The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  Around midnight, she would leave, riding her ten-speed bike back over the bridge to her parents’ house, the summer sky indigo, the moon a bright circle.

  She always wondered what happened after she left. Did Pete carry Lynn to their bedroom? Did Andrew slump farther and farther over, a broken puppet, his strings cut? And Jesse. What did he do as the evening ticked down into the morning hours? Sometimes, when she left, other people would still be there, Lynn’s friends from work, women with Farrah Fawcett wings, women with bright red lipstick and thick streaks of blush on their cheekbones, women who laughed too much and touched Jesse too often, a confiding hand on his arm. Older women who knew what they wanted.

  At a party at Zoonis County to celebrate Solstice, the sun high in the sky at eight, Sara walked into a room full of men she didn’t know, large men with Tom Selleck mustaches and bushy dark beards.

  Puff, a friend of Pete’s, caught her eye. “So serious,” he said. “You’re always so serious. Smile.”

  She slipped back to the kitchen, where Jesse was standing by the fridge talking to one of Lynn’s friends, Tracey, a tall woman wearing a low-cut red shirt and acid-washed jeans. While talking, she repetitively pulled her loose long hair back into a ponytail, a move that pushed up her large breasts, shook the blonde strands out in a crinkly mane, and then pulled her hair back again, lifting the mane off the back of her neck.

  “I’m so fucking tired. The brats kept us running today. I’d just like to lay down for an hour’s nap,” she complained.

  Sara caught the mistake and looked at Jesse to see if he’d give her that sideways smile, that look he’d flash her when Pete quoted Kierkegaard for the twentieth time in an argument. But he was smiling at Tracey, an intense beam of concentration.

  Sara leaned against the corner cupboard and drank her beer. Beads of water dripped down the neck of the bottle, dampening the label. She started peeling it back from a corner.

  She had half the label peeled off, the smooth brown glass of the bottle exposed, when Tracey looked over and smirked, “If you can peel a label without ripping it, you’re still a virgin.”

  Sara stopped peeling. She wanted to rip the label, but that felt stupid. Her face flushed.

  “Hey, can you get me another beer if you’re done?” Jesse winked at her.

  Sara handed him a beer and went outside, sitting down next to Lynn, whose arms glowed taffy-brown against her white lacy top, a splash of turquoise blue in the hollow of her throat. She finished her beer, leaving the label untouched. Uncut twitch grass brushed against her legs. Lynn lit mosquito coils and the smoke rose straight up in the still air.

  At two in the morning, someone suggested skinny-dipping in the fountain at the Legislature Grounds. Suddenly they were all moving, jumping out of the unpainted wooden chairs, dashing in a mad mob, flinging off shirts and shorts as they ran. Legs and bums shockingly white in the dusk, breasts and penises flopping, inhibitions shed, energy shimmering over their skin. Water on a hot night, that shock of cold against bare skin. Tracey screamed for attention as she raced away with the other streakers, her pendulous breasts exposed.

  Sara wanted to join them, but the thought of being naked terrified her. She was frozen in her chair, watching everyone race out the back gate.

  After they’d left, she sat alone for several minutes before going inside to the overly bright white kitchen. She ran icy water over her wrists, trying to clear the fuzziness in her head. No point in staying. Walking down the hall to get her purse, she opened Lynn’s bedroom door, caught a glimpse of Jesse and Lynn entangled on the bed. The straps of Lynn’s lacy top pushed down to her waist. The skin of her breast white against Jesse’s tanned hands.

  Sara backed out fast.

  Another summer day of monotony at the bookstore punctuated by people treating her like an idiot. A girl had come in, thick black glasses, asymmetrical dyed black hair, very ’80s New Wave.

  “Do you have The Fountainhead?”

  “By Ayn Rand?” Sara pronounced it Ann, never having heard the name spoken aloud.

  “That’s Aye-nn Rand,” the woman drawled.

