The Sandman: Book of Dreams

by Neil Gaiman

"It seemed the most likely explanation." Privately, he was relieved. It was better to know the truth, to be sure. People survived heart attacks and lived for years. Decades in some cases.

  "But you've come through it." The nurse turned to face him. "You're going to be all right."

  "Thank you," he said.

  "You're a very important man."

  Under the circumstances, that seemed humorous. Smiling took little effort this time.

  "We've had all sorts of people phoning and trying to get in to see you."

  He could easily imagine what it had been like. He said, "I apologize."

  "Oh, it's okay, we're used to it. But for the present, only family members, and no calls. It's for your own good."

  She bustled away, stopping in the doorway to ask, "You really don't dream? Ever?"

  "No," he murmured. He tried to make his voice stronger, strong enough to carry to her. "Not even when I was a child. I can't imagine what it's like, to tell you the truth."

  She regarded him skeptically.

  "Like hallucinating, I suppose." He had not thought of this before. "But I've never done that either."

  "Everyone dreams, Mister Benson. It's just that sometimes the unconscious mind tells us to forget, cuts us off from it."

  I don't, he said, but the words never reached his lips-- she had left too fast.

  If she was right, he reflected, somewhere in his memory there was a vast reservoir of unremembered dreams; he searched for it, but it was not there.

  A touch woke him. The same nurse was bending over his bed. "Mister Benson?"

  He blinked. "Would you do me a favor, Nurse? A great favor?"

  That surprised her. "Certainly, if I can."

  "Call me Tim."

  Involuntarily, she glanced at the door. "It says Otis Benson. That's the name we have you down under."

  It brought back a book that Michael had liked when Michael was young. Benson told her, "Winnie the Pooh lived in a hollow tree in the woods under the name Sanders." It was easy to smile now. "Or at least, I think it was Sanders."

  She smiled, too. "That's right. I read that to my little nephew."

  "I," he tried to clear his throat, "on the other hand, have lived under the name Otis Benson. My real name is Timothy Otis Benson. I dropped the Timothy a long time ago."

  "I see." As though unsure what to say, she added, "My name's Ruth. You can call me that if you want to, Tim."

  "I will, Ruth. My mother called me Tim. Tiny Tim. I'd like to be Tim again."

  "I understand. Tim, your daughter's here to see you. I said I'd see if you were strong enough. Are you? We won't let her stay long."

  Benson, who had no daughter, said, "Of course I am. Send her in," and watched the doorway with some interest after the nurse had gone.

  It was Daisy, and before she came in he had discovered an armless chair of enameled metal beside his bed. As he tried to decide whether the sorrow in her face was genuine he said, "I thought it was you. Won't you sit down?"

  She did, knees primly together, hands folded in the lap her salient chest clearly prevented her from seeing. After a second or two, it occurred to him that she was dressed for the office, and he asked her what time it was.

  She raised her left hand to consult the diamond-studded watch he had given her. "Seven o'clock."

  "In the evening?"

  She nodded. "We didn't hear until three--after three. I left when I heard. I left everything in an awful mess, but I left. I told Susan to--to take care of things, and I left. The traffic was terrible."

  He said, "I remember." A tall, pale-faced man in black had entered without making a sound. An orderly of some sort, Benson thought, although he did not look like an orderly.

  "You were there in your car for more than an hour-- this is what they said on the radio--while the traffic crawled around you. I listened while I drove over here, while I was stuck in traffic."

  And cried, as Benson saw. Her eyes were red, but it was probably better to pretend he had not noticed. He had always been angry when Daisy cried, never imagining that someday she might cry for him.

  "People had been calling on their car phones to complain. They said there was an abandoned car, and finally a tow truck got there, and the driver called an ambulance."

  She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. "I guess they drove on the shoulder when they could. That's the way they do, but it still took a long, long time. A terribly long time. Then it was the president and CEO of Magus, Otis Benson. And when I heard I thought, I thought..."

  "You thought what?" He was genuinely curious, and sensed that she would tell him the truth now.

