Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  She chose to work the graveyard shift in the emergency ward because at night there were fewer doctors around to pat and pinch and ogle her. The bleary-eyed interns only gave her speculative stares, as if they were studying the menu but too tired to eat. The male nurses had learned to fear her wrath.

  Night was the prime time for accidents and mayhem, as if people took leave of their senses with the onset of darkness. Husbands beat up their wives. Boys raped their girlfriends. Mothers with nerves rubbed raw by bawling infants took too many pills. Toddlers swallowed paperclips or mothballs or keys. Teenagers tried uppers or downers, sliced their arms with razor blades, wrecked their cars. Drunks tripped on curbs and broke bones. Muggers worked the sidewalks, car thieves worked the streets, rival gangs fought over turf with guns or knives. During the graveyard shift, wave after wave of sirens rushed toward the emergency room like storm-driven surf.

  “It beats me why you keep working nights,” her father said, in the tone of baffled affection he had used toward Veronica since her adolescent blossoming. “You’ve got enough seniority to work afternoons, maybe even straight days.”

  “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” said her mother.

  “Those surgeons you work with can earn a thousand bucks with a few flicks of a scalpel,” her father said, “and you won’t give them the time of day.”

  “You’re so often asleep when your beaus call, I have to convince them you aren’t sick,” her mother complained.

  “They aren’t my beaus,” Veronica said. “They’re just men pestering me.”

  Her mother sighed. “You’re punishing us, aren’t you? As if it’s our fault you’re gorgeous.”

  “Okay,” her father conceded. “Maybe all the doctors are creeps. But there’s other fish in the sea. Right? What about that vice president from the bank? Or the bowling alley magnate? Or the tech entrepreneur? Or the contractor who builds pizza franchises? Those are decent guys, and they’re rolling in dough.”

  “Snag a husband while you can,” her mother advised. “Do you want to be a night shift nurse for the rest of your life?”

  The answer to that question was no. Veronica did not want to be any sort of nurse forever. She was already nearing burnout from dealing with broken, bleeding, desperate people. But she could not decide what else to do with her life. No matter what path she envisioned—teaching, forestry, market gardening, graphic design—it led through a gauntlet of men. They would be her bosses, her colleagues, her students, her customers. Until her accidental beauty faded, they would value nothing else about her. With their rudimentary drives, men seemed to her a separate species, trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, like plankton or horseshoe crabs, while women had evolved to higher levels of complexity.

  For the present, Veronica stuck with her midnight shift despite the stress and gore. After supper she changed into her navy blue scrubs and sturdy clogs. Although her jacket and pants were a couple of sizes too large, chosen to fit loosely, when she arrived at the hospital men would still gawk at her.

  She always arrived early and parked her car at the edge of the lot near a stand of big trees, mostly beeches and maples and oaks, the last survivors of an ancient forest that once covered the ridge now occupied by the hospital. From this vantage point, she could see skeins of streetlights stretching along the three rivers that converged at the heart of the city, the flashing red beacons atop bridges, the glare of blast furnaces, the jets of yellow flame above refineries, and steam drifting in luminous clouds above the mills. But her chief pleasure was to watch the dream creatures stir from their roosts in the high branches and go gliding down to haunt the bedrooms of sleepers.

  Once she clocked in for work, time passed quickly in a siege of heart attacks, gunshot wounds, diabetic seizures, broken legs, collapsed lungs, third-degree burns, and sundry other afflictions, all accompanied by cries of pain. Among the few patients who lifted her spirits were the expectant mothers, too far along to reach the maternity ward, who staggered in and delivered their babies on a gurney, often into Veronica’s gloved hands.

