A museum specimen was what Veronica felt like much of the time, or a zoo animal, as if she were an exhibit rather than a person. But just now, buffing herself with a towel, she recalled the secretive turns of Martin’s voice and felt warmth spreading through her body.
The two of them began arriving earlier for work in the evenings and departing later in the mornings. In dry weather they sat on the bench under the sycamore; in wet, they huddled in Martin’s Jeep, shivering with pleasure at the sound of rain on the roof. Thunder and lightning pleased them even more. He did not kiss her or touch her before asking, and well before he asked she was ready to say yes. Holding one another, they felt less need for keeping lists.
Martin rarely brought much to eat during his shift and often forgot to bring anything at all, so Veronica began carrying extra food in her cooler. Boiled eggs, walnuts, apples, turkey slices, blueberry muffins, yogurt, quiche—all these and more she offered him and he ate obediently. Before long the shadows vanished from his cheeks, his limbs filled out, and his skin took on an earthy glow.
“You’ll ruin your figure,” her mother cautioned one afternoon, when she noticed Veronica packing so much food.
Instead of bristling, Veronica mildly explained, “I’m taking extra for a friend at work.”
“What sort of friend?”
“Human.”
Her mother snorted. “You know what I mean. Man or woman? Young or old?”
“A young man.”
“Tony!” her mother yelled into the den, where the TV was erupting with sounds of gunshots. “Come listen to this!”
Veronica’s father shuffled into the kitchen, groggy from the tube. “Listen to what?”
“Our girl has a boyfriend at work.”
Her father suddenly came alert. “Is it that brain surgeon who keeps calling?”
“No, Daddy.”
“The cardiologist?” her mother asked.
“Not the cardiologist,” Veronica said patiently. “He’s an X-ray technician.”
Her father whistled. “A radiologist!”
“No. He only takes the pictures. But he has a college degree and a wonderful mind and the kindest eyes.”
Her parents exchanged a look that lasted several seconds, long enough for them to arrive at some realization that made them both smile. They turned their beaming faces to her.
“If you found your guy, Ronnie,” said her father, running a hand softly over her hair as he used to do when she was little, “then bless you, sweetheart. All we ask is that you don’t move in with him until you’ve got a ring.”
“And it wouldn’t hurt to keep him interested by wearing some lipstick and eyeliner, and clothes that show off your figure,” her mother added.
Without resorting to makeup or changing her wardrobe, Veronica became, if anything, even more alluring. In the corridors of the hospital, men interrupted their errands to watch her pass. Male doctors would sometimes look up from a patient to issue a command, snag their gaze on her, and forget what they meant to say. Female doctors no longer scowled at her as if she were seeking attention, but accepted her as another example of nature’s prodigal beauty, like butterflies or waterfalls or the aurora borealis.
Several times each night, Martin slipped into the emergency room to deliver X-rays from one or another victim, casting a glance at Veronica that set her nerves tingling. There was never time for more than a glance, because the number of victims kept swelling as woodlands around the city were cleared. Bored with flimsy dreams and fangless nightmares, or deprived of dreams altogether, sleepers awoke feeling muddled and furious. There were wildcat strikes at factories along the river, explosions at the refinery, bomb threats in the courthouse, lockdowns in schools. Knife fights broke out on playgrounds, fistfights in public hearings. Turf wars erupted in the suburbs. Policemen pepper-sprayed anyone who gave them lip. A homeless encampment under one of the bridges was set on fire. The reek of teargas and smoke hung over the city.
The emergency ward overflowed with bruised children and battered women, wounded teenagers, confused elders, zonked out druggies, failed suicides, mangled survivors of car crashes, sufferers of heart attacks or strokes—a procession of shattered and bleeding, shrieking and moaning souls.
Following their shift, Veronica and Martin would collapse onto the bench under the great sycamore, almost too exhausted for talk. When they broke the silence it was often to complain of their shabby dreams, which no longer aroused them, no longer scared or inspired them. The wizards and crones lacked wisdom, the storm troopers and demons lacked menace, the saints and bodhisattvas lacked conviction. The specters that still roosted in the big trees atop the ridge were tattered, like letters that had been folded and refolded too many times. Their chatter was drowned out by the clangor of fire engines and squad cars and ambulances.
