by Mike Heppner
The Morning After
Some dreams are third-person dreams and others are first-person dreams. This is a first-person dream, meaning that it is not a movie but rather a physical experience. The meadow is a finite land, and it curves around a circular border. There are trees here, but they are pink, and their leaves are hard and geometric. The smell of grass seems artificial, as if sprayed from a can. Scarlet wears a pale nightgown, nothing underneath. The grass is wet and it sticks to her feet. Though she is running, she feels at ease, drowsy even. She can see her legs pumping, two limbs joined to the rest of her body. With each step, she feels the ground slipping away. This is what she remembers, this sensation. This is what she knows has happened in the past, in her waking life. She knows this movement with her whole body, and as her feet leave the earth, she can feel herself accelerating toward the high bursts of pink vegetation—up and up, into the cannonfire! Her pigtails branch out from either side of her head like the wings of a corkscrew. She travels by instinct; she identifies her destination and soon she is there. Glowing birds scatter at her approach. They leave their hidden homes and race toward the curved edge of reality. The dream switches briefly to third-person, showing the same pattern but from a distant perspective. Her journey from the ground to the sky splits into a series of still images. Numbered reference points correspond to handwritten descriptions, highlighting important steps along the way. The whole process, explained at last. In the morning, Scarlet’s body felt weighed down, returned to its natural state.
“Good morning.” Olden was already awake, watching her. His raised knee made a teepee under the sheets. The bedding hung to one side, exposing the scribbles of hair streaming from his navel to his groin.
“I love these sheets.” She gripped the mattress, fingers clutching at the bedspread. “Where did you get them?”
“I have no idea.”
She smiled, still waking up. A slow thought formed inside her brain. “They’re so guy. When my father was in recovery, my mother wouldn’t sleep with him, so he bought a cot and set it up in the basement. I remember going down to see him. His sheets were plain white, like in a hospital. Scratchy. He hated that place.”
“Your father.” He rolled onto his stomach and the sheet followed. “You still keep in touch?”
“Oh yeah, they’re both cool now.” Dismissing the subject, she rubbed her nose on the pillowcase. “My father’s a really beautiful guy. Even back then, we always used to hang out. Every night I’d bring him silly little presents, like tiny dogs made out of pipe cleaners, and then we’d play board games for a few hours before it was time to go to bed.”
“What games did you play?” he asked, liking the trivia, the silly details.
“Whatever.” She shrugged and the sheets fell over her shoulders. “The usual ones. Whatever was cool at the time. I think Mastermind was big back then. We were a pretty normal family.” Lying on her back, she looked up at the ceiling. Mildew stained the plaster yellow in places. She wanted a cigarette but the pack was too far away. “I always wondered how he managed to sleep down there. The cot squeaked every time you moved, and the basement was cold and gross, and there were these black bugs that came out of the drains as soon as you turned off the lights. Maybe he didn’t sleep. It only lasted a few months. I guess that’s probably the best way to get sober.”
“It sounds like my father’s room.”
She turned her head. Her cheek was wrinkled from where she’d slept on her hair. “Your mother and father, they don’t sleep together?”
“My mother’s out of the country most of the time. And my father . . . is traveling as well.”
“Ooh, a little orphan!” She grinned. Her teeth were small and square. “That’s so cute.”
“I like having you here,” he said, holding her wrist. She dug her elbow into his side, coming closer.
“I like being here.”
One whisper, then another, and then the whispers turned silent, and now their lips were together, a pink twist, pulsing, never the same shape twice. Pulling away, she raised one leg and braced him between her knees, fumbling with his penis, finding it, making it fit. She did this without unnecessary deliberation—almost a chore really, grab-it-’n’-go. Olden lay still, letting it all happen to him, staring only at her left hip, the outward curve, the dip toward the center, a gray shadow, and he reached out and put his thumb there.
“I like it in the daylight. Seeing you.”
“Much better.”
Cupping his hands around her tight dancer’s bottom—warmth coming from the crack, also moisture, thicker and more adhesive than perspiration—he kissed her violently, holding her tongue between his teeth, threatening to bite. They turned over, slipping halfway off the mattress. The toes of his right foot touched the cold floor. Scarlet’s breasts sagged, melting into her chest. Red skin outlined the space above her heart.
“I love it when you do that.”
“What’s that?”
“When you pull up against my clit like that.”
Olden exaggerated his stroke, wanting her to feel it, but it was all a bit stagey and soon she started to laugh. Smiling, he laid his palm flat against her chest and said, “Your heart’s beating.”
“So’s yours.”
“I love your body.”
“Touch it then,” she breathed, feeling the wall behind her.
He touched her right armpit where her skin was rough with new hair. The hidden ducts made a fibrous ball that rolled against his finger, then his tongue.
“You like that?”
“Yeah. Go harder. Pound it.”
Half in love, they fucked. Outside, black birds flashed past the window, a dark square divided into four equal sections. The day was clear and crisp. The air smelled of wood fires, someone making pancakes. High above, squirrels raced in panicked circles. A human voice strained against the sounds of the country.