  During the rare lulls between emergencies, she wrote lists in a small notebook she kept in her pocket—lists of proverbs, vegetables, rivers, constellations, titles of books, women scientists, famous painters, obscure actors, songs—lists of anything she could dredge up from her brain. While hoisting the bag for a blood transfusion or pressing defibrillator pads to a patient’s chest, she might recall burnt sienna or Baton Rouge, Louisiana; then at the next opportunity she would add those items to her lists of colors or state capitals. Noticing her habit, one of the gawkers might ask, “What are you scribbling, baby doll?” “Poetry,” she might answer, to discourage the man, or “Letters to a crazed world.” Indeed, as the world sank into disarray, she would have written poetry if she knew how, but at least she could make little havens of order by writing lists.

  Veronica’s favorite moment arrived after she clocked out at dawn. In cold weather she sat in her car and gazed down at the incandescent city. In mild weather she watched from a bench under the creamy branches of a giant sycamore. As alarm clocks rang and sleepers awoke, dream creatures slipped away from bedsides and came wafting up out of the valley to roost in the old trees beside the parking lot. They filled every branch, crammed together cheek by jowl. Judging by their gaudy outfits, they might have been a flock of parrots. Yet they made little noise, only a dry rustling, like wind in leaves. The sound enchanted Veronica, who imagined they were exchanging notes about the dreams they had performed for sleepers in the city.

  Of course dreams were also needed in daytime, though not so many, for napping babies and drowsy old folks and dozing workers home from the graveyard shift. On mornings when Veronica sat watching the flocks of characters returning to the ridge, a smaller number rose from the treetops where they had been roosting and swooped down into the city. Occasionally, she would meet in her dreams some dragon or soldier or crone whom she had seen gliding away on this daytime duty.

  Back in her childhood, when the ridge was still part of a state forest, Veronica often came here with her parents to picnic or camp. At first she had been frightened by the flying specters, with their talons and fangs, their metal hooks for hands and barbed tails and tentacles. When she pointed them out with a shudder, her parents dismissed her worries. “Monsters in the trees!” her mother echoed teasingly. “Let’s have a look,” her father said, shining his flashlight into the branches. The beam swept over a white-bearded gnome, a scarlet devil, and a burly gorilla, all clear as day to Veronica. But her father merely said, “See there, kiddo, just empty trees. Nothing to worry your pretty head about.”

  She soon lost her fear of the creatures, and never again mentioned them to her parents. From the first she knew perfectly well what they were, these goblins and ghouls, these shaggy wolves, these hunchbacks and witches and mad scientists. Some she recognized from her own dreams, especially the nightmarish beasts, while others—the hunter, wizard, or drowned sailor—appeared in dreams recounted by her friends. It seemed reasonable to her as a child that these nighttime visitors would spend the daylight hours roosting in trees, like owls.

  Back in those years before puberty, when girls still looked at her without jealousy and boys without lust, she would hike up to the forested ridge with friends at dawn or dusk to see if they noticed the specters swirling overhead. Only one of those friends—a languid boy with sunken cheeks and forehead pasted with sweaty hair—ever seemed aware of the chattering flocks. “Do you hear that?” he said to her one night. “Hear what?” she asked hopefully. “That whispery sound,” he said, “like river rapids far away.” Another evening he squinted up into the bustling air and observed, “The sky is full of colored patches.” “What shape are they?” she asked. “I can’t make them out,” he said, “they keep shifting, like jewels in a kaleidoscope.” Soon afterward, the boy took to his bed and died of leukemia, leaving Veronica alone with her visions.

  And so when the bearded stranger sat down next to
her on the bench one April morning and said with a secretive air, “Have you noticed there aren’t nearly so many dreams these days?” Veronica neither glared at him nor fled. Instead, she gripped the edge of the bench to still her trembling and waited to hear what he would say next.

  He recalled the hardwood forest that once covered this ridge where the hospital now sprawled amid parking lots and landscaped grounds, and then she recalled how as a girl she would climb the fire tower and gaze with wonder over a sea of trees. Of course the tower had long since been taken down, together with all but a scattering of trees that were spared to provide islands of shade on the groomed lawns.

  “The city keeps on expanding,” the man said, waving a bony hand at the horizon. “Any day you can hear chainsaws and bulldozers leveling another woods.”

