electronics.
They put a plaque by the phone.
They left a mark on our door.
“We may come back. We may not come back. Do you or your family want us to come back?”

The carpet in our livingroom is still white, and my wife never regained her appetite.

Me and my girlfriend are a team. We have hired a mechanic. We don’t yet have a car, and there’s a race about to start so we’re a bit anxious, but the mechanic says not to worry. He says he’s ordered in a very special car that will make us win. So we’re standing in the pit waiting.

As I look out across the hill and the track beneath us, I realize that it’s all computer graphics. The whole things is a console game, oldschool, pixel perfect and colorful. In a glimpse I even get to see the old coin-up machine from outside, with steering wheel and pedal controls system and all. This makes me very excited.

The special car arrives. It’s wrapped up in paper and cloth, tied up with ropes and heavy knots. The mechanic tells us that because it’s such a special car, no-one must know how it looks until he has done some minor adjustments to it. Revealing it to the rest of the contestants, not to mention the audience, will have catastrophic consequences. So we have to come up with a plan to distract everyone else while the mechanic does the necessary adjustments on the car.

The plan we come up with is this:

I’m going to dress up like a woman.

My girlfriend suddenly produces a blonde, long-hair wig, a beautiful white dress, high-heel shoes and jewelry. She puts me in a chair with a mirror in front of it, and starts transforming me. During this process I lose my beard, actually without anyone ever touching a razor. The wig fits perfectly, I get an amazing makeup, I grow boobs from out of nowhere, and suddenly I’m a woman. It feels great.

My girlfriend, though I don’t know exactly why, has decided to become a man. This wasn’t part of the plan, but both me and the mechanic go with it. When I speak, I still have my own voice, but the makeover is so stunning that people don’t seem to notice. Walking like a woman is a bit tricky, but I seem to manage well. People look at me and our mechanic goes to work unnoticed.

After a while there’s a guy approaching me. I recognize him as one of our national TV-stars, running a show where people who have become separated from their family or loved ones, get to see them again thanks to his research and tireless efforts (sic). He’s got a serious look on his face. He tells me that he’s uncovered the scam, that he’s very disappointed and that we may be disqualified because of this. He still doesn’t know about the car, though - the thing he has uncovered is only the fact that I’m not a woman. I ask him how he could know. He points to my legs and says: «You forgot stockings» - and indeed he’s right; my hairy legs can easily be spotted thru the thin, light fabric of the dress.

I wake up.

We arrive at the place where the tower is supposed to be, only to find that - you guessed it - it’s not there. A guy dressed in bright orange working clothes tells us that if we hurry, we can catch up with the tower, as it is being transported away at the moment. The bus revs up and we’re away, chasing the lost tower.

The journey is short, but intense. We’re zig-zagging through narrow alley-ways at tremendous speed, following the lights from a huge, blurry object in the distance. We yell and shout at the driver to slow down, and suddenly we stop. We’re right behind an enormous carrier, a vehicle that resembles the ones space-shuttles are being transported with. We’re moving at almost no speed at all. It’s dead quiet. The large carrier doesn’t make a sound, its wheels spin slow, almost unnoticed.

From where we sit we can now see that people are dismantling the Eiffel Tower. They’re removing small bits and larger segments and placing them on the deck of the carrier. Someone asks if we want to sit on top of the tower while it’s being taken apart, and we all say yes. So we jump off the bus and start climbing on what’s left of the tower. It’s very confusing; climbing up isn’t climbing up, it’s taking us sideways, and climbing down takes us higher. I try to tell myself that this effect is caused by the fact that the workers are moving the pieces of the tower around. I take a lot of photos, although I’m almost certain it’s too dark.

We reach the top of the tower. We’re looking at the big city below. I couldn’t tell if it’s Paris or not. Someone tells me that this dismantling routine is done every night, for preservation purposes. The tower gets unmounted, disassembled, assembled again and put back, all in a couple of hours, every night, while carried through the city on a monstrous vehicle.

We reach the space where the tower is supposed to sit. We realize that the tower is now completely rebuilt, so we run down the stairs to the ground, to get a look at it from there. It’s huge. Lightbulbs are covering every inch of it. We walk a little further away to get an overview. The bus is waiting for us. I’m looking at the pictures I took. They all show images of the Eiffel Tower from the ground, all right and proper, as it should be.

There are people with me here, about 20 individuals or so, and we’re grouped two and two. We’re on a mission; we’re supposed to find signs of summer. It can be anything, we have been told - flowers about to blossom, patches of grassy fields, grazing animals, anything. The group that finds the first sign of summer wins a prize - a bar of chocolate!

