Memory and Dream

by Charles de Lint

  * * *

  Margaret used to delight in tormenting me. I don’t know what she had against me. So far back as my memory goes, she would find ways to hurt me emotionally as well as physically, and it just never made any sense. I mean, what could a three-year-old – which is as far back as I can clearly remember – possibly have done to earn such hatred? I used to drive myself crazy trying to make sense of it. Trying to figure out ways to get on her good side.

  It was only when I got older that I realized it didn’t have anything to do with me personally. It was a power thing and I was just one more thing for Margaret to control.

  I hope my sister – excuse me, my stepsister – Susan is suitably grateful to me. If I hadn’t been there, her parents would have taken it all out on her, instead of me. But of course as far as Susan’s concerned, the sun rises and sets with Margaret and Peter. Especially Margaret. Everybody always defers to her. I mean, while it’s true that Peter started fucking me from the time I turned six, and I’m not saying the old pervert didn’t enjoy it, it was Margaret who put him up to it. Margaret who sat on the bed and watched it happen. Margaret who kept coming up with all these “interesting” variations. Margaret who took the Polaroid pictures that they’d sell to the other sick freaks who hadn’t been lucky enough to acquire their own live-in sex toy. Considering what put my natural father in jail, I guess life wouldn’t have been much better living with my real parents.

  I wonder what it’s like to have parents that love you. Parents who’d do anything to protect you from the kind of shit that Margaret reveled in.

  I’m never going to know, am I?

  * * *

  This morning I was washing out a tin can before I put it in the recycling bin and I sliced open my finger. I can’t believe how much blood poured out of that little wound. I might have bled to death, standing there watching the blood spurt from my finger into the sink, but I finally got smart, washed it out, bandaged it, and then put up with the way it’s been throbbing all day.

  Luckily it was the index finger of my left hand, so I can still write my daily entry. Trouble is, ha ha, I’ve got nothing to say. Cutting my finger was the highlight of my day.

  * * *

  Izzy called this morning and we had a nice long talk. She’s invited me out to the island for the weekend, so I’ve got that to look forward to. I still can’t get used to her being so far away after all the years we lived together, but then things started to get different long before she actually packed up all her stuff and went away.

  Something changed in Izzy after John left her and the mugging. I’m not sure which was harder on her. The mugging seemed a betrayal of the city she’d come to love, as though it were responsible for the battering she’d received. When she finally moved back to the island a few years later, I wasn’t surprised. I think I was the only one.

  As for John’s abandoning her … I wonder if he ever realized just how much he broke her heart. He was the reason that she didn’t want to use her newfound magic anymore. It was as much because of how badly things turned out between them as it was for John’s warnings of the danger it would put the numena in. That’s what I call the beings that came to life through Izzy’s art. I ran across the word “numen” in the dictionary once while looking up something else. It means a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or locality. Works for me.

  Izzy and I had long talks about her numena, me saying she owed it to the numena to make their own choice as to whether or not they wanted to come across, she being scared of what might happen to them once they got here and knowing how terrible she’d feel if they got hurt. I’m not sure what convinced her to continue bringing them across. I doubt it was my arguments alone – when Izzy sets her mind on something she can be the most stubborn woman I know. It’s more likely that with Rushkin gone, she felt it would be safe.

  Once she made the decision, though, she threw herself into her work – creating paintings that would have stood the test of time with the best of the world’s great art, had they only survived. She had Rushkin’s studio to herself – he’d gone on sabbatical or something – and that was where she worked her magic, peopling not only her canvases, but the streets around us with the denizens of her imagination.

  The numena themselves were usually pretty circumspect about being noticed. Mind you, Newford’s always had a reputation for being a hotbed of oddities and marvels. Next to the West Coast, we’ve probably got the highest percentage of mystics, pagans, sages, and downright strange people on the continent, so a few more magical sightings weren’t necessarily going to make the headlines of anything except for a rag like The Newford Sun.

  Izzy told no one about the magic besides me – not even Alan or Jilly. She felt as though talking about it would dissipate the power – that it would set up a wall between our world and that otherworld from which the magic came. I still maintain that there was no otherworld, or at least not in the sense that Izzy believed in it. The magic came from her. The world was inside her, the magic blossomed in the fertile ground of her inner landscape and was pulled forth by her painting. No less a wondrous, enchanted process, to be sure, but the difference seemed important, if not to anyone else, at least to me.

  After a few months of mourning her abandonment by John, she also became very social. She was out all the time, a fixture at all the Waterhouse Street parties; she started drinking and taking drugs, and she had a constant stream of lovers. I don’t think there was ever a time in those years that she didn’t have a lover in attendance, with at least one or two pining for what they could never have, and a couple more waiting in the wings to take their turn on the carousel. Count me in among the former, forever unrequited like so many of the women in those Victorian novels that Kristiana loves to read.

