Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  “And I took a little drive and saw the street where MariAngela grew up.”

  “Good. That could help. Have you asked her yet?”

  “This time you mean MariAngela, right?”

  “Yes, of course, who else would I mean?”

  “Well, yes, in real life, I have. Just not in a dream.”

  “Charlie, you know the moments when you first fall asleep? I’m referring to that instant where you’re still technically awake, but your thoughts go from being solid eggs to suddenly cracking and then all of a sudden you’ve got a swirl of gloppy yolk and sticky white and once it’s out of the shell you can’t put it back in, and that’s your dream, you’re asleep? If you follow the metaphor, what I’m asking you to imagine is the instant the shell cracks. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I closed my eyes and actually imagined the egg swirling around, and Dr. Nemerov’s voice was so soothing that I kept them closed.

  “This moment, when the egg cracks, this is called a fugue state, a brief instant during which you can acknowledge that things are not making sense and that you’re about to be asleep. Now normally, when we make a point of acknowledging this, that conscious acknowledgment snaps us back to a waking state for just a moment. But some people are able to recognize that they’re dreaming and go ahead and slip into a dreaming state with the knowledge that this is precisely what they are doing. I have heard of one patient of one of my colleagues who says, ‘As soon as the people I see in my mind start looking like old, worn-out silk scarves with holes in them, I know I’m dreaming.’ ”

  I couldn’t help but think of my father’s dream objects with their holes in them. I opened my eyes, and there was Dr. Nemerov. He was wearing a green-and-blue plaid pair of overalls over a pink T-shirt.

  “So I would like you to try for the next couple of weeks, as you feel yourself slipping into a dream state, to tell yourself to keep on dreaming but to summon MariAngela and to speak with her in your dreams.”

  “But even if I do this, how will I remember the next morning?”

  “Simple. Every night when you’re ready to go to sleep, set your cell phone alarm for a half an hour after you lay your head on the pillow. Is that about how much time it usually takes you to fall asleep? Twenty minutes? Okay, twenty minutes. Then, every night, focus on summoning her to one location. Make it the same location every time, your house, a park, whatever.”

  “I have a location.”

  “Okay. So you wake up after twenty minutes, and either you remember MariAngela in your dream or you do not. If you remember it, scribble down what happened on a sheet of paper by your bed. If you don’t, no big deal, just go back to sleep—or try the experiment again that same night if you want, and set your alarm for another twenty minutes.”

  “If MariAngela comes to me and I wake up after twenty minutes, I don’t think I’ll need to write it down. I think I’ll definitely remember.”

  “Good. And then you come and tell me, and we’ll figure this out together. Are you ready to set up a regular schedule of visits?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have my calendar on my phone. Can I just call you in a couple of days?”

  He nodded. “Go in peace, my boy.”

  I felt as if I were skinny enough at this point to slither down the shower drain, and I was terrified, so I did exactly as Dr. Nemerov suggested. Every night, I went to bed with my cell phone in my right hand, and as I felt myself drifting off to sleep—usually at the moment when my cell phone started to slip from my hand—I struggled to bestir myself and set the alarm for twenty minutes later. Sometimes the effort of setting the alarm would so disturb my sleeping patterns that the effort was a waste, and I would suffer insomnia for an hour or two. Sometimes I would stumble out of bed and shuffle downstairs to the couch and read an old book for a while, uncomprehendingly. Just as often, the alarm would go off, and I would automatically mash the button to shut it off in my half-sleep without giving it a second thought.

  But one night, when the alarm went off, I awakened and lay there in the silent bedroom where once Alisa and I had shared a bed, and I kept my eyes closed, though I was fully awake, and remembered the dream I’d had when I’d first slipped into sleep: It had been of Felix the Cat in all of his flat, black-and-white glory, swimming about in great circles in a blue-green sea of pleasantly slippery, little white eggs, like tapioca or milky caviar, and I knew, though there was no “narrator” to tell me so, that these were the eggs of a young female human being, waiting to be fertilized. Felix had been grinning like an old roué as he’d done his little flips and dives among the shiny white eggs. I scribbled it down in my bedside notebook: “Felix swimming eggs.”

  Interesting, but it told me nothing—except, perhaps, that I’d been influenced by Dr. Nemerov’s description of the very earliest moments of dreaming as resembling a runny egg escaping from an eggshell.

  A few days passed, and then I had a second memorable dream at the twenty-minute mark. In this one, there were no human beings at all, just a sidewalk, but it kept on shifting, so that at first it was at the height of my feet and then, like a magic carpet, at eye level and then at the level of the treetops. And as the ribbonlike pavement rose and fell, it gathered to itself encrustations of objects that I must have been recalling from my childhood: black tar and Black Jack gum; the little wooden sticks called “punks” we used to burn for their sweet smell, and the red and green “caps” filled with minuscule pinches of gunpowder that we’d put in our toy guns or strike with rocks for the tiny bang and satisfying gun-smoke smell; spittle and blood from banged-up noses; crushed bits of limestone and ancient seashells from the last visit of the glaciers; an oyster-shell-shaped chip in the cement; twigs and leaves; little square red and green, jewel-like Charms, and white peppermint Lifesavers; squashed fireflies and water bugs; wadded-up Fruit Stripe and Chum Gum; potbellied, meat-eating robins hopping around for worms; little black ants swarming a chunk of chocolate-covered coconut candy; and, in a sidewalk crack, a single, much-larger brown ant, struggling with crumbs amidst crumbling leaves.

