These Dreams Which Cannot Last

by Matt Flickinger

  “Where the hell are they?”

  “Ortega?” Zain whispers.

  A shaved head pops up from behind a bush on the other side of the yard, “Zain?”

  “Ya!”

  John Forester whisper-yells as his eyes focus on Zain, “son of a bitch!”

  John doesn’t sound like he wants to form a can-search alliance, so Zain begins a solo hunt, moving along the fence from bush to bush, thinking over the clue again. Be polite if you want to enter her bush. Along the back fence is a long row of hedges. Zain crawls along, glaring blindly into the dark recesses between roots. The hedge ends and he stands looking up at the branches of a large bush extending like bamboo up into the dark. It is much larger than the one his mother used to make him water in their front yard, before it died. An oleander, he remembers. Say yes ma’am. Zain squints into the space between the long stalks. He’s about to move on when he sees it. He reaches in and runs his hand over the thing, smooth and pointed, like a stone traffic cone. He reaches in with both hands, the oleander branches scraping his arms, and pulls. Zain stumbles back as it comes loose, almost dropping the heavy thing. He falls back hard into the cool grass, a grinning lawn gnome cradled in his lap. Zain pulls the clue from his shorts liner again…and no ma’an. Forester is crawling along a line of bushes by the house’s back wall, whispering more shits over the empty dirt. Zain stands and sets the gnome on the grass in front of the oleander. Deep in the bush, behind where the gnome was stuffed, three cans, still in their rings, hang from a plastic six pack holder.

  Two things come to Zain and he almost lets out a victorious yell. First, there are still three cans, which means he’s not too far behind. Second, say yes ma’am wasn’t the important part of the clue.

  Zain pulls a can from the pack. It’s brown, not like the silver one at the last house. He tucks the can under his shirt. Forester is looking toward the front fence. With a quick frustrated fist pump he runs toward the front gate. Zain pops the tab and gulps, holding his nose. It makes it easier. He only stops three times to breathe and belch. Forester comes bounding back over the fence, his pointless search of the front yard finished just as Zain jumps into the pool, can grasped firmly in hand.

  Zain resurfaces and jumps out of the pool, can in hand. Forester searches desperately along the hedges at the back fence. Zain passes him and hops up onto the back fence. Crouched on the cement fence top like Spiderman, he looks over his shoulder, down onto his fledgling nemesis.

  “Gnome, man!” Zain says and leaps into the night, smiling and dizzy.

  12

  Spruce Circle

  Zain’s knees wobble, buckling as he jogs along the top of the ditch bank toward the next house. The night has turned to a dizzy dream, like he’s crossing his eyes. His stomach feels like a warm water balloon, beer sloshing and gurgling with every step. He checks and rechecks his hands, can in the right, list in the left. He recites the clue, “hope another beer doesn’t bug you.” No, that isn’t it, he thinks. He looks down at the clue again, slowing his pace. Don’t be buggin’! Fill yer belly! Zain laughs. Buggin’, whatever that means, he thinks. He pulls off his heavy wet shirt, tucking half of it into the back of his shorts to hang over the backs of his legs. Zain has done this a thousand times on longer runs, but the motion seems humorous now. “I have a shirt tail,” he says.

  The dirt bank meets up with the street as the ditch below turns to concrete tunnel, disappearing under the street. He considers for a moment going underground, taking the tunnel to the other side. He stops and concentrates, a rough street grid emerging through the dreamlike dizziness: Palms meets up with Pine Street and, off Pine, the curving Spruce Circle cul-de-sac. Zain leaves the ditch and jogs up onto the sidewalk. Standing in the yellow circle of streetlight feels magical and cloudy, even if the sky is clear. To his left, after a long road of empty lots of trees and cacti, six driveways extend like bike wheel spokes into the cul-de-sac. “Five one two,” he says, swaying. Lightweight, he thinks, as Michael would say. “Two beers and wobbling in magical light,” Zain says, “lightweight Meat. Lightweight Zain. Even better,” he says. He laughs and makes his way around the curving street, reading the addresses aloud, “Five oh six, five oh eight, five ten…”

