by Alan Cumyn
“Don’t write that!” Shiels said.
“It’s not about you. But you did buy the same shoes as Jocelyne’s, didn’t you?”
“Maybe the whole school is dreaming about flying,” Shiels said. “We could put it out there. Ask for people’s flying dream stories.”
“We could call them ‘Pyke dreams,’ ” Sheldon said, and he couldn’t help it, he was a smiling little boy over his pun. Shiels thought: Two minutes sitting with Sheldon, and already the ideas are brimming.
“I don’t . . . I don’t think of him directly in my dreams,” she said. “I mean, obviously it’s him. I see him, but at the time of the dream, I think that it’s you. You with muscles.”
“I have muscles,” Sheldon said. He was writing, writing away. The way that he did. She didn’t watch the screen. He was a composer, obviously—the writer. She was the facilitator.
The muse? No, that would be Pyke.
She said, “I find myself running, like I’m in Africa or something. On the savanna. Or I’m pulling myself out of the jungle, looking for sky. That’s what I want. And his muscles and his heat.”
“You want his muscles and his heat?”
“It’s not sexual,” she said. This always happened when she was with Sheldon. The barriers broke down. It was like they were one person. She could just say what she had boiling in her brain. “It’s just physical.”
“Like the wrangle dance? Like the way his crest flares whenever he sees you?”
So—Sheldon had stuck around long enough . . .
“I don’t know what that was,” she said. He was writing and warm now too, in his sweater, a hand width away from her. She could reach over. Their whole life together had started in this very room, working on a different version of this project many issues ago.
So easily, she felt like she had dialed back the clock and none of the coldness of the separation had happened.
“You’re going out with Rachel Wyngate,” she said suddenly. When he didn’t react, she said, “Does she have Pyke dreams too?”
“Everyone has Pyke dreams.” Sheldon’s fingers did not slow down. “We’re going to be inundated with Pyke dreams as soon as we put this out.”
Words slapping up on-screen. She didn’t read them.
“You’re in love with Pyke,” he said, and she nodded, because it was a dream (sort of) that they still were in. This was a dream kind of truth. She had just told Jocelyne she did not love him, and that too was true. From a different dream.
“Everyone’s in love with Pyke,” Shiels said.
• • •
Everyone was in love with Pyke. Sheldon was right—as soon as Leghorn went live, the Pyke dreams flooded in.
It’s water. I’m swimming but I’m flying, too. Breathing underwater. I’m a dolphin with wings, my skin is stretched all tight around my body, and I have a way of jumping that turns into something else. Diving in reverse. I’m doing all the steps. Watching myself and doing it at the same time. The water is warmer than the air.
For me it’s all about the umbrella. I’m late for something, class I guess. And I just wish he would come and pick me up. Swoop down and cradle me. He’s so gentle. The way he was holding Jocelyne. That’s how he would hold me. And my umbrella. When I open it. It’s kind of hard to explain. I open the umbrella and the umbrella starts to cradle me, and then we’re flying together. I can’t believe other people have had almost exactly the same dream!
My Pyke dream is about being on my motorcycle. I’m rounding a curve, it’s a jump. I rev it and rocket, and then I’m off-ramp. I turn the way I would on a board, just slow and casual, looking down, staying calm, one big loop, and my engine cuts—it’s quiet. I’m going so slow, I might as well have stopped in midair. I had this dream before Pyke came to the school, but now it’s like the dream is in hyper-view because I can see the colors in the bike. I mean, I could always see the colors, but now the colors see me, too. Does that sound weird? I didn’t even go to the dance. I felt like bonking my head against concrete when I found out how great it was and watched it all later online. Every time I have this dream, it gets clearer and slower, so now it doesn’t even feel like flying anymore. Is that still a Pyke dream?
it’s twisting maybe a propeller or a tail whipping round like a crocodile in one of those nature shows that grabs the calf and brings it under and then whips around and around and i step into the blade but i know the blade will slide off me if i’m loose enough and not just me but a better me the gentle me i’d like to ride his back to tell you the truth i could wrap my arms around his chest i could hold him with my legs i could hug him not hard just right i don’t really dream all this the twisting yes but that’s the way i feel
XIX
Robbie Lewis tracked down Shiels near the portable outside when she was heading to Postlethwaite’s forgettable English class. It was another gray, cool, wet day, and Robbie Lewis was not in Postlethwaite’s class, so he had clearly gone out of his way to reach her.