As spring gave way to summer, sweltering heat increased the turmoil. Loaded gurneys filled the hallways of the hospital, and then the lobby, and then the cafeteria. In August, the hospital board announced plans to double the capacity of the emergency facilities by adding a wing, and to do so with all possible speed. Within days, the site of the new construction was marked by red survey flags, a large rectangle that enclosed the bench, the great sycamore, and the entire grove of old trees. The trunk of each doomed tree was encircled by a strip of orange tape.
Men wearing hardhats and fluorescent green overalls arrived one morning as Veronica and Martin were leaving the hospital, wrung out from the siege of patients during graveyard shift. Two of the men picked up the bench and moved it to a patch of grass far from the sycamore, so the lovers took refuge in Martin’s Jeep. They stared glumly through the windshield as a truck pulled up hauling a bulldozer, which the men in Day-Glo overalls set about unloading. Chainsaws began to snarl.
“This will finish things off,” Martin said quietly.
“There’s no future here,” said Veronica.
They stayed long enough to watch several of the big trees come down, the huge trunks and branches gouging the dirt and sending out shockwaves the lovers could feel in their bones. The few returning dream creatures swirled in the air above the spots where the crowns of the trees used to be. The specters circled higher and higher, as if bewildered, and then set off toward the horizon, dwindling away like brightly colored leaves riding the wind.
The bulldozer roared back and forth, tearing out stumps. When the teeth of a chainsaw began ripping into the trunk of the sycamore, Veronica whispered, “Take me to your place,” and Martin started the Jeep.
She took the first shower, leaving her drab clothes like a discarded chrysalis on a chair in his bedroom. Then while Martin showered, she waited in his bed. When he joined her there, smelling of mint shampoo, he spread her damp hair on the pillow, an auburn fan, and kissed her forehead, then her lips. The tremors she felt as his hands grazed her body were like those from the falling of the great trees. They lay with their limbs entwined through the daylight hours, wakeful, whispering, unvisited by dreams. Then all through the following night, and all the days and nights thereafter, the city rattled with gunfire and boomed with explosions, and sirens never stopped wailing.
Ascension
For weeks before the mayor put on her startling exhibition, the townspeople had trouble sleeping. At dawn on those restless mornings, when garbage trucks began their growling rounds, damp heads were still flopping on pillows like beached fish, and hands were still plucking at sweaty sheets. Children trudged off to school with squinted eyes, relying on crossing guards to defend them from traffic. The guards leaned on their portable stop signs and listened for the squeal of brakes. With eyes as empty as the mouths of canning jars, mechanics slouched off to garages, clerks to their banks, sellers to their stores, everyone wrapped in a fog of drowsiness.
“It’s the heat,” muttered some, while others insisted, “It’s the humidity.”
No one could remember a hotter July. Instead of cooling off at night when breezes swept in from the ocean, the land stayed
warm. Despite the incessant groan of air-conditioners, houses were slow ovens. More than heat was keeping the citizens awake, however, as demonstrated by a butcher who moved his bed into a meat locker, risking frostbite, and still could not slumber.
Old-timers blamed the plague of sleeplessness on the erratic tides. At whimsical hours, the ocean lapped high at the pilings of docks or sank low to reveal the granite bones of the shore. “It’s all topsy-turvy,” the elders complained. “Even lobsters are confused.” But youngsters, who rarely looked up from their screens to observe the ocean, blamed the sickness on poisons dumped in the bay from paper mills.