  But it wasn’t all fun and games, though it might seem so from the outside looking in. Izzy found time for her career as well. Her star rose until soon the occasional paintings she offered up for sale began to command high four-figure prices. Still, for all her success at the easel or in bed, I don’t think she was ever happy again.

  My own fortunes seemed to rise in direct proportion to how her happiness diminished. My turning point came when Alan decided to publish The Angels of My First Death. I still have no idea why that first collection did as well as it did. My circle of friends had widened to include any number of other writers and I thought many of them to be far more talented than I was. Anne Bourke, certainly. Christy Riddell, especially with his newer stories. Frank Katchen. We had quite a community going in Lower Crowsea in those days. Not so high profile as the artists and musicians, or even the theatre people, but then writers aren’t usually as flamboyant, are they? We work in private, emerging for the parties or book launches and signings, before withdrawing back into our seclusions. Except for Frank, who seemed to enjoy the idea of being a writer so much more than doing the actual work. But then there are always exceptions, aren’t there, and whatever else might be said about Frank, he did exceptional work.

  Alan’s Crowsea Review never had to go beyond the borders of Lower Crowsea itself to find its contributors, but it grew rapidly from a student effort into one of the more respected literary magazines in the country. It seemed only natural for him to use his East Street Press as an imprint of books as well. He tested the waters with a novella called Wintering by Tama Jostyn; and Dust, Dreams and Little Love Letters, a collection of Kristiana’s poems, before he did my collection of short stories. The first two did reasonably well for books published by a regional press, selling out their modest print runs within six months of publication. Then came The Angels of My First Death and everything changed.

  I made so much money off the paperback sales and subsequent foreign rights, movie options and the like that it was criminal. I could have lived high on the hog, but instead I kept the apartment on Waterhouse Street and channeled my money into setting up the Newford Children’s Foundation.

  I don’t mention this to toot my
horn. Truth is, if I had a choice between being remembered forever and the Foundation, the Foundation would always come first. I believe in what I write – I can’t not write – but once I saw the serious money I could make by writing, the act of writing became subservient to the Foundation, existing to keep the Foundation solvent as much as for my own need to tell stories.

  They both promote the same message: Children are people and they have rights; don’t abuse those rights.

  They both strive to educate the public. But the Foundation will always be more important because it’s actually helping those in need. I’d have given anything for the option to become a ward of the Foundation when I was a kid.

  * * *

  Tomorrow I’m off to Wren Island to stay with Izzy. I’m so excited. I’ve packed and repacked my bags three times already. I was hoping to finish off that new story before I went, but I can’t seem to concentrate on it. Maybe I should just write, “And then they all died. The End.” And leave it at that. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I’ve written so far. But who knows? Maybe being with Izzy again will make the whole thing come alive for me. Stranger things have happened in her company, that’s for sure.

  * * *

  I’m having the best time I’ve had in ages. Izzy’s been after me for years to move onto the island with her and I’ll tell you, if it could always be like today, I’d do it in a flash. But it gets harder and harder for me to be in her company and not just blurt out that I love her. That I want to be her lover. I don’t think she’s exactly homophobic, but I do know that the thought of same-sex sex makes her feel very uncomfortable.

  I can remember walking past a café on Lee Street with her once and we saw two women necking in a darkened corner of the outside patio.

  “God,” Izzy said. “Why do they have to do that in public?”

  “Heterosexuals do it in public.”

  “Yeah, but that’s normal. I couldn’t ever imagine kissing another woman like that.”

  I didn’t say anything. Truth is, I’m not so sure that I’m actually a lesbian myself. I’m not attracted to men, but I’m not attracted to women, either. It’s just Izzy I want.

  * * *

  I like the work that Izzy’s been doing for the past few years, but I miss the earlier paintings. Or maybe it’s that I miss the numena.

  Izzy used to say that they came from a place where all was story. That’s all they remember, she told me: that there were stories. But we’re all made of stories – you, me, everybody. The ones you can see and the hidden stories we keep secret inside – like my love for Izzy. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It’s a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it’s true, but then so is everything.

  It didn’t work that way for her numena, though. Even when they were brought over to this world through Izzy’s art, they lived in secret, in their own hidden world. Izzy could find them – or they found her. I could see them because I knew where to look. I suppose other people saw them from time to time as well, but it wouldn’t be quite real for them. I thought it’d be different. I thought their existence would change the world, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve been wrong about something, and I doubt it’ll be the last. It just never hurt so much before. The cost was never so high.

  When the farmhouse burned, the numena died, and their stories died with them. Only Izzy remembered them, and me.

  And Rushkin, I suppose, wherever he might be.

  Angels and Monsters

  Friend, when I am dead,

  Make a cup of the clay I become,

  And if you remember, drink from it.