The person I’m with, a pale skinned, black haired girl with rosy cheeks, is really eager and zigzags from island to island, impossibly so. I can’t believe the speed of which she moves, and all the time I can always see her clearly, as if she’s both still and moving at the same time. She finds some berries from time to time, but they’re all winter berries.

In flashes, I recollect some supposedly authentic situations at a café back home up north, where I’m sitting at a table discussing some matter or other with a few friends, and David Lynch. The matters we discuss are supposed to have some sort of relevance regarding the mission we’re on now - like there are clues hidden in the language we’re using, the things we speak of, and also by the way we glance at each other over the table. It’s very strange and the atmosphere is calm, silent, full of purpose.

Back in the gigantic room of islands it seems we’re reaching a deadline. No-one has found any sign of summer, and I have lost the girl. This gets me down, and I head back accross the icy lake to the mainland. Nobody’s there anymore, but spread out on the ground are dozens of bars of chocolate.

I wake up.

My girlfriend takes me with her into a small passageway underneath the tiers of seats. At the other end we meet one of her friends, a blonde with exaggeratedly painted eyelashes and striking blue eyes. We stand there talking to her for a bit, then we sit down at a long table. A bunch of kids are sitting there too, playing, laughing, drawing and making childish conversation. Some play with clay, and some play instruments. I ask the blonde if she works here, but she says she doesn’t - she just likes to stay here and play with the kids.

Over at the other end of the table, next to the wall, a weird, slenderly built horse is standing, gobbling away at some hay. It’s head is ridiculously small, and it resembles the head of an ostrich more than the head of a horse - but still it’s a horse’s head. We walk over to take a closer look at it. The closer we get, the thinner the horse seem to us. As we reach it, it turns to my girlfriend and sort of whispers in her ear, without making a sound, that my mother’s mother is dead. My girlfriend looks at me, amazed. We agree that this is proof that my father was telling the truth.

Some distance away, we hear sirens. There seems to be something happening in the heart of the city. We decide to go see what it is - a moment later we’re there; we never left and we never took one single step.

The city is not really a city - it’s actually my home town up north, but it’s a neon version - it’s dark, the asphalt and concrete is black, neon lights and giant boards flash it’s cold, blueish light all over the place. A long procession of cars slowly crawl along the main street, they’re all covered by funeral wreaths and other flower arrangements. There’s music in the air, some kind of noisy parade music. It’s all very surreal.

A car passes in front of me, and I recognize my brother by the wheel. He calls to me through the noise. At first I can’t make out his words, but after a while I understand - he’s complaining. He’s actually blaming me for not telling him about the death of my grandmother. I try to explain to him what our father told me, but it’s impossible through the noise. I turn to my girlfriend because I want to tell her I want to leave, but she’s not there. I try thinking about the horse, the race track and the blonde, as if it would make me disappear from this place and just go back there, but it doesn’t work.

I wake up.

I meet my girlfriend on one floor. She explains something to me about a horse that has managed to escape from his box in the horse barn. We suddenly hear the threatening, aggressive sound of a horse galloping. As we gaze out the window we can see a huge black horse below us, circling the building.

Now the horse start speaking to me, inside my head.

I can hear his troubled mind, his urge to run, and his fear. My girlfriend stares at me, intently. She knows something too. I walk outside to meet the horse. I stop just outside the front door, and wait. I can hear the horse on the other side of the building, panting, his hooves trampling the ground heavily. It seems like forever while I wait for him to appear around the corner - which he never does. I suddenly find myself upon his back, riding at such an unbelievable speed across a field that I lose my breath. The air screams past my face and I feel almost like flying, were it not for the intense motion of the horse’s body. We ride for a long time, covering distances too great to describe. Although the speed scares the bejeezes out of me, I feel both free and full of purpose, and I love being up on a horseback again. It must be the biggest horse I’ve ever seen, and his fur is incomprehensibly black, like he’s been dyed with the deepest black ink. The horse now tells me (by his telepathic magic) that I’m the only one he can trust, and that no-one else will ever ride him again. I smile proudly as we pass my girlfriend, and she smiles back at me.

I’m on the ground, wondering where the horse went. I miss him, and I miss riding horseback - but all of a sudden it’s as if all of it never happened. I ask my girlfriend, not if she knows where the black horse went, but if she wants to try riding a bit herself. Abruptly, she snaps back at me: «No! That’s your thing.»

I wake up.

I have my crappy camera with me. I am outside the former postal office with my new girlfriend. We’re waiting for a bus that is parked in front of the postal office, by the windows. We want it to be on it’s way, because it’s obscuring a very important scrolling neon-sign that has some information on it that we want. Inside the bus there are passengers that are both leaving and entering. Some put their clothes on, some take their clothes off.

