Passerby, behold this monument in words as evidence that once upon a time there were dreams, and people who dreamt. If you take from this that people might dream again and begin to imagine it, then consider it done. For in you there is a dreamer.
With this, our bargain was concluded: my dreamers got their sleep, and I their dreams.
The last dream recorded, it was time to head back if I were to make the meeting point by midnight to pick up a new group of visitors. Those I had fed, meanwhile, were about to put their life in my hands a second time. Without me (whom for this reason they also called ‘the Old Mole’), and lacking suitable equipment, they would have groped their way, on the return journey, to certain death; so twisted and pitch-black were the tunnels, the murk in them so solid, they were as good as a blindfold. And if, despite the arduous trek, the tangible gloom sat well with my guests, so soothing and prolonging the sensation of sleep that they were grateful for it, it would plant on their lips a moist kiss, as, without a sunbeam to cut it, flooding every one of their arteries like embalming liquid, it made room for nothingness. There were no canaries in these mines to give them fair warning. Only faeries and dead ends.
A dead end of sorts from the outside, shuttered and padlocked, the château must have seemed uninhabited. For their sake, I never let my patrons venture outdoors to see the exterior. To the curious among them, I would say: ‘And what if – just as with the Lutetian arena – the inside were all that was left?’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Only a few still dared to close their eyes. In sleep that was fitful and irregular, dreams were not easy to come by; the arachnean work requisite for their meshing was impaired by a dreamer’s distress, the fear of being discovered and rudely awakened. Without Chevauchet, I had the right, but no means of entry, to check on them. And that was just as well. For if these dreams were as frail as I suspected, I would worry about disturbing and damaging them.
It was much the same with daydreams. The disquiet of stolen sleep did not favour the relaxed semisomnous state, where reveries of revolt could be airborne without fear of being found out.
Among the men and women I helped, I noticed one particularly zealous, who came frequently. He always kept his distance, from what I guessed to be disdain or disgust; short, no longer young, invariably dressed in the same taupe wool suit, no matter the season, with hair the colour of charcoal, as dense and curly as a poodle’s and suspended in a thunderhead over his face, which wore a sombre, splenetic expression, a darkling brew of suspicion, connivance, and spite; upon whose surface, simmering with chagrin or resentment, bubbled an evil eye. The more he failed to hide his bad temper and hostility from me (into whose good books he had every reason to want to ingratiate himself), giving by this to understand that he was motivated by misgivings as to my person – mutely accusing me, perhaps, of some dishonesty, or decoy, or of exposing him to poor hygiene in bug-infested beds – the more I responded in kind, with unconcealed antipathy and sidelong looks, judging his manner either a pose or a dodge, and trying him on false pretenses. He stood out as a studied outlier and had the makings less of a rebel than of a fanatic – if equally without a cause. His particulars only strengthened my impression of him. After some inquiries, I established that he went by the name of Max, claimed to be descended from his namesake – Robespierre – and, representing himself thus as a revolutionary by blood, had, for purely symbolic reasons, resided near the Place de la Bastille. Sleeping him brought me no satisfaction, not moral, not financial. My unease told me I was running a risk.
I may have been the only witness to the failure of Chevauchet’s mission, which, with the end of sleep (de jure if not de facto) – and thus of dreaming, that sweet oblivion weighing down eyelids with beads of lead – had lost its raison d’être. As for the man himself, he vanished suddenly and without trace, just like that stone he had thrown the day of our meeting. As I stalked Paris’s windswept, penumbral streets, the storefronts, in the throes of retail apocalypse, seemed to transmit his last message – which could also, it occurred to me, have been a message from reality to him. Tout doit disparaître, all must disappear, everything must go. Was it a sign of things to come? His unexplained absence confirmed that our time dreaming was up, that there was nothing to be done; the world had no further need of us, or dreams, or sleep. I should know: I was sleep’s merchant. What I sold had value – was real, existed – as long as it was still worth the risk.