Hot and tired, they lay together in Olden’s bed with the white, manly sheets wadded up at their feet. The floor was a trail of clothes. Three used condoms sat like desiccated bugs under the nightstand. Scarlet went to the window and looked out. The light made pretty splotches down her back and legs; her spine was a dark line, curved. Turning, she crept back to bed, pointing at the computer as she passed. “Aren’t you afraid of someone stealing that thing?”
“Not out here.”
Still thinking about something, she found a comfortable spot next to him. “You have your own business?”
“I do a lot of things.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I want to tell you. I want to tell you everything.” Retrieving the sheets, he pulled the covers up around their shoulders. “I actually do have a real job. You probably can’t tell, judging from the way I live.”
“I like it here,” she said, smiling optimistically. “It’s like camping.” Hands pressed against her stomach, she considered making breakfast— a warm breakfast, cooked over a campfire. Oatmeal and bacon. Hungry men, holding their plates.
“I used to live in South Crane City,” he said, speaking to the ceiling. “I’ve been here since ’95. A friend of my father owns the house. Owned. He died last year. Big executive in the publishing industry. He insisted I come up here. Rent-free. I guess he figured that anything was better than letting the place fall apart.”
“What were you doing in Crane City?”
“Going to school, wasting time. I’d learned a lot about programming from my father. He was a mathematician back in the seventies. He worked with some of the biggest names in computer science. Vint Cerf. Bob Kahn. You probably don’t know who they are.” He looked at her and she shook her head. Good, he thought. Thank God you don’t. “So when I graduated from Midwestern, I figured it was probably my best shot. I did all sorts of things. Web-page design. Private consulting. I configured LANs for local businesses. I couldn’t take it for more than two years. Most of my friends were computer geeks. We didn’t have much to talk about.”
&nbs
p; “So you quit.”
“I quit. I got a job working for a construction company. Best job I ever had. Got in great shape.”
“I can tell,” she purred, using her sexy bordello voice, but he didn’t notice, just kept looking at the ceiling. The ceiling was very interesting to him right now. Tiny craters. Goosebumps.
“I spent forty hours a week in the library. I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t have much of a life. It didn’t really matter. Instead I read books. I read medical dictionaries, obscure Eastern European novels, a two-volume history of Denmark. It was hard work. The books I read weren’t dumbed down for the masses. That’s when I realized: Information should be difficult to understand. It should be inaccessible to the general public. Everything else is bullshit.” He closed his eyes and brushed against Scarlet’s cheek, touching softly with the tip of his nose. “I’m tired of this stupid democracy.” He moved down to her throat, speaking between kisses. “Life was bad enough without the World Wide Web. Now every ignorant fuck’s got an opinion.”
“So?” She felt his hair, combing it out with her fingers.
“So when it was time to move out of the city, I decided to do something about it.” The words sounded empty to him; he was quiet for a while, thinking about his project, his silly little game. Egg Code. Big deal. But the Egg Code was just a ruse—an advertisement, really. His Web page stood for a greater purpose. The goal was physical, dangerous, immediate. The Egg Code only suggested an ideology, a rationale for future wrongdoings. He knew it, and they knew it too. Feeling better, he prodded her hip with his hard-on. She shifted a bit, making room.
“I think it’s great that you know so much about it. I like a guy who knows stuff. Most guys don’t.”
“Most guys you know, what are they like?” He tongued her nipple, a hot rumpled pill. This amazed him—hearing her voice, sucking her breast. The voice, the nipple. Something vast.
“Dancers, mostly. People I work with. Everyone else, I know from school or else from the seminars I go to—sharing sessions, that sort of thing.”
“What do you share?” He stopped kissing her and sat cross-legged in bed. His erection seemed silly now, tasteless even, and he hid it behind his raised knees.
“At the sharing sessions? All kinds of things. We play this game where we stand in a circle—ten, twelve people—and we’re all holding hands: boom, boom, boom. And everybody gets an egg. So you’re holding an egg in your right hand, and the other person’s got his or her left hand around the same egg, and this goes on and on around the circle”—she walked her hand around in a circle, indicating the various places— “until this other person’s holding an egg in his right hand, and you’ve got it in your left hand, all right? So if there’s, say, ten people holding hands, then the number of eggs is also going to be ten, right? But each individual person is actually holding two eggs, because you’ve got one egg in your right hand and one in your left.”
“So the idea is not to drop any eggs.”
“Right. And you really have to trust your partners, because if the person who’s holding the egg with you decides to let go, then you have to have the presence of mind to catch it.”
“Why would he decide to let go?”
Scarlet cocked her head, trying to remember how it was explained to her. One loose pigtail dropped over her eye and she winked it away. “Well, you have to understand that some of these people have gone through some pretty drastic shit in their lives, and it might not be so easy for them to hold a stranger’s hand for however long it takes.”
“However long what takes?”
“For someone to lose. There’s no time limit. The game ends when someone finally lets go.”
“Depressing game.”
“I think it’s beautiful.” She smiled, recalling the time she played, how they’d hugged afterward and drank punch. A meeting room in someone’s basement. Low ceiling. The buzz of the fluorescent panels. She reached out and took Olden’s hand. “When two people make a connection, it’s like holding hands. But we’re doing more than that. We’re holding the egg too. It’s not you and it’s not me. It’s both of us. It’s our egg.”
