Dreams Underfoot

by Charles de Lint

  You knew there’d be an “except,” didn’t you, or else why would I be writing this down?

  It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. I’m all for creative expression, but my medium’s music. I’m not an artist like Jilly, or a writer like Christy. But the kinds of things that have been happening to me can’t really be expressed in a fiddle tune—no, that’s not entirely true. I can express them, but the medium is such that I can’t be assured that, when I’m playing, listeners hear what I mean them to hear.

  That’s how it works with instrumental music, and it’s probably why the best of it is so enduring: the listener takes away whatever he or she wants from it. Say the composer was trying to tell us about the aftermath of some great battle. When we hear it, the music might speak to us of a parent we’ve lost, a friend’s struggle with some debilitating disease, a doe standing at the edge of a forest at twilight, or any of a thousand other unrelated things.

  Realistic art, like Jilly does—or at least it’s realistically rendered—her subject matter’s right out of some urban update of those Andrew Lang colour-coded fairy tale books that most of us read when we were kids. And the collections of urban legends and stories that my brother writes don’t have that same leeway. What goes down on the canvas or on paper, no matter how skillfully drawn or written, doesn’t allow for much in the way of an alternate interpretation.

  So that’s why I’m writing this down: to lay it all out in black and white where maybe I can understand it myself.

  Every afternoon for the past week, after busking up by the William Street Mall for the lunchtime crowds, I’ve packed up my fiddle case and headed across town to come here to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Once I get here, I sit on the steps about halfway up, take out this notebook, and try to write. The trouble is, I haven’t been able to figure out where to start.

  I like it out here on the steps. I’ve played inside the cathedral just once, for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was okay, but I remember coming in on my own to test the acoustics an hour or so before the rehearsal; ever since then I’ve been a little unsure about how Jilly views this kind of place. My fiddling didn’t feel enclosed. Instead the walls seemed to open the music right up; the cathedral gave the reel I was playing a stately grace—a spiritual grace—that it had never held for me before. I suppose it had more to do with the architect’s design than the presence of God; still, I could’ve played there all night, only—

  But I’m rambling again. I’ve filled a couple of pages now, which is more than I’ve done all week, except after just rereading what I’ve written so far, I don’t know if any of it’s relevant.

  Maybe I should just tell you about Paperjack. I don’t know that it starts with him, exactly, but it’s probably as good a place as any to begin.

  * * *

  It was a glorious day, made all the more precious because the weather had been so weird that spring. One day I’d be bundled up in a jacket and scarf, cloth cap on my head, with fingerless gloves to keep the cold from my finger joints while I was out busking, the next I’d be in a T-shirt, breaking into a sweat just thinking about standing out on some street corner to play tunes.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was halfway home from noon to the western horizon, and Jilly and I were just soaking up the rays on the steps of St. Paul’s. I was slouched on the steps, leaning on one elbow, my fiddle case propped up beside me, wishing I had worn shorts because my jeans felt like leaden weights on my legs. Sitting next to me, perched like a cat about to pounce on something terribly interesting that only it could see, Jilly was her usual scruffy self. There were flecks of paint on her loose cotton pants and her short-sleeved blouse, more under her fingernails, and still more half-lost in the tangles of her hair. She turned to look at me, her face miraculously untouched by her morning’s work, and gave me one of her patented smiles.

  “Did you ever wonder where he’s from?” Jilly asked.

  That was one of her favourite phrases: “Did you ever wonder…?” It could take you from considering if and when fish slept, or why people look up when they’re thinking, to more arcane questions about ghosts, little people living behind wallboards, and the like. And she loved guessing about people’s origins. Sometimes when I was busking she’d tag along and sit by the wall at my back, sketching the people who were listening to me play. Invariably, she’d come up behind me and whisper in my ear—usually when I was in the middle of a complicated tune that needed all my attention—something along the lines of, “The guy in the polyester suit? Ten to one he rides a big chopper on the weekends, complete with a jean vest.”

  So I was used to it.

  Today she wasn’t picking out some nameless stranger from a crowd. Instead her attention was on Paperjack, sitting on the steps far enough below us that he couldn’t hear what we were saying.

  Paperjack had the darkest skin I’d ever seen on a man—an amazing ebony that seemed to swallow light. He was in his mid-sixties, I’d guess, short corkscrew hair all gone grey. The dark suits he wore were threadbare and out of fashion, but always clean. Under his suit jacket he usually wore a white T-shirt that flashed so brightly in the sun it almost hurt your eyes, just like his teeth did when he gave you that lopsided grin of his.

  Nobody knew his real name and he never talked. I don’t know if he was mute, or if he just didn’t have anything to say, but the only sounds I ever heard him make were a chuckle or a laugh. People started calling him Paperjack because he worked an origami gig on the streets.

  He was a master at folding paper into shapes. He kept a bag of different coloured paper by his knee; people would pick their colour and then tell him what they wanted, and he’d make it—no cuts, just folding. And he could make anything. From simple flower and animal shapes to things so complex it didn’t seem possible for him to capture their essence in a piece of folded paper. So far as I know, he’d never disappointed a single customer.

