Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Mooch laughed, but softly, leery of waking her patient. Orlando was the most peaceable soul she had ever met. Whatever else might have changed in the eight years since she destroyed the disney and doomed him to prison, his deep sea of gentleness could not have evaporated.

  “I’ll jerk a knot in your tail later, Mr. Mud,” she said to the monkey.

  She gave Orlando a few more whiffs of oxygen, to wash the poisons from his lungs, and then pulled the blanket up to his chin and let him sleep. His old face, as cracked and stained as an antique leather purse, was beautiful to her. The rim of white hair encircled his bald scalp like frost-covered bushes around a winter pond.

  “The show kept getting worse,” the monkey said.

  “You hush,” said Mooch.

  “It was bush. An old clown and his fagged-out beasts.”

  I reduced him to that, thought Mooch. To the monkey she whispered, “Why don’t you go mess around in the warehouse with the rest of the menagerie?”

  “They’ll hammer me into a cookie sheet.”

  “No they won’t. I told them to leave you alone.”

  “I want to see the chief when he wakes up.”

  “Go,” Mooch hissed, “or I’ll turn you into a squirrel.”

  The monkey scrambled away into the storage bay, where the refurbished circus animals were milling about. Mooch bent over Orlando and stroked his forehead, which was creased as if the skin were a letter that had been folded too many times. His eyes twitched beneath the lids but did not open. She felt ashamed, thinking of the pain she had caused him. During the year she had lived with him in the disney, loving him and afraid of loving, straining against the strange new bonds of affection, she had tormented him in every way her adolescent mind could imagine.

  Despite the shame, Mooch looked back on that year as the brightest chapter in the gloomy tale of her life. The years before had been spent in the orphanage, and the years since had been spent first in the wilds, which turned out to be poisonous and murderous; next in a reform school, after she had surrendered to the Overseers; and finally here on parole in the bowels of the city, supervising the electronics dump, and living among machines, which she found more reliable than people. A single bright year amid twenty dark ones—a single kind man amid legions of the heartless—and she had been too stupid, back at age twelve, to realize how blessed she was.

  Now here he lay on a pallet in her shop. Why had he come? For years she had longed for and feared such a reunion. Once, she had worked up the courage to go in disguise and watch him from the crowd during a circus performance. It was all she could do to keep from leaping into the ring and wrapping him in her arms. But she feared he would turn a cold eye on her, for he had good reason to hate her, and she couldn’t bear such a rebuke. These past two years, each time one of his animals had come to her, shabby and confused, telling her stories about Orlando’s pathetic circus, a new layer had been added to her guilt. Once the beasts found her, they refused to leave. They possessed an elaborate mythology about her, in which she figured as a savior, a mechanical genius, a comforter.

  Orlando stirred, mumbled, and then resumed snoring. The smile on his battered face reminded Mooch of sunsets from her time in the wilds. She waited nervously. When he’d called out her name a few minutes earlier, he was still groggy, and she could read nothing in his face. Soon he would come fully awake, and she would feel his gaze on her, and find out whether she might be forgiven.

  Orlando, meanwhile, was dreaming of his beasts. One by one they were returning, crowding around him, their pelts shiny, their eyes lit up with a secret they could not wait to tell.

  Mountains of Memory

  The mountains of Oregon City closed each night between 22:00 and midnight to allow for cleaning. Even in this spick-and-span metropolis, where dirt cost more per kilo than sugar, a mountain could become remarkably filthy in a day’s time. Children climbing the flexiglass trees shook down a litter of twigs. Cups and wrappers spread about the vending machines like glacial moraines. Deltas of metal shavings accumulated at the ends of pedbelts. Hikers who refused to ride the belts, toiling instead uphill with the aid of trekking poles, often punctured the inflatable rocks, which then cluttered the mountainside like cast-off skins. Idlers on benches pared their fingernails and some even blithely spat on the walkways.

  There were three such mountains in Natureland Park, out near the edge of the city where the curving, translucent dome met the sea. The summits rose high enough to offer views into the upper windows of skyscrapers. Molded with quickfoam over aluminum skeletons and named for the corporations that sponsored their construction, they were supposed to make up for the mountains of stone from which the citizens had been cut off by the move into the Enclosure. These days only old-timers, gazing at the fake peaks, could remember the Appalachians or Rockies or Sierras.

