Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  Because, I thought again, it was really weird how nice she was being.

  12

  That night, MariAngela came into my brain for a second time. Just as she had the first time, she arrived from the back of my head, where everything was very black, and walked slowly forward. This time around, I wasn’t “anywhere.” In other words, everything in my dream, not just the back of my head, was completely black, and all I could see was MariAngela, getting larger and larger as she approached the back side of my eyes. This time, she leaned all the way over, with her hands on her knees as if the space in my skull were as cramped as the little dormer room, and said, “Hey, Charlie, are you sleeping?”

  “Yes,” I said in my dream.

  “And is Alisa sleeping next to you?”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “Well, could you roll over and wake her up? I need to talk to her about something.”

  This was all that I remembered of my dream. I probably did not wake up, even for a moment, and am fairly certain that I did not do as MariAngela “instructed” and wake up Alisa, because I asked Alisa about it the next morning, and she had no memory of my disturbing her sleep, and certainly no memory of MariAngela coming to her in her own dreams—not that I would have expected her to. What could MariAngela possibly have to say to Alisa, anyway? But then, if she had nothing to say to her, why did she come to me in my own dream and ask me to awaken her? That was a question that no one, including (or perhaps especially) MariAngela could possibly answer. It was even more puzzling than the first dream, because this time around, MariAngela had not delivered any information about her life as she had the first time.

  And it was doubly puzzling because—as it suddenly occurred to me—in both of the “walk-in” dreams, MariAngela looked the same as she did in her waking existence. In the first dream, she had been wearing a ball gown for some reason, and in this one, I couldn’t even remember what she wore. But despite everything that Diane had said at dinner about the fluid, ever-shifting nature of our dreams, in both of the walk-ins, MariAngela had remained MariAngela, not shifted her shape or become another person, not even that woman in Galena or the other woman on the El, or become an ambiguous being who could have been any of a number of people I knew or had never met. It wasn’t my dream version of MariAngela, in other words, or my interpretation of her filtered through my fears or transformed into something or someone else. It was her, the actual MariAngela, and once again, while I was completely vulnerable and unaware, and for reasons neither one of us could understand, she had entered into my head.

  The next morning, I called MariAngela and happened to catch her while she was out doing something with her girlfriend. She sounded annoyed and a little bit distracted, and this time around, she was even more dismissive of my dream than she’d been that night at Berto’s.

  “Why on earth would I want to talk to Alisa?”

  “Exactly! That’s what I was thinking!”

  “So if we’re both agreed that it doesn’t make any sense, can’t we both agree that it, you know, doesn’t make any sense?”

  “You mean that the dream has no significance?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But I don’t know, it isn’t like any other dream I’ve ever had, or ever heard of anyone else having. ‘You’ looked exactly like you, and you spoke to me, directly, and looked into my eyes from the other side. You must have been trying to tell me something.”

  “Well, if I can think of what it was, I’ll call you, okay? And if I can’t think of what it was, but you have another dream where I tell you, how about you call me and let me know so that we’re both on the same page, okay?”

  “Sorry to have bothered you. You seem pretty upset.”

  “No problem, Charlie. Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. I did want to talk to Alisa about something last night, believe it or not, so I guess your dream was kinda true, but it was about something really trivial, okay? I don’t even remember what it was, and now I’ve got call waiting, so I’ll try to get back to you before the next acoustic night at Berto’s or maybe I’ll see you there, and we can sort it all out, okay? I gotta run.”

  And that was not only that, it also was the last time I talked to MariAngela for a long, long time. In retrospect, I wished that I asked her how she was doing, or wished her luck on the difficult journey she was embarking upon all alone, but I did neither of those things, and I guess you can’t change what’s happened, so there you go. But at least I know now that we weren’t finished, not by a long shot, and that’s something, at least.

  The main thing I took away from that hurried conversation with MariAngela was not her irritation about me and my dreams, though I confess to not understanding what that was all about, but rather her hurried and belated admission that she had indeed wanted to ask Alisa something. That something might have been “trivial,” but the sudden knowledge that I was indeed a little bit psychic was not.

  Work was a bit busier than it had been lately, and I got distracted by some client problems, and by the end of the day I had more or less forgotten about everything that had happened. But after work, as I walked into the parking lot, the sun was shining at just the right angle, and the red brake lights on all of the cars were lit by the sun, and I fell into a kind of state where everything not only seemed more beautiful than usual but more beautiful for me, I imagined, than it must be for anyone else alive. Who, after all, really notices the taillights on cars, of all things, and yet the intricate assemblages on display, the endless variety of squarish and rhomboid and ovoid shapes, the way they molded themselves so elegantly into the backs of the cars, the little red and white galaxies of glass and bulbs and colored partitions within, the subtle shades of pomegranate and cherry and strawberry and bright arterial blood, all of this was a revelation. I was high on myself and my superior perceptual capabilities, especially because I didn’t believe in psychic phenomena to begin with. Nobody, I was sure, could see the world the way I did.