  I’d seen some of the old men come down from Little Japan to sit and watch him work. They called him sensei, a term of respect that they didn’t exactly bandy around.

  But origami was only the most visible side of his gig. He also told fortunes. He had one of those little folded paper Chinese fortune-telling devices that we all played around with when we were kids. You know the kind: you fold the corners in to the center, turn it over, then fold them in again. When you’re done you can stick your index fingers and thumbs inside the little flaps of the folds and open it up so that it looks like a flower. You move your fingers back and forth, and it looks like the flower’s talking to you.

  Paperjack’s fortune-teller was just like that. It had the names of four colours on the outside and eight different numbers inside. First you picked a colour—say, red. The fortune-teller would seem to talk soundlessly as his fingers moved back and forth to spell the word, R-E-D, opening and closing until there’d be a choice from four of the numbers. Then you picked a number, and he counted it out until the fortune-teller was open with another or the same set of numbers revealed. Under the number you chose at that point was your fortune.

  Paperjack didn’t read it out—he just showed it to the person, then stowed the fortune-teller back into the inside pocket of his jacket from which he’d taken it earlier. I’d never had my fortune read by him, but Jilly’d had it done a whole bunch of times.

  “The fortunes are always different,” she told me once. “I sat behind him while he was doing one for a customer, and I read the fortune over her shoulder. When she’d paid him, I got mine done. I picked the same number she did, but when he opened it, there was a different fortune there.”

  “He’s just got more than one of those paper fortune-tellers in his pocket,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “He never put it away,” she said. “It was the same fortune-teller, the same number, but some time between the woman’s reading and mine, it changed.”

  I knew there could be any number of logical explanations for how that could have happened, starting with
plain sleight of hand, but I’d long ago given up continuing arguments with Jilly about that kind of thing.

  Was Paperjack magic? Not in my book, at least not the way Jilly thought he was. But there was a magic about him, the magic that always hangs like an aura about someone who’s as good an artist as Paperjack was. He also made me feel good. Around him, an overcast day didn’t seem half so gloomy, and when the sun shone, it always seemed brighter. He just exuded a glad feeling that you couldn’t help but pick up on. So in that sense, he was magic.

  I also wondered where he’d come from, how he’d ended up on the street. Street people seemed pretty well evenly divided between those who had no choice but to live there, and those who chose to be there like I do. But even then there’s a difference. I had a little apartment not far from Jilly’s. I could get a job when I wanted one, usually in the winter when the busking was bad and club gigs were slow.

  Not many street people have that choice, but I thought that Paperjack might be one of them.

  “He’s such an interesting guy,” Jilly was saying.

  I nodded.

  “But I’m worried about him,” she went on.

  “How so?”

  Jilly’s brow wrinkled with a frown. “He seems to be getting thinner, and he doesn’t get around as easily as he once did. You weren’t here when he showed up today—he walked as though gravity had suddenly doubled its pull on him.”

  “Well, he’s an old guy, Jilly.”

  “That’s exactly it. Where does he live? Does he have someone to look out for him?”

  That was Jilly for you. She had a heart as big as the city, with room in it for everyone and everything. She was forever taking in strays, be they dogs, cats, or people.

  I’d been one of her strays once, but that was a long time ago.

  “Maybe we should ask him,” I said.

  “He can’t talk,” she reminded me.

  “Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk.”

  Jilly shook her head. “I’ve tried a zillion times. He hears what I’m saying, and somehow he manages to answer with a smile or a raised eyebrow or whatever, but he doesn’t talk.” The wrinkles in her brow deepened until I wanted to reach over and smooth them out. “These days,” she added, “he seems haunted to me.”

  If someone else had said that, I’d know that they meant Paperjack had something troubling him. With Jilly, though, you often had to take that kind of a statement literally.

  “Are we talking ghosts now?” I asked.

  I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice, but from the flash of disappointment that touched Jilly’s eyes, I knew I hadn’t done a very good job.

  “Oh, Geordie,” she said. “Why can’t you just believe what happened to us?”

  Here’s one version of what happened that night, some three years ago now, to which Jilly was referring:

  We saw a ghost. He stepped out of the past on a rainy night and stole away the woman I loved. At least that’s the way I remember it. Except for Jilly, no one else does.

  Her name was Samantha Rey. She worked at Gypsy Records and had an apartment on Stanton Street, except after that night when the past came up to steal her away, no one at Gypsy Records remembered her anymore, and the landlady of her Stanton Street apartment had never heard of her. The ghost hadn’t just stolen her; he’d stolen all memory of her existence.

  All I had left of her was an old photograph that Jilly and I found in Moore’s Antiques a little while later. It had a photographer’s date on the back: 1912. It was Sam in the picture, Sam with a group of strangers standing on a front porch of some old house.

  I remembered her, but she’d never existed. That’s what I had to believe. Because nothing else made sense. I had all these feelings and memories of her, but they had to be what my brother called jamais vu. That’s like déjà vu, except instead of having felt you’d been somewhere before, you remembered something that had never happened. I’d never heard the expression before—he got it from a David Morrell thriller that he’d been reading—but it had an authentic ring about it.

