"The ether."
"Yeah, that's right, laughing gas. The woman who lived there moved out, cause one night the burglars broke into the apartment by mistake. Pretty much freaked her out. So the dentist wants a young guy living there. Look, if it bothers you, he said he'd throw in renter's insurance too."
"Why don't you live there, Bob?"
"It'd kill my mom if I moved out, you know that. Besides you lived in that neighborhood before."
Then I remember something. This is a long distance telephone call. "Bob, I don't live in Philadelphia any more."
"Sure. You can live with your illusions as long as you like. I'm just trying to do you a favor. There's this apartment, and I'm telling you, it's got your name written all over it. Believe me, this isn't a decision you can make."
"Would you take mine?" It is an easy offer to make. The woman can be no more than five feet tall, and my feet, well after all, they are the feet of a six foot man. No woman would want these feet.
"Yes," she answers, and surprised by her acceptance, not to mention her state she has no feet I give them to her. She cobbles down the sidewalk, waving her thanks, stumbling on my large feet.
First things first, I am shorter by at least three inches, and my pant legs whisper against the pavement, but worst of all balance. I am an athletic man and in good shape, but without feet I'm a wreck. People cross to the other side of the street when they see me coming, and a few youths on their way to school shout, "Drunk!"
I sit on a stoop to rest walking without feet is tiring and a few people walk past. What good would it do to ask for their feet? This game of trading and taking would leave someone, somewhere, without something. Then I stand up and do the only thing possible: I imagine feet. I start to walk again, and the feet flop in the space beneath my legs, slapping against the sidewalk.
After two blocks I walk without a hitch, gliding silently along, with no one the wiser, except I have no shoes. I stop in a small shoe store, and when the clerk asks what size shoes I wear, I do not know. After he measures them 10 D, a size smaller than my old feet; I will have to buy new shoes I look at my new feet. They are arched no more flat feet. My toes, which had been almost as long as fingers, are now short, and the scar which I had since I was seven and I stepped on a rake, is gone. I have new feet.
Just as I am about to turn and head for home, a man rushes up to me. He has no hands. Whether he noticed that I had no feet will it always be that we seek what we need from those who have less, the inescapable logic of "if he has no feet, what use could his hands be?" I can't tell. Sadness overwhelms him as he grips me in his handless arms sobs, then shoves me away and shouts curses in my face. Of course I give him my hands they were ugly, stumpy fingers and oddly lined palms, and I always dreamt of hands worthy of marble or bronze and he leaves happy, grasping himself with utterly foreign hands.
This goes on all morning until a woman comes up to me not making a sound why she wants my head I will never know. She has a beautiful body, long legs, slender fingers, small breasts, and a neck that now ends at my head: bearded, balding, creased with the effort of too much imagination.
I look back at myself, one glimpse before my eyes become hers. What was I thinking? I look like nothing more than a perfect scarecrow. Then I look at her with my new eyes greener than the cold northern ocean and her smile, which never suited me, no matter what mirror caught my reflection, only makes her more beautiful.
Kelly shakes two of the blue pills out of a plastic bottle and swallows them down with a diet coke. In ten minutes she can't see a thing, and something more, she can't remember ever having seen a thing. When someone asks, "Want another soda?" she can remember the acidic tang on her tongue, the give of the slippery wet metal against her fingers, but not the white can, the red letters, or brown liquid. When someone says red, and she tries to think of red, it's the same as blue or green.
The effect doesn't last more than half an hour, one pill or two dozen, the dose doesn't matter. Most people take two the first convenient number after one anything more is considered rude. Some kids take it in school. They sit bolt upright in chairs that may or may not be big enough, sometimes falling over, always dropping things. At work people take it during lunch hour, or on the long train ride home. First timers talk too loud and touch everything they can get their hands on.
Kelly's mother finds the bottle of pills in her daughter's dresser. She's heard about Blind on the radio. While the experts agree that no harmful side effects have been discovered, they also say that the need to take the drug, any drug, must be considered symptomatic of a preexisting condition. "What makes the illicit act so seductive?" "What creates the predisposition towards use or abuse?"
Kelly's mother ties two bandannas together, then ties them around her head, masking her eyes. She sits at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee, the pills on the table. When she gets up to pour herself a second cup, she spills coffee, it runs onto the floor. Her feet slide slightly under her, but she catches her balance, grabbing hold of the counter. She can see through a slight gap at the bottom of the bandannas.
"There they are," Kelly says when she comes home. She picks up the pills and puts them in her pocketbook. Her mother sits on the floor, wavering, her hands reached out in front of her, palms down, pressed flat to the floor, the bandannas off.