  I suppose you could say that I’d become a little puffed up. Somehow this created in me a hunger to see and feel even more, so instead of going home, or going over to Alisa’s condo, I decided to visit the sports bar where MariAngela was reputed to work.

  It was at least twelve miles away via highway and a long, industrial road near the airport, and by the time I passed the first tollbooth—it was now dark and the taillights of the cars in front of me were now nothing more than indistinguishable red streaks, all those sublime and beautiful designs blurred together and erased—I had started to wonder why I was going.

  Of course, the odds that she would still be working there were pretty small. I remembered what she had had to say about her post-diagnosis working existence, and the possibility of her serving Stoli, gin and tonics, and Jägermeister to lonely men and sports fans at this point in her life seemed close to grotesque. No, I really didn’t want to see her in a sports club or a music club, nor even, apparently, in my dreams.

  The whole thing had me flummoxed, and a few miles away from the club, I pulled my Lexus into the parking lot of a Burger King, turned the car around, and, a bit more deflated than I’d been that morning, headed home, becoming just another one of the indistinguishable taillights.

  After I got off the highway, I called Alisa’s cell, but she didn’t pick up. Then, when I got home, I sent her a text and a Facebook private message that both read, “it’s up” as a little ambiguous joke, but, unusually for her, she didn’t answer and was nowhere to be found. I tried Frank, whom I rarely called on my own, but he didn’t pick up, either. Something about their unreachability frustrated and depressed me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, though I suppose at some subconscious level the idea that I was psychic but had hardly any friends and couldn’t communicate with the ones I did have, tasted like rust. So, too, did the not implausible thought that both of them were unreachable because they were together.
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br />   Next, I turned on the downstairs TV, found nothing there, spent a little time on my own Facebook page, and then, frustrated, went upstairs to look at my shelf of old DVDs. I watched most movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but I had a backlog of DVDs I’d never seen and decided that, since I had no friends anyway, I might as well devote my time to catching up. I picked out Once Upon a Time in the West, which I hadn’t seen in ages, went downstairs, stuck it in the DVD player, grabbed the remote, and settled back.

  But I’d either picked up the wrong remote or hit the wrong button, because there was a complicated and anachronistically mechanical-sounding whirring noise, and, instead of the menu screen for Once Upon a Time in the West, I was greeted by an old black and white Felix the Cat cartoon. I had somehow managed to activate the missionaries’ ancient videocassette player, which I hadn’t even noticed was still there, on a lower shelf of the TV stand, and the long-forgotten tape it still contained. I hadn’t watched a video on cassette for more than a decade and certainly hadn’t seen a Felix the Cat cartoon since I was a child, but I was too lazy to hit “eject” or figure out how to switch to the DVD player, so I settled back to watch.

  In the cartoon, Felix discovered a loose thread in his sweater, so of course he pulled it, which caused the sweater to completely unravel. The thread seemed to be connected to everything else in the room, because as Felix kept on pulling, it unraveled a coat tree and all the coats and hats hanging from it, and then in turn the ceiling and floor, and then the whole room, and then the planet Earth, and then our galaxy and the entire universe, leaving only Felix himself, floating around in a cold and lonely primeval void.

  “Your fault,” I thought, “you could have stopped pulling that thread at any point.”

  Before I found out what happened to Felix, however, there was a burst of static, and I suddenly saw, there on the screen, the upstairs room of my own house, the one with the dormer room attached. It startled me so badly that I actually ran upstairs (though I couldn’t explain exactly why I did this), and there was the actual dormer room, more or less exactly the way I had just seen it on the screen. But by the time I got back downstairs, I saw that this was nothing more than a homemade video that had been recorded over the cassette, as people used to do years ago.

  Sitting on the couch—the actual couch I sometimes sat in myself, against the life-size window looking out onto the street and adjacent to the dormer room with its own miniature window—was a very skinny, one-armed man wearing a dirty, sleeveless T-shirt and holding a little boy, about six, in his lap. The man had floppy black hair and a recessive chin and very large brown eyes that—perhaps because they were obscured from time to time by the longish hair—made him look furtive and weak. His right arm had been amputated below the elbow, and he had a metal hook for a right hand. This was clearly something I did not want to see. But these were (or so I surmised) the very people, the Christian missionaries, from whom I’d rented the house, and I felt duty bound, at least for as long as I could bear to watch it, to see what this man would do to this little boy.

  The sound quality was very poor, as it usually was in home-recorded videocassettes, and the picture quality was not much better. The boy said something unintelligible to the man, and the man said something that sounded like, “after dinner.” And then the boy, who was about six, said, “Okay, but I got another move I’m gonna try.”

  The man laughed and said, “Okay, but does it involve my having to stare out the window while you move my pieces around?” This part was clearly audible for whatever reason, and the way he said it was so full of rich amusement and warmth that I immediately let go of whatever ugly thoughts had been forming in my mind and actually began to enjoy this accidental eavesdropping on a father and his son.