“I love hearing you talk.”
“This isn’t me.” She swept her hair back, holding it in a bunch. “Derek Skye wrote a whole book about it. These Eggs Are Scrambled! (I Asked for Over Easy). Good title, hunh? I’ll bring it over sometime. I own all of his books. I’ve seen him in person sixteen times.”
“You’re a disciple, then.”
Scarlet blushed. It made him feel strange to see her react so strongly to another man’s name.
“No, we’re much closer than that, and he doesn’t even know who I am. I’ve been trying to meet him for years.” She stared at their stain on the coverlet, lower than she’d imagined. “I keep having this dream. I had it again this morning.”
“Tell me about it.” He touched her knee and she unwound around him, resting on her side.
“It’s a weird thing. Ever since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to be a dancer. That’s actually late,” she added, lifting her head, “for most kids. But my mother gave lessons at this special academy and I always used to tag along. Her students were all physically handicapped. Some were in wheelchairs and some had to wear back braces and some weren’t really handicapped per se but their minds were so damaged that they could hardly control their bodies, and basically the whole thing was really sad and scary and awful, particularly when you’re only eight and don’t know what any of it means.”
“Keep talking.” He felt her leg, wanting only to touch, wanting her to touch him too.
Scarlet smiled—a bit dubious, but amused all the same. “Mmm, so anyway, yeah, so I’d go to these classes and watch my mother working with these kids, and it was awful and kind of beautiful all at the same time. But what I remember thinking is that if you just put your mind to it, and if you showed a little courage, then you could overcome even the worst thing.” She turned her knee, making it easy for him. Hot nerves skittered like stick bugs under her skin. “Here’s some poor child who can hardly move, but with a little effort he can learn how to wiggle to the music and feel the rhythm and use the floor and laugh and hum and stomp—and if that’s not dancing, what is?”
“Roll over.”
Sliding onto her back, Scarlet placed her arms behind her head and held them there, imagining handcuffs, silk ropes loosely tied. “And so . . .”
“I’m listening.”
“I know you are. So recently I started thinking about my own life, and how I’ve always been blessed with good health, good friends, enough money to live on.” She closed her eyes and saw it again, the old, familiar vision. “But my dream’s different. It’s hard to remember. I’m weightless, always weightless, and I can dance over trees and through rainbows . . . it’s like I’m the pilot of my own body. My mind takes me there. I can still feel it—oh, all the time, like it’s locked up inside. A part of me says it’s happened already, and that I’ve just suppressed the memory because at first it was almost too overwhelming to understand, and the dream’s only my mind telling me that if it happened once then it can happen again, and maybe Derek can help me and maybe he can’t, but if there’s a man alive, he’s the one.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to come again if you don’t stop.” A cold wave poured over her body; her eyes looked sad and frantic.
“Mmm. Well. I know something you don’t know.”
“What?”
“Who.”
“Who?”
“Derek Skye.”
Scarlet sat up and seized his hand, stopping it. The words, the name. An instant recognition. “You know him?”
“Well, I don’t know him.” Olden drew his hand back, afraid of her now. “I did some work for him once. Fix-ups. He just moved into a new apartment.”
“Where?” Scarlet was already halfway out of bed. Her feet pressed into the mattress as she staggered toward the door.
“Well, I don’
t know if he—”
“Tell me. I won’t give you away. I’ll say that I followed him up from the city.” She scurried to separate her clothes from his. “It’s in walking distance?”
“Well, sure, but . . .” The words ran out, and he could only marvel at her efficient way of dressing in the morning. It must come from working in the theater, he thought. All those quick costume changes. Her uncooperative bra wriggled like a Möbius strip, defying all attempts to bring the straps and cups in order. Giving up, she chucked it onto the bed and reached for her T-shirt.
“Look, just give me the address and everything will be cool.” The tight collar stretched around her head as first one pigtail popped loose, then the other. “You have no idea what this means to me. Look, look—” Reaching for her gym bag, she pulled out a spiral notebook and flopped the pages. Both the front and back covers were missing, and the wire binding had come loose at the base. “I add to it almost every day. I’ve got quotes from all the tapes, ticket stubs going back to ’96. I even copied the picture from My Brush with Happiness.” Olden saw the drawing flash in a rustle of ink-intensive journal entries. A head, a mustache. A nice tie.
“Okay, okay.” He grabbed the sheet and wrapped it around his waist. “It’s a quarter-mile down the road. Turn right, and there’s a row of apartments near the end of Main. His is the one on the corner. On the corner or right next to it, I think. Second floor for sure.”
“I’ll ring bells.” Crossing the room, she stepped into her shoes.
Olden grabbed her by the waist. “Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”
“No.” She pulled away. “I want to walk. I need to figure out what I’m going to say.”
She opened her bag and dug through it. A sock. A gun. A new element entered the picture. Olden froze; the gun looked solid, like a giant lump, with no moving parts. “What’s with that?” he asked.