  “It’s worrisome,” said Veronica. She stole a glance at the man, so pale and thin, his hair and sparse beard as blond as corn silk. His blue eyes, glinting behind the spectacles like pebbles at the bottom of a creek, shyly avoided looking at her.

  “The fewer the trees, the fewer the dreams,” the man went on. “Some people get only half a sleep’s worth, others don’t get any. That’s why the hospital is so busy. That’s why the city is boiling with anger and fear. People are going nuts from dream deprivation.”

  Veronica had been disturbed by the same thought, and was about to tell him so. But before she could speak, she burst out laughing, overjoyed to meet someone who shared her vision.

  Abruptly the man stood up. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “Oh, you’re not bothering me.”

  “You’re laughing. You probably think I’m weird.”

  “No, no.”

  His scrawny frame swayed, as if caught by a breeze. “From the way you were watching the skies, I thought maybe you saw—” Without finishing his sentence, he bolted for his car.

  Veronica rose from the bench and called after him, “Wait!”

  But without looking back he hurried on to a mud-splattered Jeep, climbed in, and drove away. As the engine noise receded, she could hear the chatter of flocks rising from the ancient trees to go deliver daytime dreams.

  That night as usual Veronica arrived early for work and the next morning she lingered afterward. Instead of going to the bench under the huge sycamore, however, she sat in her car to watch the flurry of dream characters arriving and departing, aware of the bearded man sitting nearby in his Jeep. They kept on like this for several days, cooped up in their cars. Then one morning she walked to the parking lot after a hectic graveyard shift, the food in her cooler bag still untouched, and there he was standing at the base of the sycamore, hands pressed against the trunk, gazing up through the branches where new leaves blazed like tiny green flames. Curious to see him touching her favorite tree, she continued on past her car and onto the lawn, drinking in the fragrant spring air. Eventually, as if by chance, she circled back to the bench and sat down, placing the bag beside her on the weathered slats.

  With eyes closed, the man was embracing the great tree, his cheek against the massive trunk, his arms reaching perhaps a quarter of the way around. As if sensing her presence, he suddenly opened his eyes and stood back, brushing flakes of bark from his jacket. “I like trees,” he said apologetically.

  “I love them,” said Veronica. “Especially this one, with its patchwork bark and creamy branches. It’s like a dancing goddess with a hundred arms.”

  “Yes, a dancing goddess!” His beard parted with a smile. Gesturing at the bench he asked, “Do you mind?”

  By way of answer she picked up the bag and placed it on her lap.

  He lowered himself beside her, not too close, and kept his legs cocked as if ready to flee. “I didn’t mean to spook you the other day.”

  “You didn’t spook me.” She hesitated, then decided to take a chance. “I see them, too.”

  He gave her a startled look, his eyes wide behind their lenses. “What do you see?”

  She tilted her face toward the brightening sky and pointed. “There’s a fox, a fat lady, a burglar, a tangle of snakes, a dwarf.”

  “And a peacock,” he said, grinning broadly now, “an octopus, a two-headed calf . . .”

  “A gambler in a green eyeshade, a lumberjack, a tattooed woman . . .”

  “A beggar with a bowl, a child in a lab coat . . .”

  They fell silent and stared at one another. His eyes watered, and Veronica could feel tears brimming from her own. After several deep breaths, she asked, “Have you seen them all before?”

  He nodded. “All of them. I’ve cataloged several hundred characters, but I haven’t added any new ones for years. In fact, lots of those on my list don’t show up any more.”

  “I’ve noticed that. Many old standbys are disappearing. I suspect they’re migrating.”

  “Searching for a forest that hasn’t been clear-cut,” he said, finishing her thought.

  “That’s why our city is suffering a drought of dreams.”

  “Exactly.”

  Veronica shivered. It was as if she had finally met someone who spoke her native tongue. “I’ve always wondered where the dream furnishings are kept,” she said. “You know, bulky things like rockets and cupboards, or scenery, like mountains and castles and caves.”

