Whipping his head around, he looked at the beautiful blind woman. He knew her too. What the hell was going on here? Why was the world too familiar to him all of a sudden?
Back a few rows in the bus, Donald Duck looked across the aisle at the cassowary and slowly raised an eyebrow. The cassowary saw it and shrugged.
“Mrs. Dugdale!” Her name fell on top of Haden’s head like a brick dropped from the roof. “She was my teacher!”
The octopus bus driver looked at him. “Who was?”
Haden pointed excitedly through the windshield in the direction of where the children had just gone. “Her—the black woman who just passed with all those kids. That was my teacher in third grade!”
The driver looked in the rearview mirror a moment at the passengers. At least half of them had slid forward in their seats expectantly, as if waiting for something important to happen.
The driver feigned indifference. “Yeah? She was your teacher. So what? Too late for me to run over her now.”
“Let me out. I’ve got to talk to her.”
“You can’t leave now, Simon. We just started a tour.”
“Open the door, I gotta get out. Open the door!”
“They’ll fire you, man. If you walk out like this on a tour, you’re history. Don’t do it.”
“Fleam, we’re not having a discussion here, okay? just open the damned door.” Haden was a big man with impressive muscles. Fleam Sule was only an octopus and wasn’t about to argue. However he couldn’t resist flinging a last warning at the other’s back as Haden walked down the steps to the street: “You’re in trouble now, Simon. As soon as I tell them about this back at the office, they’re going to fire your ass.”
Haden wasn’t listening. He didn’t even hear the door hiss shut behind him or the bus pull away from the crosswalk. He certainly did not see all of the passengers flock to one side of the bus to see what he was going to do next. Even the beautiful blind woman was there; her cheek pressed to the cold glass, listening intently as someone described to her what Simon Haden was doing at that very moment.
He hurried after Mrs. Dugdale and the children. It was amazing that he had abandoned the tour and even more, his chances with the gorgeous blind woman. But the moment he realized who was leading those kids across the street, Haden knew he had to talk to her.
Because her third grade class had been so important to him?
Hell no.
If he’d been forced on pain of death to remember one nice thing about that year in Mrs. Dugdale’s class, all that he would have been able to come up with was she kept a goldfish in a large round bowl on her desk that was soothing to look at.
Then was it because Mrs. Dugdale herself was one of those memorable teachers who by example change our lives forever?
Nope.
The woman yelled at students or threw chalk at them whenever she felt their attention was wandering, which in her class was most of the time. Her idea of teaching was assigning individual oral reports on what was grown in Surinam. If you were bad (and most everything was bad to Mrs. Dugdale), she made you stand interminably in a corner against what she called “the Wall of Shame.” In other words, she was like too many teachers you had in elementary school. Haden had endured her moods and mediocrity and morsels of knowledge for a year and then he moved up to fourth grade.
But there was one thing about her that he had never forgotten and it was why he was running after her now. In fact this one thing had played a significant role in forming him. It was one of those rare childhood moments that we can look back to and say without hesitation right there—that X marks the spot where something in me was changed forever.
When he was a boy, Haden had one great friend who happened to have the unfortunate name Clifford Snatzke. But Cliff was so utterly typical that he blended into life with only that unusual name to distinguish him from X zillion other boys. For a while, until girls eventually became both visible and scrumptious, the two boys were inseparable. In Mrs. Dugdale’s class they sat next to each other which made the time with her slightly more pleasant.
Right before that school year ended and report cards were sent home, Cliff became frantic that he wasn’t going to pass because he had failed too many spelling tests. He worried so much and so vocally about it that an exasperated Haden finally urged his friend to go see their teacher after class and just ask. After much hemming and hawing, Snatzke agreed to do it—if his friend would wait for him outside the school building. Although Haden had ten other things he wanted to do at that time, he agreed. What were friends for?
Not much in life bothered Clifford Snatzke and his face showed it. Usually he wore a slight smile or else a pleasant blankness that said he wasn’t thinking about anything special and everything was okay.
But when he emerged from the school half an hour later, his cheeks were the red that accompanies great humiliation or a bad cry. Seeing him like that, Haden eagerly asked what had happened inside. At first Cliff wouldn’t even make eye contact with his friend, much less tell the story. But eventually he did.
Mrs. Dugdale was sitting at her desk looking out the window when he entered her classroom. Always one to mind his manners, Cliff waited until he was noticed. When the teacher asked what he wanted, he told her in as few words as possible because all of her students knew that Mrs. Dugdale liked a person to get right to the point.
But instead of looking in her grade book or giving him a lecture on how to improve his spelling, his teacher asked what kind of name Snatzke was. He didn’t know what she was talking about but said only that he didn’t know. She asked if he thought Snatzke was a very American name. He said he didn’t know what she meant. She looked out the window again and didn’t say anything for a long time. After a while he gently repeated his question about his grade in spelling.
Who knows why, who knows where such a thing came from in the woman, but Mrs. Dugdale then turned to this little boy and said, “Get down on your knees and ask me, Clifford. Get on your knees and ask for your spelling grade.”