  Yes, you fucking bitch, Sara thought, and can you spell? Bookstores are arranged alphabetically. Rand would be under R. She didn’t say this. She wanted to keep her part-time $4.50 an hour job, especially since the manager would give her weekend hours once university started. So she smiled and led the pretentious bitch to the appropriate section.

  At Zoonis County, her cousins lounged in a half-circle of lawn chairs in the back yard, a fenced area of knee-high grass and bright yellow dandelions, with a firepit in the centre. Slotting her Coke into a cooler full of ice, she sat down in a lawn chair with fraying green and white strips.

  Lynn waved from across the circle. She was next to Pete, who was wearing his usual uniform of cargo shorts, with an Oilers cap hiding his receding hairline. Jesse and Andrew slouched in their chairs, in faded cutoffs and ripped T-shirts, beer bottles dangling from relaxed fingers.

  By nine, the light had faded into a bloody sunset, red and orange streaks. Marianne Faithful growled about infidelity.

  Pete came out of the back door. “We’re out of beer,” he said. No one responded.

  “Did you hear me? We’re out of beer,” he said belligerently. “Which of you freeloaders drank my Coors?”

  Everyone sprawled, silent.

  “Fine, I’ll get more myself.” Pete headed to the back gate, slammed it shut.

  “He’s too drunk to drive.” Lynn followed him. At the gate, she turned back. “Jesse, help me.” Her shoulders and back glowed, bright red above her yellow tank-top. Jesse shrugged and pulled himself out of his chair. Sara hovered for a moment and then followed.

  The van was parked in the back driveway, an unpaved area thick with dandelions. Pete was in the driver’s seat, Jesse leaning over the open door, saying, “Listen to me. You’re too drunk to drive.”

  “Give me my fucking keys.”

  “You’re too drunk to drive.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Get out of the damned van.” Jesse grabbed Pete’s shirt, pulled him out.

  Pete fell awkwardly, jumped up, smashed Jesse against the door of the van, and punched him in the stomach, once, twice, and then swung at his head, missing as Jesse ducked. Sara watched from the gate, unable to move. Jesse splayed against the van, his arms held up protecting his head. Lynn screaming. “Pete, stop, Pete, stop.”

  Jesse, Lynn and Andrew were driving back east. Their construction jobs had ended, and the boom wasn’t coming back.

  “Might as well go back to school,” Jesse told Sara. They were in his favourite coffee shop, Café la Guerre, sunk into one of the sagging brown sofas, drinking lattes from enormous blue mugs and sharing a piece of carrot cake with thick cream cheese frosting. Sara licked frosting off her fork, the sweetness aching in her teeth.

  “I’ll finish my degree. See if I can get some work doing illustrations. Publishing maybe. I want to do something creative.”

  Sara didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. University started in a week.

  “Do you think you’ll be out west next summer?” she asked.

  “Doubt it.” He smiled. “You’ll have to come visit me. I’ll show you some places.”

  “That would be awesome.” But she knew it wouldn’t happen.

  Jesse died two months later. He rolled his Camaro on a gravel road near Peterborough. The car was totalled, but Jesse walked away unscathed. The next day he shot himself with his father’s hunting rifle. The story was that he was sent home from the hospital with an untreated concussion.

  The funeral was in Ontario. Sara and her mother flew east. A closed casket.

  Lynn had hysterics just before the service started. She began hyperventilating, a wheezy breathing that sounded like a broken accordion, air forced through a bellows. Then she laughed, a shocking bark of sound.

  Her friends led her to the back of the church, down a set of stairs to a wood-panelled room
lined with black and chrome stacks of chairs. They hovered over her, patting her back, soothing her like a skittish horse. “It’s okay, it was an accident.”

  For a few minutes, Sara watched Lynn’s claim for attention, her desire to always be at the centre of events. Then she left. She couldn’t go back into the funeral parlour. Climbing back out of that hot dark basement, she emerged into afternoon light, the grass glowing, brilliant green, even though it was November. She wandered under the dark shade of elms, their branches meeting in arches above her head.

