Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

Winos hugging their rags curled up as usual in the waiting room of the bus station, but they could not shut out the blare of departures or the shuffle of feet. Children sat up watching midnight movies. Babies clamored for attention at all hours. Parents took turns hiding in basements, in barns, in parked cars, anywhere to escape the tantrums of exhausted kids. Teachers called in sick. Druggists sold out their supply of sleeping pills and began recommending warm milk to their bleary-eyed customers. Soon the dairy cases in grocery stores were stripped bare, and the smell of scorched milk filled the July streets.

  Not everyone complained about the insomnia plague. All-night disk jockeys welcomed the dramatic rise in song requests. “Play us some crooners, quiet stuff, ballads and blues,” teenagers begged. Bowling alleys and cafes and bookstores kept their doors open, and doubled their business. On the town square, where the mayor would perform her startling exhibition, the cinema began screening films in the wee hours. An abandoned gas station was converted into a thriving doughnut shop. Truckers cruising through town discovered they could drive all the next day without needing pills. Traveling sales reps contracted insomnia as soon as they checked in to local motels.

  Sally was reluctant at first to attribute the plague to Kenneth’s donning of the spacesuit. As an engineer, she knew quite well that correlation is not causation. Still, it was hard to ignore the coincidence. While the townspeople tossed and turned in their beds, he slumbered placidly through the nights. Then he began dozing through the afternoons, and eventually he slept around the clock. Now and again, without opening his eyes, he spoke in a scratchy voice. “Maintain oxygen pressure in the blue zone,” he might say, or “Add serum every fourth day.” Several times Sally heard him whisper, “Don’t open my suit or I will die.”

  Despite her engineer’s training, she wondered if Kenneth’s unbroken slumber might be sucking sleep away from the town, as a black hole sucks in matter and light. Tapping on the helmet would not rouse him, nor would jostling his body in its pale husk. Perhaps there were narcotics in the bag of pink fluid that fed nutrients to him through a tube. But the label seemed innocent enough, and so did the sample that the police lab tested for her.

  After Kenneth had slept for seventy-two hours straight, she called in the hospital pathologist, an old friend who could be trusted to keep mum about her husband’s peculiar condition.

  “Damn fool stunt, if you ask me,” the pathologist grumbled when Sally warned him that they mustn’t open the suit. He shone a light through the helmet, flexed Kenneth’s legs and arms in their bloated casing, read pulse and blood pressure and other vital signs from gauges on the front of the spacesuit. “It looks like normal sleep,” the pathologist concluded. “Has he been exceptionally tired lately?”

  “He’s been wrung out by worry for years,” Sally conceded.

  Now it was her turn to worry. Not so much about Kenneth, who seemed to be enjoying his hibernation, and not about the town, whose problems could be solved. What kept her awake now were the vast, irresolvable dilemmas that had so deeply troubled Kenneth. Nor was she alone in her anxiety. At the office her secretary began quoting statistics about rising greenhouse gas emissions. The county surveyor brooded over satellite photos showing the clearcutting of Amazon rainforests. The panhandler who used to pluck a banjo for loose change on the steps of the town hall now passed out leaflets condemning strip mining. Children playing video games fretted about radiation poisoning from nuclear reactors.

  While replacing Kenneth’s nutrient bag one morning, Sally muttered, “You’re making me a nervous wreck.”

  She was surprised to hear him drowsily reply, “I’m almost finished.”

  “With what?”

  “The dream work. The sacrifice.”

  She asked what he meant, but he would say nothing more.

  A few nights after this exchange, when the sultry air of August smothered the town, Sally lay wide awake, twitching with dread. She could feel, as if in her own body, the sinews of Earth snapping, its flesh withering, its veins running dry. She could sense Earth’s creatures perishing, like a galaxy of stars winking out. Her own species was tearing apart and devouring this once-abundant home, the only habitable planet within billions of miles.

