Ronan had not said anything out loud, but Adam said, “I can’t miss class in the morning.” There was some comfort to seeing that he was stalling as much as Ronan, fidgeting beside the bike, touching a scuff on the tank from his ride down and then a scuff on Ronan’s wrist from the murder crabs, turning his head sharply when a night bird came into range of his hearing ear, adjusting the zipper of his jacket. “Say something in Latin.”
Ronan thought. “Inuisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto et sine Adam tristis agendus erit.”
Some ancient poetry bitching about spending one’s birthday without a loved one felt apt.
Adam thought it through and then laughed. “Propertius? No. Sulpicia?”
“Sulpicia. Are you sure I can’t drive you?” Eight hours back to Harvard, through the night, on a bike. Ronan was still tired from the nightwash and too many nights of checkered sleep, but he’d stay awake if he was with Adam.
“Matthew wants you for your birthday, and you can’t let him down. I’m awake. I promise. I’m very awake. I have a lot to think about.”
They both did.
Letting out a breath, Ronan began to walk the bike toward the dreadful security system. Adam patted the tank twice as a good luck and headed off to pick through the woods.
Ronan steeled himself as he would steel himself for dreaming. He reminded himself of where his physical body was in the present. He reminded himself that what was about to happen to him was in the past.
Then he headed through the gauzy dreamt security system.
Memories rose up. He expected it to be horror, as it often was. Guts and blood. Bones and hair. Closed-casket funerals. The scream.
Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone.
There was no gore. No shrilling with terror.
There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.
And then Ronan was through and swiping away the tears before Adam joined him by the shoulder, emerging from the dark with the bright dreamt light cupped in his hands.
“Break will be here in just a few days,” Adam said. He kissed Ronan’s cheek, lightly, and then Ronan’s mouth. “I’m coming back. Be here for me.”
“Tamquam—” Ronan said.
“—alter idem.”
They embraced. Adam put on his helmet.
Ronan stood there in the dark long after the taillight had disappeared. Alone.
Then he returned to the house to dream of Bryde.
There was a time when Jordan used to fantasize about living on her own. When she turned eighteen, the idea of it was like a crush, an obsession, something that dully ached during the day and frothed her to sleeplessness at night. She’d even gone to look at an apartment one day, telling the others she was going to work at the NGA and then secretly going to the appointment she’d set up.
The property manager had shown her a unit that reeked like chlorine and dog urine, had rooms the size of elevators, had only one parking space, and was a dispiriting fourteen miles from the city.
“I’ve got a lot of interest in this one,” she’d said.
Jordan thought about how she would capture the line of the property manager’s heavy-lidded eyes, how they never opened all the way, how that weight was signaled by the skin between her eyebrows, tugged by the longtime burden of staying awake. Her painter’s mind catalogued the color gradient between her subtle dye job and her lighter roots. Her fingers twitched by her side, already blocking out the negative space behind the manager’s profile.
The manager said, “So if you want to be in consideration, I’d get an application and fee in ASAP. A. SAP.”
Jordan didn’t like thinking about applications, because she didn’t like thinking about prison. She really didn’t want to go to prison. It might not have appeared that way—seeing as she spent much of her time doing things that were against laws of all shapes and sizes—but she spent a considerable amount of time thinking of ways to avoid it. For instance, she was careful with what she forged. She forged art, not checks. Lithographs, not money. Paintings, not certificates of authenticity. Historically, the law was kinder to those who forged brushstrokes of all kinds instead of pen marks of any kind.
The manager looked at Jordan. She was standing directly next to a stain on the beige carpet. She had not even bothered to stand in front of or on it in an attempt to hide it. The apartment was not at a price point that required her to. “It’ll be just you?”
“Yeah,” Jordan lied.
“I’ve got some one-bedrooms that are cheaper than this, honey.”
“I need the extra room for my studio,” Jordan said. “I do the old nine to five from home.”