  Five one two Spruce is dark. It’s a large house, like the others on the block, but sadder somehow. The two story white brick house is an interruption in a perfectly maintained grass yard conversation. Like the yard was fine until the house came along. Zain stares up at the only lit window, glowing purple behind sheer curtains. He looks again at the clue. Don’t be buggin’! He laughs again. Bugs, he thinks, it must be. Maybe a bug zapper. When he looks up again at the window there is a shadow between the curtains. He ducks into the yard, crouch-running around the side of the house. Zain stops at the black iron gate, heart beating down his tingly arms in waves. He reaches through the iron bars and the gate lock latch pops up. He swings the gate open slowly and enters the backyard on tiptoes.

  Zain squats beside a trash can in the dark side yard. With all the perfect manicured lawns and private pools he’s happy to smell the stench. At least their trash stinks, he thinks. The pool lights reach upward into the night, throwing a blue green glow across the backyard. If he can find the cans it’s a short trip back to the side yard. Then it’s up the street and off to the park. The pool water laps and spills over the top step. A trail of wet footsteps stretches across the tiles on the opposite side, toward the back fence. An odd metallic note rings, gurgled and muffled from an uncapped bug trap. Zain sets his empties in the grass at his feet and sneaks over. Four silver cans float in the circle like trapped dolphins nosing the surface. Zain grabs two cans, looking to the back door, dark beyond the curtains. He squeezes one can into the band of his shorts and pops the tab on the other, holding his nose. The beer is cooler than the last two he drank and goes down easy. Zain tilts his head to finish the last swallow and crushes the can between his fingers. He tries throwing the empty back across the pool, to where he’ll exit, but it lands in the water.

  Diving in after the empty, the full beer in his waistband slides into the liner of his shorts. His chest scrapes the bottom of the pool. He surfaces and grabs the empty. Lifting his knees, Zain runs through the water toward the edge of the pool, towards the safety of the darkness. He can’t run fast enough, like running in a dream. Just as he reaches the edge of the pool, the back porch light switches on. Zain grabs the side of the pool, lifting himself out. He pulls a leg over the side of the pool, something he’s done a thousand times over the last ten summers. But the can in his shorts weighs him down. He almost makes it over the lip with his other leg, but his toe catches on the rim of the pool. He puts a hand down to catch himself, but the hand slips on the wet tile. The pool deck hits his jaw with a wet slap. He can sense more than see what comes after. The back door opening, the shadowed figure moving across the porch, her feet running. Then everything goes black.

  13

  A Second Stanza

  Charlotte nods at Michael from her window, then gives him three fingers, as promised. She told him she would indicate how many people had been there by the time he showed up. He smiles up at her and blows a kiss. A wink too probably, but it is hard to tell in the dark. She knows from personal experience, a freshman year mistake, Michael can be very convincing. He explained the beer pool mile last month, which actually sounded kind of cool. Michael isn’t in charge of the race this year, but her house would be perfect, he’d said. Knowing her parents would be gone, she agreed to be a stop on the race route.

  She sits back down at her desk. The page on the typewriter holds a single short paragraph and she’s not wild about it. Too obvious, too cheesy, too lame. A story about a girl leaving a small town with a musician. Charlotte has never written a story like this, so hopeful. She will find a way to work herself in. It is her story, after all, kind of. She turns her Beats headphones down as the Bent Fenders start playing. Probably the best song they’ll ever write, she thinks. And s
he’s listened to it enough. She takes off the headphones, throwing them on the desk. She sits, staring at the blank space she should be filling with her story.

  A sharp laugh cuts through Charlotte’s zoned out haze. She leans over and parts the curtains, looking down at the street. Another skinny kid, unfamiliar, sways on his feet. He’s shirtless, toned like the others, but smaller. What is it with these guys and their aversion to shirts? she thinks. It looks like he has spotted her in the window, and he runs around the side of the house, crouched awkwardly, big feet too long for his thin legs. Charlotte pulls the page from her typewriter, replacing it with a fresh sheet. There’s something about the boy’s insistence, and those legs, awkward but striking, like a newborn spider. Writing something would be better than staring at that too-empty page anymore. There is something there, too, for sure. A poem, she thinks.