  She tries to tell the story, but the fragments won’t come together. Maybe if Jesse hadn’t died young, he wouldn’t be caught in a haze of summer light.

  Some stories keep repeating. Two days ago, in a coffee shop, Sara saw a girl in bell-bottom jeans, a gossamer red top with butterfly sleeves, a gold chain. The past is haunting her, wearing her clothes. Does that girl sit in living rooms in decaying post-war houses, drink beer, long for someone unattainable?

  Variations on a Theme

  Beginnings

  Sara has an eight-month teaching contract. She hadn’t imagined that six years later she’d still be working on her dissertation, taking temporary contracts, moving every year to another town with the same vicious circles of intrigue and gossip. She’d had other plans, but now the patina of partial success clung to her, the faintest stale whiff, like cheap cologne.

  David has black hair with a blue sheen, his eyes a dark glaze in a tanned face. When he smiles at Sara, her head is woozy from two quick glasses of cheap wine. They spin banter out of nothing. He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. When he comes back, he is stopped by a woman, small, bone-thin like a famine victim. She looks as if she would break in two if touched.

  What Others See

  “So what do you think of the new sessionals?”

  “The usual. The disenchanted, the perpetually procrastinating, the failed writers. I was talking with Sara; she seems pleasant. She also seems very taken with David. I wonder if someone should warn her.”

  “It’s like Frank and me. The first time we met, I knew what he was like. It doesn’t matter what you know, you still do the same thing.”

  She tilts her head to one side, half-listening to familiar phrases. His relationship had ended four years ago but he is still rehashing the mistakes. Their conversation lulls into a familiar theme with variations, the andante section of a concerto, slow, measured, the same words falling over and over in slightly different patterns, building to the same crescendo.

  “So I knew he was possessive, I mean for Christ’s sake he told me to stop seeing my friends, an innocent hug in a restaurant and it was silence and cold shoulders for two, three days, but I kept thinking that I needed to be patient, to compromise for him. But you can’t compromise yourself.”

  She’s heard the phrase before. But smiles, nods. “No, you can’t.” Although isn’t she doing just that, smiling and agreeing, when she should say, It’s been four years, move on, get over it. But then who would listen to her complaints, ask for her tidbits of gossip, laugh at the bitter futility of the same dramas enacted over and over and over?

  Constant Motion

  At the end of a frustrating day of silent students, two endless meetings, and four hours of marking, Sara droops over her desk. Winter is approaching, another winter of closed doors and snowdrifts five feet high. Where will she be next year?

  David stops by the door and asks, “What about a drink?”

  Stephen Fearing’s The Assassin’s Apprentice plays over the hum of conversation in the bar. When the tiny fluttery server finally comes to rest beside them, he orders a beer and she asks for white wine, even though she wants vodka. She catches phrases seeping through the loudspeakers in Fearing’s light tenor. David chain-smokes and tells her about his nearly finished novel.

  “It’s really a novel of ideas. Not like most of the work coming out in this country, banal little lives in mind-numbing detail. More like Don DeLillo. Have you read White Noise? Modern angst. Postmodern dislocations. I’m not into thumbnail realism. I want something bigger.”

  Are people still “into” things, she wonders, noticing her attempted distance, the implied criticism. She doesn’t say this. Instead she smiles, nods, admires the way his turquoise shirt brings out a warm sheen in his soft brown skin, the way he pauses and looks off into the distance, thoughtfully, as he drags on his cigarette. A certain lack of self-awareness or a pose so practised it looks instinctive.

  “But do things ever really end?” she asks, after he uses the phrase “postmodern lack of closure” for the third time.

  “No, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. Nothing ever really ends; it’s all endless repetitions, the same stories over and over. A feed-back loop.”

  “Like at the end of the movie Speed,” she blurts out, regretting instantly as the words slip away. Why that movie, that reference? Inarticulate Keanu Reeves and the mass market appeal of a continuously moving bus. Constant motion, the postmodern metaphor. She files the thought away for a possible paper topic.