  Jamais vu.

  But Jilly remembered Sam, too.

  Thinking about Sam always brought a tightness to my chest; it made my head hurt trying to figure it out. I felt as if I were betraying Sam by trying to convince myself she’d never existed, but I had to convince myself of that, because believing that it really had happened was even scarier. How do you live in a world where anything can happen?

  “You’ll get used to it,” Jilly told me. “There’s a whole invisible world out there, lying side by side with our own. Once you get a peek into it, the window doesn’t close. You’re always going to be aware of it.”

  “I don’t want to be,” I said.

  She just shook her head. “You don’t really get a lot of choice in this kind of thing,” she said.

  You always have a choice—that’s what I believe. And I chose to not get caught up in some invisible world of ghosts and spirits and who knew what. But I still dreamed of Sam, as if she’d been real. I still kept her photo in my fiddle case.

  I could feel its presence right now, glimmering through the leather, whispering to me.

  Remember me…

  I couldn’t forget. Jamais vu. But I wanted to.

  Jilly scooted a little closer to me on the step and laid a hand on my knee.

  “Denying it just makes things worse,” she said, continuing an old ongoing argument that I don’t think we’ll ever resolve. “Until you accept that it really happened, the memory’s always going to haunt you, undermining everything that makes you who you are.”

  “Haunted like Paperjack?” I asked, trying to turn the subject back to more comfortable ground, or at least focus the attention on someone other than myself. “Is that what you think’s happened to him?”

  Jilly sighed. “Memories can be just like ghosts,” she said.

  Didn’t I know it.

  I looked down the steps to where Paperjack had been sitting, but he was gone, and now a couple of pigeons were waddling across the steps. The wind blew a candy bar wrapper up against a riser. I put my hand on Jilly’s and gave it a squeeze, then picked up my fiddle case and stood up.

  “I’ve got to go,” I told her.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you…”

  “I know. I’ve just got to walk for a bit and think.”

  She didn’t offer to accompany me and for that I was glad. Jilly was my best friend, but right then I had to be alone.

  * * *

  I went rambling; just let my feet just take me wherever they felt like going, south from St. Paul’s and down Battersfield Road, all the way to the Pier, my fiddle case banging against my thigh as I walked. When I got to the waterfront, I leaned up against the fieldstone wall where the Pier met the beach. I stood and watched the fishermen work their lines farther out over the lake. Fat gulls wheeled above, crying like they hadn’t been fed in months. Down on the sand, a couple was having an animated discussion, but they were too far away for me to make out what they were arguing about. They looked like figures in some old silent movie; caricatures, their movements larger than life, rather than real people.

  I don’t know what I was thinking about; I was trying not to think, I suppose, but I wasn’t having much luck. The arguing couple depressed me.

  Hang on to what you’ve got, I wanted to tell them, but it wasn’t any of my business. I thought about heading across town to Fitzhenry Park—there was a part of it called the Silenus Gardens filled with stone benches and statuary where I always felt better—when I spied a familiar figure sitting down by the river, west of the Pier: Paperjack.

  The Kickaha River was named after that branch of the Algonquin language family that originally lived in this area before the white men came and took it all away from them. All the tribe had left now was a reservation north of the city and this river named after them. The Kickaha had its source north of the reserve and cut through the city on its way to the lake. In this part of town it separated
the business section and commercial waterfront from the Beaches where the money lives.

  There are houses in the Beaches that make the old stately homes in Lower Crowsea look like tenements, but you can’t see them from here. Looking west, all you see is green—first the City Commission’s manicured lawns on either side of the river, then the treed hills that hide the homes of the wealthy from the rest of us plebes. On the waterfront itself are a couple of country clubs and the private beaches of the really wealthy whose estates back right on the water.

  Paperjack was sitting on this side of the river, doing I don’t know what. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell. He seemed to be just sitting there on the riverbank, watching the slow water move past. I watched him for a while, then hoisted my fiddle case from where I’d leaned it against the wall and hopped down to the sand. When I got to where he was sitting, he looked up and gave me an easy, welcoming grin, as if he’d been expecting me to show up.

  Running into him like this was fate, Jilly would say. I’ll stick to calling it coincidence. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big.

  Paperjack made a motion with his hand, indicating I should pull up a bit of lawn beside him. I hesitated for a moment—right up until then, I realized later, everything could have worked out differently. But I made the choice and sat beside him.

  There was a low wall right down by the water with rushes and lilies growing up against it. Among the lilies was a family of ducks—mother and a paddling of ducklings—and that was what Paperjack had been watching. He had an empty plastic bag in his hand, and the breadcrumbs that remained in the bottom told me he’d been feeding the ducks until his bread ran out.

  He made another motion with his hand, touching the bag, then pointing to the ducks.

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t planning on coming down,” I said, “so I didn’t bring anything to feed them.”

  He nodded, understanding.

  We sat quietly a while longer. The ducks finally gave up on us and paddled farther up the river, looking for better pickings. Once they were gone, Paperjack turned to me again. He laid his hand against his heart, then raised his eyebrows questioningly.