The manager tapped on the counter. “You want to look around some more and fill the pre-application out here, honey, you can drop it back off at the office on your way out.”
A Post-it note was stuck to the top of the unforgiving application with the appointment time and a name: JORDAN HENNESSY. As if Jordan owned both those names equally. Jordan looked at it for thirty seconds, thinking about how she would re-create the shadow just under the curled edge of the Post-it note, how she would evoke the sense of distance from the paper below, what it would take to replicate the limpid yellow of the note.
Then she had taken a walk around the town house, trying to imagine what it would be like to live there. The little bedrooms with their flimsy closet doors, their cheap light fixtures overhead—she had to take out her phone to snap a photo of the dead flies caught in the globe of it, because there was something angelic and ephemeral about the way the light came around their bodies in a soft nimbus. She imagined the Supra parked out front, her never having to wonder if one of the other girls had taken it and broken it. She imagined painting here. She imagined painting her own work, not forgeries.
She stood in the tiny bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Hennessy’s face looked back at her.
She was just playing pretend. No matter how clearly Jordan could paint the picture in her head, she would never be able to replicate it in real life.
She knew the numbers. One thousand, two hundred, seventy-eight. Number of square feet. One thousand, three hundred, ninety-five. Dollars per month for rent. Two thousand, seven hundred, ninety. The first month’s rent plus security deposit.
But those weren’t the damning numbers.
The damning number was this: six (this was right before Farrah, the fourth copy, had shot herself). The number of girls she lived with: six. The number of girls she shared a face with: six. The number of girls she shared a social security number with: six.
The number of girls she shared an entire life with: six.
The others never found out that she went to look, but Hennessy found out when the property manager called to follow up a week later. Jordan hadn’t said anything to explain herself. Hennessy said, “I’d leave me, too.”
“Professional beauty,” Hennessy said, blowing a smoke ring. She looked disastrous. Black rivulets ran from her eyes. Her ears. Her nostrils. Coated her teeth. She could have passed as ordinary when Jordan found her at the harbor with The Dark Lady a little while earlier. She wouldn’t be able to now.
Now she bled black and monstrous before the real Dark Lady.
Jordan was displeased to find that they’d somehow gotten her wrong when they copied her. Some variation was understandable, given the unideal circumstances they’d been working with—referencing photos and stolen glances at previous public sales. But it wasn’t that the brushstrokes or colors were wrong. It was the atmosphere. The original Dark Lady had a verve and magnetism that the copy completely lacked. Desire oozed from the original.
Hennessy had said it was because it was a dream.
Jordan didn’t know anything about dreams, apart from herself and the other girls. She hadn’t realized they could have f
eeling attached to them. That seemed like a lot of power for one person to have.
Hennessy gestured with her cigarette at the bullet-holed Madame X, which leaned next to The Dark Lady (“bitches need company,” she’d said). “That’s what they called hens like her. PBs. Pro. Fessional. Beauties. Everything roses and riches as long as her face was in order. She dusted herself in lavender powder, didn’t she, to be that color? Could any of us do what she did? Prepare ourselves for the public eye, ensure that everything about us was ready for no-strings adoration?”
Hennessy had selected one of the mansion’s several master bathrooms to try out The Dark Lady’s influence. Like every other room in the house, it was outrageous: two hundred square feet, marble floors, tufted armchairs, two toilets, fourteen showerheads, a bidet. Everything that could be black was black. Everything else was gold. The massive jetted tub was sunk into the floor like a swimming pool, and it was in this empty tub Hennessy reclined, fully dressed in lace, leather, and black ooze. Jordan couldn’t figure it out. Hennessy lived a sleep-deprived life, always perched in uncomfortable places, her phone timer carefully set for eighteen or twenty minutes, everything designed to keep her from dreaming. If Jordan had been in the same situation, she would’ve used this opportunity to luxuriate in sleep for once. Do it right. Bath. Pajamas. Best mattress available, piled high with pillows and duvets. Yes, if she dreamt a copy, it was going to be hell on the other side. But at least she would’ve gotten wonderful sleep for once. A lemonade/lemons situation.