Tout doit disparaître. The familiar commercial slogan struck me particularly in its French wording. When no one comes into a store anymore, the goods inside become worthless, unreal. Whereupon they expire, which is to say, perish.
The apple does not fall far from the tree, and a rotten one even less! In Chevauchet’s absence, refusing to come to terms with its finality and the futility of our mission, I redoubled my efforts and installed even more beds I had no problem filling nightly. And the regulars kept coming. They kept me busy. I made my bed, but not the time for it. Sleep beckoned, yet I ignored it. I would not accept that my human garden was full of rusty leaves and stones, from which nothing would sprout. How could I quit? Nighttime was for revolution.
Of course, expanding my operation only made it vulnerable to discovery. Sooner or later, I knew, I would be known to the authorities, and needed Chevauchet’s advice, if only one last time.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Inside the lining of my coat, where it slipped through a hole in the pocket, I found the calling card he had given me the day we met. I dialled the number written on it, hoping against hope that someone would pick up, and when no one did, headed for 11, Villa d’Enfer, the address of the embassy. I walked through the puddling rain as fast as my legs would carry me, and did not stop until, quite out of breath, I rang the unmarked doorbell on a discreet and undistinguished facade. I had a memory of a door in my mind – an ethereal image that I didn’t trust myself ever having seen in reality, and of which the door in front of me was not the very picture.
I heard the floor behind it creak, and a middle-aged woman opened. By her mournful, wilted mien, I reckoned she must have been a nurse, a domestic, or a personal secretary, retained by an attachment in the empty space wherein she greeted me. It was almost as if she were planted – a cipher – for those foolish enough to think they could get to the bottom of things. And without asking so much as my name or what business I had coming there and looking so bedraggled, she let me in.
Peaceful, bathed in light filtered through stained glass set in four vertical windows, the sitting room to which I was shown would have made a charming chapel. The modest collection of art, furniture, and other objects assembled inside complicated this first impression with its apparent randomness. A sculpture of Atlas with a pretty patina had been placed upon a pedestal beneath a neoclassically framed reproduction of The Depths of the Sea, a watercolour by Edward Burne-Jones. Above the writing table hung a Daumier print, eyed from across the room by a Senufo mask, most certainly a modern copy. A squat and smart sofa, whose unembarrassed redness was a kind of profiteor, sat offset by white wainscoting, against which, closer to the door, a dark armoire – a piece of latter-day chinoiserie – rose awkwardly, as if to indicate an exit or entrance to another dimension.
Seeking something to occupy me, my eyes alighted on a book. It was A Dream of John Ball. The title sounded vaguely familiar; was not the author the utopian anarchist responsible for News from Nowhere? I leafed through it slowly and happened upon this marked passage, worthy of being put on a tombstone:
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name …
I held the volume in my hand, or rather: there it rested, the weight and solidity of an old edition. My attention then turned to the leather binding, and I admired its beauty and artistry. The cover depicted a large closed eyelid, exe
cuted in polychrome marquetry. It was clearly the work of a master craftsman, bringing to mind my late friends, of whom one was a gifted bookmaker. I recognized her genius in the design.
While I waited in vain for someone to fetch me, the sun setting through the windows sapped their blues, roses, and yellows and, little by little, submerged me in darkness. Finding no light switch, I got up for the small menorah I had seen upon the marble mantelpiece, between scaled-down replicas of the Rosetta Stone and the heads of two Cycladic idols.
It was then, the candles lit, that by the shadow it cast upon the bare wall I first took notice of the tall hourglass. Looming ominous atop the armoire, lonely and lopsided, its curves trembling in the candlelight, it had none of the dance of death’s rigid boniness.
