Unquiet Dreams Read online

  "I put a wee bit by." It was no less than the truth. The crisp blues had been destined for Connolly's or Garavan's and a swiftly flowing river of lager. Perhaps a man ought to expand his horizons on occasion—not as far as Nagle, mind. "Right-o."

  "Go round there then, shall we?"

  In the streets below the rain pelted down and the wind howled mournful. Hanley pulled his collar up. Nagle shuffled along beside him, the hum audible even in that din. How much longer would the Crimbo lights be up? Surely the city paid good money to unstring them even at the holiday rate.

  "Here." Nagle nodded but once. Lesson learned.

  Hanley eyed the brick The door proved to be a gothic affair, metal bound and painted all black. Seeing no modern convenience, he lifted the oversized bat knocker and clapped it to a few times. They both craned their ears but all around them it was suddenly as quiet as death as if all the people had walked hand in hand into the bay abandoning the city behind them. Hanley shuddered.

  When he had just about surrendered all hope and began to get thirsty for a tall foamy pint, the door groaned open to reveal a disheveled looking eurotrash reject of indeterminate age. "What?"

  Hanley found him off-putting. Nothing like a youngster thinking he was better than he was to rile him. Nagle must have sensed it. He swayed in and said, "We're here to see your man."

  The dull-witted young man stared for a moment, as if he were about to refuse, then shouted over his shoulder, "Gregor, coupla pugs for ye." He moved himself with the door to allow the two to pass.

  "Thanks, pikey," Hanley muttered. His mam wouldn't have held with such rudeness, but Hanley figured the kid ought to have been to them. Unprofessional it was.

  They walked along the corridor to the sitting room at the back. The afternoon light—such as it was—filtered in through the net curtains and lit a strange scene. Cholly Case sat on the mock-leather sofa, the parts of some fancy gun spread out before him as he polished a shiny piece. He nodded to Hanley, then went back to his work. At the table a Dutch woman sat there weeping and playing Solitaire.

  Gregor raised his hands in greeting. "My friends, welcome!"

  Nagle oozed obsequiousness. "Gregor, you're looking lively."

  "It's no less than the truth," the dealer agreed. "What'll you be having today? A little crack with your craic."

  Hanly grimaced. The joke was so old it had a beard in his grandfather's youth. "None of your cut-rate Polish grinder."

  Their host smiled, a magnificent and beneficent beam. "May the cat eat you."

  Nagle intervened. "We were after some mandrake anthrax." He managed to invoke the words without betraying the hunger behind them.

  Gregor's surprise could not be hidden, but he recovered quickly. "How quickly it spreads, the word." He named a price. It was sufficiently astronomical to be convincing.

  Nagle nodded at Hanley. This time he could not cease the jerky motion. "We'll do it."

  Gregor looked from one to the other of them. The Dutch woman sniffled. Without another word, he turned and went to the cupboard below the sink. When he returned, Gregor held out a bottle. Its black letters spelled Hex.

  "Mandrake Anthrax," he cooed.

  Somehow the bottle seduced. Hanley's fingers itched to hold it. The dark green curves would fit his hand like an old friend. He couldn't smell it, yet it tickled his senses. It had been the right thing. His tongue moved, lascivious.

  Hanley handed over his folding money and swigged.

  The effects came instantly. His belly boiled with its heat. His skull expanded. His mouth began to laugh. Nagle looked so small beside him. That seemed to be funny as well and he threw his head back to guffaw with abandon.

  The room widened. The moon peeked in. How had the time passed? Nagle chattered, his arms stalks waving in the gloaming. For some reason it angered Hanley.

  Gregor poked a finger at him, but Hanley did not let it dissuade him. His legs propelled him across the darkened room as if they were moving through meringue. Nagle shrank in the twilight. No more than a bug, Hanley thought. With both hands he grabbed the wee man's ears. He pulled Nagle's head off and watched it skitter up the wall. The eyes blinked at him from their perch. His humour returned. No point moving, he realised. I'm already in hell. Hanley laughed his own head off.

