Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  He was a master at folding paper into shapes. He kept a bag of different colored paper by his knee; people would pick their color 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 fortunetelling 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 fortuneteller was just like that. It had the names of four colors on the outside and eight different numbers inside. First you picked a color—say, red. The fortuneteller would seem to talk soundlessly as his fingers moved back and forth to spell the word, RE-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 fortuneteller was open with another or the same set of numbers revealed. Under the number you choose at that point was your fortune.

  Paperjack didn’t read it out—he just showed it to the person, then stowed the fortuneteller 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 for her 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 fortunetellers in his pocket,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “He never put it away,” she said. “It was the same fortuneteller, 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 ply when it comes to 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’d 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 be there, and those who chose to live there like I do. But even then there’s a difference. I had a little apartment not far from filly’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,” filly 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, filly.”

  “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 the 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 deja 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 fiddlecase.

  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’l
l 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 onto more comfortable ground, or at least focus the attention onto 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 laid my hand on Dilly’s and gave it a squeeze, then picked up my fiddlecase 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 fiddlecase 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 onto 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 awhile, then hoisted my fiddlecase 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 awhile 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.

  Looking at that slim black hand with its long narrow fingers lying against his dark suit, I marveled again at the sheer depth of his ebony coloring. Even with the bit of a tan I’d picked up busking the last few weeks, I felt absolutely pallid beside him. Then I lifted my gaze to his eyes. If his skin swallowed light, I knew where it went: into his eyes. They were dark, so dark you could barely tell the difference between pupil and cornea, but inside their darkness was a kind of glow—a shine that resonated inside me like the deep hum that comes from my fiddle’s bass strings whenever I play one of those wild Shetland reels in A minor.

  I suppose it’s odd, describing something visual in terms of sound, but right then, right at that moment, I heard the shine of his eyes, singing inside me. And I understood immediately what he’d meant by his gesture.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m feeling a little low.”

  He touched his chest again, but it was a different, lighter gesture this time. I knew what that meant as well.

  “There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

  Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been real ... But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been real, I wanted her to come back, but if I accepted that, I also had to accept that ghosts were real and that the past could sneak up and steal someone from the present, taking them back into a time that had already been and gone.

  Paperjack took his fortunetelling device out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave me a questioning look. I started to shake my head, but before I could think about what I was doing, I just said,

  “What the hell,” and let him do his stuff

  I chose blue from the colors, because that was the closest to how I was feeling; he didn’t have any colors like confused or lost or foolish. I watched his fingers move the paper to spell out the color, then chose four from the numbers, because that’s how many strings my fiddle has. When his fingers stopped moving the second time, I picked seven for no particular reason at all.

  He folded back the paper flap so I could read my fortune. All it said was: “Swallow the past.”

  I didn’t get it. I thought it’d say something like that Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” What it did say didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I don’t understand,” I told Paperjack. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

  He just shrugged. Folding up the fortuneteller, he put it back in his pocket.

  Swallow the past. Did that mean I was supposed to forget about it? Or ... well, swallow could also mean believe or accept. Was that what he was trying to tell me? Was he echoing July’s argument?

  I thought about that photo in my fiddlecase, and then an idea came to me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I grabbed my fiddlecase and stood up.

  “I ...” I wanted to thank him, but somehow the words just escaped me. All that came out was, “I’ve gotta run.”

  But I could tell he understood my gratitude. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, except that that little message on his fortuneteller had put together a connection for me that I’d never seen before.

  Fate, I could hear Jilly saying.

  Paperjack smiled and waved me off.

  I followed
coincidence away from Paperjack and the riverbank and back up Battersfield Road to the Newford Public Library in Lower Crowsea.

  Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened. Did you ever run into someone you went to school with—someone you never really hung around with, but just passed in the halls, or had a class with—and they act like you were the best of buddies, because that’s how they remember it? For that matter, maybe you were buddies, and it’s you that’s remembering it wrong ....

  Starting some solid detective work on what happened to Sam took the blur from my memories and brought her back into focus for me. The concepts of ghosts or people disappearing into the past just got pushed to one side, and all I thought about was Sam and tracking her down; if not the Sam I had known, then the woman she’d become in the past.

  My friend Amy Scallan works at the library. She’s a tall, angular woman with russet hair and long fingers that would have stood her in good stead at a piano keyboard. Instead she took up the Uillean pipes, and we play together in an onagain, offagain band called Johnny Jump Up. Matt Casey, our third member, is the reason we’re not that regular a band.

  Matt’s a brilliant bouzouki and guitar player and a fabulous singer, but he’s not got much in the way of social skills, and he’s way too cynical for my liking. Since he and I don’t really get along well, it makes rehearsals kind of tense at times. On the other hand, I love playing with Amy. She’s the kind of musician who has such a good time playing that you can’t help but enjoy yourself as well. Whenever I think of Amy, the first image that always comes to mind is of her rangy frame folded around her pipes, right elbow moving back and forth on the bellows to fill the bag under her left arm, those long fingers just dancing on the chanter, foot tapping, head bobbing, a grin on her face.

  She always makes sure that the gig goes well, and we have a lot of fun, so it balances out I guess.