"Why do you take them?" she asks.
"Wendy gave them to me. Mom, did you take some?"
Her mother looks up in the direction of her voice, which is on the opposite side of the room, where the cabinets meet, a spot that swallows all the sound in the room.
"I wanted to know what it was like," she says. "I couldn't shut my eyes tight enough."
Satan came and whispered in his ear, "If you like, I will restore the path left by your feet, so you can find your way back home and leave the desert and this storm."
Jesus shook his head a gesture the devil neither saw nor heard, but a gesture of silence, and so the devil knew it had been made. "Then perhaps," Satan said, louder now because the wind had grown stronger, threatening to carry his voice away like a handful of sand, "If you wish, I will open a door in the storm, so that you can see more clearly the way ahead."
Again, the devil discerned no response.
"Then, damn you," Satan shouted, afraid that Jesus could no longer hear him above the roar of the storm, "Let me take you out of this storm, because if we don't leave now, we will be buried under a world of sand."
And this time, even though Satan could see and hear nothing but the storm, he reached for Jesus, ready to whisk him out of the desert and bear him away to a safer place. When he closed his arms there was nothing.
"I have won," the devil thought as he flew away alone. Once out of the storm he stopped by the side of a mountain and understood that without an adversary he had lost, and there, next to the mountain, he turned into a pillar of basalt so long that it ran like a rod through both ends of the earth.
Jesus stood in the desert between the devil and the storm, between where he had been and where he was going, and as he listened to the devil's temptations he felt himself carried away piece by piece by the storm, replaced by wind and sand. And he became, as Satan spoke, a man of sand, a man of wind, and finally a man of storm.
Calm returned to the desert. Jesus regathered himself and headed in the direction of a mountain he could barely see in the distance. As he walked over the dunes he thought, "Whatever happens next begins there."
They sit and stare at each other, stare at the food, stare, until a dull ache starts at the bottom of their feet, and their hands grow stiff and thin, and their eyes hurt. They sit that way for hours.
At the end of the day, sometimes there is food left covered with ants or other insects, sometimes it has been carried away, sometimes one or both have lost their shoes. A ranger comes by and taps them on the shoulders, the sun is setting, the park is closing. They look up the first time in hours at this stranger, and mouth words over dry tongues, "Why have you waited so long?"
She's right. The Phillies have started the season with one hundred straight losses and the Mummers' Parade is five months away. This summer will never end. Our lives need stirring up. I take the gun from behind the piano as long as it's there, no one will find it and ask, "How many shells do we have?"
"Seven."
"I thought there were only five left after last time."
"I stole two more."
We go up to the roof, prying the last door open with the butt end of the rifle. Janet shoots first. She takes aim and fires. Lights go on everywhere.
"You missed." Not even a crater to show for it.
"It's a big target," she says, "but it's moving fast. She reloads and shoots again. Below us are curses and raised voices. A siren starts in the distance.
"You want to try?" she asks.
I'm happy to watch. "No, you go ahead."
Janet fires a few more times. All misses. The siren arrives with the squeal of tires.
"Alright, that's enough "
We can't see the face the red and blue lights flashing, white light beaming make sure of that but we know the voice. It's my brother. Janet knows we have one chance, and he tosses the rifle to me. "There's one left. Take it Denise."
I aim quick. There isn't much time. As long as the other cops don't arrive, my brother won't do a thing, after all he was the one who taught me to shoot. I squeeze off a shot. The gun jerk snaps back and bruises my shoulder. We wait.
Janet says, "I think you did it."
I shake my head.
And then the moon drops back to the horizon in the East. "Yeah!" some kid yells down the street. From somewhere else: "Goddamn kids." I look down and wave at my brother, then run inside.
"Now you've done it," my mother says when we get in. "You could ruin everything for your brother. You know how hard he worked for that job." I hold the rifle by my side, its barrel still hot. "Put that away, for Chrissakes." The gun goes back behind the piano.
"You know," my brother says later that night he stops in my room and turns on the light "You're going to have to go get it."
"I know."
"It will take a while. It won't be easy."
"I know," I say, keeping the sheets pulled over me, my back to him. He can't see me.
He switches the lights off, but he doesn't leave, he just stands there in the dark. I can hear him breath. It seems like hours.
"That was some shooting," he says, "and tell Janet she's aiming late."
"Okay," I say. "Thanks." I roll over, but he closes the door and I hear him walk down the hall to his room.
There must have been others, because men started complaining about being stalked. City service workers hustled the homeless off the streets, for once without their complaints. Even the crazies knew the coyotes are dangerous. Everyone was afraid.