  Line by line, the first stanza materializes across the page. The darkness around his slender body, bathed in yellow light, swaying and laughing. It just flows. After the first line of the second stanza, recalling his running, tripping briefly over the lawn, she stops. She needs more. She needs to see his jump into her pool, watch his slight frame emerge, wet and weak.

  As she reaches the back door she hears the splash. She turns on the light, peering around the back door curtain as the boy tries to lift himself over the side of the pool. He slips, his face hitting hard on the tiles. Charlotte throws the door open and runs out.

  “Holy shit,” she says running down the back porch steps.

  The boy lies motionless on the tile, head cocked, eyes blinking momentarily before they close.

  “Hey!” she yells.

  Nothing.

  She crouches at the top of his head. The boy’s cheek is wet and soft in her hand. She readjusts his head so his face isn’t so smashed against the tile, wondering if she should turn him over, start CPR. If it’s his neck though, or his back, she thinks. “Hey,” she says again, patting his shoulder lightly. His full lips, too big for his thin face, open slightly and let out a soft plop. His eyebrows twitch and squeeze. Charlotte shakes his shoulder lightly, her fingers shaking. The boy grunts.

  “Hey,” she says again.

  The boy coughs once and vomits over the tile, a few drops hitting Charlotte’s knee. It smells like beer and spaghetti sauce.

  “Shit,” he says, lifting his hips off the pavement. He pulls a dented can from his shorts and sits up. Sitting cross-legged, he rubs his face gently, looking back at the pool. “What happened?”

  “You hit your face.” Charlotte’s breathes slowly. “Are you ok?”

  “I think so,” he says. He looks down at the tile, “did I throw up?”

  “Ya. It’s okay. What’s your name?”

  The boy shakes his head at the vomit and looks up at Charlotte, big brown eyes swimming in their sockets.

  “You saved me?” he asks.

  Charlotte laughs into her fist. “Are you okay?”

  “Do you have any paper?” he says.

  14

  Sinking

  Getting the perspective right on the underwater scene is difficult, especially since he can’t seem to steady his eyes. But drawing is giving Zain something to keep him awake, and keep him from getting sick again. After sketching his arms, outstretched at the bottom of the page, he outlines the figure above, bent over the side of the boat. For now, he’ll sketch each of the early essentials. He can add all the details later, the shadowed tint of the water, the brown bottom of the tiny rowboat, and the features of the uninterested face staring down at his sinking body. The look on her face as he fell overboard in the dream will be there later. It’s a look he has seen before, too many times.

  Zain heard once that dreams only last a few seconds in real life. But they all feel longer when you’re in them, especially the bad ones, he thinks.. The running dreams are usually the worst. The ones where everyone else passes him, fleeing from disaster, while his own legs barely move through some invisible sludge. But tonight’s vision was so much worse than those running dreams. Because, even though, somewhere within him, he knows in those sluggish running dreams that he’s faster than the slow motion he can’t quite escape, in the sinking dream he couldn’t swim. He was aware that swimming would save him, but completely certain that it was impossible for him to make the motions. Nothing was possible but the sinking. And so he sunk helplessly into darker and darker water. The pencil shakes in his hand and he sits back.

  “Wow,” the girl says over his shoulder.

  Zain feels like he might puke again.

  “Who’s in the boat?” she says, touching the paper above the woman’s figure, careful not to smudge her.

  “My mom,” Zain says. “I fell overboard. I couldn’t swim. I was sinking.”

  “Did she jump in after you?”

  Zain can feel her eyes on him. “No,” he says. The warm purple light beyond the soft glow of the desk lamp feels so far away. He hasn’t been in a girl’s bedroom since elementary school. He puts the pencil back in the mug with all the others, trying to steady his hand. Some serious-looking man’s face glares out from the coffee cup’s side.

  “Who is that?” Zain asks, nodding at the mug.

  The girl leans over and shakes the cup until the pens and pencils even out, her long brown hair brushing his arm. She smells heavenly, soothing.