  Each night, as the last of the idlers and gawkers withdrew at 22:00, detergents gushed from nozzles on the mountaintops and scoured the slopes. Drains siphoned the run-off into recycling vats down below, where the muck was reduced to its pristine molecules, which would be refashioned eventually into some new doohickey or other.

  Mt. Texxon, tallest of the three, was honeycombed with caves. Stalactites dangled from the ceilings, mushrooms sprouted from the floors, albino crayfish speckled the walls, bats glided through the dank air, every feature having been made out of rubbery gunk. Hidden tubes dripped water into murky pools. The hollow chambers echoed with the grunt of circulating pumps. The psycho-architects who had designed Natureland Park, as they had designed every last nook and cranny of the Enclosure, believed that even space-age citizens would need some place for making stone-age retreats. The citizens thought otherwise. Each year fewer of them ventured into these clammy pits, and those who did often returned gasping from the gloom. So the caves were slowly filled by the groundskeepers with outmoded vegetation, deflated rocks, broken trees, shattered creek beds, sacks of frogs, tangles of snakes. These shaggy and bulging items only rendered the darkness more frightening. After a few spelunkers lost their wits in the labyrinths, the Overseers closed all entrances to the caves, leaving open only the ventilator shafts.

  If, like Humphrey Tree and Grace Palomino, you were looking for a hidey-hole where you could stash away tons and tons of junk, then Mt. Texxon was just the place. The elderly couple had been collecting rubbish for years in the streets of Oregon City, not from any habit of tidiness, but, on the contrary, from a desire to spring a messy surprise on this oppressively neat hive. The two old scavengers usually reached the foot of the mountain at 24:00, an hour they persisted in calling midnight even though midnight looked no different from noon under the dome’s eternal blaze of lights.

  Tonight they arrived a few minutes early, while cleaning fluids were still pouring down the slopes. So they sat in their zip-carts talking over old times, which in their case stretched back nine decades. They had known one another since kindergarten in the suburbs of Old Portland. They married right after college, then served in the Pollution Corps, moving around the country as, bit by bit, the whole of North America was declared uninhabitable. They knew the history of one another’s wrinkles. Over the years they had come to smell alike, a blend of fish oil and wintergreen. The sum of their weights hardly varied, so when Humphrey put on a kilo or two, Grace lost the same amount, and vice versa. By now they had loved one another so long that the edges of their personalities were fuzzing together. When either one began a sentence, the other could finish it.

  Peering up the flank of Mt. Texxon, Humphrey sighed. “Won’t be long now—”

  “—before it’s filled up,” Grace added.

  “Seems like only yesterday—”

  “—when we started hauling.”

  At ninety-seven, Humphrey had a face that brought to mind a crumpled brown sack. Fortunately, Grace never gave a hang about looks. After his stint in the Pollution Corps he became a chip inspector, a tedious job from which he was now blessedly retired. His eyes and heart were electron
ic and one hand was synthetic, but otherwise he got by with his original joints and organs. Due to his monumental appetite, he had accumulated a big man’s body on a small man’s frame, so the flesh now sagged over his bones like a garment he would never grow into. Grace was three years younger, a retired dance therapist, not so quick on her feet since acquiring new hips and knees. Shriveled now, she possessed the antiquated beauty of a palace awaiting restoration. When she was feeling her oats, she still ran circles around Humphrey.

  “What’ll we do with ourselves when it’s full?” he mused.

  “Move on to Mt. Pepsicoke and start over,” said Grace.

  “Remember Pepsi?”

  “Remember Coke? My mother would shake all the fizz out of it and feed it to me with a spoon when I had a fever.”

  Their youth was so far in the past it had taken on the blurry contours of myth. Grace was half convinced that her mother, an oceanographer, used to ride whales. Humphrey was persuaded that his coal-mining father had brought him ingots of goblin iron hot from the core of the earth.