I come out of my house one the morning and find the remains of a small animal still fresh, steaming in the autumn chill on the front steps; a car couldn't have done a worse job. Quickly I look up and down the street, but nothing is there. No animal. No one sees the coyotes during the day. No one knows where they go.
I leave for work early, and come home late, usually six, sometimes seven days a week. The pay is good, and I can put half of every check away for when I don't work, besides I haven't time to spend what I make. The partners at the firm tell me to "Keep up the good work," and they compliment each other on the wisdom of hiring me in the first place.
When I come home the place is a mess. I have long given up on the sofa and carpets, but sometimes the bed sheets are torn, chair legs have been chewed to splinters, or the refrigerator has been nosed open and I spend an hour cleaning half eaten food from every room. When I come home early to scold it, the coyote seems to sense my arrival, and it exits through a window at the back of the house. Once or twice I hear the click of claws as I come in the front door and it runs across the kitchen's linoleum tile.
Why did I take the wounded coyote in, nurse it back to health and let it live in my house? Now that it's healthy, I never see it. Sometimes, when I have worked several weeks in a row without a break, late at night, I can sense it nearby. The temperature in the room seems to rise, the air grows humid and I can smell the rank scent of its breath. When I return to my office from dinner I notice the faint trace of paw prints pressed into the pile of the rug and the plants by my desk seem bothered.
Still when I leave in the morning I leave a window open, and when I come home and clean up after it, I feel satisfied. I wish that I could see it, but I know that it is close at hand, and for the time being that is enough. There are coyotes in the city. There is a coyote in my home.
At first, who knew? Even one person a woman who kept a dream journal, like a diary of a life secret even to her could only remember parts of it each morning, or as a reflection of her ever changing life, in the context of work, love or car trips. And so when the Midtown Dream Society met (every Thursday at a Vietnamese restaurant on Eleventh), it took months, nearly a year, for the fragments, broken interpretations and unintentional misunderstandings, to come together, but they finally did, like a puzzle missing half its pieces.
A year later the best selling book The Dream and You helped those who couldn't remember the dream sort through the night images. Revisions were made as faces were identified the man behind the department store door is Kenny Jefferson's uncle and odd details were sorted out: the wallpaper pattern, the coffee cup on the red kitchen table, the fluorescent green shoelaces worn by the boy watching the parade.
No one agreed on the meaning of the dream, but its existence was proven by sleep researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who discovered that a random sample of sleepers showed identical EEG patterns when they entered REM sleep. The NIH sent a team to test the water, the air, and anything else they could think of, but the testing was expensive, and since no one could prove that anyone was being hurt by the dream, the tests stopped.
Tourism boomed. People came from all over to have the dream, and, by all accounts, at least half of them did. Those who didn't felt disappointed, but after all how many people remember their dreams every night to begin with?
Many adults who lived in the city and who had once had other dreams, left. They felt invaded, set upon, as if their nights had been stolen away. Even if they didn't normally remember their dreams, even if they had never before put any stock in the poorly edited and illogically constructed movies of their imaginations, they left, afraid of losing something to which they could assign no value at all.
Children who grew up in the city were surprised the first time they left, and had a different dream. Some did not, and they carried the dream with them for the rest of their lives.
Most stayed, however, and the city briefly ruffled, returned to normal. Interest in the dream dwindled, and the dream book and its many revisions found a permanent, if dusty, place on the bookshelf. In the morning people remembered what they wanted, and at night they went to sleep tired.
In the dream I watch a parade of marching bands and muggers play their way down Chestnut Street, past Wanamaker's, across the Ben Franklin Bridge and into the city zoo. The trombone players fend off the muggers with the slides of their horns, but then the bears get in the way. I stop to buy ice cream and feed the seals, who bark, "Chocolate, chocolate" and all I have is vanilla. The band continues down the hallway and into the kitchen where my father pulls up his pants and my mother straightens the wallpaper. The drummers surround the bed, where I have gone to hide, under the sheets with a man, or a woman, one of them is me, and I can't remember the other's name, and the drummers are naked, and I sweat, cut grass sticking to me everywhere, making love to a stranger, all the while thinking, "Do children have this dream too," and the little boy in cut off pants and a torn T shirt asking me whether I'm done, "When is it my turn?"
As they chew at me I think, why couldn't something have taken me whole, all at once? But there are no whales swimming between the buildings, waiting to swallow Jonah. No bengal tigers, orange striped, royal, ready to leap from office doors and dispatch me in one great kill.
No. I'm being eaten by ants. They take one pincer full at a time. There must be millions of them, and as many other kinds of insects under the bench absorbing the flow of blood. I look up and down the street, hoping no one has noticed. Who but a fool would be eaten by ants?
