Dreamer

by Daniel Quinn

He shook his head.

  She squeezed his hand but felt no answering pressure. “Please, can’t we do it all over again without that part? Can’t we just pretend I’m not so stupid as to have said that?”

  He said, “No,” but it came out hoarse.

  “Oh, Greg,” she groaned, “don’t fall in love with me. Please.”

  “Why?”

  When she didn’t answer, he took his hand back, went into the kitchen, and made himself a drink. After taking a swallow and clearing his throat, he went back into the living room and stood over her. “Why?”

  Ginny, still kneeling on the sofa, shook her head.

  “Why? Are you in love with someone else?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t, Greg. Please.”

  “Are you a man killer? A Soviet agent?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you have some dread disease? For Christ’s sake, what is it?”

  “Please don’t quiz me, Greg.”

  Suddenly he felt his face flush with anger. He reached down and pulled her off the sofa to her feet. Gripping her shoulders fiercely, he said, “All right. You can tell me not to quiz you. I have no right whatever to quiz you. But you have no right to tell me who to love and who not to love.” He shook her like a doll. “Do you get that? You can no more tell me not to love you than you can tell the sun not to shine.” He shook her again till her head was bobbing. “It’s a thing that’s already happened, goddamn it!”

  Her eyes wide with alarm, she nodded helplessly. Still holding her in a numbing grip, he snarled, “Now tell me again what a shame it would be to send me home.”

  “Sh-sh-shame . . .” she whispered, her chin trembling.

  “Goddamn right.”

  A couple hours before dawn, Greg woke from a light sleep and was immediately glad. This wasn’t a night to sleep through. Ginny lay asleep on her stomach beside him, and he propped himself on an elbow to study her. This is enough, he thought. He’d be content to spend a week just watching the slow rise and fall of her shoulder blades below the cascades of her hair.

  Their lovemaking, at least for him, had been like nothing he’d ever experienced—precisely because it had been love-making, not just the quenching of desire, not just delightful play. Holding her, touching her, he’d felt suffocated, overwhelmed, delirious with love. He’d felt no urgency to bring it to a climax. He’d wanted it to last forever, and it seemed to him it had. They had occupied a timeless zone in which tomorrow would never come, the sun would never rise, phones would never begin ringing to signal the beginning of just another workday.

  When he’d come at last, it was something other than just a physical release, it was an electrical one. His body had sizzled and his brain had dissolved in a champagne foam. Ginny had fallen asleep with her head pillowed on his chest, and, his arm around her shoulders, he’d dozed off a few minutes later, drunk and exhausted with happiness.

  With a sigh, he pulled the sheet up over her, carefully rolled out of bed, and began gathering up his clothes. He didn’t want this magical evening to end in a humdrum morning of bathroom visits and breakfast and good-byes. And, having made that decision, he wanted to be gone before she woke up.

  Passing through the living room, he considered leaving her a note. But saying what? Nothing could be added to what he’d already said, without words, a few hours before. He let himself out silently, eventually found a cab, and, sitting in front of his window with a cup of coffee, watched the red ball of the sun emerge from the far side of the lake. This satisfying ritual completed, he decided that two hours of sleep wouldn’t see him through the day and took himself off to bed.

  Silently, as if borne on a puff of wind, the steel door of the observatory swung open. With a thrill of panic, Greg took Ginny’s arm and hurried her to the opposite side of the dome, where he began frantically to search for an exit. In his haste, he nearly missed it. It was an elevator door, fitted almost invisibly into the sleek metal wall. A plate beside it framed a single red button, and he slammed his palm onto it.

  Nothing happened. The door at the other end of the build-ing closed and locked with an echoing clunk.

  Greg hammered on the button with the side of his fist until he felt Ginny’s restraining hand on his arm.

  “Not that way,” she said. “Lightly.”

  Holding his breath, he touched the button with his index finger, and the door slid open with a gentle mechanical sigh. They scrambled inside, and when the door closed behind them they began to descend, smoothly and silently. Looking around, he thought he’d never seen such an elegantly appointed elevator. The walls, lit from some invisible source, glowed an indescribably delicate red. Handsomely machined brass panels on all sides offered knobs and buttons controlling unguessable functions.

  The elevator sighed to a gentle stop, and he waited for the door to open. After a few moments a neutral voice issued from a brass grill over the door: “Yes or no?”

  Yes or no? He looked at Ginny, and she shrugged. Greg answered with a shrug of his own and said, “Yes.”

  The elevator resumed its descent.

  Twice more it paused to ask its question and twice more he answered yes. Finally it settled to a halt and the door opened. They stepped out onto a brightly lit street, and Greg realized that, by passing through the house and observatory, they’d reached a parallel street a block away.

  Behind them the door sighed to a close, and the elevator began to ascend.

  He looked around and saw a subway entrance just ahead. “Come on,” he said, taking Ginny’s hand. “The trains run all night.” They raced down the stairs, through a turnstile, and out onto the deserted platform. He turned to the left, straining to hear the distant roar that signaled an approaching train, but there was nothing.

