The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  Ágota smiled at her worriedly and said to Ben, “Kitty dreams a great deal. I always say she’s like the little boy lost in a dream. Do you know that story?”

  “Of course he doesn’t know it,” Kate said absently. “No one in America knows it.”

  “I don’t,” Ben said.

  “It’s a story about a boy who takes a wrong turn in a dream,” said Ágota. “He can’t find his way back to his bed, so he travels through many countries and kills a dragon, and he becomes a prince, and he marries a princess. Very normal fairy-tale adventures. And the years pass, and he grows old in the dream, and he dies.

  “Then he wakes up in his bed and he is a child again. But his father, who was very poor before, is a wealthy businessman; his mother, who was dying before, is now very fat and healthy. So we understand, this is because of what he accomplished in his dream. It’s a Hungarian children’s book,” said Ágota. “Our old friend Gabor wrote it.”

  “Gabor really believes in that kind of thing,” Salman said, coming back from the kitchen. “He’s the one who fell in love in a dream.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Ágota said.

  Salman set his coffee down and smiled at Ben. “Gabor left his wife for a woman he met in a dream.”

  “It wasn’t a woman he met in a dream,” said Ágota. “It was his student.”

  “He saw her first in a dream and fell in love,” said Salman. “Then one day she walked into his class.”

  “Bullshit,” said Ágota.

  “Maybe it’s true,” Kate said.

  Ben said, “I’m voting bullshit.”

  Everyone laughed but Kate. Salman said to Ágota, “You think he’s lying? But why would he choose that lie?”

  “I think he’s a man who fell in love with a twenty-year-old girl,” said Ágota. “It’s not a mystery.”

  “That book used to frighten me,” Kate said. “The Boy Who Got Lost in a Dream. It made me think it was going to happen to me.”

  “We know,” said Ágota. “Don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset.” Kate looked to Ben. “Do I seem upset?”

  “You can get upset,” Salman said in a softer, be-fair tone.

  Kate shrugged. “I’m only saying what I felt.”

  “Gabor is a pill addict,” Ágota said. “You aren’t like Gabor. What happens to Gabor won’t happen to you.”

  “What if it’s already happened to me?” said Kate.

  “The man takes handfuls of pills every day.” Ágota held out her cupped hands to show the handfuls.

  Kate said, “He could be a pill addict and have dreams that affect real life. Correlation isn’t causation.”

  “Please, Kitty,” Ágota said. “This is not a realistic problem.”

  Suddenly Kate ducked under the table. She went down on all fours and was crawling around. Her parents frowned, bemused.

  Salman said to Ben, “She doesn’t usually do this. This isn’t part of a family ritual.”

  “Kitty?” said Ágota. “What are you doing?”

  Kate called from under the table, “I’m looking for the sigils me and Petey made. I want to show them to Ben.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Ágota.

  “The sigils!” Kate said. “But I can’t find them. The sigils me and Petey carved on the table legs?”

  “You carved on the table legs?” said Ágota.

  “You know we carved on the table legs. We used to carve things with that cloisonné pocketknife. The knife with the bluebirds on the handle.”

  “We have the knife,” said Ágota. “But if you carved my furniture, I don’t know about it.”

  Kate poked her head up next to Ben’s knee, tousled and smiling. “I can’t find them.”

  “What were they like?” said Ben.

  “My brother, Petey, made a peace sign, and I was trying to carve a hawk, but it came out looking like a seal. We were making believe we were medieval lords. My sigil was a hawk and his was a peace sign.”

  “This never happened,” Salman said smilingly to Ben.

  “I remember the game, but I don’t understand,” said Ágota. “Did you and your brother really carve on the table legs?”

  “Yes, we carved on the table legs,” Kate said. “But it’s gone. There’s nothing there.”

  “Thank God,” said Ágota.

  Kate whispered to Ben: “We really did carve the sigils. It’s making me feel a little crazy.”

  “This never happened,” Salman said.

  On the stairwell as they left, Ben said, “I love your parents.”

