It wasn’t like I had given her a name. She told it to me all by herself, and I knew that this was the Dream Dust all the way. I had a little Mex girl once down in El Paso who taught me some Spanish but all I remembered of it now was that “Vida” means “life.”
Sometimes we sat on the rock under the willows, and sometimes it was a wide, white beach with the sun beating down and a cool wind sliding over us. Vida lay with her head on my arm, her eyes closed, feeling the sun warm us when the wind quit blowing every now and then. Her bathing suit was made of some kind of cloth I had never seen for real—the colors in it shifted and changed like in a sunset. She would turn and lean over me and let her hair fall down on each side of my face and it was like a little room with the light coming through it as she kissed me.
Whenever something would pull at me and bring me back to the cell in Block 9 I kept my temper and waited until I could get back to her and as time went on, getting back to her got easier and easier.
When the lights in the block went out at night she was always there; she would slip under the blankets and put her arms around me; feeling her hands on my back and shoulders was like satisfying a great hunger, somehow. And when I would wake up during the night she was still there, breathing slow and deep as she slept, and kissing her took a little while to wake her but then she would kiss back and maybe whisper something to me and it was all in the cell. But it was fine.
I could see the bars, dim in the light that filtered in from the windows across the way; I could feel the blankets that covered us, but Vida was there with me and I didn’t ask for any more. She was life and I had found her and I never doubted that she would stick by me.
Sometimes when we couldn’t sleep I’d change the cell with Dream Dust and it would be a boat out alone in the middle of a big river, all quiet under a million stars, and the new moon riding along with us, and a soft wind over the water. It was always warm on the river and we would drop over the side and swim a little ways, Vida’s hair darkening in the starlight when it was wet. I would swim after her and she would turn, treading water until I got close. Then we would be together and let the water close over our heads and we would kiss in the darkness, with the water all around us, until we had to let go and swim up for air.
In the boat were towels and dry clothes and Vida would press the water from her hair and tie one of the little towels around her head like a turban and we would drift again with the same blanket around us, warm and close and feeling the touch of the night wind cool on our lips after we had kissed and Vida’s eyes were big and dark in the light of the new moon and all the summer stars. We would fall asleep in the boat, and when morning came I would hear the guard’s whistle and kiss Vida and she would step out of the bunk and stand there, making a face toward the end of the block where the screw had sounded his whistle, and then she would blow me a kiss and walk past the head of the bunk. When I turned she would be gone. Then I pulled on my clothes, made up the bunk, and waited for the first formation and breakfast.
Once the fellow who marched on my right in the file came down sick and there was a blank file beside me as we marched to the mess hall. But halfway to it I felt someone next to me and there she was. She had on prison denims that were cut to fit her and her hair was caught up under her cap. She slid her hand into mine and I closed mine on her fingers, holding my hand so nobody would notice anything. That morning she sat beside me at the table and whispered to me all during breakfast, mostly little jokes about the screws up on the balcony of the mess hall. I couldn’t keep from laughing a couple of times, quietly, to myself.
5
And then, in the middle of all this—when I had everything a man could want in this world—I get sent for one morning to come to the warden’s office. I thought he was still after that blueprint of the drains and I smiled to myself because if they took me down into the tank and worked me over I knew Vida would be there, holding my face between her hands while I got my licking, and I knew it would be all right.
The warden started to say something but I didn’t pay much attention. I had better things to think about and I just smiled a little and then suddenly his voice cut through to me:—
“…this other fellow was picked up, pulling a gas station heist with the same modus operandi used in the case for which you were convicted. The resemblance is one of the most uncanny things I have ever seen…”
It didn’t seem very important to me and I tried not to listen but he put two cards in front of me and I saw that they both had pictures of me. Only the fingerprints were different.
The room cleared and I picked up the cards and looked at them again. The warden went on, “…you’ll probably sue the state for false arrest and imprisonment. If you’re smart, you won’t hold any grudges toward this institution or its administration. Let bygones be bygones. You’ll get a good job out of it; I’ll see to that. You’re a bright lad. You’ll be okay. No hard feelings, eh?”
I couldn’t quite figure it. They gave me a suit and shoes and a full outfit, even a tie and an overcoat. It was spring and still cold in the evenings. The screws chipped in and gave me some dough and the warden doubled it. But it was all sour. Guys went about asking me questions and in the office of the prison psychiatrist the doc filled out a lot of forms, with Dreamy O’Donnell grinning over his shoulder at me. Then I was on the platform of a railroad station, holding a ticket. I didn’t want to be there. I began to cry.
A train came along and I got on it and the screw told me it didn’t go where this ticket said I was going which was the town where the job was. Only the screw wasn’t a screw, he was the conductor.
I got off again and while I was waiting I walked out of the station and saw a bus and I got on it and paid the driver. But I didn’t know where it was going. I wanted Vida to hurry back and tell me where we were, but she didn’t come.