  “I’ve wondered, too. Maybe they’re dissolved in the air of bedrooms and only precipitate out when they’re needed for a dream.”

  “So that’s why if you sleep in somebody else’s house or a hotel or in a tent . . .” she began.

  “The scenery and props are different from the ones at home.”

  No longer pallid, his face shone, and Veronica’s own cheeks burned. She squeezed the cooler bag with both hands to keep from reaching over to stroke his downy beard out of sheer gratitude. No man except her father had ever made her feel so safe, and even her father had never made her feel so deeply understood. While the chatter from the trees ebbed into silence and the sky turned from pink to blue, they sat there trading stories. His name was Martin. He was an X-ray technician at the hospital. Starved of dreams, he had recently volunteered for the night shift, so he could sleep in the daytime when the characters might be more convincing and the plots fresher. Living alone since his parents had retired to a golf course condo in Arizona, he taped notes on the refrigerator to remind himself to eat. As a boy, he had wanted to become a painter, but his parents refused to pay for art school, insisting that he learn a practical skill, and he gave in, studying X-ray technology at the community college. Now, after four years of capturing ghostly images of bones, he was beginning to doubt the substantiality of flesh.

  “When I saw you sitting here on the bench,” Martin said, “at first I thought you were a figment from dreams. But when I looked closer I saw you were real.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Your curiosity, your excitement, the intense way you watched the sky. I could almost see the rays cast by your eyes, like searchlights.”

  Veronica remembered the beam of her father’s flashlight shining up through the branches, and his assurance that nothing was there. “When you sat down beside me that first morning,” she said, “you didn’t seem very substantial yourself. You made me think of birds, with gauzy wings and hollow bones.”

  “Birds,” he muttered, then snapped his fingers and drew a notebook from his pocket and jotted something down. “Excuse me. I just remembered the name of a constellation.”

  “Cygnus, the Swan?”

  “How did you know?”

  Veronica smiled. “I’ve made a list of constellations.”

  “You keep lists?”

  “Lots of them.” She produced her own notebook and riffled the pages with her thumb. “They’re something I can hold onto while the world’s spinning out of control.”

  “Amazing. It’s as if we’re twins.” He ran his gaze over her, head to toe, lightly, then blushed and looked away. “Not identical, of course.”

  She laughed. “No, not identical.”


  Gripped once more by shyness, Martin stood up and squinted at the sky. “Looks like the show is over for this morning. Time to go sleep. Maybe we’ll see one another here again.”

  “I hope so,” said Veronica.

  Back home that morning, she received the customary grilling from her parents, who wanted to know if she had met any cute doctors at the hospital, and would she please return calls from the banker and bowling alley magnate, and why doesn’t she buy some pastel outfits for work instead of navy blue. “Pink would bring out your lovely coloring,” her mother said.

  As soon as she could disentangle herself, Veronica filled the bathtub and soaked neck deep in the steaming water and fell asleep. She dreamed of spiders spinning webs between the stars to snare comets and spaceships. It was a familiar scenario, interesting the first time, grown tedious through repetition. The spiders seemed as bored with their work as the orderlies at the hospital. She was entering a second dream—this one about a flying man, not brawny Daedalus with his wings of wax melted by the sun, but a slender man with a blond beard and blue eyes, wheeling in thermals above a forested ridge—when a knock rattled the door and her mother barged in carrying a pizza that filled the bathroom with the smell of pepperoni.

  “It’s from that contractor,” her mother announced. “He delivered it himself. He said he’d bring one by every week, except he doesn’t want to spoil your perfect figure. Isn’t that sweet?”

  Veronica groaned. “I can’t eat it. I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since right now. I just converted.”

  Her mother frowned. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “You can start by taking that pizza out of here and letting me dry off. This water’s cold.”

  As Veronica rose from the tub her mother surveyed her up and down and repeated a favorite remark: “You could pose for statues.”