Sometimes my dreams take a left turn at certain town in New Mexico:
Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny, or their avatars, live in a vast post-apocalyptic building complex. They're part of a team that puts on stilts and somehow runs through the halls to apartments targeted by the government. The team members break in and remove contraband, including unlicensed babies. it's pretty heartbreaking. So after one job, the Cowboy and the Rabbit about how they don't think they can do it any longer. It's a private conversation, between one-time adversaries who now have more in common than they do with anyone else.
The team heads to an apartment inhabited by a lesbian couple and, apparently, their unlicensed babies. Despite the size of the group, all running on spindly stilts, Sam and Bugs arrive first. Only one mother is home, and she retreats in tears. Sam and Bugs discover the babies, hidden inside hollow bowling balls.
Except they're fake, elaborate dolls.
Sam and Bugs sit back with beers on the couch and wonder why, when the group was so large, only two of them ever arrived. And then there's no sign of children, unlicensed or otherwise. They found only fake babies, and even the crying mother has vanished. So, what is up, doc?
"We done been set set up, ain't we, varmint?"
They swig their beers.
"Eh, doc... I wonder how we've lasted so long."
"Way I figger it, if one of us dies, the other won't be long fer this world."
Bugs laughs his buggy laugh. "If I pick up the papers someday and see that either you or Fudd has passed on..."
"That's the day ya better say yer prayers, rabbit."
They finish the beer and beat a hasty retreat, separating in the halls. Bugs dives into some sort of hole. Sam skedaddles up a stairwell. We follow Sam as he makes his way through a labyrinth of tunnels and out into the large central court, a cross between an architectural graveyard and a Lower East Side street scene, circa 1901. A roof stretches across where sky should be.
Sam works his way through the crowd. He becomes aware of someone following him, a sinister heavy hired by the government. Making Bugs-like, he lets himself be trapped against a wall, but in some maneuver involving the sort of physics encountered only in cartoons, as though he has harnessed some lingering vestige of his pre-apocalyptic state, he moves rapidly out of the way, opens a grate, and his adversary slides into the hole. Sam hastily screws the grate back on.
A woman I have not seen in decades, a woman I once knew, someone whose initials, as it happens, are WB, looks on from somewhere outside this grotesque world and nods her approval.
I wake up to the sound of music. Since it's not my alarm, I wonder if my wife has set hers and wake her up. No, though she was planning to get up early. The music comes through an open window, presumably from a passing car.