Alone among the townspeople, the mayor’s wayward husband, Kenneth, dozed serenely. Early in the summer, before the heat became oppressive, he had ordered an astronaut’s suit from NASA Surplus Inc., and now he spent his nights cocooned inside it, breathing bottled air. He would tumble into bed soon after supper and sleep until morning, oblivious as a baby. Initially, the mayor had rejoiced at his show of enthusiasm for space paraphernalia. True, Kenneth’s previous enthusiasms had filled the basement with cameras, woodworking tools, fly-fishing gear, a potter’s wheel, a make-your-own harpsichord kit, and sundry other items, all now lying untouched. Yet the mayor kept hoping that some new toy might lure him out of the gloom in which he had been mired since the early days of their marriage.
They had met on the operating table, she as patient and he as surgeon. Sally was not yet mayor back then, merely director of the waterworks. Her own waterworks had gone awry, somewhere south of her navel, and Kenneth was trying to repair them with scalpel and sutures. All she glimpsed before the anesthesia washed over her were the surgeon’s blue eyes, which had about them the anxious air of a pilot recalling dangerous flights. When she came to, she realized he had bungled the operation, for the first thing she saw as her eyes fluttered open was his apologetic face, asking her to marry him.
“It’s the least I can do,” he explained.
“You needn’t worry,” she mumbled. “I’m not the litigious type.”
His blue gaze softened. “I’d like to marry you anyway.”
“Nonsense,” she declared.
Six months later she went through with it, having tested his resolve, his cooking, and his taste in art. By then they had shared late night talk after he slouched home from the hospital, early morning talk before she slipped away to the waterworks, talk under umbrellas and over meals and in bed—talk about their miserable first marriages, their love of wildflowers and crosswords and TV mysteries, their fears and hopes.
The hopes, it turned out, were mostly Sally’s and the fears were mostly Kenneth’s. Not long after the wedding, when she was promoted to chief engineer, he bungled another operation, then another. Obviously he couldn’t amend every mistake by marrying the victim, even if all the victims had been female.
When the patient lay muffled in green sheets on the operating table, a rectangle of skin exposed to the knife, Kenneth began thinking of solar flares, meteor strikes, ion storms. What if dark matter engulfed the solar system? What if the moon spiraled away from Earth, abolishing tides? He knew from browsing on-line that tectonic plates were lurching about, triggering earthquakes and volcanoes. Glaciers were melting. Sea levels were rising. Deserts were spreading. Species were vanishing at a thousand times the normal rate of extinction.
During surgery one day he lapsed into a meditation on ozone holes, and only returned to the here-and-now when a nurse remarked that he had opened a potentially lethal hole inside the patient. The patient survived but Kenneth’s nerves were shattered. How could he concentrate on the geometry of incisions while Earth unraveled?
After settling the malpractice suit for a hefty sum, he announced that he was hanging up the scalpel. Busy campaigning for mayor, Sally didn’t quarrel with his decision, not even when he began shuffling around the house, wringing his idle hands like a mourner beside a crash site. Those hands were as firm and steady as ever, he was quick to point out. Unlike many surgeons who retire in their forties, Kenneth had not lost his touch. What he had lost was his ability to concentrate. When he made love to Sally he stroked her body with a harpist’s delicacy, teasing melodies from her skin. Then suddenly his fingers would freeze, his eyes would roll shut, and his mind would wander off—to fret about killer drones armed with lasers, perhaps, or antibiotic-resistant microbes, or some other menace.
“Come back, space cadet,” she would plead.
Kenneth used to be the one who couldn’t sleep, while Sally, exhausted by her mayoral duties, dozed through the night. At breakfast, his eyes glazed from staying up reading bad news, he would tell her about polluted aquifers, dying corals, blighted forests, or gyres in the oceans swirling with millions of tons of plastic.
“Did you realize the sun is already middle-aged?” he announced one morning over English muffins. “When it uses up all the hydrogen it will swell out and roast the planets.”
“Is that so?” she replied, without looking up from the crossword.
“Maybe it won’t matter,” he added. “If we kill the plankton, we’re done for anyway.”
“Would you pass the honey, dear?”