By the other side of the road there’s a large lump of snow. Something is covered underneath all of it, and I really want to get to it, or at least know what it really is, but somehow I can’t do it, I can’t dig into the snow, and I can’t understand why. In the distance we can see the «famous» 1600 feet tall, triangle-shaped mountain that is the characteristic landmark of the place. Above it, in the sky, we see the sun and the moon, extremely close to each other; the moon’s crescent is, inexplicably, facing the totally wrong direction according to the sun’s position. Both planetoids are glowing yellow, and the sky is almost brown. We’re struck by the weird beauty of the sight, and of course I want to take pictures. I fumble and mess around a whole lot with my camera, making wrong adjustments, pressing the wrong buttons, shaking tremenously while shooting, and so on… I end up not getting any good shots, and after a while the spectacular moment has passed, the sky is dark, and both the sun and the moon are gone. I feel at a loss, and a bit frustrated.

We decide to go buy some snacks. As we pass the parked bus again, we notice that it’s exhaust pipe spews out some weird bubbles, or exhaust in bubble form; it looks sticky and sort of heavy, or having it’s very own gravitational laws, it moves slowly and in a straight line from the exhaust pipe. I want to take pictures here as well, and I think I manage quite well.

Moving on, we spot a small sort of carriage or wagon, half covered in snow. In it, a figure lays still - it looks like a female mannequin. It’s wearing a full body suit, yellow in color, with black or dark blue stripes along the sides. The mannequin’s face is completely covered by the snow, but somehow we know that it’s lips are formed into a kiss. Also, in the genital area, large, pink «lips» have been placed, on the suit itself, it’s a tad vulgar. I snapshot this too, but as we start moving along, the figure suddenly jumps up from the wagon - very much alive. She’s an asian girl, wearing weird makeup that almost looks like war paint. She adresses me: «Why are you, a man, here? This party is female only!»

We’re puzzled by this, as there does’nt really seem to be a party anywhere. The woman is clearly a bit confused, she shakes her head and blink a lot. A man appears from behind the parked bus. From his name tag we can see that he’s a cameraman. He tells the woman she’s been sleeping through the whole party, that it’s the day after now, and the no men-rules no longer apply. The woman gets a bit angry, but mostly she’s just very disoriented. We turn and walk away.

My girlfriend suddenly stops and grabs her stomach. She then takes off and run around a corner, into a kind of pit, with fences all around. She sits right down and - to my shock - starts peeing, right in her pants. I ask her just what on earth she’s doing, and she tells me: «I’ve had an itch in my ass all day long, and my tummy hurts, but now I’m finally able to relieve - this is the only way to get rid of the itch in my ass!»

I wake up.

As we travel along, we start a long, almost unnoticeable descent into a wintery landscape. The colors change into white and blue, rivers freeze and trees turn black. We reach the bottom of a mile-wide slope that ends in a gigantic clearing. There’s a frozen lake here, and we drive on to it. We slow down to watch the amazing scenery below us; the ice is completely transparent, yet thick, but we can see structures and form inside it. We pass entire buildings frozen in time, there are even people encapsulated in the ice - these images are so beautiful and horrid, it’s impossible to describe. It’s as if the water came so sudden and froze at such speed that nothing or no-one had time to react. These three-dimensional images in the ice are like snapshots of a single moment in time.

It gets darker around us. We drive on. For some time all we can see is the black ice, but after a while we start seeing faint, green lights under the surface. The light increases in intensity, and suddenly we can see hundreds and thousands of bottles scattered in the ice, silhouetted against the green light. Several hundred feet long racks, or shelves, on which the bottles were originally stacked, stretch far into the distance under us. The scene that the ice has captured here is one where the shelves have started to topple over, and the bottles all fell out. It can’t be described, but it’s as beautiful as it is absurd.

A bit further on the atmosphere gets chillier. The lights under the ice turns light blue, and now we can see people again down there. They are all dressed in old, white rags. Their hair is also long and white, they all look like ghosts - and suddenly it dawns on me that this is what they actually are. Weird, haunting music emerges from below, scary, muted sounds accompany the music, and suddenly the ghosts start screaming. At first I can’t make out the words, but then it gets clearer and clearer. The ghosts scream: «And again! And again! And again!» They move slowly in the cold ice. They move towards the surface, inexplicably. I know they’ll eventually appear above the ice, and it totally freaks me out. My dad tries to revv up the engine and drive the hell out of there, but it is useless. The ghosts keep chanting: «And again! And again! And again! And again … ! »

To my great relief, I wake up, cold and sweating.