Chapter Forty
I opened the wardrobe and heard dogs barking somewhere down the tunnel, within earshot but still far off. Inclining inward, I felt a mortuary wind caress my face. My eyelid twitched uncontrollably. Some moments later, the closet shook violently as a three-strong posse of policemen clambered through the frame and spilled out like actors from the wings, the animals thrusting their muzzles between their legs, wild with excitement. I had left the door ajar, for I could not bear them breaking it down.
I was awake and ready. I held my arms high over my head as they searched me, then the room, for weapons. That done, they demanded to be taken to the sleeping quarters. Obedient, I nevertheless chose the ‘scenic route’ – through the horseshoe-shaped garden – that the sunset might enchant them, and they would go easy on my guests. The weather was mild, the leaves, only just nipped by the first frost, had yet to turn. The majestic crabapple tree, Malus sylvestris, had dropped its ripe fruit, there being no one to pick it, and from the soil around it there rose a sweet odour of decomposition.
We entered the long gallery, where the air was stale and heavy with respiration. The sleepers, dead to the commotion, dreamt on peacefully, or, fearing what might happen to them when they woke up, feigned sleep. From some the blanket had slid or been thrown off, revealing a contortion of limbs, no two bodies in the same position. In repose, they were angelic and beautiful.
Meanwhile, the gendarmes tore through the hall with a terrific din, the dogs sniffing, snarling, and baring their armature to show who was in charge.
‘Wake them up!’ ordered the officer closest to me.
I said I could not.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Can’t be done. They wake up when they wake up.’
‘You’re lying! Without you they’d sleep for days. They miss a dose of Potium and they’re out like a light. They can’t afford to stay here indefinitely. How much does a scoundrel like you make off them? Come on, what do they pay you?’
‘That’s between me and them. And I don’t charge by the hour. I let them sleep however much they need or like. They’re paying customers. And as long as they can afford it, I’m here to feed the addiction.’
‘Filthy Jewrab!’ the officer sneered at me.
‘They are safe here,’ I continued coolly, pretending not to have heard the compliment. ‘No one looked for them – until now, that is. That you should come this far on your own, without an insider, is next to impossible. So, tell me, how did you get wind of me? Who brought you all this way?’
And as I confronted him, I thought I recognized the scowl – the sullen aspect and tenebrous complexion that went so consummately with it – magni nominis umbra, in the dogged shadow of a great name, his coveted Jacobin ancestry – I knew it well, that face in search of a death mask and a place in the annals of ignominy. He always slept, this one, with his lids parted just a crack, like those of the deceased; what I had mistaken for a sign of lagophthalmos was in fact watchfulness. My intuition about him had indeed hit the mark.
Max the blue, true-blue Max, did not appreciate my back-talk and ordered the other two to wake up the sleepers, if necessary by force. They flew like furies from bed to bed, shouting and kicking the footboards. The results of this obnoxious conduct were negligible. Some figures stirred and changed position. But my forty heroes kept sleeping, like ones enchanted, making music with their snoring, groaning, and sighing, as if in defiance of their would-be tormentors, who yelled:
‘We’ll fix them good, your sleeping dogs, so that they’ll never wake up! You’d like that, wouldn’t you?!’
Their bodies padded like cells, they criss-crossed the hall corner to corner, rifling through everything.
‘Stop it, stop at once! You won’t get anywhere this way.’ I felt an acute responsibility to protect my patrons, as their guardian. I had with me the key to a box of ivory and horn, containing the Sandman, a powerful sedative. But its whiteness gave it away.
‘Keep your rotten hands off that thing!’ the officer barked. ‘Now, or you’re done for! And the world’s one scum cleaner.’
And they fell to dragging the sleepers one by one out of their beds, beating them blindly at the least show of resistance. These were bad cops, rabid and savage.
‘Look at ’em clowns!’ It was the ringleader again. He was having fun, laughing his head off. ‘That’s what you get for not taking your medicine! Get moving, junkies!’ and, addressing his confreres, ‘Let’s go!’