  At length the cleansing of the mountain was finished and the gates opened. Driving their zip-carts, which as usual were heaped with junk, Humphrey and Grace climbed the glistening slope. Everything shone as if newly made, the quickfoam gullies and hillocks, the flexiglass bushes and trees. Below, the avenues were marked out in a grid of lights, orderly, immaculate, as if Oregon City had just that moment crystallized out of the air like a snowflake. This geometrical perfection, false to everything they knew about the funk and mess of living, made the old couple grit their teeth.

  While they had the peak to themselves, Humphrey and Grace climbed out of their zip-carts and peeled back the tarps and showed one another the treasures they had collected on their separate rounds that day.

  “Twenty-seven cans,” Humphrey announced, pointing out the highlights in his cargo bin, “five rags, two zippers, a pair of boxer shorts, a melted joy stick, and volume three of The Anarchist’s Handbook.”

  “Don’t we already have the first volume?”

  “It’s down there somewhere.” He thumped his foot on the roof of Mt. Texxon.

  “Lord only knows where,” said Grace. “Look here at this hubcap and this perfectly good catcher’s mitt.” She put on the mitt, which swallowed her tiny arm halfway to the elbow. “Chuck it in here, babe!” she sang, smacking a fist into the pocket.

  Humphrey tossed her a doorknob, which she caught deftly. “Any spoons?” he asked. Because of his appetite, he coveted spoons above all other loot.

  “No,” said Grace, “but here’s a fork.”

  “Ah, there’s my sharp-eyed lass!” Humphrey kissed her full on the puckered lips. That was one of the fringe benefits of growing old—you could smooch whenever you liked and tell any busybody who objected to go take a flying leap.

  “And would you believe four wigs?” said Grace.

  “Isn’t that a record for wigs?”

  “I think it is. And they’re good thick ones, too.”

  The blue wig that Grace was wearing had been acquired in this manner, as had the videocap worn by Humphrey, as indeed had the better part of their wardrobe. Her calf-length boots, for example, had been salvaged from a trash can beside the wading pool in Marconi Plaza.

  They did not scavenge as a way of making ends meet, but as a hobby, almost an art. Unlike Old Portland, whose streets in the latter days had swarmed with bums and beggars and dumpster-pickers, Oregon City fed and housed every last soul. Collecting junk was not easy in such a sanitary city. Along with the mountains, the streets and plazas were flushed daily, each quarter of the city at a different hour; and the recyclers down below gobbled everything. No space station gliding in orbit, no ship cruising to the stars could have been tidier than Oregon City afloat on the Pacific. By timing their rounds, however, Grace and Humphrey scoured the avenues just ahead of the detergents, and thus managed to find, on most days, a cartful of trash: items of clothing, broken heels, foam cups, ad flimsies, toys, depleted batteries, electronic gizmos, belt buckles, even spare body parts.

  People sometimes left stale food or wounded furniture in their path, imagining these old geezers had somehow fallen through the welfare net into poverty. Most people, however, encountering the two scavengers, looked the other way. The Overseers regarded them as harmless eccentrics. What did it matter if they hoarded rubbish?

  After the day’s discoveries had been admired, Humphrey and Grace rolled aside one of the pumped-up boulders, disclosing a ventilator shaft, through which they dumped their junk into the hollow crown of Mt. Texxon. As they listened to these new prizes clattering onto the hoard of rubbish below, they exchanged the sly prankish looks they had been sharing since kindergarten.

  Once the boulder was back in place, they sat for a while atop the mountain, basking in fake sunlight, gazing down at the city. The icy glitter of the streets reminded them of the winter when the Columbia River froze hard and they skated from Old Portland to Vancouver and back. That ice had gleamed with the same sinister perfection. The freeze would have played havoc with the spawning of salmon, if those marvelous fish had not already vanished.

  “Will you look at that yucky color,” said Grace.

  Indigo vapor had begun spurting from vents on the nearby peak of Mt. Pepsicoke, forming imitation storm clouds that would never drop rain or snow but would merely hover beneath the dome like bruised angels.

  “I don’t like these sickly purples they’re using on Tuesdays,” Humphrey agreed.

  “The old clouds used to remind me of purple iris,” said Grace, “a color so thick you could spread it on toast.”

  “Toast,” Humphrey repeated dreamily.