Kids are dumb. They’re trusting and they have faith in what adults tell them because adults are the only authorities they have ever known. But the moment he heard this order, even dumb Clifford Snatzke knew that what Mrs. Dugdale was telling him to do was both wrong and extraordinary. But he did it anyway. He got down on his knees as quickly as he could and just as quickly asked for his grade. His teacher looked at him for a few seconds and then told him to get out of her room.
That was the story. If Haden hadn’t known his friend so well, he would have thought Snatzke made the whole thing up. But he hadn’t. Before there was a chance to say or do anything, the front door of the school opened and Mrs. Dugdale emerged carrying her familiar brown leather briefcase. She saw the two students, gave them a fake smile and moved off.
Both boys stared at the ground for a long time. They couldn’t look at each other until she was gone because of their shared knowledge of what she had just done.
Simon knew he had to act. Mrs. Dugdale had done a very bad thing to his friend. But Cliff would let it slide because he didn’t have the guts to face her.
Haden did and for one of the only times in his life, he decided on the spot to do a genuinely selfless thing and right the wrong that had been done to his friend. Throwing Cliff a reassuring look, Simon trotted off in the direction of the faculty parking lot.
When he got there, Mrs. Dugdale was already in her beige Volkswagen and the engine was running. When she saw him coming toward her car she rolled the window down halfway. He would always remember that—the window went down only halfway; as if whatever he had to say was not important enough for her to make the effort to lower it further.
Moving toward the VW, he felt as confident as a god about to fling a flaming lightning bolt at a sinful mortal. He was going to let her have it because boy, did she deserve it.
“Yes, Simon? What do you want?”
He looked at her and panicked. Whatever godlike courage he had brough
t to that moment fled. He could almost see it running crazily away in a zigzag across the parking lot, its ass on fire like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Haden loved cartoons.
“Why—” he managed to squeeze out of his terrified lungs before starting to hyperventilate. He thought he was going to have a heart attack.
“Yes, Simon? Why what?” Her first two words were friendly; the second two were a steel trap snapping shut.
“Why—” He couldn’t breathe. His tongue had turned to stone.
“Yes, Simon?” He saw her right hand release the emergency brake. Her mouth tightened and her eyes flared when she realized he wasn’t going to say anything more and that he had delayed her unnecessarily. Desperate and terrified, he did the only thing his body could manage at that moment—he shrugged. Mrs. Dugdale would have said something nasty if she hadn’t seen Clifford Snatzke walking toward them.
She didn’t even bother to roll up the window. Putting the little car in gear, she shook her head and gunning the engine, pulled away from Haden.
On and off for the rest of his life he thought about that moment and what he should have said and done. It haunted him, as childhood memories so often do. He even dreamt about it at night sometimes. But always, even in those dreams when his big Cinerama, Dolby surround-sound moment came to be valiant, he chickened out.
Well not this time, by God! He had been having a rough go of it recently. Maybe seeing Mrs. Dugdale on the street now for the first time in thirty years was a test. If he passed it, things would take a turn for the better. Who knows? Life could be sneaky sometimes. The lessons it taught weren’t always straightforward. Anyway, he’d like nothing more than to tell that bitch what he thought of her all these years later.
As he hurried after her now, a thought blazed up in his mind like a flame flaring in total darkness: maybe many of his failures in life had been due to her and that stinking incident so long ago. If she hadn’t scared him into silence, the courage he’d had on the tip of his soul that afternoon would have emerged. For the rest of his life he would have known it was there in him and real and could be used any time he needed it.
Rather than a botched, half-assed, bill-laden, dead-end life full of microwave meals and lousy smells, Haden might have been a contender—if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dugdale. He picked up his pace.
A few moments after he caught sight of her, a car driving down the street lifted lazily off the pavement and took flight. It buzzed around overhead in a few circles before veering off out of sight behind an office building. Two large chimpanzees dressed like 1930s gangsters in double-breasted suits and black Borsalino hats came out of a nearby store smoking cigars, speaking Italian and walking on their hands. Haden saw these things but paid no attention. Because Dugdale was near.
As he closed in, he touched the tops of her students’ heads as he went. Despite his preoccupation with wanting to reach his old teacher, he couldn’t help noticing how warm the children’s heads were under his hand. Like little coffeepots, all of them, percolating.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Dugdale?”
Her back to him, the woman turned slowly. When she saw the adult Simon Haden standing two feet away, her eyes did not ask Who are you? They said I know who you are—so what?
“Yes, Simon, what do you want?”
Aaaugh! The exact same words she had said to him thirty years ago in the elementary school parking lot. The same unsympathetic expression on her face. Nothing had changed. Not one thing. He was almost middle-aged but she was still looking at him as if he were a bad piece of fruit at the market.
Fuck that. His moment had come. Now was the time to act decisively. Now was the time to say something brilliant and important to show her who was boss.