  "I thought, I don't care what anybody says, I'm going, and I'm going to wear black, everything black and a veil." For an instant, her reddened eyes flashed. "Then I thought, nobody will say anything. The loyal secretary coming to the boss's funeral, how nice. Mister Wilson will pat me on the shoulder. I know he will." Her voice rose to a wail. "Oh, Benny! Don't die. Please don't die!"

  She should not have called him Benny in the presence of the silent man in black, but Benson could not bring himself to rebuke her. "I won't," he said. "I won't." His groping hand found hers.

  The prettiest secretary in the company, and when he had reached the top he had taken her, although she was by no means the best secretary or the best typist. She had been a badge, a trophy, letting everybody know that he was in charge, that the board was in his pocket, that what he said went, and there had better be no arguments and no foot-dragging--one trophy among a great many. Susan, who had been his secretary when he was first vice president and sales manager, became his executive assistant at twice her old salary, handling everything tricky, confidential, or sensitive. Daisy had typed a few letters and memos, had brought him coffee and emptied the ashtrays and opened the mail each morning.

  And then--

  "So I showed them my fake ID that says Daisy Benson," she was saying, "and they let me come up."

  He managed to nod. She had that odd old-fashioned streak, worrying about hotels that had ceased to worry about couples fifty years ago, wearing gloves in the lobby or slipping the star sapphire he had given her onto the ring finger of her left hand. Lying in the hospital bed and only half-hearing her, he understood for the first time that she had found satisfaction in that, had liked to think of the sapphire ring as a wedding ring, had fantasized about it. She was still talking, but he interrupted her. "What kind of a ceremony do you want, Daisy?"

  "You mean your... ?" She stared blankly, the pinkish lids of her wide, bloodshot eyes moving slowly down, and slowly up again. "What?"

  "What kind of wedding? You must have thought about it. What kind would you like?"

  "We didn't have a real wedding."

  For a moment he actually thought that she meant the two of them, that she was reminding him of something he had forgotten.

  "Just at the courthouse."

  The nurse appeared in the doorway. "You'll have to leave now, Miss Benson."

  Reluctantly Daisy rose, letting go of his hand. "At the Consort. Please?"

  "All right," he told her. "Soon as I get out of here."

  She blew him a kiss from the doorway, and he smiled and shut his eyes. He had wanted to keep Michael's estate safe for him, had wanted to avoid the entanglements of a divorce he had considered only too likely. All of that seemed childish now. Perhaps she really loved him--perhaps she didn't. He loved her, and that was what mattered.

  When he opened his eyes again, the tall man in black was standing over him. He had the whitest face Benson had ever seen--so white that he seemed practically transparent. "I'm awake," Benson told him.

  "I know you are."

  "What is it you want? Do you have to change the bed or something?"

  "You have been wronged." The man in black spoke slowly, in a loud whisper. "You would say shortchanged. I have come to set things right."

  Benson shut his eyes again. No doubt he was
entitled to some hospital amenity that he was not receiving, a TV in his room or an evening snack.

  "You have never dreamed."

  He had told someone about it not long ago; perhaps it had been this tall man in black. The darkness he saw with his eyes closed was the tall man's black clothing. He had never known it, yet it did not seem strange.

  Far off, in a palace beyond the universe, the man in black said, "You will dream now, Timothy Otis Benson, for as long as may be."

  He sat up. He had lain down, apparently, on the front seat of his car. Drunk? He hadn't been drunk since college.

  Something fell from the seat with a melodious clang, and he bent to pick it up.

  It looked like a guitar yet unlike one, too, a tinny affair someone with more skill than sense had made from one of his mufflers and a section of tailpipe, guitarlike but given the S-shaped sound holes of a violin.

  Turning it over, he verified that it was in fact (as he had supposed from the first moment he saw it) made from a Magus muffler; Magus's clouded moon was stamped boldly on what was now the back, although the trade name itself, which should have appeared there in capital letters, was missing.

  As were the sensuous curves of a real guitar, or for that matter a real violin. This--his questing thumb woke a chord from the five silver strings--was as plain and straight-sided as any prepubescent girl.

  How did the song go?

  "Little Missy Riddle,

  Haul 'em away."

  He had meant only to mutter the words, but their old magic overcame him at once; his voice echoed from the windows and the windshield, in some fashion transmuted to mellow gold.

