I dreamed I was a little girl named Alice. I lived with my parents on a little farm by a river, just outside of a small town. We were peasants, and our cottage floor was hard-packed earth, but I was loved and we were happy.
Then one day three men came while I was home alone and my parents were working in the manor fields. They were identical triplets, and wore the same suits and ties, had the same dark hair and the same cut of beard. They said they were my Uncle John, and I needed to come with them. My parents had died that day in a horrible accident, and I was going to live with my other family.
They took me to a luxurious hotel. We sat at a table in the gold and amber light that drifted across the Art Deco ground floor restaurant. The walls and pillars were of a honey-rose marble and the lamps were all shaded behind paper-thin plates of tortoiseshell. They told me this was my home now, and soon I would meet my grandmother, who lived in a penthouse suite. I wouldn’t be living with her there; there was a second floor suite prepared for me.
We had to wait a long time, so my Uncle Johns began explaining to me my new family ties. I thought I saw my parents, then, behind a large man who was hustling them out of a back door. I couldn’t be sure, though. I was about to get up when the Uncle Johns told me that my real name was Mary, and if I agreed to marry a man named William when I was old enough, I would become Queen Mary 2.
And that’s what happened. I grew up in that hotel, which was on Canal Street in New Orleans. I met and married William, and I became queen. One day I went out for a ceremonial meeting with a Highland pipe and drum band. One of the Scots looked like Jonathan Van Ness. He was particularly angry to be there and to have me there, and he led the band in an army song. The lyrics he sang were full of anger and profanity, and I just sat there smiling blandly because that was my job. I made a note to have a meeting with him later so I could see if there was anything I could do.
As we arrived back at the hotel, it was such a beautiful sunny day, and I told my assistant how sad it was that I lived here in New Orleans, which people came from all over the world to visit, but I could never wander the streets and enjoy the sights like they did. I just have distracted my assistant, because instead of pushing the elevator button for my second floor suite, she pushed the button for the ninth floor, where she lived and had her office.
We rose passed the second floor before she could push the button. For the lower floors, the elevator ran up a well in the front of the building, but in the upper floors, the elevator was in the back. After we passed the third floor, the whole elevator slanted to run along a diagonal before straightening up in the rear well. My assistant apologized profusely the whole time. As we started back down, some people got on the elevator. I pulled my har down to hide. It turned out that the elevator couldn’t stop at the lower floors on its way down. It had to go all the way to the ground floor in the back of the building. To get back to the front and the elevator I needed, we had to ride the airport shuttle van. I got into the van, and then I woke up.