  Panic forced her out of bed, heart racing. The air in the room was stifling. Mummified in his spacesuit, Kenneth seemed to radiate heat. The air-conditioner whined continuously, with little effect. She took off her nightgown and let it fall to the floor. Why bother to hang up clothes? Why even wear them? Such habits now seemed pointless. She moved to the window and stood there a long while, looking out, wondering how many experiments in life the cosmos had tried, how many had flourished, how many had failed.

  When she turned around, Kenneth was floating a foot above the bed. Rushing over, she touched his booted foot, which set him gliding across the room until he bumped helmet-first against the sliding door to the balcony.

  “Kenneth!” she cried.

  He did not reply. The helmet thumped against the glass door. She needed to call for help—the police, paramedics, firemen—someone, anyone. But her phone wasn’t on the nightstand, where it should have been. So she hurried downstairs to check her briefcase in the kitchen, but the phone wasn’t there either. Rattled, she searched countertops and cupboards, pulled out drawers, flung pillows from the couch. She was rummaging through the pockets of coats hanging in the closet when she heard the rumble of the balcony door sliding open.

  She raced back upstairs and into the bedroom, just in time to see Kenneth floating out over the balcony railing and into the muggy night.

  How she passed the next two hours Sally herself would never be able to recall. Nearly everyone else in town did recall, however, and in gossipy detail, for no public official had ever before done anything half so remarkable.

  The mayor ran screaming down the front steps of her house, as naked as the day she was born. She kept pointing skyward and yelling. At first no one understood what she was saying. The late-night strollers were too distracted by her appearance to notice the ghostly white figure gliding overhead. The sight of her body amazed the men, who had always assumed that beneath her severe workaday suits she was an iron maiden. Even the women found themselves captivated by the spectacle of their naked mayor. Such intelligence, such drive, in flesh so like their own! Anything was possible, the women reflected. Girls thought of running for office or becoming engineers. Matrons vowed to take up yoga and stick to their diets. Young children wriggled out of their clothes and ran after the mayor, who rushed ahead, baying like a hound.

  Sally reached the town square just as the cinemas, churches, and dance clubs were letting out from their midnight sessions. Her grief hushed the buzzing throng, which parted to let her through to the courthouse lawn, where she climbed onto the equestrian statue commemorating a Civil War general. Clinging to the general’s uplifted sword, she stood on the bronze rump of the horse and shouted at the sky.

  No one knew what to do. Call her husband? Nobody had seen him for weeks. Call the sheriff? Wrap her in blankets and carry her to the hospital?

  While the townspeople crowded about the statue, stunned into silence by her shrieks, the mayor kept gesturing skyward. At last the onlookers followed her pointing finger and spied the astronaut floating above the courthouse trees. Now the people found their voices and cried out in surprise or delight or bewilderment. Children glanced at their parents to see what they should make of this apparition.

  Balanced precariously on the bronze horse, the mayor lifted both arms, fingers splayed, as if imagining she could pluck the astronaut from the air.

  “Kenneth!” she yelled, her first decipherable word. “Please don’t go!”

  Feeling her anguish, many onlookers thrust their arms into the air in sympathy. Toddlers waggled their small hands at the darkness. Soon all of the onlookers, from babes in arms to oldsters in wheelchairs, were reaching for the sky.

  The glint of the spaceman’s helmet and the glow of his chalky suit reminded young and
old of when they had first glimpsed the full moon, and had begged their parents to pluck it down for them. Their parents had merely laughed or frowned or shaken their heads helplessly no. The townspeople felt once again the tug of infinite longing and infinite regret as the astronaut spun slowly in the moonlight like a tethered balloon.

  “Stay, Kenneth, stay!” pleaded the mayor. She teetered on the horse’s back. “Don’t give up on us! We’ll survive! We’ll come through!”

