“Look,” he added, “when we close an account, we close it. You have at least twenty-five good years left in you. And the payment terms aren’t really so bad.”
“So out with it.”
“All we want is to own the copyright on all your dreams from here on.”
“That’s all?”
“It means a lot to us.”
“Copyright?”
“Copyright. The right to use your dreams as we see fit.”
“Why the hell do you need my permission in the first place?”
“You insult us. Ethics are of prime importance in my line of work. I can’t speak for the previous administration, but today we run a very ethical operation.”
“I don’t get it. How is it worth your while? What do you do, sell the stuff to Hollywood?”
“Let’s not be coy.”
“Then what? Why the hell should I care if you buy up every dream I ever dream from here on out?”
“Well, like yourself, there are others out there who have needed some help in diversifying their dream habits. People are so uncreative these days. It’s like tuning in to reruns you’ve seen too many times before. Without our help, well, dream life would be almost as dull as waking life.”
“Then help yourself. If somebody wants to recycle anything I have to offer, let them have it. The copyright is yours. May it rest in peace.”
“Now you’re being hasty.” Harry had swooped down and was walking in circles around the dream auditor, pecking at pieces of grass and looking for insects. The bird caught his reflection in the shining black of one of the patent leather shoes and stood there transfixed.
“You see,” the dream auditor continued, staring right at Harry, “the corollary is this: sometimes we loan our copyright privileges to other government departments that operate, shall we say, outside of the bedroom. Scenarios in the waking world become, as you’ve probably discovered, repetitive and less than imaginative, too.”
“So. You’re saying that if I come up with a brilliant dream, I could be helping someone out?”
“It doesn’t always turn out that way.”
“But I thought that you’ve already told me that most of my dreams have come from your department anyway.”
“Well, they have, but now you’ll be on your own. Our years of training will be yours to do with as you please.”
“So I still continue to dream, but I’m fully responsible to make them up as I go along? And you simply get to keep the copyright?”
“That’s the way it works.”
“It doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Then perhaps you’ll just sign here. Good. Thank you very much.”
“Well, you could have been less theatrical about the whole thing. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal.”
He nodded. As he turned to go, Harry flew up and perched on my shoulder as he was prone to do when he wanted to read my mind more clearly. I always liked the feel of his talons gripping my collarbone. And I felt safer now that the dream auditor was walking down my driveway toward his car. He looked back before he got in, however, and offered some last-minute advice. “Now that we have an agreement, I would ask one more thing of you.”
“What’s that?”
“Do be careful about what you dream.”
PRYING LOOSE
Carl and Vincent sit at the kitchen table playing a makeshift game of hockey with an Oland’s cap and pencils for hockey sticks. It’s a game of skill, and the ritual has become quite elaborate. Arlene, Carl’s wife, walks in from the living room and rinses out a glass, which she then puts away. Carl looks up and Vincent sneaks a shot across the table and off. Score.
“How’s the game going?” She is looking at Vincent and ignoring her husband. For once, there is a distinct lack of the usual mocking tone in her voice. She opens another cabinet and pops a Midol. Carol gives her a dirty look. He doesn’t think she should take Midol after a glass of wine.
“You must be practising with Carl. He’s improving. I used to be able to beat him.” Vincent is surprised how unhousewifely Arlene looks. She wasn’t nearly that attractive when she was younger. None of the girls he goes out with have that certain poise and quiet charm that she has.
“Get off it, Vince. Carl has always been the shits at anything to do with sports. He’s lost his touch at a lot of other things, too, lately. Who knows, though, maybe this is his forte.” Arlene fakes a smile.
Carl keeps his mouth shut. Her comments are unfair and by his estimation unfounded. He locks his teeth and breathes through his nose. Carl is one hundred per cent opposed to airing dirty laundry in front of friends. Vincent is about the only buddy from the old days that he hangs around with. They have very little in common these days. They sometimes sit and drink beer, play table hockey and leave it like that. Conversations usually involve automobiles, government, beer or what-became-of questions.
“How’s work going, Vince?” Arlene asks, washing her hands in the kitchen sink.