  Eating the Dream

  In memory of William Blake

  Out here you can see America, the real America—small roads, small towns, small minds, all littered with the detritus of waste, despair, and greed. I spend my days chasing the broken white lines of the numbered passages between those towns. I have crossed the borders of the whole forty-eight on an elliptical path that gives a wide berth to the yellow clusters of city centers on my ragged maps. I know cities. It's not any kind of prejudice that I don't visit them anymore, just a need to avoid the limelight; the shadows it casts are too strong for someone of my age. The lights of a small town are just right, a bouquet of neon, headlights, and flickering fluorescence. Makes me feel pretty.

  Today I'm driving an old red Honda. It's been a while since I have driven a stick shift and I'm always amazed how quickly the rhythm returns. What is it about shifting gears that turns you into Mario Andretti? I had to catch myself. Smiling, laughing, and singing along with some old rock-n-roll tune about love and longing, I had let the needle creep up to almost ninety. No need to get anyone's attention—not that I don't have a valid driver's license and a clean record, but you never know when you'll meet someone who isn't sufficiently numbed by television and advertisements, someone who still pays attention. Or more importantly, notices things. I can pass, among most people. But in the daylight it's harder, and this is a glorious day of wide open blue skies from horizon to horizon, a glistening sparkle charging from every shiny surface. Birds sing so loudly and so energetically that droppings fly out their other ends from the sheer strain of it. It's a day for grins and fast driving. Even this rusty Civic seems to spring to the challenge and I pass by many a potential town because I have to keep driving, feeling the wind whip by through the open window, seeing the countryside slip away. It's almost like flying, and I bury the thought and the melancholy it provokes. Just for today I will be happy, just for today I will enjoy what I have: an open road, a fast car, and my freedom.

  When at last I have to stop, dusk has crept across the plains. Blue has already become lavender and the big orange globe has sunk wistfully beneath the crust. At the gas station I pat the Honda tenderly and fill it with premium grade gasoline. She deserves it. I look around me. I could be anywhere. The gas-n-go is one of a chain, though not one of the big ones. Coffee is cheap and the adverts garish. What could be in 99¢ hot dog that you would want to eat? People poison themselves with what is cheap and easy. Less than a hundred years ago, dinner was still an occasion. Where's the joy? Where's the real pleasure? I shiver at the thought of trying one frank just for the vicarious thrill, but it would be risky. Even though my overbig jacket disguises my form, the harsh interior lights always make me feel naked and unbearably wrinkly. Ah, vanity! I have been so grateful for the rise of the self-service station. It's a pity people have adapted to it, too. They just don't appreciate their liberty to come and go. I have been hiding so long; it makes me weep to see what freedoms they relinquish without a moment's reflection or even the slightest tear.

  Having crossed that invisible border and entered town, I reconcile myself to getting something to eat. It's not really dark enough, but in these small towns darkness hangs at the fringes and in the corners of the strip malls. There's a place where all is hidden, forgotten, non-existent, where nobody knows your name. It doesn't take too long to find one.

  In the south the euphemism is "gentleman's club." Some dim remembrance of a lost time that perhaps only existed among a small elite, or perhaps only in the pages of bright magazines and thick novels, today it means nothing more than darkness, longing and money. Sex is there, but it's a by-product. The main transaction is between loneliness and cash. Surrounded by teaming populatio
ns, they are all so alone. Some fear, some loathe, but they are all alike in their certainty that it cannot be theirs any other way. I talk to them about it, sometimes, why they think they cannot have it, why it eludes them. For many, it is simply that they are unwilling to exert the effort it would require. They want the world and they want it now, but lacking any extraordinary ability, they have nothing with which to reach out and snare it. But others see only a shadow world, twisted and darkened by their own stunted failures with disappointments piled like corpses to cover any glimpse of their own true reflection. They cannot see their own beauty and they work seemingly day and night to erode it. Even in their imperfection I find glory, but they are blind.

  Of course there are the tourists, too, but I leave them alone. They are just around for the night, the fun, the occasion. They have friends and families who will miss them. They are not safe.