  At that moment the onlookers felt a tug on their uplifted arms, as if the threads of desire they had flung into the sky were actual strings of gossamer. Instinctively they squeezed their hands into fists, and for an instant their feet lifted clear of the ground. The mayor let out a piercing cry. Then with a barely audible whisper every fist opened and the townspeople settled back to Earth. High overhead the spaceman swung about and began to rise. As he ascended, he appeared at first like a small cloud, then dwindled to the size of a minnow, a needle, a star. When at last he vanished, the townspeople slumped down on the courthouse lawn, and for the first time in weeks they slept, and dreamed, and scarcely heard the mayor’s wailing.

  Sleepwalker

  I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me. In my nightmare I was captured, put on trial, and sentenced to be hanged for refusing to serve in the war. Awareness of the slaughter in Africa rises in my stomach like nausea.

  I roll over to find Sharon watching me, her chestnut eyes slick with tears. I kiss her on each wet cheek, but she refuses to smile. Her worried expression has become so habitual that I almost forget how serenely happy she was—how happy we both were—during those early weeks of marriage before the draft summons arrived.

  “Gordon,” she says, “I can’t bear to think of you in jail.”

  “Let’s not start on this again.” I’ve run out of reassurances for Sharon, just as I’ve run out of appeals for the draft board. It seems more and more likely I will have to choose between prison and exile, if I am to avoid putting on a uniform and crossing the ocean to kill strangers.

  “Tell them your ankle’s ruined. Tell them it aches all the time.”

  “I’m not going to lie.” I throw off the covers and begin to dress.

  “They’ll never let you do civilian service.” Her voice cracks. “If they honored your conscience, they’d have to question their own.”

  “Can we just drop it? I’ve got to catch the bus.” I wrench a shirt from its hanger and button it quickly as I huddle over the radiator. Water gurgles in the pipes, circling round and round through the system, as I keep circling through this quarrel with Sharon.

  “Maybe the X-ray will show your ankle’s still a mess,” she says.

  “It works fine.” I tug on my jeans, parcel keys and coins and wallet among my pockets, lace my boots.

  Lying on her side, head propped on one bent arm, she follows my movements with her tear-slick gaze. “You’re forgetting to limp.”

  “Limping won’t fool the doctor.”

  “You promised you’d at least try.”

  “Maybe the war will end before they arrest me.”

  “They’ll start another one.”

  “Got to go.” I bend down to kiss her, but she rolls away to face the wall. Pulling the bedroom door closed behind me, I realize she’s right, which maddens me. Right that war has become perpetual. Right that I could try using my rebuilt foot as an excuse for a medical waiver. But a year has passed since the climbing accident shattered my ankle, and the artificial joint no longer gives me pain. The mended bones and tissues have become as numb as the metal and plastic lodged under my skin.

  Descending the stairs, I am gripped by the chill of prevision. I can see the next few seconds of my life laid out before me as if in time-lapse photography—my stumble on the stairs, my grabbing the banister, the phone ringing in my pocket. When I answer, I hear the voice I expected, saying words I expected.

  “Gordon,” says my sister, “if you think the doctor would fix this report for a fee . . .”

  “Not a chance,” I answer, hearing my words before I utter them.

  “Then go to Canada. Go to Argentina. They’re accepting resisters.”

  “I’d never be able to come home.” I mean to stop there, but I hear myself adding, “Besides, Sharon can’t go with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s pregnant . . .”

  “My God, that’s wonderful!”

  “. . . but the fetus isn’t implanted well, so she might miscarry if she travels.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “We just found out.”

  There is a pause, but I know what my sister will say next, and the words duly follow: “That’s all the more reason to bribe the doctor to declare you unfit.”

  “I can’t buy my way out.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  Even her peevish sigh I recognize before it hisses into my ear. “You’re stumbling into this like . . .” While she searches for the word, I hear sleepwalker, and then she says, “like a sleepwalker.”

  “Good-bye, big sister.” I want to say more, but I see myself ending the call, and that is what I do.