  “Look,” Ginny whispered and pointed into the track well. A long table set for an elaborate meal sat astride the tracks, and he groaned. They had stumbled into a subway station that had been abandoned by the city and turned over to private use. No trains ran here.

  He looked around desperately for some way out, but they were surrounded by an unbroken, white tile wall. Again and again he swept it with his eyes, looking for some exit other than the one leading back up to the street. Then he realized he’d seen it and missed it. Once more he sent his eyes across the wall, this time fully alert. Then he had it: at a certain point, the wall angled in to form a V. Set into one arm of the V was a door. The other arm was a mirror cunningly angled so as to give the illusion of an unbroken wall. He remembered now that this was how the subway dwellers kept intruders out. It was an effective illusion; even knowing it was there, he had to concentrate to see it at all.

  Keeping it fixed in his vision, he held out his hand to Ginny and whispered, “There’s a door over here.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Ginny, come on!”

  Nothing.

  Tearing his eyes away from the illusion, he looked around. He was alone on the platform. Ginny was gone. He turned back to the illusion and in the mirror caught sight of her disappearing into the darkness beyond the hidden door.

  Behind him a thunderstorm of footsteps broke out on the stairway leading down from the street. Now completely maddened with fury, the follower had found them.

  Fear clutched at Greg’s heart.

  VIII

  LOOKING THROUGH THE CLIPPINGS that remained on his desk, Greg realized he was doomed to return to the library. He'd worked through the best of the lot, and the stories that were left weren’t worth fooling with. Checking his watch, he saw it was nearly one o’clock: hardly time enough to make the trip worthwhile. He sighed, knowing he was just groping for an excuse to stay home with his bright daydreams. He was in no mood for the gray, hushed confinement of the library.

  He wanted to call Ginny. No, that wasn’t quite it. He wanted to be where Ginny was. He wanted to look up from his desk and see her working away at her drafting table. He wanted to stroll over and plant a kiss at the nape of her neck. He wanted to see her look up and give
him a distracted smile and accept another kiss, this time on the lips. He wanted . . .

  God, he thought, it is a form of madness.

  Mentally gritting his teeth, he gathered up his notebook, shoved a couple of pens in his pocket, and headed for the door.

  When he returned five hours later, he was in a foul mood. He’d struck a two-week period that was a dry hole. After nearly three hours of wading through the New York Times, he’d come up with two mediocre stories. In desperation, he’d floundered through Variety, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and even the Wall Street Journal for the same period, garnering exactly nothing. He was tempted to call Ted Owens in the morning and tell him the idea was a washout. In a world of terrorist bombings, Star Wars game playing, and famine, no one gives a damn if a man bites a dog. He tossed his notebook on the desk and headed for the bathroom to make a second pass at stripping away the black sheen his hands had picked up from a thousand sheets of newsprint.

  A few minutes later he was stretched out on the sofa with his eyes closed and a drink resting on his chest, trying to wash away the blackness of his mood, when the phone rang. His heart stopped and he thought: Ginny. Rolling his eyes at his own foolishness, he set his glass down on the coffee table and answered the phone.

  “Is this Mr. Donner?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m calling from Armando’s restaurant,” the voice an-nounced primly. “We have a small bookkeeping problem here.”

  “Oh?” Greg wondered if he’d accidentally written them a bad check, then remembered he’d paid with a credit card.

  “I was rather expecting you to have called us by now.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “I see. You don’t know what the problem is.”

  Greg laughed. “I’m afraid I really don’t.”

  “Well, the problem is the bill I have here. I was wondering what you plan to do about it.”

  “Bill,” he said, frowning, completely baffled. “What bill is that?”

  “It’s a bill from last Friday night, Mr. Donner. I’m sure you must remember it. For six hundred forty-three dollars and seventeen cents?”

  Greg felt the blood drain from his face. “You’re crazy.”

  “Oh . . . Well, I must say I don’t think that’s quite the approach to take to this thing, Mr. Donner. I know you’ve been a regular customer here, and I’m sure you want to go on being a regular customer here, and—”

  “You’re crazy!” Greg screamed and smashed the receiver down into its cradle.

  His legs shaking uncontrollably, he sank into the cushions of the sofa and held his face in his hands. He struggled to think, but his brain seemed clogged with sound: with the rushing of blood in his ears. Finally he dropped his hands and stared at the phone. He tried to imagine it ringing, to remember the sound of its bell. Had it rung at all?

  He got up shakily, idiotically put the receiver to his ear, and listened to the hum of the dial tone. Then he cradled it and said aloud, “That didn’t happen.”

  Obviously it couldn’t have happened.

  He turned and stared at the sofa, where he’d been lying just a few moments before, and it came to him: he’d fallen asleep. Lying there with a drink on his chest, he’d dozed off and had a dream. But if that was the case . . . when had he woken up? When you wake up from a dream, no matter how vivid it is, you know you’re awake and you know that what you’ve just experienced was a dream.

  He hadn’t woken up.

  Christ, he thought, is it possible that I’m still asleep, still dreaming? How do you tell with absolute certainty that you’re not dreaming? Pinch yourself? Can’t you pinch yourself in a dream? He shook his head violently. He knew he was awake. But if he was awake, then he’d never been asleep—and the phone call hadn’t been a dream.