I feel a tap on my shoulder. "Aren't you?" she asks, "I've been dying to meet you." She's beautiful, of course she's beautiful I'm being eaten by ants. She tells me how much she has looked forward to meeting me. "Why thank you," I say. Please don't notice, please don't notice, please go away.
Then a man in a suit. "There you are, if you could just sign here the grant money will be wired to your account." My account? Grant money? I'm afraid to sign. Do I still have hands? I would look, but what would I see? Ants, ants, everywhere ants.
At first there is just the white line, like a boundary at the edge of office buildings or the city zoo. And people know about Walter: newspaper articles and the memory of a job; someone had to be responsible for all that paint. Then come others like Mattie, a frightening woman who stands 6'4" and weighs 250 pounds and is homeless (who can imagine?) painting the city with an array of colors. The lines down the Ben Franklin Parkway change weekly, daily.
None of this bothers Walter the work, the work but the city's oldest residents who remember a time without lines and the youngest who think Walter's a freak and dangerous (children as old as 18 report the intrusion of the man with the white paint into their nightmares) form a temporary league against the painters. The old ones say, "Damn them. Ban them." The young ones say, "Burn them."
Walter wakes up, bent over, on all fours. When at work, it is a dream, and I don't know where I am, or where I have been, but there is paint all over his hands and they are white. The line comes from around a corner, and the boys follow it until they find him. They carry lights no, torches blue with fire. Someone carries a can.
Look for someplace to hide, stand behind the cart, rummage through for something to throw. Newspaper clippings flutter in the air. They don't go far. What else can I throw? Look, but don't get paint on everything the paint white on my hands. They are on top of you. Grab one of the torches. The fire lights the paint, and the paint ignites, flames dart from my fingers it's almost beautiful, if only there wasn't the pain. There is nothing to put this out.
Someone splashes you into blue flame, and from my eyes alight, without lashes everything is on fire. From around the corner come some brighter than others, one tall, still a woman. They track footprints of fire until they drop. We are all on fire! In the cart the plastic shrinks from my heat, glass breaks, and the everything melts. I hear their voices no longer sighted "Oh my god. Look at him go."
It goes off before I fall asleep. I turn it off and sleep.
The phone on the bedside table rings. It's dark out.
"Get up!"
I mumble into the phone. I am still tired. I am not ready to get up.
"No! you must get up now. There have been complaints. You are sleeping too long. Everyone is waiting. Get up!"
I put the phone down, letting the buzz of voice fill the space under the bed. I try to remember the name of the hotel, so I do not make the same mistake again, but I can't even remember the name of the city in which I have stopped, and under the white ceiling of the hotel room I fall back to sleep.
A loud banging on the door wakes me. I wrap the thin hotel blanket around my shoulders and swing open the heavy grey metal door. The night manager, the one who gave me the room, and several other men stand in the dark hallway outside the door. Deep rings sag under their eyes, wrinkles bend the fabric of their suits.
"You must get up!" the manager implores. "These men are waiting."
"Damn right!" a heavy man shouts. He wears what had been, not so very long ago, a handsome blue suit. "Nothing is happening, and it's all your fault. You can't sleep forever! We've got things to do!"
The other men gather behind him, showing their support. They all look too tired to speak for themselves. The hotel manager on one side, the businessmen on the other.
"Bother someone else's dreams!" I try to shout, but all I do is yawn loudly. Then I close the door and chain it shut, and take sheets and pillows from the bed, and make a small nest in the bathtub. I close the bathroom door and turn on the ventilation fan to drown out the noise of the pounding and shouting, and fall asleep between the pink tiles and mirror of the hotel bath.
When I finally wake, I am stiff, but rested. I brush my teeth and wash my face, and walk into the room to change. The manager sits in a folding chair. Firemen, thick booted and heavy coated sit in the two chairs in the room, their heads back, dreadfully awake. A policeman sits on the floor eyeing the shine of his shoes. Men and women near him, almost asleep, curl up together in the unmistakable fashion of strangers. The blue suited businessman lies alone on the bare bed, his head propped up on a briefcase pillow.
"Are you up?" asks the manager.
I raise my arms in demonstration of the obvious.
"Thank God," mutters the businessman, and he leads the others out of the room, past the door propped up against the wall separated from its hinges and into the slowly lightening hallway. Outside I hear the sounds of engines starting, and sirens whirring to life.
The sun rises while I change my clothes and repack my suitcase. The maid waves to me on my way out. She looks rested too. In the car I open the road atlas and check my itinerary. For each city circled in red there are pages of names. Perhaps I will finish today.
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