  They talked a bit more about this long-ago game (chess? Monopoly? Stratego?), and then a rather plump, youngish woman walked in, followed by a girl about the same age as her brother—fraternal twins, perhaps, or “Irish twins.” Each was holding a Fiesta plate of something that looked, as best as I could determine from the poor-quality video, to be egg rolls. The woman—the wife—said, “Here’s a little sampler.” And then the man said, “Okay, we’ll be right down. We’re just discussing ‘stragety.’ ” And the boy said, “Dad, I think it’s ‘strategy,’ ” and then the little girl took a bite of her egg roll and got upset about something or other (it appeared that she didn’t like the way it tasted, or thought it had too many vegetables in it) and threw it at her father. It bounced off his cheek, and he growled a little at her and picked it up off the couch and took a big bite out of it, and then everyone headed downstairs for their Chinese dinner. There was a blip in the video, and then I saw the one-armed man and his daughter, and she walked into the dormer room (she had to duck her head a bit, even at her age) and then the father got down on his side and slid in after her, the lower portion of his legs sticking out into the room.

  The video camera was somewhere on the opposite wall, near where I’d stored my DVDs, so I couldn’t see what was happening in the dormer room, but I really didn’t have to. The little girl came out a couple of times and “stomped” on her father’s legs, and I could hear both of them laughing, and that was all I really needed to see and hear. This was a normal family, and perhaps better than normal, because the father had clearly been the one who had built the floating dollhouse.

  I wished I could see the dollhouse, but the camera was on a tripod or resting on a table facing the couch, and though I fast-forwarded through the rest of the cassette, it never moved from its location. Still, I had seen a lot. I had seen the couple from whom I had rented the house, and their two children who had played with the dollhouse, and had met the man who had built it not by kneeling painfully inside the tiny dormer room, as I had once surmised, but by lying on one side, the side with only a hook for an arm, and using his good arm and hand to cut the tiny hole in the wall with a DeWalt drill and a jigsaw and create the intricate assemblage of the shutters.

  I’m embarrassed to admit that, that very same weekend, I wasted several hours looking through a utility closet in the second bedroom (the room that adjoined the family room next to the dormer) for other home-recorded videocassettes. I even found one. This one had been recorded on a new videocassette, rather than by taping over an old cartoon, and most of it consisted of the same four family members playing with a beach ball in the backyard.

  At one point, they took a break and were eating tangerines and slices of watermelon, and the way the one-armed man would hold each slice of tangerine up to the sun to check whether or not there were any seeds inside before handing it to his daughter (evidently a very fussy eater) only solidified my view of this person. True, every time he swatted at the beach ball with his hook, I must admit to cringing a bit, but it never burst, and I never saw anything else of any particular interest.

  The rest of the videocassettes were the normal sort of Disney and Pixar products you’d expect to see from a family with children, though there were no new movies after about 2006 or so, at which time they must have switched over to DVD, and then, presumably, Netflix or Hulu. A couple years after that, they had left for the Philippines, and I had moved in.

  But none of this is really important. All that mattered was that seeing the way the one-armed man had carved out a little window in the wall for his children gave me an idea that transmogrified—as in a face glimpsed in a dream that would not stay itself but shifted from moment to moment to others unknown—everything I thought I knew up until then.

  13

  Diane, who’s very big on internal exploration—“spelunking” she calls it, referring both to Western psychiatry and Eastern mystical arts like meditation and weeks-long yoga retreats—had evidently been thinking about our conversation at dinner, because she called me and recommended that I see a psychiatrist that she was impressed with. I didn’t tell her about the second dream, not wanting to make it sound like I needed a
psychiatrist as much as, in fact, I did. But I was willing and curious. In any event, though I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling her this, I had been thinking about seeing someone for a long time, long before the dreams had begun, just because of the residual guilt about Elizabeth and how it made me afraid of a lot of things that I shouldn’t have been afraid of.

  Alisa had water; I had women. So be it. At least I was doing something about it.

  His name was Donte Nemerov. Dr. Nemerov’s office was in his apartment on a small side street near University Place on the South Side of Chicago. It’d taken me forever to find a place to park, and I was running late, so I dashed into the front door of his apartment building, gasping a bit for air.

  But that first lungful of air inside his humid vestibule would have been my last, if I had had a choice. The vestibule reeked, and it got worse as I walked up the stairs—a mix of kitty litter heavily soaked in cat urine, cat turds, and cigar smoke. When Dr. Nemerov opened the door, though, I almost forgot the smell, because he was such an odd-looking example of a human being—six foot four or so, with a lumpy bald head, coarse and potato-like features, and a very dark complexion but only from the neck up, as if he’d been basking, lizard-like, under a sunlamp. He had a pair of eyeglasses with bright red frames dangling from a gold chain around his neck. He was wearing denim overalls over a light gray T-shirt and a pair of redundant leather suspenders under the overalls that must have been attached to a second, tighter pair of pants, undoubtedly leather, under the denim. In the pockets of the overalls, he had a number of very shiny or burled old-fashioned cartridge pens—some gold, some silver, some with a wood or kilt pattern. He clutched in his mouth the stub of a very wet and slimy but unlit cigar. He looked like a slovenly, gay intellectual Freudian motorcycle-club member—quite possibly the only member of that particular species on the planet.