  "Little Missy Riddle,

  Haul 'em away.

  She broke her brand-new fiddle,

  Haul 'em away.

  Got a hole right up the middle!

  Haul 'em away.

  To me holly heigh ho!"

  Benson grinned as he ducked beneath the Magus-guitar's thin strap. Could you really play this thing?

 

  "Little Missy Taylor,

  Haul 'em away.

  Said she'd never love a sailor,

  Haul 'em away.

  She's been harpooned by a whaler!

  Haul 'em away,

  To me holly heigh ho!"

  He had never played, never sung, half so well; moved by innocent vanity, he looked around to see whether anyone had been listening.

  Cars, trucks, and buses surrounded him, motionless in the slanting rays of a brighter sun. No brake light glowed crimson now, no exhaust fouled the clear air.

  Here in his car that air was warm and musty, and growing warmer. He depressed a switch in the armrest to put down his window, but the glass remained where it was. Turning the key kindled no instrument lights, woke no sleeping tiger in the engine.

  He opened the door and got out. Morning was fresh and beautiful, and ghostly in its silence save for the barking of a small dog far off. A jet-black cat with eyes like emeralds blinked at him, spit, and retreated beneath a rusty minivan.

  Before and behind him, the sixteen lanes of Interstate 75 stretched as far as he could see, eight north, eight south. Every lane was filled, and every bumper touched another.

  He turned back, remembering that he had left his key in the ignition; but he had locked the door behind him, or it had locked itself. There were no keys in the pockets of the worn work pants he wore, no money, no driver's license, no credit cards, and no handkerchief.

 

  "I'm broke and I ain't got a dime,

  Everybody gets hard luck sometime."

  He had not meant to play, but the low-down blues notes stole out of the Magus-guitar, possessed by a will of their own.

  "Mama don't treat your daughter mean,

  That's the meanest woman that ever I seen."

  The door of a station wagon several cars up the lane swung open and a sleepy-eyed woman in a threadbare housedress got out. Thinking she might be offended, he switched songs.

  "Woke up this mornin' with the blues round my bed.

  Yep, woke up this mornin' with blues round my bed.

  Went to eat breakfast, got blues in my bread."

  The woman called, "You hungry?" and started toward him.

  "Good mornin', Blues, how d'ye do?

  Good mornin', Blues, how d'ye do?

  Feelin'good, Partner. How 'boutyou?"

  Nearer now, the woman repeated, "You hungry?"

  Benson shook his head.

  "We got a few little somethings left over from last night. The chowchopper come last night."

  "I'm really not hungry," Benson told her. "I just hope my singing didn't disturb you."

  The woman smiled, and at once the smile made her younger and almost attractive. "I was just layin' there in our car awake, thinkin'. You sure can sing. I never heard nobody on the radio better'n what you are. Not near as good."

  "Thank you," Benson said.

  "They don' play music much, and ain't good when they do. Maybe you'd play me just one song?"

  "If it won't wake people up."

  Another car door opened; the man who got out said, "Go ahead. Nobody's goin' to complain."

  "A love song," the woman said, and Benson nodded.

  "As I was a-walking down Strawberry Lane,

  Where the roses grow pretty and fine,

  I happened to meet a merry, fair maid,

  That would be a lover of mine...."

  By the time the song was finished, there were ten or more ragged people around him, some awed, many smiling. Someone shouted, "Another song!" seconded at once by the woman, "Play another one, won't you?"

  Benson winked at the nearest man and began it.

  "I'm a lonely bush-whacker on the Reed County Line,

  I can lick any bastard, yokes one ox o' mine.

  If ever I catch him, you bet that I'll try,

  I'll lick him with the ox-bow,

  Root, hog, or die!

  "Git out upon that lonely road,

  Crack your whip 'n haul your load,

  Whip 'em, boys, and holler,

  Yell and cuss 'em 'til you're dry,

  It's whack them cattle on, boys.

  Root, hog, or die!"

  Benson glanced around him. He had fifty listeners now, perhaps a hundred. As he launched into the third verse, he told himself firmly that he should play no more than three songs for them. It was better--far better--to get off stage while you were still welcome, still being applauded with honest enthusiasm. He would count "Strawberry Lane" as the first, this as the second.