  “Iris,” Grace said, trying to get him back on the track of the conversation. “A flower so sumptuous it made me envy the bees.”

  “Marmalade on toast. Rhubarb preserves. Honey.” Humphrey’s tongue slicked across his lips as if he were prospecting for these vanished foods. “Apple butter. Watermelon pickles.”

  Once Humphrey began reminiscing about bygone foods, Grace had to let him run down. While he drooled through his epic of jams and jellies, she recalled her own vanished pleasures: the kiss of cotton on skin, the smell of dung from police horses, the raspy summer sound of locusts, the ooze of hot tar between her toes on a country road, the squirm of a kitten. So the two old people ambled on separate pathways back to the days before the Enclosure. They ended up gaping at one another, startled by the length of their memories, measuring how old they were by the remoteness of these things.

  “All the same,” Grace declared, “I wouldn’t go back to those days for love or money. If we were still living outside, we’d be dead.”

  Humphrey nodded. “Killed thirteen different ways by poisons and radiation, starved to death, and shot full of holes in the bargain. Not to mention getting fried by ultraviolet rays and sizzled by microwaves and eaten up by acid rain.”

  “One of those alphabet chemicals—DDT or PCBs—would have rotted our bones.”

  “Druggies would have bonked us over the head.”

  “Warlords and bankers.”

  “Greenhouse effect.”

  “Smog.”

  They clicked their tongues in unison. At this point the first visitors of the day were gliding up the slopes on pedbelts or dawdling up on foot, toddlers tugging at leashes, kids wearing the masks of their favorite video stars, occasional elders as barefaced as Humphrey and Grace, all of them so fresh-looking they might have just been taken off a shelf and unwrapped.

  “Here come the drones,” said Grace. She stood up, beating the dust from her jumpsuit, stamping her boots on the mountain’s pliable skin. The nearby trees wobbled and boulders bounced.

  Humphrey laughed. “That’s my Gracie, more powerful than an earthquake!”

  “You’d better believe it,” said Grace.

  Day after day, the old scavengers wheeled through Oregon City, filling their zip-carts with refuse, castoffs, and lost articles. Then at midnight
they buzzed up the slopes to dump their haul. Eventually they decided it was time to see how much more rubbish the mountain would hold.

  As the son of a Kentucky coal miner, Humphrey insisted that he should be the one to climb down the ventilator shaft. Grace protested, but he said, “No, no, ducky. Your flexy joints might give out. You stay up here and keep an eye peeled for the fuzz.”

  “Don’t get your belly stuck down there,” she warned.

  He sniffed indignantly. “I am as svelte as an otter.”

  She snorted. “And don’t go snapping your brittle old bones.”

  “And don’t you be such a worrywart.”

  Fortunately, there was a ladder, or Humphrey would never have managed the descent. After some noisy reconnoitering, he surfaced again to declare, between labored puffs, “I figure we’ve got space for about another month’s worth of junk.”

  “Only a month, and then no more scavenging?” Grace lamented. They had been working toward this moment for years, but now, having nearly reached it, she felt glum. Her face, pale and wrinkled, had the look of a snowy field crisscrossed by animal trails.

  Humphrey, who loved every one of those wrinkles, was old enough to remember snowy fields. “Give or take a week,” he said.

  “When I was a girl, I never dreamed I’d grow up to be a bag lady!” She broke into a fit of laughter. “Remember how the scruffy old crones lugged their bags from one dumpster to another, picking up leftover pizzas and moth-eaten sweaters?”

  Flowing easily into his wife’s memories, Humphrey said, “And the winos near the Lighthouse Mission browsed in the gutters for cigarette butts, their eyes like holes in rusty pails.”

  “At night they’d wrap themselves in newspapers and sleep on benches.”

  “Or in cardboard boxes.”

  “Thank goodness nobody has to live on the street these days,” Grace said. “You could, though, in a pinch. It’s a regular cornucopia out there. Seems like the more stuff people have the more they throw away.” She drew up her sleeve to peruse the gadgets strapped to her arm. A few of them kept time, although no two kept the same time. Out of old habit, she put one of them against her ear. But there was only silence—the vibration of crystals, the lunge of electrons. It was an overly tidy world, she thought, where time could slide by without ticking.