  She stopped on the stair below him. “So you’re not going to leave me now?” He laughed and caught her in his arms. They kissed. The stairwell around them smelled of cold dust, and the window there was dirty, so the light looked dirty, but they glowed cleanly like a jewel within that light; it was far and near somehow. As a child, he’d seen the distant lights of towns from his parents’ car at night, and the lights were colored and enchanted, delicious looking like fairy fruit. He’d imagined they were magical cities that could never be reached in his parents’ car. Only Ben could reach them someday, if he were brave enough, if he believed.

  Two weeks later, Ben and Kate moved in together. Everything was good between them for a very long time. It was a wonderful autumn.

  8

  Then the weeks when she couldn’t get back to the dream. She woke up next to Ben and had almost been there. She woke up next to Ben. And again, with the nothing that had happened. With Ben.

  (But once, it seemed she dreamed into a scene by an inn. She watched it darkly from above, like a bat—but at the same time she was Emilia, small below. It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light. The windows of the inn were shuttered, blind. Its eaves noisily streamed. Half a dozen people were mounted on horses and mules in the flooded yard. Others walked around below. Emilia’s horse shifted beneath her, finicky at the shouting voices.

  It was an argument ongoing while her back ached unendurably; her servants yelling and banging the shutters because the innkeeper wouldn’t open for them, afraid they’d brought the plague from London. There was Mary, shrieking as a servant never should, beating on the door with both small fists, swearing that if her mistress died for their strange uncharity, she would burn them all like sticks. Behind her, a manservant—Arthur—smiled in mortification and blinked the rain from his eyes. His hat was shapeless, sodden, a heap of drip.

  Kate was speaking in her sleep. She was commanding and weeping beneath the silencing rain. They left …

  going to, fleeing to—the place name, Horne, repeated in her head until she heard horns. Perhaps the horns were real. Horne, Surrey. Horns in the cold outdoors … hey, ho, the wind and the rain. So cold.)

  (Then a long impression of riding in a rain that darkened the dawning morning, of a clenching that pinched until it flew)

  (if her baby would live)

  (a bed

  and at her ear, Mary’s scolding prayers that Saint Margaret not suffer Emilia to die, as Mary’s good mother had been let to die, with the blood running all about the floor and the dreadful infant come dead and blue)

  and Kate was trying to dream past her black sleep, and almost breaking through to the screams of childbirth that wrung and bled her, that sweated the blankets wet—but she never woke up, but to Ben and nothing. To the penetrating silence of no pain.

  Then in waking life, she was dogged by anomalies, discrepancies, attacks of jamais vu. In every street, there were new stores and restaurants, appearing at a pace that seemed impossible even for New York. She didn’t know most of the songs on the radio. She didn’t know half of the movie stars. She went to get custard apples at the Co-op, and the people there had never heard of custard apples, though Kate had bought them there the week before. Sabine’s friend the congresswoman from Maine, who’d had gray hair all the time Kate had known her, appeared on TV with a stiff blond bob, and when Kate mention
ed it to Sabine, Sabine said, “She always had that weathergirl hair.”

  These were all things Kate could have missed somehow. She’d always been absentminded, unworldly. It would have been just like Kate.

  But she knew. And she tried to tell Ben one night, when she was drunk enough to think he would see what it meant. They were on the subway coming home from a party, tipsy and tired and too happy to read, and Kate told Ben about the dream again. She said she knew it had no impact on reality. She hadn’t really gone to the past—of course. And yet things had changed, just as if it were real, just as if she’d traveled to the sixteenth century and done something there that had altered history.

  Ben said, “I’ve never heard of custard apples, either.”

  “I’ve been thinking … Do you remember the butterfly effect? That night?”

  “Well, I know what it is.”

  “No, the night we first met, you teased me about it.”

  “I guess I don’t remember.”

  Then Kate became maudlin and stared out the window. The train jolted through flashes of graffiti and darkness. Perhaps the graffiti had always been there. She’d never seen it before, but it could have been there.