  “Edgar Allen Poe,” she says and moves away to the curtains. “I collect writer mugs.”

  “Oh, cool. He wrote the black bird poem,” he says. There are probably a hundred better things to say, but he can’t quite find any of them. His eyelids feel heavy again.

  “The Raven,” she says.

  Zain jerks awake. What is he doing here? he thinks. In this girl’s bedroom? He doesn’t even know her name. He forces his eyes to stay open, concentrating on the page in front of him. He retraces the night from the time he woke up on the pool tiles, trying to find a name. When he woke he saw the yard and the porch bobbing in that sick haze, then stared at the puke on the pool deck. He can still taste vomit on the back of his tongue. Then the girl told him he slipped coming out of the pool. And then what? He asked her for a piece of paper. No thank you or I’m sorry about jumping into your pool, or for puking on your yard, and no what’s your name. Zain dares a glance at the girl between the curtains. She’s dressed all in black. Thin and pale.

  She nods at something outside, “I think that’s the last one.”

  “I don’t know your name,” Zain says.

  She looks around the curtains and Zain’s breath catches in his chest. He is suddenly very grateful that he didn’t say it while she was looking right at him. Her eyes are incredible. Big and mischievous and dark. Messy brown hair frames the sides of her smooth face, sharp and intense. Zain weaves his fingers together on the desk, squeezing his shaking hands.

  “Charlotte,” she says. She is even prettier when she smiles. “How about you? Or should I call you Meat?” Her smile widens at Zain’s confusion. “I know Michael, he told me to watch out for you.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. Said you’re a good guy, but didn’t think you drank much.”

  “Oh.”

  “You could’ve just dumped the beers, you know.”

  Zain never considered it. That would be cheating.

  “I guess,” he says, “I gotta get going.” As he tries to stand, pain splits his head at the temples. The room crosses over itself and he sits back in the chair, hard. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, trying to keep from throwing up.

  “Whoa,” Charlotte says, holding the back of the chair.

  “I need to get to the park.”

  “You need to sit,” Charlotte says. She places a hand firmly on his shoulder, holding him down. Her hand is strong, but soft. He opens his eyes and stares down at the picture, blurring on the page. Breathing slowly, he waits for everything to stop swaying.

  “Just chill,” Charlotte says, withdrawing her hand.
>
  Slowly, the page comes into focus, “maybe that’s a good idea.”

  “So, you got a name?” she asks.

  “Zain.”

  “Cool. Hang out for a while, until you feel better.”

  Zain pulls a pencil from the cup. “Thank you,” he says.

  15

  Baffled

  Zain’s head dips again, this time hitting the desk. He jerks awake and pulls the towel up from the back of the chair, wrapping his shoulders. Then gets right back to his drawing. Charlotte knows she can’t let him leave and he won’t tell her his mother’s phone number. She’s not sure he actually remembers the number. Again, she recalls the one useful thing she learned in Health class: concussion plus sleep equals death. And Zain keeps drifting.

  “That’s it,” she says, “we’re going for a walk.”

  “I’m okay. I have to finish this.”

  “You’re not okay.” Charlotte swings her legs over the side of the bed. “Can you walk?”

  Zain stares at the paper, knee bouncing under the desk. He nods to himself. “OK,” he says, standing slowly, his eyes on the desk. “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s just walk.”

  A block from the house, Zain stops, looking up Cloudbank Avenue. The lights of the park are visible over the hill. Is the team still there? Just waiting for him, he thinks. He could jog up, explain the whole thing. Disqualification is better than a loss. If DQs are even a thing in the BPM. He can’t remember.

  “You coming?” Charlotte asks. She waits on the next sidewalk with her arms crossed, hips cocked under the streetlight. Zain looks up Cloudbank again. A huge thunderhead is rolling in from the west, lightning strikes glowing within, lighting the cloud’s edges. Somewhere up the street the team might be waiting. But, down here, there is this beautiful girl. A totally cool girl with a whole night free to do whatever she wants, with whoever she wants, he’s sure. And she’s here with him. His father used to say never leave a question from a woman unanswered.