The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  Then she said, sounding nervous for the first time, “Do you remember your dreams?”

  That was the last important thing before he was kissing her. He stroked her cheek, her skin soft as powder, so wonderful it was bizarre. The whole world had gone to his head, with its purple-tinted grass and its black hair, in both of which the wind moved gracefully and smelled of sky. And when they lay down together, their bodies fit in an uncanny way, interlocked; however they moved, they fit together again, plugged in, and electricity flowed between them. Then he stayed awake for hours while Kate slept easily, naturally, in his arms. For the rest of his life, he would remember it: that intoxicated moment not only of first love but of universal hope, that summer when Chen swept the presidential primaries on a wave of utopian fervor, when carbon emissions had radically declined and the Jerusalem peace accords had been signed and the United Nations surpassed its millennium goals for eradicating poverty, when it felt as if everything might work out. He could conjure it all by harking back to that inflatable mattress with no sheets, the endangered grasses fluttering and springing above their heads, the stars like dusty candy. Without sheets, the wind blew directly on his body, on his bare arms. Far below was the sound of traffic, as quiet as a thought. Occasionally a siren rose, like a frail red line that scrolled across the sky and faded again. Kate muttered and kicked in her sleep. Every time, it was adorable and he was amazed. He fell asleep at dawn, still plotting how he would make her stay.

  2

  In the dream, Kate was asleep.

  She was sleeping but not where she’d fallen asleep. It was a place distinct from any place she’d ever been, although in the dream she knew it well. She knew the bed, the house, the great city. She didn’t have to wonder where they were. But it wasn’t Kate who knew them. It was the person she was sleeping as.

  Often, she dreamed in the dream—or the person she was sleeping as dreamed. These dreams were mostly of horses she was riding, which reared and threatened to throw her off or flew uncannily into the sky; or else she was playing a stringed instrument whose strings broke, lashing her fingers. Once she was conscious that a man in her dream-within-a-dream was her father, but his face remained vague; of course, she was supposed to already know what her father looked like. But since it wasn’t Kate’s father, she didn’t. She never learned what he looked like; she only knew, vaguely and pitifully, that he was dead.

  Other times she drifted toward waking as that other person in that other place, and was aware of lying nude under heavy layers, the air comfortably chilly on her face. Something itched. There was a closeness—the bed was enclosed somehow—and a variegated landscape of smells. Somewhere nearby, the alto hoots of doves made her idly, desultorily dream of pie. Kate would try to wake up further, but the person was tired, bone tired as if from manual labor, exhausted as Kate never was. So she always blissfully, helplessly, fell back into deeper sleep.

  In the dream, Kate was magically happy. The person had fears and resentments and sorrows, but even these were a wonderland of sensation, like a series of beautiful colors. When Kate woke up, there would be a few minutes when she felt that way about real life.

  Kate had started having the dream when she was a child. At first it only came a few times a year, but now she had it most nights. On mornings after she’d had the dream, she felt a particular, sublime importance—as if the dream were a secret mission, on which depended the fate of millions; as if it held the key to the salvation of the world.

  3

  Ben breakfasted with Sabine. Kate had vanished while he was asleep, although she was expected back any minute since the dog had likewise vanished, and presumably Kate was out walking, not stealing, the dog. The breakfast was made by a servant, a middle-aged woman with jet-black hair, to whom Sabine spoke companionably in French. When Ben listened in, the conversation was about the extinction of the [word he didn’t understand] in the Mediterranean, which was being killed by pollution. The pollution caused algal blooms that suffocated the [word he didn’t understand]. Agricultural runoff had been cut back, but it was too late for the [word he didn’t understand]. It’s horrible, the servant said, and Sabine repeated in the same aggrieved tone, It’s horrible. Then Sabine said that her uncle—here she gestured vaguely around at the uncle’s apartment—didn’t believe in pollution. He thinks all chemicals are the same, said Sabine. He says the air is made of chemicals.

  At this point, Sabine and the servant noticed Ben listening and smiled at him. He said in his careful French, We are all made of chemicals too.