  “Are you okay?” Ben said.

  “I’m just thinking, if you did something four hundred years ago, it would have some effect. It wouldn’t matter how trivial a thing you did. That’s the butterfly effect. That’s what I think I might have done.”

  Ben laughed. “Go home, butterfly. You’re drunk.”

  Kate had never blamed a man, and she didn’t blame Ben. He couldn’t know what only Kate had seen. But a magical idea that had attached to him began to dissipate about this time. She saw him for who he was: an ordinary man who needed things from her, and perhaps this was love. She still wanted him there. She reached for him when she woke and the contact comforted her. He was her earthly body.

  She would hold him in the darkness, waiting to sleep, and think about the dream. She tried to guess its meaning and came up with teasing details: the fireplace poker in the shape of a salamander; the fire that had turned into a long-dead city; the date 1593, which felt significant, although she’d looked it up and couldn’t find any important thing that had happened in that year. Then she would fall asleep and feel the dream there, alive, but couldn’t wake there. She woke up next to Ben.

  The rest of her life was inconsequential. She did nothing with her days. It was a time when she spent a lot of time on the phone or visiting people. She was mostly happy.

  9

  The baby entered the picture the day Ben and Kate had their first fight.

  It was December, and the new apartment in Queens—already a Katified space, a place like her old room in Brooklyn, which Ben had seen in hurried passing when he helped her move. That meant drawings in colored pencil, which she made on paper of various sizes pinned to all the walls, and assorted Persian rugs with geometric patterns in crimson and teal, which Kate’s father binge-bought in Iran and which dignified the plain pine furniture (Ben’s contribution) that was all they otherwise had. It was a happy-looking place, both Spartan and luxurious. Friends stopped by to see the apartment and stayed for hours, sitting on the rugs (because there weren’t any sofas or comfortable chairs) and chatting while idly tracing a woolen pattern with a finger; announcing they should leave, then drawing out the conversation in order to stay. The neighborhood was Astoria, and the building was named Stella Court: Ben would repeat these starry names in his head and feel unreasonably good.

  The morning of the fight was a workday. Ben had been getting ready while Kate lay reading in bed—as he’d conceived of it up until then, industrious Ben was preparing to go out to win bread for them both (because Kate scarcely worked; she made hand-painted tablecloths and napkins, which she sometimes sold to friends and for which she was always intending to create a website), and this happy notion played in his head like a song, until the moment he had to shave. It was a task he’d always hated. Then a thought appeared, a blot. It was like a little cockroach in a clean room.

  He turned his shaver off and said, “Are you still thinking of getting a job?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a voice infused with sleep, a distant, desultory voice.

  “I’m only saying, because you said you were going to look for a job.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’ll try to get a job, but I’m not good at getting jobs. Maybe I should get a cat instead.”

  “That’s not funny,” Ben said, and suddenly nothing in the world was funny. He turned away from Kate, turned the faucet on, and washed his face. Every movement was tiresome and intimate, a series of petty impositions. For the duration of this face washing, Ben was angrily thinking he would grow a beard—the patchy, indecorous beard Ben grew—if Kate wouldn’t get a job, he would grow a beard.

  When he’d finished, he said, “I just think you’d be happier if you were doing something.”

  “Okay,” Kate said, now with trepidation. “Although I’m pretty happy now.”

  “But you can’t go on like this forever. And anyway,” he said, though he’d resolved not to say this, “it’s unfair to me.”

  Then the fight really got started. He was explaining the unfairness, explaining at too much length, too loudly, and she was objecting faintly that Ben liked his job, he’d said he did. And Kate had been trying to figure things out; it felt important even if it wasn’t visible to others. She added in a tight, defensive voice that she panicked when she did jobs, it gave her existential panic. She could do them for a while, but it felt like darning socks in a burning building. Time was running out and … Did he ever get that?

  “So you won’t get a job because it gives you bad feelings.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t get a job. I’m only saying it’s strange. I don’t think life is exactly real when you’re working for money.”