But Jordan had always seemed more built for lemonade, and Hennessy more for lemons.
“Jordan. Jordan. Jorrrddaaaaaaaan.”
“I’m listening,” Jordan said. She sat on the edge of the tub, her legs dangling into empty air. She imagined the air was water. She longed for it to be water. One of her strange episodes had begun on the drive from the harbor back here, and now, part of her was once again being made to look at water plunging over rocks, turbulent clouds of smoke rolling over asphalt, moss on rocks, mist ghosting over blue mountains. She felt thirsty for all of it. If she went to the mountains, she thought, she wouldn’t feel like this. Starving. Suffocating. Deprived of something she needed to live.
“Read back the last sentence I dictated.”
Jordan gave Hennessy the finger.
“Did you like your date with Monsieur Declan Lynch?” Hennessy asked. “You’re probably the coolest thing that yob’s scored in his life. It’ll be the topic of his therapy for decades.”
“He gave me a jar of Tyrian purple.”
“How’d he score that overnight?” When Jordan didn’t speculate, Hennessy continued, “His old man was a dreamer. Or signed his name to someone else’s dream. Is that what we’re thinking? Is Declan Lynch a dreamer? Did he dream those snails for you? Does that make them real, if he did? Is anything real if you give it a think? Is some maladjusted god fitfully populating his nightmare with us, praying to his own unnamed god that he’ll wake up? Is—”
“Hennessy.”
She was stalling.
“Jordan.”
She knew she was.
Jordan slid down into the tub beside her, inhaling sharply where the tub was cold against her bare skin. The tub was gritty in the bottom. It hadn’t been used for its intended purpose for years. Maybe ever. It was impossible to discover the mansion’s backstory; squatting here was only possible because the owners and its history were thoroughly absent. It was difficult to imagine it ever being vibrant and loved, vacuumed and lived in. A place like this didn’t seem like it had been built for intimacy.
Hennessy put her head down on Jordan’s shoulder. Jordan stroked her temples lightly as Hennessy’s wide-open brown eyes looked up at the ceiling. Black leaked from the corners. If Jordan looked closely, she could see the darkness leaking into her pupils, too, wicking from the edges like into blotter paper. It wasn’t right, she thought. It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fair. She was sure between the two of them they’d done plenty to deserve anything they had coming to them. But it wasn’t right. It was wrong. It looked corrupt.
“Heloise,” she said, “you’re getting to where if you don’t give it away, the man’ll take it from you.”
Hennessy’s throat moved as she swallowed. The movement sent three tiny rivers of black from her ears down over her neck. She was frightened. She didn’t say it, but Jordan knew she was. Not of dying, but of whatever it was she dreamt of every time she let herself sleep for longer than twenty minutes. On many sleepless nights, Jordan had tried to imagine what she herself could possibly dream of that was so terrible she couldn’t bear even a minute of it. She couldn’t think of a single thing, but what would she know? Dreams didn’t dream.
Jordan put her hand over Hennessy’s eyes until the feather touch of her eyelashes against her palm told her that Hennessy had finally closed her eyes.
The Dark Lady watched them both with that mistrustful, pessimistic look.
“It’s going to work,” Jordan said. She wasn’t sure if she was addressing the painting or Hennessy. “Take a think about the seaside. All kinds of nice shit there. Portable things. Seashells. Sand toys … umbrellas …”
“Sharks … jellyfish …” Hennessy’s head was so heavy, but Jordan didn’t want to move in case she was the only thing making her sleep. She leaned her chin against her hair. In the mirrors, they looked nearly the same, only Hennessy was ruined and bleeding and Jordan was unmarked and dreamy.
Images flickered at the edges of Jordan’s eyes. A waterfall. The mountains. A starving fire.
“I’m so knackered,” Hennessy said. “I’m so goddamn knackered.”