“Is Pyke a go for Friday?” he asked. “Because Coach has to submit the lineup sheet now. So we have to know.”
Robbie seemed smaller. He was shivering in his Vista View colors, the gray and gold.
“I thought you were practicing in secret,” Shiels said. “Haven’t you been working out plays and stuff?”
“He hasn’t come yet. But you said he would. You practically guaranteed him!”
“Did I?” Shiels was enjoying her little moment of teasing. Finally she said, “Of course he’ll be there. Put his name down.”
He almost needed to bend double just to talk to her. “But what position does he play?”
The same question she had asked him when she’d nearly knocked him over in the hall. “Anything where he has to catch the ball.”
“Tight end? Wide receiver? How about special teams? Punt returns?”
“Sure. You saw him in the cafeteria, in the auditorium. Just get the ball to him! It’s not rocket science.”
“Catching the football is a whole lot different from playing in an actual game. Does he even know the rules? Has he ever been hit? He wouldn’t swallow the ball, would he?”
“He grew up in the Himalayas playing football with his brothers and sisters,” she said.
“Really?” Was it getting bonked on the helmet that made Robbie Lewis so credulous all of a sudden? Shiels took a moment to enjoy him shivering in his flimsy shirt, trying to figure out if she was kidding or not.
“Every day on the mountaintop. Football, football, football,” she said. “That was his whole life. Just you see. It’ll be a game for the ages.”
• • •
I have always wanted to be a doctor, Shiels wrote in her application essay for her mother’s choice, Stockard College. I suppose it was simply in my genes, in the soup of my childhood. Having two doctors as parents helps a great deal, no doubt. I took it for granted that every girl grew up surrounded by microscopes. At breakfast, conversation revolved around the latest in cancer research or what an elderly woman might do to prevent bone loss. It is simply a given in my family that we serve others, that our lives were meant to be dedicated to improving the health and well-being of the ill and suffering, patient by patient, neighbor by neighbor, friend by friend.
She paused. The opening paragraph had just poured out, almost without thought.
But what I wasn’t expecting, what took me by surprise, is my fascination with political society. The science of groups, I suppose it might be called. Beyond the microbes in our gut, beyond the workings of various viruses and other physical instabilities, what makes the body politic tick and twitch? What are humans? Who are we and who could we be? And why are we like we are? When our hearts thump in certain directions, when life seems to have laid down an honorable and worthwhile course, why do we turn away and follow another distraction? Why can’t we love who we are meant to love, simply and without doubt? Why does the blood boil in such uncomfortable directions?
Who are we?
Wh
o are we when we dream, when we close our eyes and the good sensible sweet smart guiding judgment of our magnificent brains turns off for the night and what emerges is the soup of our desires with its clashing tastes and its talent for mixing the uncommon with the unnatural? Who is that naked woman with the purple beak running in the tall grass after the winged boy with the dark skin and the probing eyes and other things . . . other things that should probably not be included in a college application essay?
The truth of the matter . . .
Dear Committee, the truth of the matter is that you will be taking a big risk if you admit me to your esteemed program. I might be fine, I might settle down, I might yet get my act together and use your excellent faculties to springboard my way to a life in epidemiology or clinical obstetrics or forensic parapsychology . . .
Or I might fall in love with a pterodactyl.
I might sit in class dreaming of his glowing pectorals, of those arching wings. I might fly off.
I might fill my lab notes with descriptions of his odor.