  He stood staring into space for a few seconds, then looked up Agnes’s number and dialed it. When she answered, he said, “Agnes, this is Greg. Have you just played a little trick on me?”

  “What? What on earth are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer. He knew it was all wrong. For her to have impersonated that caller would have been inconceivably out of character. “Do you remember the dream about that ridiculous bill at Armando’s?”

  “Of course.” She sounded puzzled.

  “Did you repeat it to anyone?”

  “Why ever would I do that?”

  “Just answer me. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Not to anyone?”

  “No, dear, not to anyone. Why?”

  “Because I just got a call from someone dunning me for the six hundred forty-three dollars I owe Armando’s.”

  He listened to her breathe through a full minute.

  “I’m trying to think what the point of this is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a wonderful sense of humor, Greg, but this is completely over my head.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “You’re saying this really happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He told her, and she said, “You were lying on the couch with your eyes closed when the call came?”

  Greg sighed. “I’ve already thought it out, Agnes. I definite-ly didn’t dream that call.”

  “Of course you didn’t. If you had, you’d know it. That isn’t what I was getting at.”

  “Oh. Well, go on.”

  “In a semiconscious state, as when we’re just waking up or just falling asleep, it’s not at all unusual to superimpose a dream context on things happening around us. For example, the alarm clock goes off, and in our dreams this becomes a fire alarm or someone screaming. This is a common experience. You must’ve had it.”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Okay. Lying on the couch, you were in such a state: semiconscious, on the verge of dreaming. You had a phone call, and you superimposed a dream context on it. The caller may in fact have been trying to sell you a newspaper subscription, but what you heard was related to your dream about Armando’s. Maybe he said something that sounded like Armando’s or six hundred, and your unconscious latched onto that and supplied the rest. And by the time you were fully awake, you’d hung up.”

  Greg nodded reluctantly. . . It fit, barely. It was plausible, or at least credible. He wanted it to be credible, because it was infinitely preferable to thinking he’d had an outright hallucination. “Bless you, Agnes. You have saved a man’s sanity.”

  “Good heavens,” she said. “Did you think you were ready for the straitjacket?”

  “Just about.”

  “You couldn’t pay for our drinks in a straitjacket, honey.”

  “I know. I owe you a brace of them, love.”

  Greg’s weariness had been washed away with relief, and, without thinking about it, he dialed Ginny’s number.

  “I’d like to see you tonight,” he told her.

  A pause. “All right. Can we meet somewhere?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, let’s have a drink together. Maybe somewhere up in your neighborhood for a change.”

  He asked her if she knew the Tango, and she said she didn’t. “It’s in the Hotel Belmont. You’ll like it. Very designy. Then you can come up and see my place—it’s only a couple blocks away.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said levelly. “Eight o’clock?”

  He said that would be fine. But, after hanging up, he didn’t feel fine. Ginny had seemed cool and remote. He shook his head, recognizing this as just another symptom; to one struck down by the love madness, every word, every tone, every gesture is a portent of acceptance or rejection.

  Thrusting his apprehensions aside, he began to organize something to eat.

  “Very nice,” Ginny said, surveying the Tango cocktail lounge with a wan smile. “Nice colors. Nice lighting. Though I’ll bet people fall over the tables a lot.”

  The tables, were in fact low cubes, and they were a bit awkward. />
  Greg looked around nervously for the waitress. He’d arrived early to be sure of snagging a corner booth, and there was a half-finished drink in front of him. Finally he caught her eye and ordered one for Ginny.

  Ginny looked down at her hands and folded them. He reached over to claim one, and she gave him a reserved smile but didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  He felt sick with dread.

  When her drink arrived he said, “What’s wrong, Ginny?”

  She shook her head. “I had it all rehearsed, now it’s gone.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m sorry, Greg. I’m desperately sorry.”

  “What is it? Is it something about last night?”

  She took her hand back after giving his a brief squeeze. “No. Last night was . . . lovely.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong,” she repeated blankly. Then she looked up at him appealingly. “I wish you’d listen to me.”

  “I will listen to you, Ginny.”

  She shook her head hopelessly. “I told you not to fall in love with me, and you didn’t listen. I suppose you thought I was being . . . coy.”

  “I didn’t know what you were being. I still don’t.”

  She turned her hands up and studied them as if she might find something written in her palms. “It’s true I have no right to tell you who to love. But . . . ” She broke off with a sigh. “But I have a right to resist being torn to pieces.”

  “Is that what I’m doing to you, Ginny?”

  She shook her head.

  “Ginny, you said you wished I’d listen to you. I’m listening. I’m listening as hard as I can.”

  Suddenly she lifted her head and turned away from him, and he could see tears standing in her eyes. “What you want from me I can’t give. And what you want to give me I can’t accept. That’s what you have to listen to.”

  “God, Ginny, all I want is what I’ve had. And I don’t even mean last night. I didn’t demand that.”

  “I know.” She groped in her purse for a tissue and wiped her eyes. “That was my fault.”

  “Your fault? Jesus, what are you saying? Didn’t you want it to happen?”