  Should your lips cling to the cup,

  It will be but my earthly kiss.

  – Traditional Mexican folk song

  Newford, September 1992

  For Isabelle, the act of unwrapping the painting of Paddyjack was like that moment in a fairy tale when the crow, sitting on the fencepost, or the spoon one held in one’s hand, suddenly begins to speak – its advice, however confusing, still calculated to restore order or at least balance. In the world of fairy tales, what was strange was also invariably trustworthy. One quickly learned to depend upon the old beggar woman, the hungry bird, the grateful fox.

  So she fully expected the figure in the painting to speak to her, or for its numena to appear at her window, tapping his long twiggy fingers against the glass pane, requesting entry. She remembered a winter’s night, a fire escape festooned with ribbons, the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of wooden fingers on a wooden forearm, three bracelets that she’d woven from those ribbons, one of which lay at the bottom of her purse, the cloth frayed, the colors faded, the other two vanished into memory, or dream. But the painting kept its own counsel and the only sound she heard was the repeated knock at the door of her studio.

  It took her another long moment to register what the sound was before she cleared her head with a quick shake. Laying down the painting, she went to the door to find Jilly standing out in the hall, worry clouding her normally cheerful features.

  “I was about to give up,” she said. “I’ve been knocking for ages.”

  “I’m sorry. I was … thinking.”

  Remembering. Wishing she could reclaim what was gone. Regretting that the world would no longer allow her even that small touch of magic. But perhaps when she began the paintings to illustrate Kathy’s stories, perhaps when she once again breached the barriers that lay between the world of her numena and her own …

  “Isabelle?”

  She blinked, returning her attention to her visitor.

  “You went all vague on me,” Jilly said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Isabelle nodded and stepped aside to let Jilly in. “I’m fine – a little distracted, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’ve had the weirdest thing happen to me,” Jilly said. She paused in the middle of the room to look around. The studio looked exactly the way it had when they’d left it last night, still furnished in unpacked boxes and suitcases, sacks and bags, all heaped up in various piles.

  “I just got back from running a few errands,” Isabelle explained.

  “This is why I don’t ever move,” Jilly said. “It’s way too much like work. I don’t know how Christy can stand to do it almost every year, especially with all those books.”

  “Imagine if I’d really moved.”

  “No thanks. But listen to this.” Jilly boosted herself up onto the counter that held the studio’s sink and a hot plate, and sat there with her legs dangling. “John Sweetgrass stopped by to see you at my place this morning.”

  “John,” Isabelle repeated.

  A deep stillness seemed to settle inside her. She put a hand on the counter to steady herself. Only moments ago she’d been yearning to reclaim the past, but now that it was here, looking for her, she wasn’t so certain what to do about it. After all these years, what could she possibly say to him?

  “Except,” Jilly said, “he told me he wasn’t John. He was quite rude, really. The only similarity between this guy and the John I knew is that they look exactly the same.” She went on to relate the morning’s encounter, finishing with, “I mean, isn’t it weird? I know we were never the best of friends – I don’t think anybody really knew John well except for you.”

  And did I even know him at all? Isabelle wondered.

  “But still,” Jilly said. “It’s not as if I hadn’t just seen him a few days ago and he was perfectly normal – well, perfectly John, anyway: friendly enough, but a little distant. This guy had such a mean look in his eyes. Does John have a twin brother? More to the point, does he have an evil twin brother?”

  Isabelle shook her head. “I’ve no idea. He never really talked much about his family, or his past. I know he had an aunt living here in the city and that’s about it.”

  “It’s funny how you can know someone for years, but not really know them at all, isn’t it? There’s people I’ve hung around with for years
whose last names I still don’t know.”

  “Considering how many people you do know, I’m surprised you can remember anybody’s name.”

  Jilly smiled. “Yes, well, I’m not exactly renowned for my very excellent memory. I never forget something I’ve seen, but anything that requires words, which includes names, forget it. My memory becomes very selective then, tossing up information only as it feels like it, instead of as I need it.”

  “I think it’s called getting old.”

  “This is true, more’s the pity.”

  Isabelle was trying to match Jilly’s lightness of mood, but it was a losing struggle. She couldn’t help but remember what Rushkin had told her: how the numena could be either monsters or angels, and sometimes it was difficult to tell which was which. Except Rushkin had always had his own agenda when it came to parceling out what he wanted her to know, hadn’t he? But what if her turning away from John was what had changed him? What if it wasn’t so much that numena were either monsters or angels, but that they became what we expected them to be? That they could be transformed, monster into angel, angel into monster, by our expectations. If there was only one John – and really, how could there be another, identical version of him walking around – then she couldn’t even protect herself from him because his painting had already been destroyed, burnt in the fire along with most of the rest of her work.