“They wanted to ship me off to Ontario again, but I said no way. I like it here. You have to put your foot down with those turkeys at the home office.”
Carl tries for another score while Vincent is talking but fails, and Vincent snaps the cap back across the table, through the pencil defence and onto Carl’s lap. “Who knows,” Carl says, “you might find a woman you really like in Ontario. They’re more aggressive there, I hear.”
“No, thanks.” Vincent looks over at Arlene again. She is looking at him in a soft, motherly fashion. She feels sorry for him still being single. Vincent hopes that she is comparing him to her own husband, that she notices that he is ageing ever so gently and gracefully compared to Carl, who is thinning up front and thickening down below.
Two more beers are opened, and the boys throw two new pucks onto the table, making for a brief free-for-all. Carl accidentally whacks one good, all the way across the room. It hits Arlene on the back as she is washing her hands for a second time. She doesn’t turn around.
Vince always sets aside Wednesday evening as strategy night. He sits at a beer-varnished table near the back of Alfie’s Place and watches the university girls pretend they’re thirty years old. Vincent never smokes but always keeps a pack of Matinée cigarettes open on his table in case he needs an opener with a potential.
The truth is that Vince is long past college girls and tavern hoppers. Thirty-five and well settled into a “semi-executive” slot at a company that sells custom accessories for bulldozers and earth movers, Vince has talked more bullshit to women than many movie stars get away with in a lifetime. He’s futilely matched himself up with more coke-sniffers, teeny-boppers, high school dropouts, tequila sunrisers, pill-popping tight-assed flakeheads and over-torqued sweet young things than most rockband roadies would encounter on a dozen West Coast tours. Vince has surveyed the mental real estate of half the unhitched under-thirty female population of Halifax and found a lot of empty lots and vacant floor space and not much hope.
He ran an ad in the Herald one Saturday out of desperation:
SINCERE guy, mid-thirties, looking for companionship, love and affection. Simple and straightforward.
Only the Herald ran it saying “gay” instead of “guy,” a typesetter’s little joke. Vincent read through some very sincere responses that poured into his newspaper box number. All the wrong sex.
Vincent gives himself three and a half years before the top of his head looks like a TV commercial for floor wax. He was an extremely handsome man for quite a while and had almost everything going for him. This had caused him to dawdle, and it was getting late. He had been too damn good at everything. A champion high school basketball player, he ended up managing his own McDonald’s by the time he was nineteen. Later, he sold out his interest in a regional ball-point vending machine franchise just before the company went into receivership. He worked up north on an
oil rig one year as a tool pusher and made enough money to buy into co-op housing in the South End.
Clinton Connicker is tuning up his twelve-string Rickenbacker and making sure his band is in order. Clinton holds down the stage at Alfie’s three nights a week, non-union. He plays the twelve-string electric plugged into a giant, overweight Marshall amp and is backed by an electronic rhythm gizmo that makes Ginger Baker sound like somebody’s grandmother. Clinton has a macro-jiver sound-sync synthesizer that coughs up fuzz-tone rhythm guitar, piano, sax, and a Philadelphia Orchestra string section when necessary, and, just for kicks, he plays a pedal bass low enough to crawl down your sock. Eventually, he’ll retire and allow his machines to pump out the music without him.
Clinton runs through seven songs, rehashing top-forty slop and retrieving Rolling Stones and Beatles numbers in a convincing trance. Then he eases into a song called “A Little Bit Longer” and, in the middle, lets the boys in the band take over. He flips on a tape loop, leans a brick on the D-pedal and sets his digital watch for seven minutes, so that a little blue light will blink when his break is over.
“Wha’ say, Vince?” Clinton sits down and semaphores the beer slosher for a pair of Keith’s.
“Just ripping along. How’s Pam?” Pam is Clinton’s wife. Pam, Clinton and Vincent went to school together. Right now, Pam and Clinton are practising for a divorce.
“The bitch.” An all-inclusive answer. Vincent would settle for Pam at the drop of a shoelace if he had a chance. Pam, Arlene or Ann. Any one of the three.