“I know,” whispered Jordan. “I know you are.”
They slept.
Ronan was dreaming.
He was lucid and electric in this dream, perfectly aware of both his sleeping and his waking forms. Of course he would be. His physical body was close to the ley line and his mountains. Chainsaw, his psychopomp, his dream guide, hunched on the sill of his bedroom’s window. He knew what he wanted.
Under these conditions, he was a king.
“Bryde,” he said out loud.
In the dream, Ronan stood in Lindenmere, lovely Lindenmere. His forest. His protector and his protected. The trees were massive and shaggy, green and orange lichen scaling their northern sides. Between them, boulders tumbled over one another, moss softening their edges. Mist moved darkly between the trunks, gray, shaggy breath from words just spoken into the air. The sound of water was omnipresent: rivers flowing, waterfalls hushing, rain pattering. Mushrooms and flowers ventured between stumps and fallen logs. In some places, it looked beautiful and ordinary. In other places, it was beautiful and extraordinary.
It was perhaps the purest expression of Ronan’s imagination.
“Bryde, are you here?” Ronan called. He climbed through the woods. He could feel the strain of climbing in his calves as well as he would’ve if he’d been actually doing it.
He didn’t know if other dreamers had forests, or whatever Lindenmere was. Lindenmere was a forest like this: Ronan could close his eyes and get to it in his dreams. Lindenmere was also a forest like this: Ronan could get in the BMW and drive thirty minutes west, up into the mountains, abandon his car on a fire trail, and walk the remaining twenty minutes to the forest where it existed in real life. He could step between those familiar trees and find they knew him and cared for him and manifested his thoughts in the waking world nearly as easily as they did in the dream world. The real-life Lindenmere was a place to dream without closing your eyes.
He had dreamt it into being. One day, there had been nothing but ordinary trees high in the blue mountains. And then the next, he had woken up, and there was Lindenmere hidden among them.
It was perhaps his best dream.
“I suppose you’d say both versions of Lindenmere are equally real,” Ronan said into the trees. He reached into the moving air. The mist curled around him. “I can feel you here, Bryde.”
/> Greywaren, murmured Lindenmere, the sound coming from the trees, or the water, or from everywhere. This was Lindenmere’s name for him. It knew his real name as well, and sometimes called him that, but Ronan hadn’t figured out why it sometimes chose one or another. Greywaren, he is here.
He knew Lindenmere was not exactly a forest. Lindenmere seemed to have previously existed somewhere else as … something else. And then Ronan, in a dream, had chosen its form in this world. He had not quite dreamt it into being the way he’d dreamt other things into being. He had just opened the door for it and chosen a forest-shaped suit for it to wear.
“You told me to chase,” Ronan said. “Here I am.”
He found himself looking at a deep creek. A bridge floated over it. A motorcycle was parked upon it. It was precisely the Harvard dream.
But he wasn’t far away from his forest and his ley line now. His thoughts weren’t confused and fragmented. This dream was his kingdom and it would do what he bid it.
“No more games,” Ronan said impatiently. He lifted his hand. Snapped his fingers. The motorcycle was gone. The bridge was gone. The creek was gone. The dream was exactly as he wanted it.
He had worked hard to be able to control his dreams so well, and it was easy to forget how good he was at it when he was in DC or farther afield, in Cambridge, or half-dead with nightwash. It was easy to forget how much he loved it.
Things begin to fall asleep. Sparrows fall from the sky. Deer canter and jolt to their knees. Trees cease their growing. Children fall into gentle comas. So many creatures sleep that once roamed, imagination trapped in stasis. There are dragons sleeping underground who will never stir again.
“I don’t want a monologue,” Ronan said.
All around us the world is falling asleep, but no one’s looking out their window anymore to mark it. Dreamers are dying. Dreamers are being killed. We are not immortal. And the things we dream … What is a dream without its dreamer? It’s an animal in a room without air. It’s man on a dead planet. It’s religion without a god. They sleep without us because they must.
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