Because he was in such a state of shock after hearing her familiar words, Haden did not realize that all of Mrs. Dugdale’s students were frozen in place, staring at him with intense anticipation. Nor did he notice that essentially the whole world around him had come to a standstill because it too was waiting to see what he would do next. Oh sure, cars moved along the street and flies buzzed their mad circles in the air. But all of them—the flies, the drivers in the cars, the molecules in their lungs—everything and everyone had turned to Simon Haden to witness what he would do next.
He made to speak. We must give the man that. Stirring words came to him, perfectly right for the moment. The right words, the ideal tone of voice. He was all ready to go. He started to speak but then discovered he no longer had a mouth.
He worked his mouth up and down, or rather the skin on his face where a mouth had previously been. It stretched, it moved, but that was only because it was skin and he was working the muscles beneath it. Muscles that should have controlled a mouth but Haden did not have one of those anymore. He had only skin there—smooth flat skin like the long expanse on a cheek.
He put both hands up to touch it but that only confirmed what he already feared—no mouth. Unwilling to believe what they were feeling, his fingers kept groping around as if they were feeling for a light switch in the dark.
He glanced at Mrs. Dugdale. Her expression made that terrible moment worse. Scorn. The only thing on her face was scorn. Scorn for Haden, scorn for his cowardice, and scorn for whomever he was now in her eyes. He was reliving his thirty-year-old moment of truth with her in the school parking lot. And this time he would have prevailed—if he’d only had a mouth.
But he didn’t. Frantically he slapped the space on his face where a mouth should have been. While doing that, he glared at the woman—this villain in an Afro who was winning again. The only weapon he had to use now was his eyes. But eyes are not meant for this kind of warfare. A dirty look doesn’t have the firepower, the mega-tonnage a ripping good sentence does.
Somewhere in a far corner of his mind, Haden knew that he had been here before, right smack in the middle of this moment and same situation, mouthless. But his fury and exasperation combined brushed aside this déjà vu. So what if he had been here before—he still had to handle it now. Still had to find a way to defeat Dugdale and show her that he was not the fool her mocking eyes said he was.
Desperation growing, he looked around for something, anything that he could use. His eyes fell on a little girl. Her name was Nelly Weston and she was one of Mrs. Dugdale’s students. The girl was tormented too often by the teacher for being too slow, too sloppy, too dreamy for Dugdale’s liking.
Haden picked up Nelly and slid his hand under the back of her sweatshirt. It happened so fast that she didn’t have a chance to protest. But when he touched her bare back she understood instantly what he was doing and smiled like she had never smiled before in her teacher’s presence.
Nelly looked at Mrs. Dugdale and opened her mouth wide like the ventriloquist’s dummy she had just become. It was all right though because she also knew what was about to happen. Out of her little girl’s mouth came a man’s deep voice—calm but a little threatening too—Simon Haden’s voice.
“You mean old witch! You haven’t changed at all in thirty years. I’m sure you’re still torturing your students when no one is watching. When your door is closed and you think you’re safe. Remember Clifford Snatzke, huh? Remember what you did to him? Well, surprise! You’re not safe and some of us do know exactly what you’ve done, bully. Shithead.”
Nelly mouthed his words perfectly. She could feel Haden’s hand on her back manipulating her, but he didn’t need to because the two of them were wholly in synch with the words. What he wanted to say she wanted to say, and she did.
When he was finished and staring triumphantly at Dugdale’s stunned face, Haden barely heard a voice nearby say, “Well, it’s about time. Bravo for you.”
He shifted his eyes over and down and to his real surprise, there was dapper little Broximon, hands on hips, a big smile on his face. Where had he suddenly come from?
A million or a billion synapses and connections and whatever else suddenly happened in Haden’s brain. Something big was taking form in the
re, something was coming clear. He suddenly looked at life around him. At the street, the cars, the people, the sky, the world. And then an instant later, Simon Haden understood.
He gasped through a mouth that reappeared on his face the moment he made his discovery. He lowered Nelly Weston to the ground.
This city, this planet, this life around him was his own invention. He had created all of it. He knew that now. Where had he created it? In the dreams he had every night while he slept.
He looked at Mrs. Dugdale and was almost as surprised to sec that she was smiling at him and nodding. So was Broximon. So was every person nearby. A small dog on a leash was staring and smiling at him too. He knew the dog’s name—Kevin. He knew because he had created it one night. He had created this entire world.
Simon Haden finally realized that he was surrounded by a city, a life, a world that he had gradually made every night of his life in his dreams. Everything here was either fashioned by him, or taken from his conscious life and carried over into his dream world where he could play with it, fight against it, or try to resolve it in a place of his own.
At forty, Simon Haden had had more than fourteen thousand dreams. A lot of material there with which to build a world.
“I’m dead.” He stated this—he did not ask it as a question. He looked at Broximon. The little man kept smiling but now he nodded too.
“That’s what death is—everyone makes their own when they’re alive. That’s why we have dreams. When we die all of our dreams come together and form a place, a land. And that’s where we go when we die, isn’t it?” This time Haden looked at his old third-grade teacher for corroboration and she nodded too.
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