She filtered Kenneth’s fears through the grid of her engineer’s pragmatism. Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, she thought, stuffing her briefcase with notes on the current emergencies. One by one the town’s troubles crossed her desk, and one by one she wrestled them into submission. She could prevent the explosion of a boiler in the basement of a nursing home, but she could not keep the sun from going nova. She could protect kids by ordering the removal of asbestos ceiling tiles from schools, but she could not save frogs from pesticides. If Kenneth saw fit to lie awake brooding on catastrophes, that was no reason for Sally to ruin her own rest.
Well before sunrise on the day the spacesuit arrived, Kenneth was propped up in bed, reading by the glow of his headlamp, muttering to himself. At last unable to contain his alarm, he blurted out, “Honey, do you realize that bacteria from ice in a comet’s tail could set off a worldwide epidemic?”
“That’s nice, dear,” Sally murmured. She folded a pillow over her ears and dove back in search of dreams. She didn’t find any, however, and wouldn’t dream again until long after her husband disappeared.
When the spacesuit was delivered, in a carton large enough to hold a refrigerator, Kenneth unpacked the numerous pieces, laid them out on the floor, and studied the instructions. Then at bedtime he began donning his mail-order gear.
“Isn’t it rather late to be trying that on?” she asked.
“I’m going to sleep in it,” he said as he wormed his arms into the puffy white sleeves.
“You’re kidding.”
“Could you reach me those boots?”
“You’ll swelter.”
“It has a ventilation system.” He pulled on the clumsy gloves. “Now the helmet.”
“But you’ll suffocate.”
“Each air tank is good for eight hours.”
Sally quit protesting and helped him into the suit, since it appeared to be lifting his spirits. After the bubble helmet was in place and oxygen began flowing through the hose, his voice emerged by way of a speaker, sounding like the drone of a pilot instructing his passengers. “If you ever notice this needle creeping toward the red zone,” he said, pointing to a dial on his chest, “open the air valve a half turn. If you hear a beeping sound, call the ambulance.”
That first night, squeezed to the edge of the mattress by the bulbous white hulk, Sally slept fitfully. The second night she dozed off for only an hour or two. The third night she gave in to insomnia and read a report on waste management. Meanwhile Kenneth slumbered blissfully, his face inside its bubble as tranquil as that of a newborn in a crib.
In the mornings, he didn’t stir when she left for work. He still cooked supper, but hastily, for the hours he once devoted to fixing elaborate meals he now spent shopping at big box stores and hauling back carloads of supplies, which he stowed in the basement a
longside the residue from his former hobbies. When she asked what they would ever do with all this stuff, he replied, “Postpone the end.”
Well, she thought, the canned goods and freeze-dried foods would keep, as would the bottled water and toiletries and fuel. If stockpiling supplies and sleeping in an astronaut’s suit freed him from gloom, she would indulge him. Her insomnia was bound to pass, as soon as she grew accustomed to the wheeze and purr of his life-support devices. There were, of course, some practical difficulties, one of which she mentioned in the opening week of his spaceman era.
“How are we supposed to make love while you’re wearing this contraption?”
“NASA thought of that,” he replied. “There’s a strategically placed airlock.”
“I’m talking about sex, sweetheart, not the docking of spaceships.”
“It’s been tested in the space station.”
“Couldn’t you go without the suit once in a while?” His look of dismay kept her from pressing the point. “Okay, okay,” she added soothingly. “Suppose I skip my yoga class on Wednesdays and come home at noon, so we can frolic in the old-fashioned way?”
He frowned. “That’s my prime time for shopping.”
One of the qualities that made Sally a good mayor was a high degree of tolerance for human idiocy. But Kenneth’s antics were straining her patience. At the town hall, where the eyes of her staff members began to resemble empty eggshells, she grew irritable. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she apologized after scolding her secretary. “Neither have I,” the secretary replied.
Everywhere the mayor looked, faces had been eroded by sleeplessness. Upon questioning the clerks who gathered listlessly at the drinking fountain like buffaloes at a waterhole, she discovered that a plague of insomnia had swept through town in the days following the arrival of Kenneth’s spacesuit.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 3