He smells like: leather boots that were stored wet last season and now are moist and grainy to the touch, an unexpected slap to the nose;
like running hard in the rain with winter coming on but your heart and your body, everything is oiled, and suddenly you are awake to what the ground and the air and the moist trees and the dying leaves and the very world taste like with every breath;
like the place might slant suddenly, geotectonically, and Africa might suddenly collide with South America while swallowing the Atlantic Ocean, and so where would all that seawater go but onto the land, and what would it bring but a million gulls, who are like crows—white crows—and so we’d all better learn to fly then.
I know, that last item is not a smell.
It’s an everything.
Are you sure you want to admit me to your school? It could be a waste. It could be throwing away a perfectly good spot.
Did I tell you that I am student-body chair and that in the course of my duties my nose has turned purple?
• • •
How was it that a whole school could imagine the same play over and over—the arcing spiral, the swooping catch, hapless Wallin players running comically after a flying Pyke—yet the closer it got to game day, the easier it became to imagine it might not happen at all?
Pyke hadn’t been to practice.
He had said he would—to all of his friends in Human Geography, to his Spanish buddies, his bandmates, to Shiels’s brother, Jonathan, who at her insistence had cornered Pyke in the cafeteria and then later outside the library. Pyke clicked his beak, he smiled, he said, “Za! Za!” whenever anyone brought it up.
He caught anything anyone threw at him.
On the track, in the early morning, he showed up only one more time to accompany Jocelyne Legault, who lapped Shiels time and again while Pyke circled above the champion, keeping pace.
“He knows about the game,” Jocelyne said to her when they—Shiels—was catching her breath at the end of the workout. “He’ll be there.”
Melanie Mull was a whirlwind organizer. She reminded Shiels of herself last year getting Vhub vibrating on all cylinders. Ticket sales were brisk; the buses ordered; the cheer team prepped; megaphones procured, tested, assigned. Shiels, master delegator, was left to ponder the enormity of the failure if Pyke in fact did not show. Late in the afternoon of the day before the game, she found Pyke behind the auto shop hanging out with the smokers. She approached them with her jacket pulled tight. He looked like any other juvenile delinquent slouching against the wall, puffing away.
“Who gave him that?” Shiels demanded.
Randy Eggles, with his pimply face and his hooded eyes, said, “He’s a musician. Of course he smokes!”
Shiels wanted to snatch the butt out of Pyke’s mouth, but she guessed she could never move fast enough. He seemed to be smiling at her. His crest was flaming.
“Mebbee zu try?” he said.
Shiels glanced around at the empty parking lot, the blank wall. Then she reached out and took the thing from his beak.
It seemed like a deeply intimate gesture. She thought she was going to toss the cigarette into the can but found herself pulling it to her own lips, taking a drag, closing her eyes.
She would not . . . cough.
“Oh—hey!” Lionel Catching said. He was a tall boy who was all Adam’s apple. “Shiels Krane hanging with the low-lifers!”
She blew smoke into his face. Filthy, wretched habit. But she stood with the thing in her fingers. Now that she had their attention, she turned her full gaze on Pyke. “You need to show up for that football game tomorrow. You’re part of this school. A lot of people have stuck their necks out for you. You can’t let us down.” She took another drag. Totally disgusting. She tried to make her face look like maybe it was all right.
Randy Eggles suddenly cried, “Pyke!” and flicked his burning butt into the air. Pyke leapt at it, swallowed it down triumphantly.
“Oh my God!” Shiels yelled. She wanted to whap Randy right on his smirking face, but he was too far away. Instead she said, “Pyke—cough it up! Cough it—”
Instead, Pyke twirled his beak and produced the cigarette, still burning, for all to see.
“Stop it! You—” She slapped him across the beak. The cigarette went flying and skittered across the cold pavement. Everyone looked at her in amazement. She tossed away the other cigarette, the one she was still holding. Pyke’s grin flickered for a moment.
“Gotta give a beast some lead on the leash,” Randy said finally. “Especially if you’re that hot for him!”
There was no time to react. A news van turned the corner and headed toward them. Shiels screamed at Pyke, “Get out of here! Go! Go!”