I got off the bus again and we were in a town and I saw a hotel and went in and they wanted me to pay in advance. It was all right by me. The clerk came running after me and handed me some change; I stuck it into my coat pocket without bothering to count it, I was in such a hurry to get to the room and be by myself. I started up the stairs, only the kid who had the key said we’d better take the elevator.
I wanted to be by myself and find Vida and then everything would be swell.
When I got in the room I drew down the shades so it would be nice and dark and peeled off my clothes and got into the bed, pulling up the sheet with blankets over it until it covered my face. Then I whispered to her, “Vida, Vida. Come on, darling.” But nothing happened. I waited, listening to a big clock somewhere knock off the hours.
I stayed there in the bed until it was dark outside and then I got dressed and went out, looking at the lights in the stores. Once I thought I saw her but it was just one of these figures of girls they have in store windows, wearing a playsuit something like one I’d seen on Vida once. It wasn’t Vida, even though I stood and stared at it, trying to throw enough Dream Dust around it to make it come alive. I knew if she came alive she could slip through the glass and come to me. Only I couldn’t work it at all this time. I thought maybe it was because I was hungry.
I had coffee with cream and lots of sugar and then I had some more and the girl behind the counter kidded with me a little but I answered her with only half my mind. The rest was worrying about Vida and how I would find my way back to her.
6
I had this money they had given me and I lived on it until it was gone and then I found myself walking toward the freight yards. A string of empties was pulling out and I found a refrigerator car. My arms were weak, so weak I could hardly make the top. It wasn’t sealed and I crawled down inside, hoping Vida might be in there. But she wasn’t. After a lot of backing and jolting we were some place else and I climbed out and cut down a country road and hit a back door for a meal. I don’t know what it was I ate or who gave it to me or whether I even thanked them for it.
But I looked around while I was heading toward the
highway and I thought it looked familiar. It wasn’t far from the old place—maybe fifty miles. Then I knew where I might find her—in Happy Valley. I started thumbing but nobody picked me up. And I couldn’t walk much because my feet were soft and the shoes had begun to gall me.
There was a car parked in a side road; whoever left it there had forgotten to take the keys. I just wanted it for the short trip and I knew the state cops would find it as soon as I left it. I didn’t think whoever had left it needed it as much as I did right then. It was the first time in my life I’d ever swiped anything and I wasn’t going to sell it, you see. I just needed it to get to Happy Valley and Vida.
I let the clutch out too fast and nearly piled it up against a telephone pole but I got it going at last and then I rammed my foot down on the gas and let her fly. I knew what I had to do and that was to get to Happy Valley before dark and wait there for the light to fade. Then, I kept telling myself, she would come to me. I prayed to her to come to me when the daylight was going and the valley shading over.
I stopped the car on the old timber road nearest the valley and set off straight up the side of the ridge, stopping to rest and get my breath every little while. I went as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast because I was out of condition. Finally I got to the top of the ridge.
The valley was gone.
That is, the Happy Valley I knew. It had been logged over; was nothing but stumps and spindly second growth. It looked dead and naked and I just stared at it for a long time. This was the end of the road, all right, because Vida would never come to me now, not in any place as empty and wide and ugly as this. I lay down and just about died. Only I didn’t die. I just wanted to.
I went back to the car. The light was fading. But the night wasn’t friendly any more. There was no place.
I thought I might as well take the car back again because I hadn’t found Vida and it didn’t matter now where I went once I took the car back, so I drove slow. There was a weight pressing on my shoulders and I felt like something was mashing me to death. I would start up and realize that I had driven a couple of miles in a dream, not remembering anything I had passed. I would find myself on the left-hand side of the road sometimes and wrench her over with a start.
I was almost there when I heard a siren behind me and I fed her the gas to try to get back in time—the state cops had spotted the license of the car and I wanted to get away from them. But they slid up alongside me. Then I saw the side road where the car had been and I turned left into it. Or I started to. That’s all I remember.
There was a hospital and I was handcuffed to the bed. I heard talk—it seemed one of the cops who had been chasing me was dead in the same crash that knocked me out but I was too miserable to listen any more.
The jail wasn’t like Coulterville. Besides, I had a broken collarbone. It kept aching under the cast and then itching and I couldn’t fix my mind on anything.
The court didn’t seem real, or the lawyers, or the judge—nothing seemed real. The train trip was all a dream. Until I saw the big gate of Coulterville Pen and I felt better because this was the place I had found her first and I could remember better here even if I couldn’t ever find her again.
I was mugged and printed all over again and this time I got a new number.
In the shower I slid my hand up the concrete wall and it felt old and familiar and I began to slip back into life again, only the old things were gone from inside me and it was just a stir now and dead-looking everywhere I turned.
I pulled on the denims and jacket and a screw took me into the office of the prison psychiatrist. There I sat, waiting on a bench. There was a clock on the wall and I watched its hand jerk in little jumps for the minutes, thinking about Vida and wanting her again, and I shut my eyes because I felt tears coming.