“Vince, you don’t know what a pain in the butt it can be. She won’t let me do nothin’. ’Member when we used to go cruising around at one a.m. chasing carfulls of women all the way to Truro if we had to? Shoot. Now my life is Spaghettios and afternoon soaps. Pam runs off to crapayoo yoga every afternoon, and I wash dishes, listen to Bargain Box and fight off bill collectors. Some frigging life.”
Clinton breathes in two beers, checks his quartz and flees back to the stage in time to relieve the orchestra. Vincent runs through strategies again. Halfway through a seventies version of a sixties song recently made big by an over-the-hill fifties singer, Clinton gets distracted by a customer. She looks to be maybe twelve, but she’s made it past the ID check, so she must be older. Her hair is cut in a butch, like the surgery Vince’s mother had once performed on his own hair. She’s flat-chested and scrawny and deathly pale. Clinton can hardly contain himself but finishes his set with one eye glued on her as she sits at a conspicuous table up front and drinks nothing at all.
* * *
Chuck is a master at home repair. He has a workshop in his basement with twenty-five thousand dollars worth of Black and Decker. Last week he installed a sauna in the living room. “The Swedes’ll tell you that a sauna should be at the centre of a family’s life. I moved the TV into Ann’s sewing room.”
A sauna in the living room didn’t surprise Vincent one bit. Chuck’s three-tier living room was enormous. Once they had moved all the furniture to the corners and had an all-out wrestling match. Just like the old days. Vincent won, of course, and Ann applauded. “I bet you’re hell in bed, too,” Chuck joked good-naturedly after the match. Vincent had accidentally flipped Chuck into a teakwood coffee table that surrendered two legs and cracked down the middle.
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t think twice. Get that sucker down to the Workmate and have it like new in minutes. It’s incredible what you can do with the new epoxy adhesives.”
Tonight, Ann wants to know if Vincent would like to join them in the new sauna. “Sure, why not join us?” Chuck adds, wanting to show off a special way he managed to seal the shiplap joints and the novel manner used to cover up the wood screws with mother-of-pearl inlaid wood plugs.
Vincent took Ann out exactly twice during school. The first time, one of the brake lines rusted through, and they just barely avoided driving into the side of an oil truck. The second time, Ann had just had an operation on her gums, and her mouth was Novocained beyond conversation.
She had made it through university and was entering law school when Chuck came along with a winning smile and uncanny skills in the areas of investment counselling, foreplay and belt sanders. Ann was married and pregnant before she had a chance to address her first moot court. After a late miscarriage, she learned that there were problems in the fallopian tubes and she should consider adoption. She decided that Chuck was, at heart, still just a big kid and figured that it might be just as satisfying to play den mother to a child genius for the rest of his days. As a result, their home was legendary for its polyurethaned glow of imported real-wood warmth and vitality. Chuck had built everything from violins to hanging beds in his spare time away from a firm that counselled bored third-generation millionaires on how to shelter their money in obscure but sound Caribbean republics.
“I guess I’ll give it a go,” Vincent agrees as he hear Ann in the adjacent bedroom, changing her clothes.
“Splendid,” Chuck says, dropping his pants on the spot. “Voila.” Nothing but blonde-haired legs, spare torso and speed swimming trucks. “Since I put in the bath” — he means the sauna — “I always wear these, so that I can just sneak in for a sweat any old time.”
Ann walks back in wearing a one piece wrap-around black bathing suit with a curlicue swath cut out of the middle. Vincent is still wishing he could have got past the brake lines and the gums.
The door closes to the sauna, and Chuck begins to explain the life cycle of the tree from whose entrails the walls were ripped. This is followed by an elaborate explanation concerning how wood grain needs to be “wooed” with just the right combination of sandpapers and finishes. Vince tries to change the subject and asks about tax havens.
“If you got over a quarter-mil, the best place is a bank in the Cayman Islands. The government is so stable there, it makes Switzerland look like banana republic.” Vincent can tell it’s a line he’s used on little old ladies and irresponsible corporate nephews.