  “This is bullshit, Kate. You don’t think my life is real?”

  “I didn’t say anything about your life,” she said, and she was pleading now. “I can try to get a job. It’s fine.”

  But he’d lost some kind of grip. He was seeing her as a weight, a parasitical weight that would ruin his life. He started to explain the unfairness again. She was weeping. It made her look distorted and alien. Her voice grew shrill. He didn’t know her. He didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just admit she was wrong.

  There was no time left. As he put on his coat, she was saying, “Don’t go yet,” and he was speechless with rage, he couldn’t think. Now she wanted to make him lose his job. And no one was going to take care of Ben. He didn’t have a Ben. He couldn’t sit around all day and expect other people to pay the bills.

  Then he was on the stairs alone. Deafeningly alone, and terrified because he’d just lost Kate. His footsteps sounded small and meaningless. The chipped tile and stained paint in the stairwells were signs of something rotten at the heart of things. Everything squalid: he was going in the wrong direction, away from what mattered. But he had to go to work. There had to be a bottom line.

  When he got outside, the day was cold and practical, the sky a clear, no-nonsense blue. People went by in their ordinary moods. He walked behind a woman whose child was tugging urgently on her hand; the woman said amusedly, “You’re pulling my mitten off,” and the child said, “I want to pull your mitten off,” and the woman said, “Well, you’re succeeding.” Everyone in bright winter coats and pom-pom hats; by the subway, there was a wall of Christmas trees for sale, at which people lingered as they passed. Nothing was wrong here. It was as if he’d stepped through a portal to a parallel universe where nothing was wrong.

  He got on the subway and while he traveled in the morning crush, the fight reappeared in his head. He was angry again. It went and went. Everyone was pressing against him, nudging him with their elbows. They didn’t care what he felt—like Kate. In flashes, he remembered her tearful face and hated himself, but the thoughts kept going. He couldn’t go to
work. He had to get off the train right now. He was going to lose his mind.

  Another stop, another stop, and he was there. In the cold sunlight of Manhattan, he was immediately calm again, a feeling like collapsing to the ground after great exertion. He didn’t know what all the drama had been about. She’d said she would try to get a job. He walked toward work, already knowing he wouldn’t go in. No one would miss him this close to Christmas. Why had he thought it mattered so much? The facades of office buildings, which on this block were in the gargoyled, opulent style of the twenties French revival, passed in his peripheral vision with a tickling sort of disregarded beauty. Occasionally, the gilded letters of a building’s name caught his eye, and he read without conscious thought: Van Dusen Cooperative, American Uranium Building, Hotel Ariane. Did he even want to keep this job? He might be better off working at the Jersey City mayor’s office.

  He got to his building, but instead of going in, turned back and went into Amsterdam Bank, the coffee shop in the former Amsterdam Bank. It still had the original green marble floor and a mural on one wall that showed Dutch traders meeting the Iroquois, while a troop of beavers watched from a nearby brook with worried expressions. The coffee shop was run by a charity, and most of the employees had cognitive deficits; you often needed to exercise patience, but the coffee was good, and it was for a good cause. Today the girl at the counter was a moonfaced redhead who made the same squinting face again and again but took Ben’s order very capably, chatting about the upcoming referendum and what it meant for disabled rights. He wanted to ask if she had a cognitive deficit; it was the kind of thing Kate could have asked without giving offense, but Ben could not. He wished Kate were here. He should have taken Kate to breakfast, instead of storming out like a petulant child.

  He took his coffee to the bench out front and was considering calling Kate from a pay phone when Sabine came walking up the street, looking haggard and blank. She was wearing pajamas, but pajamas so expensive they were better than most people’s clothes. Over them, a short red puffer coat; Ben recognized the coat because Kate sometimes borrowed it. Now it struck him painfully. He realized his office was only nine blocks south of Sabine’s apartment. If he and Kate broke up, he would see Sabine’s people all the time in the street. He would see Kate.