  I used to visit more places—bus stations, diners—but the choices were so hard. Who was a student? Who was simply poor? The homeless are no good—so many of them are either alcoholic or mentally incapacitated. Such a sad waste. It was so random at first, but you know how it is when you first strike out on your own. Your ears are so full of dreams and youth that advice, from those who know more or better, inevitably falls on deafened ears. I would be different! I was so certain. And they were so cautious—I would not live their life of safety and secrecy. This country was mine, too, and I would share in all its promise and wide vistas. I can chuckle now, but I was so sincere. And persistent—while I did not succeed as wildly as I had hoped, I have indeed carved out a different life from my parents, one they could not imagine, scarred as they were by their lives in the old country. When, infrequently, I stop back home to see them, they fuss and tsk and cry inevitable ruin, but I think they're happy for me—except, of course, for my still being alone. Yes, I know—my cousin Hardraed, up in Canada where he says things are much looser, much freer; they always remind me about him. His folks say he has settled down a lot and my mother raises her heavy brows encouragingly to me, but I always shrug it off. Yeah, soon, yes, I know I'm not getting any younger, but of course my secret dream is that there is another way. We cannot be the last.

  So the lonely men, I understand. I'm not alone—I can talk to my folks anytime I want to or to any of the others of our race, though as the decades pass their voices seem increasingly feeble—but I am in a sort of exile out here. As the country has become more and more built up, I have tended to keep increasingly to the prairies and mountains where there's still a good bit of space between the yellow and pink blobs on the maps, where I can choose when to see people and enter their realms. It is not the life of legends, but legends adapt. Perspective: that's the advantage of a long life. Wasn't the vanishing hitchhiker just the vanishing pilgrim centuries before? Somewhere outside Santiago de Campostella the stories would have spread, the pilgrim returning from the holy lands, back to the loved ones who feared him or her gone. Arriving at the village home to find him—alas!—no more among the flock. The tears, the confession: he had been missing since the last crusade. Loneliness, loss, confusion, heartbreak—it is the human condition. An occasional few rise above it, find the secrets of the universe, of happiness, of genius. But so few.

  Tonight I slip in, $5 cover to keep out the riff-raff, but the doorman has no curiosity about my slouched form, his ideals worn down by the steady drip of sadness, loneliness and cheap sorrow. I paid my money, so in I go. It is the same at a thousand or more oases across the great swath of the middle and west of this country: dim corners, desultory stares, and a haphazard décor poised somewhere between fantasy and squalor. Neon, the elixir of pizzazz and glamour, flickers to the siren calls of booze by well-known trademarks. "Hot girls," the sign promises, but the stage offers only a lukewarm creature of mechanical movement. She swings lazily around a pole, her mind elsewhere—bills, pimps, drugs, or maybe just a day job. Who can say? Their lives are as varied as their jobs are the same. I have talked to many over the years and developed a grudging respect. They live here, too. They know the score, and if they do not fight it, they make their use of it. Who am I to criticize? On nights when I have indulged in the fiery waters, I think of razing the place to the ground with my own flames, but I do not do it. Indeed, I seldom think of it anymore. But the fiery waters play havoc with one's thoughts—it's easy to see why they all indulge. Drunkenness makes us all gods.

  I cast about for a likely one. It seems early and I feel choosey. At last I sigh and I settle at an empty table, deciding to wait for a more propitious time. There can't be more than half a dozen seats filled, half with tourists, so I can bide my time. When the waitress comes by, swinging her hips in a mockery of seduction, I order champagne and laugh at myself. Such nonsense. It would be better to stick to beer, but the drive has whetted my appetite for delight and only champagne can match that gentle bliss. I can see the waitress' eyes glow: hey, big spender. If she could see me, really see me, would her eyes glow? No, they would not; I have seen it too many times. Once in a while, once in a very great while, my revelation brings awe not abjection, but how long has it been? Years, no doubt. Visionaries are so few. And fear these days is omnipresent, stirred daily and ladled with paranoia in the cauldron of power. No wonder they seek escape.