Pyke took off like an explosion. Shiels felt herself blown back against the wall. When she looked again, he was gone, disappeared around the corner of the building.
The van screeched to a halt. Two men scrambled out, one with a TV camera on his shoulder.
“Is this your lead?” Shiels asked calmly. “A bunch of kids in the smoking area?”
• • •
But she wasn’t calm. On game day, when the buses were late because a windstorm had knocked out power to half a dozen stoplights in the downtown core, strangulating traffic everywhere, she raged against Melanie Mull’s haphazard organizational effort in front of half the council — the half that had drifted somewhat back into Shiels’s orbit—until Rebecca Sterzl finally said, “Shiels, enough!”
Enough.
(Rebecca Sterzl! Telling her!)
But it was enough.
Shiels’s nerves were frayed. She was working herself into a state the way she had before Autumn Whirl. Why? Why did she operate this way?
She seemed to know, more than anyone else, what was at stake, how huge the failure would be if Pyke dropped the ball, or couldn’t play, or didn’t show up in the first place.
It was all on her. All of it!
“I’m sorry, Melanie. I’m sorry!” Shiels said, in front of everybody. “Of course it’s not your fault. You’ve been terrific, all throughout this. The buses will come. Of course they will! It’s all going to be fine.”
And Melanie Mull accepted her embrace, wiped her tears, seemed to soak up this late praise from Shiels.
Later, on one of the buses, with a megaphone now in her hand, while Shiels called out the war cries of the Vista View Vikings, a strange part of herself seemed to drift above her body, like a spirit self looking down at the proceedings, at the strident young woman with the megaphone.
Hard left, hard right,
Cut, slash, Valiant Vikes!
It was as if the sound had leaked out of the picture, as if she were seeing things from the security camera mounted high above her life.
Inside, outside, crush ’em, fight!
Hurry hard, Valiant Vikes!
The bus hit a bump, and the red-faced, purple-nosed girl with the megaphone grabbed a seat back to steady
herself, while her spirit self looked on, unmoving, and thought: What if this is all a dream?
Kick ’em hard, trounce ’em, fight!
Stride to victory, Valiant Vikes!
A niggling memory: Mrs. Tron’s world religions class last year. Some religions—Buddhism?—consider the entire world to be a construct, a mental fabrication (was that the right term?) . . . a dream. We take things in through our senses, we seehearsmelltouchtaste them, and reorder them in our minds, construct reality like a film on-screen.
We become fascinated by our own constructions.
Our dreams.
Walloping Wallin might be a dream, she thought.
Tear their jerseys, struggle, bite!
Fight forever, Valiant Vikes!
The bus felt real; the students’ faces looked as real as in any dream. Shiels could stand and shout and feel her hip against the side of the aisle seat, and it was all as real as any flying Pyke dream she’d had in the last several weeks.
(Swallowing burning cigarettes, and then regurgitating them, still lit! How could she fall for such a, for such a . . . She wanted to say “clown,” but he wasn’t that. He was more like a god, and girls never got gods, did they? And if they did, it was always trouble.)
Who was that girl screaming into the megaphone? What was she yelling about? For all this public display of volume and spirit, why did this feel like a descent into sadness?
• • •
The wind blew, cold and hard, in the stands, and Shiels was not dressed for it. She hadn’t thought this through. Normally she was three steps ahead of events; she was used to cracking the whip on life and watching the wave turn into a snap. But Pyke was not there at the start of the game, and now she sat on the metal bleacher in her cotton pants and felt the chill of new-November settle into her tissues. She was clutching her megaphone still and every so often would stand and let loose a rallying call that rattled inside her as if her bones had turned into aluminum.
The cheers of the Vista View crowd sank into the cold air.
A lumbering player for Wallin knocked down four Valiant Vikes, stepping on three of them, to score a touchdown on the very first play. They scored again just a few minutes later when Jeremy Jeffreys threw the ball directly into a stiff wind, only to have the sickly pass curve into the arms of a Wallin defender who’d been standing alone away from the play.