  This clairvoyant spell persists through my hasty breakfast. Then as I wash my dishes, I settle once more into the present moment, no longer foreseeing what will come next. The smell of coffee, the feel of suds on my wrists, the glint of snow-light through the kitchen window—every sensation comes to me fresh.

  On the bus ride, as the snowy countryside slides by in stark shades of black and white, I try to read the book I have brought along, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. But I keep being distracted by recalling those moments of prevision. I have experienced déjà vu before, but never for so long at a stretch. When the spell comes over me, it’s as if a switch has been thrown, and suddenly I foresee everything that will happen in the next moment, and then just as suddenly I slip back into my ordinary mind. I’ve read the explanations offered by psychologists and mystics—neurological asynchrony, epilepsy, reincarnation, spirit possession—but the phenomenon still baffles me.

  When the bus reaches the county seat, I realize I’ve gone more than an hour without thinking of the war. At least my seizures, whatever their cause, have distracted me from this constant fret.

  The moment my boots touch the salted pavement, the switch is thrown again, and I am possessed by foreknowledge. As I crunch over the snow toward the highway, I feel split in two—one version of myself walking ahead, and a second version following, as if dragged along. I shake my head, trying to clear the illusion. But even this gesture I see before I make it.

  Standing by the roadside with my thumb jutting in the direction of the airbase, I sense each car a moment before it approaches, foresee its make and color. After twenty minutes or so, when the cold has made my undamaged foot as numb as the reconstructed one, I realize that the next vehicle to appear—a battered van, reeking of paint—will stop for me. I hear what the driver will say as I open the passenger door.

  “Damn fool day to be hitching,” he says.

  “You going near the airbase?” I ask, knowing his answer.

  “That’s exactly where I’m going. Hop in.”

  “Much obliged.”

  The man turns to me a face already familiar, right down to the broken front tooth and the bruised skin under his left eye. “What business you got at the base?”

  I tell him about my synthetic ankle, and the X-ray that will decide whether it is healed well enough to suit the army.

  “Got a titanium rod in here,” he says, tapping his gas pedal leg, “thanks to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.”

  I wince. “It must hurt in this cold weather.”

  “Hurts like hell,” he says. “Every twinge makes me cuss the sons of bitches who sent me over there.”

  Hearing his words, I am delivered
back into ordinary time, not knowing what will come next. We talk about his folks and mine, about where each of us played high school basketball, about truck stops and hunting dogs. Just as I am preparing to ask him what he thinks of the war in Africa, we draw abreast of a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. I swallow the question. The fence I have seen countless times while traveling past, but this time I am going inside. We turn in at the main gate, which is flanked by two vintage fighter jets.

  “Shame to see those planes rust like that,” the driver says. “Give them a good paint job, they’d look like new.”

  Abruptly the switch is thrown again. I know the guard will recognize the painter, ask to see my papers, check my name on his list, and then will say, “Physical, eh?” before waving us through. His gruff voice reminds me of the water gurgling in the radiator, circling time and again through the closed circuit of pipes.

  “You figure that bum foot will keep you out of the war?” the painter asks as we ease forward.

  “Not likely. But I’m hoping my conscience will.”

  He snorts. “Conscience? Good luck with that, kid.”

  Black pipes mounted on posts snake along beside the road. The painter tells me they carry steam from the heating plant, and I imagine the vapor circulating from boiler to barracks to warehouse to machine shop and eventually back to boiler.

  “What are you painting today?” I ask.

  “The gym in the officers’ quarters. It’s a bear. Walls thirty feet high.”

  “How does that titanium leg do on ladders?”

  “Hurts like hell!” he says again, and his laugh rattles through the van.

  We pull up in front of the hospital, which might have been blue once but is now drab gray. As I climb out, the painter says, “Don’t think killing foreigners makes you a patriot.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “You bet.”

  The van pulls away, trailing a stench of burnt oil mixed with the tang of paint.