  They laughed in a friendly way, as if they wanted to make him feel good. Then the servant brought him a plate of scrambled eggs, said, “Bon appétit,” and left.

  Sabine said to Ben, “Kate shouldn’t be long.” Then she opened a New York Times and started to read. It was startling, both for its rudeness and because Ben hadn’t noticed the Times there. Also the naked feeling of being left to eat without reading material while someone else was reading. It made him feel leaden and ridiculous, while at the same time he accepted it as part of this new world, the world with Kate. There were secrets to which he would not be privy. He would have to feel stupid because he cared too much.

  Then just as suddenly, Sabine put down the Times. “Fuck. I just realized Kate could be a while.”

  Ben made an intelligent face, chewing eggs.

  “I mean, I’m not throwing you out,” said Sabine. “You can wait. But I’m thinking she took the dog to Nick’s.”

  Ben swallowed awkwardly. “Nick’s?”

  “Nick’s her ex. She didn’t say about Nick?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, don’t worry. It’s over with Nick. Nick left Kate for a mail-order bride. Somebody else’s mail-order bride. I think she’s Thai. But Kate brings the dog there because Nick’s depressed and she thinks it cheers him up.”

  Ben smiled with forced casualness. “Nick stole someone’s mail-order bride?”

  “No, she’d already left her husband. She was a runaway mail-order bride. I know it sounds weird, but it’s not that weird. We’ve got a lot of mail-order brides around, because a friend of ours started an organization to rescue them. I’ve got three living here now.”

  At that moment, a toilet flushed upstairs. Ben immediately pictured a mail-order bride, wan and homesick, turning away from a glug-ging toilet and straightening her traditional Thai garb.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s got to be weird.”

  “Not really.” Sabine shrugged. “Everyone stays here. Right now, I’ve got a congresswoman from Maine, plus two environmental activists, plus the mail-order brides and Martin and a couple other people. I’m the only person in left-wing politics who has spare rooms. I’m like the red hotel.”

  “You’re in politics?”

  Sabine made a stupid-questions face, then suddenly got up and went to the sink. She fetched a large metal pitcher from a shelf and started to fill it at the faucet. For a moment, Ben imagined she was preparing to pour cold water over his head. But when it was full, she carried the pitcher, ponderous and sloshing, to the windowsill, where Ben now noticed a gathering of elegant plants. They appeared to wait expectantly, bracing themselves to receive the water.

  Sabine started to pour and said, “I shouldn’t have mentioned Nick. That sucks. I can’t stand people who gossip, but then I go and do it myself.”

  “It wasn’t gossiping, exactly.”

  “Dude, please. It was gossiping. I mean, I’m not out to poison your mind against Kate. But I have to start in about Nick or some fucking thing. It’s like a compulsion.”

  Then, as if to prove her point, she launched into another story about Kate, often forgetting to water the plants and simply standing there talking with the heavy pitcher trembling in her small hands. The story began with Sabine meeting Kate when they were twelve, at the American International School in Budapest. At that time, the thing about Kate was that she believed, or said she believed, she was from another world. Kate fashioned odd headdres
ses from towels and said it was what the women wore there; she once made a castle from bread that was supposed to be like the castles in her world. She called it Albion. The Albionites sang beautifully; they liked to sing in four-part harmony, standing in courtyards full of otherworldly peacocks and flowering trees. Kate was a sleeping princess there, like Sleeping Beauty, only more serious. She’d been asleep for years and therefore knew little of her Albion life, except that in Albion she had a horse (as Sabine did in earthly Budapest).

  Kate’s fear was that our world was actually just Kate’s dream, an enchanted dream she was having in Albion. This was what Sabine and Kate used to talk about in their sleepovers at the ambassador’s residence (Sabine’s father had been the American ambassador to Hungary). They lay in the dark and scintillatingly pondered: If Kate woke up in Albion, would our world disappear, and everyone in it? Was it Kate’s fault when Earth people died, because she’d dreamed their dying? Could Kate direct her dream and thereby bring about heaven on Earth?

