Dreamer

by Daniel Quinn

  He shoved the crowbar down into the garbage disposal unit as far as it would go, then went into the living room. As he passed the skeletal figure of Matilda raging from the seat of her death cart, he paused to give her a conspiratorial wink.

  His eye fell on a bookcase, and he wandered over to study the titles. At last he smiled and slipped out a copy of the first People’s Almanac, which he considered one of the best reference works of all time—except for its index, which was so obviously and annoyingly inadequate; however, what he wanted was there under the D’s, and with an air of triumph he turned to page 1394, glanced down to the bottom of the page, and burst out laughing. He stood there for a while, reading and nodding, then reshelved the book and looked around again.

  He walked across the room to the glass and chrome étagère and nodded a greeting to a familiar object a few years older than he was, but in better shape: Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch Band. Out of a sense of diffidence, he’d always resisted the temptation to see exactly what it did. Now he took it down, wound it up, put it back on the top shelf, and switched it on. With a fixed smile, he watched the madcap dance and listened to the furious rattle of drums. When it started to run down, he switched it off.

  “Now you know what it’s like,” a voice behind him said.

  Chuckling, Greg turned to the sofa where Larry Fielding sprawled. Wearing a dark blue three-piece suit, he looked the way Greg remembered him from graduate school, before he’d been reduced to delivering legal papers.

  “You know,” Greg said, “I’ve always felt guilty about that last night.”

  Larry shook his head, smiling gently at this slow learner. “You’ve always been big on guilt, Greg, from the time you started feeling guilty about your brother’s suicide—guilty for being alive when he was dead. You’ve always measured your-self against him, always expected too much of yourself. People aren’t perfect—even you.”

  “I know. All the same, I could have been a little more . . . compassionate that night.”

  “Forget it. I was a spooky person. I know that.”

  “I take it you . . . recovered.”

  “Don’t try to push it too far, Greg. I’m just saying the things you want to hear, after all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “All these years, you’ve wanted me to be well, wanted me to come and reassure you that you didn’t hurt me too badly that night.” He shrugged. “‘So here I am, well and reassuring.”

  “I see. In other words, you’re just a hallucination.”

  Larry chuckled ruefully. “Just a hallucination. I like that.”

  Greg checked his watch and was surprised to see that it was after seven. He made himself a drink, which he nursed through the next hour, while the southern windows became a blaze of city lights. Then he made another, promising himself it would be the last until Agnes arrived, and took it to the eastern windows, overlooking the lake.

  Though clear, the sky was still the milky gray of twilight. Over the next half hour the gray deepened until a sprinkling of stars appeared like pinpricks in velvet. As he watched, one of them broke out of its place, arced briefly across the sky, and plunged into the pale glow above the lakeside towns on the eastern shore. Greg smiled and drained his glass.

  Ten minutes later, a call from the lobby signaled Agnes’s arrival.

  XXXX

  LIKE IT?” GREG ASKED. After giving hatchet-wielding Matilda a doubtful glance, Agnes had paused, stunned, at the entrance to the living room.

  “It’s a little extreme for my tastes, but it’s very . . . chic, I suppose.”

  “I’m the Sheik of Araby,” Greg stated in a matter-of-fact tone, and she turned and frowned up at him.

  “Would you like a drink?” He held up his empty glass.

  She shook her head.

  “Come into the kitchen while I make one for myself.”

  “I really think it would be wise to go easy on the booze, Richard.”

  “I intend to. Come on.”

  She followed him into the kitchen, where she stared at the wrecked walls and the crowbar sticking up out of the sink.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what I’ve been up to here?” Greg asked, taking ice from the freezer.

  “All right, Richard, what have you been up to?”

  He finished pouring his drink, leaned against a counter, and used his glass to gesture to the walls.

  “I wanted to see if there was any wiring behind the Sheetrock.”

  “Wiring?”

  “Electrical wiring. For the lights and things.”

  “I don’t understand, Richard.”

  “There isn’t any, Agnes. What do you make of that?”

  Shaking her head doubtfully, she peered into one of the holes. “Aren’t there wires inside this metal tubing?”

  He came and looked over her shoulder. “By golly,” he said, unruffled. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I missed that completely.”

  “Richard . . .”

  “I’ll bet you noticed the crowbar.”

  “Yes, I noticed the crowbar.”

  “Do you know where I found it? Right in that pantry, beside the broom.”

  “So?”

  “There was no crowbar there yesterday, Agnes. What in the world would I want with a crowbar?”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Richard?”

  “I’m telling you it’s an invented crowbar. Watch. I’ll make it go away.”

  He closed his eyes. After a moment he opened them, and his eyebrows arched in surprise.

  The crowbar was still there.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “Richard, I think it would be best if—”

  “Come on. There’s something I want to show you in the bedroom.” He turned and walked away, and Agnes followed, her face a study in baffled uncertainty.

  He paused at the doorway to his bedroom and gestured to the tangled heap beside the closet.

  “All my ties are made from a single length of material.”

  She gave him a puzzled look.

  “That’s an obvious mistake. Ties are always made from two pieces, with a seam that falls at the back of the neck.”