They rounded us up, still comatose some, and amused themselves pinching and prodding us with their guns in sensitive places. Then, Max taking the lead, they shoved and pushed us, a flock without a shepherd, handcuffed and linked in a chain gang, into and down the passageways leading back to the capital.
Their haste was their undoing. They soon realized they had no choice but to trust me, to let me guide them. Below, they could not force me to do anything. They had entered at their own risk, and I, pretending to obey them, went about gaining the upper hand. Instead of making good time, as they must have thought, we strayed deeper into tapering territory I knew to be well-nigh impenetrable, sans issue. We made one after another vertiginous descent. Dreamily, as one picking flowers, I took us where peril was writ large, to the edges of cunicular cliffs. I played at losing my way.
Through the entire ordeal, I was careful to a fault, awaiting an opportunity to give them the slip. They would have to fend for themselves. Some would go mad. All the better. I no longer cared, shedding all remorse. Indefatigable, I made a truce with the demon stirring inside me. I had to think of the future so as not to lose sleep over it. I had to get away. And, as in an autoscopic transcendent projection I saw myself neither unsung nor a hero, a change came over me.
Plenty mortified, the cops wanted to stop and regroup, to work out what course to take. They had had quite enough of this ‘scandal.’ Now, now or never. It was my only chance.
I took off, and as I fled, I heard the discharge of a firearm behind me, then a loud rumbling, the earth vibrating all around … And none too soon, as far as I was concerned.
There are tragedies, and there are tragedies. Some wait to strike till the intermission.
Chapter Forty-One
Over the entrance to the Palace of Justice, commanding its classical Greek frieze, stands Argus Panoptes, the guardian who never sleeps, every one of his hundred eyes open. Above it, there is a Latin inscription, which reads MALUM DORMIT, Evil sleeps. It is a perversion of an old proverb – the Devil never sleeps. Not so long ago, Evil never slept. It was Good that closed its eyes. But such an image of Good was not right for the times. Good should be sleepless and ever-watchful.
My mind is captive, my walk as free as can be. I have received the maximum penalty, a week without sleep. But judging by the ghastly state of the poor devil on the bench beside me, ciliatomized several days ago, each day more hallucinatory and convulsive than the last, a week will likely be the end of me. It is a death sentence in everything but name. This is what they do to enemies of the state and mass murderers. Prosecuted for seditious conspiracy, trafficking, and triggering the collapse of an old tunnel, killing many, I was convicted on all counts. My genealogical data was scoured for aberrant, criminal individuals. And,
lo and behold, they found one: a homosexual, anarchist assassin of an American president! Unlike him, I had no Emma Goldman to defend me. Not that it did him any good. Like me, the bastard called himself ‘Nobody.’ Thanks to the unfailing apparatus of justice, I was reconnected with him – my distant double, pages apart in the history books.
I serve my sentence in a portable prison. The agent for sleep deprivation, which makes life endurable, is denied convicts, evildoers like me. Only those who are technically at liberty have access to it. And where everyone is a watcher and every watcher is watched at all times, there can be no black market for drugs. Using them would lighten the punishment and relieve the prisoner. And relieved prisoners are virtually free. To give us Potium would amount to an amnesty.
The only time sleep is permitted is when one is already lying in state. For they don’t call it death anymore, or necrosis, but narcosis – terminal narcosis – which seals the evil of sleep.
The forced wakefulness without reprieve is a strange reversal of death, because deadlier than it.
Chapter Forty-Two
Two days ago, I opened my eyes for the last time. After I had been detained, the guards, one of whom was familiar, let me sleep for weeks. A great clandestine gift: freedom in the bowels of a prison hospital. I felt freer in this bastille than at liberty. What heavenly bliss it was to be nursed by sleep. So I closed my eyes every night, knowing full well it could not be much longer. I would shut each of them tightly, as though sliding the lid over a manhole (a hole big enough for a man to dream in it) from beneath. And I would plumb more profoundly than ever into my dream.
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