  Soon other girls (the popular girls at school) were inducted into the secret, and they would gather conspiratorially to discuss their in-tuitions about the crisis, to draw pictures of Albion, and to speculate about whether they might also have sleeping Albion counterparts. On this point Kate was generous; when someone claimed to have had an Albion dream, Kate never pooh-poohed but listened intently. She wanted to believe. Still, Kate was the official dreamer, and they would lock themselves in Sabine’s bedroom, sit in a circle around Kate, and chant “inspirations” to help her dream a better world. Kate lay in the middle with her palms pressed to her eyes. She wished so hard her toes curled. A typical inspiration was: Dream no cancer, dream no cancer—Albion! There were other chants to end poverty, infidelity, and hurricanes. At the time, they found proof of their benevolent influence in the nightly news, though in retrospect, the news had mostly been terrible.

  Then a difficult girl (the granddaughter of a Hungarian movie star) rebelled and said Kate was lying. She pointed out that “Albion” was just an old word for England; Kate hadn’t even made up a new name! That girl was exiled from the group, but told the story of Albion far and wide. Then other kids (the unpopular kids at school) began to snigger—this was what Sabine remembered most: being laughed at, the topsy-turvy of popular/unpopular, and how it made her suddenly realize she’d never believed in Albion. It was just a game, a game of make-believe, like little kids played.

  Next came an ugly scene where Sabine and the popular girls cornered Kate and hounded her to admit she’d been lying. When she resisted, they called her names and one of them began to tear up a sandwich she was eating and threw the fragments into Kate’s long hair. Kate wept but refused to change her story. The panic mounted; it made the girls vicious. One girl threatened Kate with a lit cigarette. Another told Kate she was going to call an ambulance to take Kate to a mental hospital, where Kate would be kept tied to a bed. Sabine herself walked out instead of defending Kate—ran out, although they were at her house. She ran to her boyfriend’s place and got drunk there for the first time, though that was another story.

  Sabine had never really believed in Albion. Still, she felt the loss of it no less. It was as if they’d almost made it real; they had almost been the gods who determined history. Now the world was magicless, a dull, inanimate thing, and they were insignificant children.

  Here Sabine stopped. By now, she’d set the watering pitcher down and was sitting on the windowsill. She said, “That’s Kate.”

  “Okay,” Ben said (and sickeningly wanted to protect Kate, tearstained preteen Kate; the story had made it ten times worse), “but what do you mean by that? What’s Kate?”

  Sabine paused, possibly biting her tongue. There was a gathering din upstairs, of footsteps and slamming doors and voices. A shower was running somewhere and a hair dryer somewhere else. Ben was trying to guess Sabine’s point, but was distracted by images of mail-order brides in showers, of congresswomen drying their hair.

  At last Sabine said slowly, deliberately, “I guess I’m saying Kate doesn’t live in the real world, and ultimately people can’t deal with it and then they end up hurting her? Like, Nick was crazy in love with Kate, but then he couldn’t take it and he left her for Phuong. Now Nick’s depressed, and Kate goes over there and comforts him like she ruined his life. And okay, she kind of ruined his life. Nick’s fucked up. But.”

  “So you’re warning me away from her?” Ben said, giving it an in-credulous note.

  “No,” Sabine said. “I didn’t mean to. Is that what I’m doing? Jesus Christ, I’m such an asshole.”