Something touched my hand. I didn’t want to open my eyes and have them see me crying right there. But the next thing I knew was the soft touch of her hair. Then her lips on mine. She whispered, “Cry now, before they come back,” her arms going around me and pulling my head over to her breast. She was kneeling on the bench, holding me, when I heard the door rattle. Vida stepped down and just stood there with her arm around me.
I didn’t care any more if they saw me holding on to her, I needed her so.
It was the old trusty, Dreamy O’Donnell. I gave Vida a little hug with the old man looking square at us. Or at me.
His face was sharp and sad, in spite of the little smile that was always stamped around his mouth. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said out of the side of his mouth, “Cold winter coming outside, kid. Eh? Don’t you worry, kid. Stir ain’t the worst place in the world. Not for us. Eh, kid?”
I just smiled at him again and Vida reached up and kissed my ear. I kept my arm around her, not caring right then if the old man saw me or if the doctor saw me or if anybody saw me do it. I had her back again; that was the big thing.
O’Donnell watched me with his sad old eyes. Finally he said, “I tried to tip you off, kid. There’s one thing you shouldn’t never make out of Dream Dust—or you’ll spend your life in stir.”
The door was rattling again and I knew this time it would be the doctor so I took my arm from around Vida and she strolled over to the window to wait for me.
O’Donnell stood looking at me for a moment and then he whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Well, kid, you’re over the line now. I only hope she treats you right.”
AUTHOR NOTES AND RECOMMENDED READING
As per the distinctions outlined in the introduction, these notes for further reading are centered on modern fantasy literature. They are also merely an introductory guide, rather than a thorough consideration of Lewis’s reading in the genre. Many of Lewis’s best comments about fantasy and science fiction can be found in Of This and Other Worlds (1982), edited by Walter Hooper. Other valuable resources on this subject include the three volumes of his Collected Letters (2000–06), Selected Literary Essays (1969), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1956).
Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75)
Danish writer, best known for his fairy tales, originally published in four collections. There are many modern translations.
Anstey, F. (1856–1934) [pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie]
British writer. Lewis is known to have enjoyed his Vice Versa: or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882), The Brass Bottle (1900), and In Brief Authority (1915). In Vice Versa, a Mr. Bultitude is transformed into his son and vice versa. Lewis used the name Mr. Bultitude for the bear in That Hideous Strength.
Barfield, Owen (1898–1997)
British writer and solicitor. Barfield was one of Lewis’s closest and lifelong friends. His output of fiction is small, but includes the fairy tale The Silver Trumpet (1925), and the humorous and philosophic depiction of a literary man’s everyday life in a lawyer’s office, This Ever Diverse Pair (1950). Some short stories are included in A Barfield Sampler (1993), edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas. Lewis read the manuscript of The Silver Trumpet in 1923, noting that in it Barfield “squirts out the most suggestive ideas, the loveliest pictures, and the raciest new coined words in wonderful succession. Nothing in its kind can be better imagined.”
Blackwood, Algernon (1869–51)
British writer of mystical stories and novels. Lewis wrote favorably of John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908), Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909), The Education of Uncle Paul (1909), and A Prisoner of Fairyland (1913). He was disappointed in Blackwood’s later books, noting that the author was turning from a “good romancer into a bad mystic.”
Brandel, Marc (1919–94)
British-born novelist, and prolific writer for American television from the 1950s through the 1970s. Lewis commented favorably on his short story “Cast the First Shadow,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for April 1955.
Buchan, John (1875–1940)
Scottish writer and politician. L
ewis is known to have enjoyed Buchan’s thriller The Three Hostages (1924), and around 1937 he wrote a fan letter to Buchan describing Witch Wood (1927) as a favorite.
Carroll, Lewis (1832–98) [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]
British writer and mathematician, author of the children’s classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Besides these, Lewis is known to have read (and to have quoted from) The Hunting of the Snark (1867) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889).
Chesterton, G[ilbert]. K[eith]. (1874–1936)
British writer and critic. Chesterton was a strikingly prolific writer of nonfiction, including many apologetic works. His novels with elements of fantasy include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and Manalive (1912). Of his fiction, for which Lewis recorded a general liking, some parts of The Ball and the Cross clearly foreshadow the Objective Room in That Hideous Strength.
Clarke, Sir Arthur C[harles]. (b. 1917)
British writer. Lewis’s correspondence and friendship with Clarke is documented in From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis (2003), edited by Ryder W. Miller. On Joy Davidman Gresham’s recommendation, Lewis read Childhood’s End (1953) and was “thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of the range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon.”
Dickens, Charles (1812–70)
British writer and editor. Dickens played a major role in establishing the tradition of the Christmas ghost story, of which his novella A Christmas Carol (1843) is the most famous. In a 1954 letter, Lewis said, “the best Dickens seems to me to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.” Of Dickens’s many mainstream novels, Lewis is known to have read—in addition to Bleak House (1852–53)—The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849–50), Great Expectations (1861), Little Dorrit (1855–57), The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). Lewis often made reference to Dickens in his letters.
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