  "Sing another like that 'un!" a man in the crowd called when he had finished.

  Benson shook his head. "There are no more like that."

  "Sing a good one," the man he had winked at said. "You know what you got."

  "Shenando' " seemed the only possible choice. He began to walk before he finished the first verse, afraid at first that they would follow him, and fearful that they would not.

  And when the last was sung, and the last of those who had, had dropped behind him, the Magus-guitar sang still, murmuring the haunting melody of the wooded Eastern river and the cruel, hot, Western flood men had once called the Big Muddy, a mile wide and an inch deep, too thick to drink and too thin to plow, relentlessly rolling to the Gulf of Mexico.

  "Where are you goin', Mister?" a boy shouted.

  "Moving on," Benson told him, and sang "The Wayfaring Stranger" for him, and then walked on as he had promised.

  Where was he going, and where had he been? Once he had sold franchises for a company that was to all intents and purposes a fraud. Bit by bit, he had made the thing real, providing the training that had been promised, upgrading the cheap and sleazy replacement parts, arranging--it had been his one stroke of genius--to sell stock to the franchisees, and welding them, his people, into the force with which he had seized control.

  It seemed a very long time a
go, something he had worried about once but need worry about no longer. For a moment he paused to study his reflection in the window of a big, black, limo-like vehicle, a window cleaner than most.

  He looked as he had always supposed himself to look. A tickle from the back of his mind reminded him, for a moment only, that of late he had not looked like that--had been shocked, in fact, each time he saw his own face in a mirror. He turned away, and the tickle ceased.

  He was going to marry somebody again, marry a woman he loved, he felt sure, though he could not lay hand to her name at the moment. She would be pleased, whoever she was, to see him looking so young. Or anyway to see him no longer looking old.

  "Can you play that thing?" a man much younger than he asked.

  Benson nodded. "I'll play you a song, and sing it too, if you'll stroll along with me."

  The young man hesitated, then grinned. "One song? That shouldn't be very far. They can't get too mad if you just walk for one song."

  "Ah," Benson said, wondering who "they" were.

  " 'Sides, if you play like most others I've heard, one song ought to be enough. Maybe too much."

  "This is the way I play," Benson told him, and his fingers (almost carelessly, it seemed to him) called forth the melody of "Londonderry Air."

  "Say," the young man croaked when the last note had faded, "you're good. You're real good." He sounded almost reverent.

  "Thank you," Benson said. "It's a good tune, though. So good that some have called it the most beautiful ever written. It's hard to go wrong with a tune like that if you can play it at all."

  "You said you'd sing, though. You didn't sing."

  "That was before you implied that the way I played one song would be more than enough," Benson explained. "Since it was my playing you'd questioned, I let you hear that. Nothing compels me to sing for people who don't like my music."

  "Are you going to sing now?" the young man asked. "I'll come along."

  "No," Benson told him, and walked on, a little upset with himself at first, but soon feeling oddly at peace.

  He had walked two miles if not more before he understood the feeling. He was at peace because he had been given what, in the depths of his soul, he had always wanted. It was an article of faith with many people that what one wants is never enough when one achieves it.

  But that was only because so many--himself included-- enjoyed the chase, the struggle, the pursuit of some distant goal. Mountain climbers, when they had at length conquered the peak that had frustrated their efforts for months or years, went looking for more difficult heights. Not because they were insatiable, but because they enjoyed pitting their courage and their skills against Nature.

  He had liked pitting himself against Business, had liked being more duplicitous than the crooks, cheating them as they had cheated others, enjoyed beating the corporate politicians at corporate politics--then striking down those who tried to play politics with him.

  All that was true; but underneath it, he had longed for this, had longed to be a simple man living among simple people, seeing their faces glow when he sang the old songs. He had been in a hospital; he was quite sure that he remembered that. Someone must have given him this to cure him.

  As it had.

  The persistent whick-whick-whick of a helicopter sounded in the distance. It drew scores of people from cars to look at it, and point, and shout to one another. Benson stopped to look, too, shading his eyes with his hand. It was a big one, as large as the largest military helicopter he had ever seen, but slate blue or blue-gray, not the desert camouflage of the United States Army.