  The champagne is cheap, yet the bubbles tickle my nose no less. The pleasure is small and exquisite, like a well-carved jade ink stone. It is their inability to appreciate such small blessings that leaves so many of them unhappy. They dream of wealth and abandon. Even here, the televisions blare their endless coaxing of spending and oblivion over the bar opposite the stage, their ignored competition. Spend and you will be happy; this car will bring you sex; buy this beer and you will never be alone again. The girls change places, another on stage; taller shoes, lighter hair but still the same weary combination of strut and languor. I have reached the bottom of my glass for the first time when at last I spot one.

  He sits alone at a table for three, jacket on, hat low. We are both in disguise—or is it our natural plumage? His hand rests lightly on the edge of the table, his fingertips clasp a sweating beer bottle. Despite the darkness I can see one swollen bead of moisture roll lazily down the side and join the pool at the bottom of the amber glass. My eyes are like that, meant for distance. Even the flickering colors in here do not distract my sight. He is alone. That matters most, and I can tell from his posture, from his beer, from his clothes that he expects that his state will not change. But tonight it will. He is here seeking the communion of flesh and dreams that makes him feel less alone for an hour or two, yet more alone later. I know, I have talked to his twin in so many small towns. So lonely, so lonely.

  I wait until his beer is half-empty. He has not relaxed, exactly, but he has released the clench in his other fist and appears to be marking the languid moves of the stripper with some desultory attention. Enough, anyway, to distract him from my approach, so I have to clear my throat to ask, "Is this seat taken?"

  His surprise is genuine. An actual woman accosting him was certainly not part of his plans for the evening. The surprise quickly metamorphoses into suspicion. I would want money, no doubt. The radiating hostility makes clear his unwillingness to offer any. I sit down anyway, slipping my now half-empty bottle of champagne onto the table opposite his brew. He maintains his glare and I avoid challenging him. I will always be nervous about my appearance before them. My brothers could never pass this close, but fortunately my hybridity shows most in my face. Yet its incongruity can easily provoke suspicion and unease. I keep my head down, look at him out of the corner of my green eyes. It is the habit of years to draw my nose back into my face as much as possible, a practice that gives me the false sense of confidence in the murky anonymity of the bar, but never completely removes the fear that my truth will be seen.

  But they never look you in the eye here.

  True to that edict, he squints across the dark expanse of the table to take in my form—or as much of it as he can guess beneath the vo
luminous folds of my wrinkled coat. He sees woman because it is what he desires. Auburn curls cover most of my head so the points of my ears and other protrusions are masked in the tumble of hair. I seek in vain to recall a line from an old movie about a homely female character who disguised as a man was merely passable, but as a woman, she "was a dog." The description fits. Among my kind I am merely passable—diluted blood perhaps drawing scorn from the oldest, but who among us immigrants can claim any purity of essence? But to pass as a human woman, I must rely on darkness, the trick of the light and the broad strokes of assumption. Curls, the right profile, somehow they may add up to "female" though I show as little skin as possible to conceal my florid hide and the scales—tiny, even graceful for our folk, but nonetheless distinct.

  It must be working because his cautious face has begun to look speculative. Sometimes we do come to money. I have had decades to figure out how much is too much—and how much suspiciously too little. The art of haggling—old as the species—will never dull. Everyone wants a bargain. The desperate ones—like this one—they will not offer money. They are far too cautious. But the lure of sex often eases their doubts, particularly when the exchange can make them feel magnanimous. "Gotta place?" I ask quietly, so quietly that he must bend toward me. He fingers his beer, noncommittal. "I need a place to stay," I wheedle, "I got no money." He can draw his own conclusions about what I might have to trade.

  "Why you drinkin' champagne, then?" he asks, proud to be so observant. He was no pushover, he congratulated himself. Not born yesterday, as many might say.

  Hmm. Good point. "It's my birthday," I say with just a little catch in my voice, fueled by the sudden inspiration. For all I know, it could be. Silently I curse myself for my giddy purchase. Ah well, it still tasted wonderful. He remains mutely watchful. I reach in my pocket and pull out the crumpled bills and change hiding there. "It's all I got and not enough to stay somewhere. Maybe buy a burger. How about it, mister? I'll make it worth your while." Perhaps not in the way he intends, but what price miracles?