Vincent feels a little uncomfortable sitting on the scorching bench in his jockey shorts. Ann is lying down on a long rack across from the two men, and while Chuck is fingering the Norwegian grain, Vincent steals a mental snapshot of Ann’s steaming, glistening ribcage. She might almost be sleeping but that would be impossible in this heat.
Chuck begins another lecture on how to rabbet hardwood, but, out of the blue, he’s cut off by Ann, who props herself up, dripping great tears of perspiration, and blasts, “This is the most goddam boring thing you’ve ever built!” She stands erect and flashes a scorching look at Chuck. In the hot, compressed air of the sauna she seems volatile and other-worldly, voluptuous and explosive. A door opens and an arctic seventy-degree derailed freight train of air crashes into the chamber.
When Vincent is alone at night on a Tuesday, eating a dinner consisting of Colonel Sanders and rye whiskey, he is feeling depressed. Not only have the Maple Leafs screwed up the season for good, but Ronald Reagan wants to put missiles on railroad tracks shuttling around Wyoming so that he can blow up whatever remains of the world after the initial damage is fulfilled in a mutual assault. On top of that, his mirror has reported that his face is also hard at work on reinforcing an intricate network of tiny tracks all around his eyes and forehead. Now, when he smiles, it’s like the heyday of the CNR and CPR.
After deciding that two legs and a thigh are enough for any slightly paunched thirty-five-year-old male, he turns on his phone message recorder. The red-headed girl who was flunking out of university called to say that he should come over for dinner next week. She’s serving swiss chard quiche and wild rice. Could he bring the wine? His insurance agent called to say that his life insurance had run out and that if he reinstated it now, he wouldn’t have to pay the new federal surcharge.
Lying on the sofa with both the radio and the TV on, Vincent sees himself living on a palm-lined beach in the Cayman Islands. Inside his myth
ical Hollywood-styled beach cottage, he makes hockey sticks and ukeleles that sell for phenomenal amounts of money in industrial North America. They are embarrassingly easy to make and forge a ridiculously large tax-free surplus in his bank account. From inside the cottage he can look out and see three women lying asleep on towels near the lap of the blue water. As he tries to bring them into focus, a curtain of haze sweeps across the beach and they become indiscernible.
The playback machine has one more message. Clinton. “Vince. You know I hate this. Talking into a frigging machine. Like this is what it all comes to. We talk to each other through our machines. Nobody ever has to really communicate. You know? Shit, hey look, anyway. I’m having sort of a party. Friday. Not really a party, just a chance for you and me, Chuck and Carl to get together and slosh a few. What’s the occasion, you might ask, had you human voice there to query. Pam. She finally took off. I’m free at last. I don’t even know where the hell she . . .” That is where the machine runs out of tape, and Clinton ends up talking to a dead wire. Vincent gets up and shaves with his Phillips for the second time that day. He trims his moustache, puts new laces in all his shoes.
By Friday the plans have changed. Clinton has been kicked out of his apartment by the landlord after the police came searching for the cocaine he had just flushed down the toilet. Chuck had gone through a bad week of stock counselling and suddenly believed that he had silverfish crawling through the knotty pine walls. He is paying a fortune to have exterminators in on an emergency Friday- night job. Carl had taken in two hockey games, a boxing card and a regional tag team wrestling championship that week. If he brought the boys over on a Friday night, Arlene had promised to strangle him with a pair of pantyhose in his sleep.
So Vincent had put off the red-haired girl, who sobbed that she really was in need of a friend right then, with her life in a puddle. He would stay at home and host the boys. Maybe they’d get pissed and have a great time rehashing old victories and farting contests. Maybe he could open up about his worries for once. Maybe he would just keep his mouth shut and find out where Pam had run off to or see if any of the other family battles were nearing divorce court. He had awakened in the middle of the night remembering a dream: he was shuffling down a long bleak hallway, and there was snow piling up around him. There was a door at the end, and he knew he could make it there if he just kept shuffling along. The snow became deeper, and he felt his ankles turn to ice. But he had arrived. When he opened the door, there was nothing but blackness.
Dance the Rocks Ashore Page 18