  As she started into the room, he said, “Don’t bother, Agnes. I know you can fix them so they’re right. The point is, they weren’t right when I first looked at them.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back into the living room, where he took The People’s Almanac from its shelf and handed it to her.

  “Turn to page 1394, Agnes.”

  “Richard, let’s sit down and talk.”

  “Page 1394. Please.”

  With a sigh she found the page, scanned it briefly, and said, “What am I supposed to see?”

  “The story at the bottom, entitled ‘Gregory Donner, the Man Who Dreamed.’”

  Without even glancing at it, she handed it back.

  The story at the bottom was entitled, “Ghosts and Haunt-ings.”

  He sighed and closed the book. After thinking for a moment, he looked over at the chrome and glass étagère. Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch Band, which he’d appropriated from Agnes’s collection in Kentucky, was gone. In its place stood the familiar terra-cotta figure of the outraged pre-Columbian magistrate. Greg shook his head, acknowledging defeat with a rueful smile.

  “All the same,” he said, gazing wistfully out at the lake, “I made a star fall out of the sky.”

  “Richard,” she said gently, “let’s sit down.”

  With abrupt cheerfulness, he said, “Sure, Dr. Jakes,” and threw himself onto a nearby sofa.

  Agnes sat down on the edge of a matching sofa opposite his and gave him a long, searching look.

  “You know, Richard, I believe it was a mistake for you to try living alone so soon. I think you’ve had too much time on your hands and have spent too much of it just . . . thinking, wrapped up in your own imagination.”

  She paused at Greg’s sudden grin.

  “Do you know where y
ou went wrong?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what tipped me off?”

  “Richard . . .”

  “It was the siren.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at her comically.

  “Richard, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about these things when—

  “Eee-aww, eee-aww, eee-aww,” he mimicked. “That’s wrong, Agnes. Ambulances don’t use that electronic howl—police cars do. Ambulance sirens sound like sirens.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Richard, but—”

  “That’s what got me started. Then I thought about Nassau.”

  “Richard, please listen to me for a minute.”

  “I’m sure you know I tried to go to Nassau, Agnes. Just after Christmas. I really wanted to go. I had my ticket, I had a hotel reservation, everything. I went to the airport to catch my flight, and then, for no reason at all, I just couldn’t bring myself to get on that plane. I felt compelled to turn around and come home. So I did.

  “Now at that time I didn’t think that much about it. I’d wanted to go to Nassau, but when it actually came down to doing it I found I really wanted to stay home. That’s the way it seemed. But then, after the siren business, I thought about it some more. Why exactly hadn’t I been able to go to Nassau? Let’s do some supposing. Suppose I couldn’t go to Nassau be-cause neither one of us could manage Nassau, Agnes. Suppose neither one of us knew enough about it to make it convincing. I’ve never been there, so I had no memories to work with. And I’ll bet you’ve never been there, so you had no memories to work with either. Even between the two of us, I’ll bet we couldn’t come up with a convincing Bahamian accent, for example. There would be all sorts of other mistakes, like the mistake with the siren. And the sum of those mistakes might have made me suspicious, might have made me wonder what the hell was going on. And once I started wondering, it was only a matter of time till I figured it all out. So a visit to Nassau was just too risky, Agnes. When I got ready to board the plane, you made me turn around and come home.”

  Agnes sighed. “Richard, please . . .”

  “Then I went looking for other mistakes, like the seams missing in the ties, like the lack of wiring in the walls. Natural mistakes to make, Agnes. I mean, how many people ever notice that ties are made from two pieces of cloth? How many people ever tear down the walls to see if there really is wiring behind them?”

  He held up a hand as Agnes tried to interrupt.

  ‘Then I made some experiments. I conjured up that crowbar. That must have given you a shock, but there was nothing you could do about it. You’d obviously seen it, so you couldn’t get rid of it. And of course you couldn’t let me get rid of it once you’d admitted it was there. But that wasn’t so bad; it was at least possible that I’d have a crowbar.

  “Then I put my name in the index of The People’s Almanac, I put in a story about me on page 1394. You couldn’t let that stand, of course, because that was obviously impossible, so you put it back the way it had been. Then I swiped your Dogpatch Band from Kentucky and put it on a shelf over there. Again, that was something you didn’t want to deal with, so you got rid of it as soon as you saw it.”

  He chuckled.

  “I suppose you could even put the star back in the sky, if you knew which one it was.”

  He leaned forward and looked into her eyes.

  “It’s all very simple once you understand, isn’t it, Agnes. In a dream, you can have things just the way you want them. Anything’s possible in a dream.”

  She sighed with weary relief and sank back into the cushions of the sofa. “So that’s what this is all about. You believe we’re in the midst of a dream. Is that it?”

  “You know it is, Agnes. There is no sanatorium in Kentucky. There is no Richard Iles. Greg Donner is asleep somewhere, and we’re running around in his dream.”

  Agnes gave him a look that was half a smile, half a puzzled frown. “Richard, think. When you called me this afternoon, you said you were in deep, deep trouble. You said you’d hurt some-one badly. Isn’t that right?”