  “I don’t see the connection.” He stares over her shoulder, his eyes unfocused, and now she feels a brief spurt of anger for his dismissal. No doubt he only watches grainy foreign films, with subtitles.

  “It’s not important.” An uncomfortable pause and she starts talking department gossip.

  They leave the golden dim of the bar. A light snow is falling, gentle flakes drifting down, illuminated by the old-fashioned street lights enclosing the public square. A night for lovers. She reaches for his left hand. It is icy cold. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she jokes. His hand hangs, boneless, inert within her grasp, but she cannot let go now.

  Friday night sex in his office, the hard edges of the desk against her thighs, their clothing abandoned at their feet. The door left partially ajar.

  What People Talk About

  “Why does she put up with him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she has low self-esteem. She doesn’t believe she deserves to be treated with respect.”

  “So what’s the latest gossip?” He scoops up the foam on the side of the cup with a plastic spoon and licks the cinnamon-flecked white cloud, a pink flick of tongue. Vaguely obscene.

  She looks down, grimaces. “Oh, I don’t like to say.”

  “Come on, tell. You can’t just start something and leave it hanging.”

  “Well, they’re still together. I think. But last week I saw him after work, at Play It Again, having a beer. With that woman from his department. You know, the one who is so thin she looks anorexic.”

  “Does Sara know?” he asks, avidly curious for the latest development in this soap opera.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. David has always been like that.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  What We Leave Behind

  Folding clothes, Sara finds one of his shirts and wishes she’d found it before the smoky burn of tobacco washed from the weave, before his smell was obliterated by the cool perfume of laundry detergent. She rubs the black cotton against her face, imagining his cheek, rough with unshaven stubble, his hands cold against her neck.

  His hands were always cold. She’d bought him gloves at Christmas, thinking of Tristan and Iseult. The king’s words to Iseult — Your hands are cold, but I will warm them — the glove placed on the breast of the sleeping Iseult. She couldn’t share the reference, any mention of love forbidden. They lived within the tight lines of his comfort zone.

  Wearing Masks

  “So I was walking by Sara’s office this afternoon and I could tell she’d been crying.”

  “What did you do?” he asks.

  “I stopped in and asked if she was okay. She was embarrassed, but I wanted her to know she has a friend, someone she can confide in. But she said she was fine.”

  “I didn’t think you were that close.”

  “Well, we’re not really, but it helps to have someone to talk to.”


  “You just wanted the dirt.”

  He knows her too well. She smiles, acknowledging the hit. Around him, glimpses of her other self peer out, not just the carefully constructed persona: the confident professor, the aging woman. How soon until she metamorphoses into a wise, old crone?

  “I do have some gossip,” she confides. “A colleague told me David was seen leaving that woman’s apartment on Monday morning. You know, the skinny one.”

  “What is he doing, notching his bedpost with every woman on campus? You’d think he’d have learned; you can’t hide anything here. You found that out your first year.”

  “Yes. Just like I found out Frank was cheating on you, before you knew.”

  He flinches, and then gazes reproachfully at her, but she refuses to feel guilty. He alluded to her past, a taboo topic, those few weekends with David. His coldness. Her mask of indifference.

  The Only Cure is Distance

  The university offers another contract, but Sara refuses, accepts another job. The town is too small for two of them, only a few bars and one university, she can’t escape, too many people know. There are too many opportunities to walk past his apartment, phone his number, casually introduce his name into conversation. It hurts too much. She has to leave.

  Packing up her dishes, she remembers meals together. Feeding him ravioli with her fingers, the sauce smearing his mouth. When she straddled him on the chair, kissing him, her lips wide, tongue probing, he tasted of tomato and garlic, a warm oregano-scented flavour with a hint of iron and blood. In bed the next morning, she kissed his stomach, down the thickening line of dark hair, his skin warm and sweaty, garlic and oregano and sex on the tongue.