  That was the last real thing Sabine said, because the door banged open and the kitchen started to precipitously fill with houseguests. There was the garden designer from last night, the congresswoman from Maine, a Nigerian mail-order bride who was missing a tooth in front, and a diminutive, hirsute guy who looked like a little glum hamster and was never identified. Then more people. Most wore identical cashmere bathrobes, which Sabine presumably kept for guests, and they exuded a frowsy bonheur; they were pleased to be here. When the table filled, people sat on the floor or perched on the kitchen counters. The servant reappeared, a little flustered, and the egg routine began again, while the houseguests made a lot of noise and laughed. They argued about labor policy and baseball and whether the Antarctic was going to melt. They quoted nineteenth-century economists and added, “Which is horseshit straight from the horse.” They told stories about President Chen’s transition team and the fight for the universal basic income and how one staffer had threatened not just to quit, but to burn himself alive on the convention floor if the UBI wasn’t in the party platform. One environmental activist demonstrated how she’d set a right-wing candidate’s stump speech to the tune of “O Sole Mio,” in a harsh histrionic soprano, and the Nigerian mail-order bride laughed so hard she snorted egg out of her nose. Meanwhile, others had side conversations about another right-winger’s mistress’s chlamydia; tickled each other and shouted “Revisionist!”; got up to interfere with the cooking, were threatened with a spatula, and slunk back to the table with comically chastened expressions.

  And Ben was taken, buoyed, caught in a widening circle of infatuation. These were Kate’s people, better than people, just as Kate was better than women. Even when they discussed the congresswoman’s haircut, the haircut chitchat was markedly superior: they made botanical allusions, called the haircut anti-intellectual, and laughed very happily, enjoying each other. The glum hamster summed up, “It’s a bit shag carpet,” and the congresswoman said, “Well, let’s be honest, my base is a bit shag carpet.” Ben laughed and ate cold toast and imagined himself in this jovial world—with Kate—and his suspicion that she was his answer, his escape, became a conviction.

  Then more footsteps came from the hallway, and Ben was caught grinning as he looked back at the door, expecting more mail-order brides. But when the door opened, it was Kate.

  She was still in her rumpled dress from last night, but because she’d come from outside and was entering a room of bathrobes and bare feet, she seemed very poised and competent, as if she’d stolen a march on everyone and taken possession of the day. The dog was trotting alongside, looking up to her face with a worshipful air. Her hair was wild and windblown. She was beautiful as she hadn’t quite been last night, conventionally beautiful in a way that made Ben feel wrong-footed.

  She saw him there and balked. There was a pause of social embarrassment. It occurred to him for the first time that Kate had expected him to leave. She’d ditched him. Her vanishing was a hint, not even a particularly subtle hint. Sabine must have known, and that was why she’d been trying to warn Ben off. He was an idiot.

  There was a sickening moment of exile. He wanted to catch all the things, to catch the morning and the careless laughter, Kate’s windblown hair that had been in his hands, that belonged to him, the halcyon night where he had belonged. Even the dog, who was now looking openmouthed at Ben, as if trying to place him.

 
; Then Kate said, “Ben! Are you free today?”

  For a moment, he was still preparing his exit. Then the penny dropped, clangorously, thrillingly. Ben stood up from his chair. The room fell silent as Kate came toward him, dropping the dog’s leash on the floor. She put a hand familiarly on his chest and said, “I was thinking we could go to the movies.”

  “Movies,” he said. “Yes, I suddenly really want to do that.”

  “Or we could do pretty much anything else.”

  “Yes, I really want to do that too.”

  Then they felt their audience and looked around at the table of houseguests, prepared to bask in implicit congratulations.

  “Sweet,” said Sabine behind them. “But Kate? You shouldn’t just take my dog.”

  4

  When Kate was in love, when a man was in love with Kate, the dream grew stronger. She was still asleep in the dream. The person she was sleeping as could not wake. But her oneiric world could be intuited; it grew into a city around her bed. There were fields beyond the city, with dream cattle shaking their horns at a dim dream sun; there were sailing ships that rode on a bright dream sea. The dream was strongest of all when Kate’s heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn’t prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.

  So after her first kiss, she dreamed the bed where her other self lay, the musty velvet curtains enclosing it. The night she first had sex with a man, she dreamed a cat that slept beside her, that stretched and poked her ribs with a small, distinct paw. When her first boyfriend cheated on her, she dreamed the bay-leaf scent of Christmas garlands and knew how she’d spent the long day making them; she felt her stiff, chafed hands. By the time Nick left her for Phuong, she anticipated that the dream would compensate his loss, and her sadness was an ecstasy, a guilt, an assignation.