  Greg shrugged.

  “Exactly. Now you shrug. Now you’re no longer worried about that. Why? Because you’ve come up with an explanation. This dreadful thing—whatever it is—didn’t actually happen. It was all just a dream. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’re completely off the hook.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true.”

  “Come now, Richard, summon up your intelligence for a moment. Doesn’t this explanation strike you as being just a bit self-serving? Just a bit too convenient?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes, I admit that. But it also happens to be the truth.”

  “Which you’ve demonstrated by conjuring up a crowbar that you say you’ve never owned. Which you’ve demonstrated by discovering that there’s no wiring in the walls of your apartment, even though there is. Which you’ve demonstrated by discovering that your ties are made from a single length of cloth—though you don’t care to have me confirm this. Which you’ve demonstrated by seeing things in a book that I can’t see, by seeing things on a shelf that aren’t there. Richard, do you remember what you told me this afternoon when I asked what was wrong? You said, ‘I’ve been hallucinating.’”

  “These things weren’t hallucinations,” he snapped.

  “Ah. These things weren’t . . . but evidently some other things were. And you can tell the difference.”

  Greg shook his head stubbornly.

  “Very well. Let’s explore this theory of yours for a bit. You say we’re in a dream. Greg Donner’s dream?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I see. So you’ve turned everything on its head again. Richard Iles is the dream and Greg Donner is the reality.”

  “That’s right.”

  She paused, frowning. “Let me see if I can work it out, Richard. Greg Donner has a dream in which he wakes up as Richard Iles at the Glenhaven Oaks Sanatorium. At the end of this dream, he wakes up and learns that Franklin Winters, the diabolical dream-walker, is responsible for it. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Greg Donner then goes to New York and kills Franklin Winters. With the dream-walker eliminated, Greg lives happily ever after with his beloved Ginny—except that he doesn’t. In the midst of a party celebrating the birth of their daughter, he loses consciousness—and wakes up a second time at the Glenhaven Oaks Sanatorium. But this too is a dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. So at this moment, Greg Donner is lying unconscious in the midst of that party.”

  Greg frowned.

  “Well?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re beginning to see the impossibility of it, aren’t you, Richard? If Greg Donner killed Franklin Winters, then there is no dream-walker. And this is not a dream.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and sullenly chewed on his lower lip.

  “No,” he said at last. “This dream didn’t start when I collapsed at the party. It obviously had to start before that. It had to

  start before I killed Franklin Winters.”

  “Because you need a dream-walker to blame it on?”

  Greg laughed. “That’s right.”

  “Come, Richard. If this is a dream, when did it start?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if this is a dream, whose is it? You say it’s Greg Donner’s. But where is Greg Donner as he’s having this dream?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  She shook her head regretfully. “I’m sorry, Richard. You’ve been grasping at straws to keep this theory afloat, but it’s just not working. And you’re intelligent enough to know it.”

  She checked her watch. “I took the precaution of booking us on a flight that leaves at eleven-thirty. If you haven’t yet packed, you’d better start now.”

  But Greg, sprawled contentedly on the sofa and gazing up at the ceiling, didn�
�t seem to be listening.

  “Do you know what the trick is, Agnes?”

  She gave him a weary smile. “What trick is that, Richard?”

  “The trick of dream-walking. Franklin explained it on that videotape he sent Ginny.”

  “Richard, please. It’s been a very long day, and it’s far from over.”

  “He said it’s just a matter of becoming aware that you’re dreaming. Once you’ve done that, you’re free. Just like that.”

  He snapped his fingers.

  She stood up. “Alan’s waiting out in the hall, Richard. If you like, he can help you pack.”

  He grinned at her. “Brought some muscle along just in case I get difficult, huh?” Greg too stood up.

  “I don’t mind leaving, Agnes, but let’s not go to Kentucky. Let’s see if Franklin’s right. Let’s go somewhere else.”

  Agnes sighed and folded her arms in resignation.

  He looked around thoughtfully. “I would have tried this before you came, but I was afraid of attracting attention. This is a little more ambitious than conjuring up crowbars.”

  “Get on with it, Richard. I’ve had about all I can handle for one day.”

  “Now don’t fuss at me, Agnes. This takes concentration.”

  He closed his eyes, held a deep breath for a count of five, and opened them again.

  The walls of the room undulated briefly, as if under water, then steadied and became solid.

  “Almost,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

  When he opened them, the lights were dimming, the walls flowing. Beginning at its center the ceiling dissolved like cellophane held over a flame, revealing a more remote, curved ceiling overhead.

  They were standing just inside the entrance to a vast domed observatory. A few yards away, the black mass of a telescope reared upward toward a slot in the roof.

  “Well, damn!” he crowed, looking around triumphantly. “What do you think of that, Agnes?”

  Agnes, her arms still folded, gazed at him with concern.

  “What is it you’re seeing, Richard?”

  “It’s the Celestial Mirror, Agnes! Ginny and I were nearly trapped here in one of those early follower dreams.”

  “Oh, Richard,” she said, shaking her head in obvious disappointment.