  The Felix dream and the sidewalk dream seemed to be two steps along a path that was taking me somewhere I needed to go. I thought of Bea, using her Johnnie Walker Red and Edgar Allan Poe to take her someplace dark and far away; I was doing something similar, I thought, but headed, I hoped, in a different direction, closer instead of farther away, and toward something that might actually do me or someone some good for once.

  I finally heard back from Willa at about this time. It was a chatty text about Bitty and her job and some new restaurants in Seattle. She didn’t in any way address the issues I’d raised in my previous text, and for this I felt, oddly, relieved, as if I’d dodged some sort of bullet. From that moment forward, we continued from time to time to text and to message each other on Facebook, but we never again talked about what had happened between us.

  I guess I didn’t care too much one way or another anymore because “what had happened” got lost in the shuffle of what was currently happening; I had received some very good news. The owner of Glennis, whom I’d met at the deposition, had taken a liking to me and called about possibly bringing me “back into the fold,” as she’d put it, and so I became excited at the prospect and put aside my dream work and assorted other spelunking for a few days to research the agency and prepare for my interview in two weeks’ time. But I felt worried, as well, because I was indeed a “good boy” and was horrified when I contemplated the prospect that people who saw me on the street, skeletal and unshaven, would think I was a bum, or mentally ill, or homeless. I wanted a new job, and I wanted to be “in the fold” like everyone else, but I couldn’t accomplish either if I wasn’t able to eat.

  So I plucked my cell phone out of my pocket to make another appointment with Dr. Nemerov, but just as I did so, my phone buzzed.

  It was Dr. Nemerov.

  “Oh, my God, I was just
about to call you.”

  “Hi, Charlie. I’d like to pretend I knew that, but you were just on a list of patients I wanted to check up on. You were on the top of the list.”

  “Really, why?”

  “Because you’re so mentally sick.”

  I don’t know why, but I just laughed, and Dr. Nemerov laughed too. “Nah, just kidding. You told me you’d call me in a couple of days so you could check your calendar and we could set up a regular schedule, remember?”

  “Oh, shit, yeah, I forgot. I’m kind of panicked because I got a possible job offer, and I need to get healthy before then. I can’t walk in for an interview looking like a wraith. I don’t know what to do, and I’m really upset.”

  “Well, it helps not to flail. Force yourself to eat something, even if it’s only a bag of pistachios, and I’ll squeeze you in tomorrow night. In the meantime, I want you to think about the image of a tree reflected in a lake, as Maugham discusses somewhere in one of his writings. Okay? Maugham says the reflected tree cannot exist without the actual tree, but the actual tree, needless to say, is not in any way affected by its reflection. So the question is, do you agree that the same applies to your human consciousness?”

  “I’m not even sure what you mean.”

  “That’s exactly why I want you to think about it.”

  I came early for the appointment but wasted much of the time evading what was really on my mind. I complained that I’d never heard back from Reese “the Knack” Nakamura about another gig at the Palmyra; I told old stories about Gilbert and his callous cluelessness; I reported, truthfully, that I’d eaten a bag of pistachios and drunk some orange juice; I told Dr. Nemerov that I was ashamed that I’d not picked up my guitar in months. After about a half hour of this, he made a waving motion with his hand and said, “I told you on the phone not to flail, but I didn’t mean you should go all the way to the other extreme and just drift.”

  And then he said something interesting.

  “You know, Charlie, when I called you yesterday, it was purely coincidence that you were about to call me. But at the risk of stating the obvious, there’s something about our miraculous communications tools that makes it easier than it’s ever been to dodge people. The more tools we have, the more means of telling people to ‘fuck off’ we have, right? So I’m going to step out of my psychiatrist role for just a moment and be a human being, and admit to you that I picked up the phone to call you because I’d put a lot of effort into our first few sessions and I was frankly hurt and pissed off that you hadn’t called me back like you said you would to set up a regular schedule of appointments.”

  “I’m sorry, that really wasn’t my intention. I just feel scattered.”

  “I know, don’t worry about it. You’re not the only one who’s scattered. We’re not going to be around to see if I’m right, but I think in a couple of hundred years, the intuitions that we call ‘vestigial’ that we once all possessed when we were still half-animals and lacked the powers of speech to communicate with each other verbally will have returned in full force to become part of our daily lives, because we’ll have walled ourselves off with so many devices that make ordinary face-to-face communication unnecessary that we’re going to devolve ourselves back into that half-animal way of communicating in order to make ourselves understood. Every time I see a robin on the lawn, cocking his head at the grub beneath the grass, I think of you and me and all of us after the power goes out.”

  During the nearly two weeks before my Glennis interview, I resumed my dream work. One night, long after I’d shut off the twenty-minute alarm with no results, I felt a cold sensation in the middle of my forehead, and I awakened and checked my cell; it was 3:45 a.m. I thought, improbably, that the tiny shutters had popped open again and that the cold air had somehow wended its way into my room and chilled me. But it was only my forehead, or rather one tiny patch just north of my nose, that was cold. And then it came back to me: I had just dreamed that my one-armed predecessor, or some version of him, for the face in my dream was predictably vague and distorted, had placed his hook hand against the spot where the bridge of my nose touched my forehead.

  It hadn’t been a threatening gesture, but rather an admonitory one, it seemed to me.

  I knew exactly why he had appeared. I rolled out of bed, right then and there instead of going back to sleep, and popped open the miniature shutters, and then I went back to sleep and waited for my next dream. And as I lay there, I decided that I understood—well, more or less—Dr. Nemerov’s question about the tree. A tree is not affected by its reflection, no, of course not, but a human being is, in whatever form that “reflection” might manifest itself.

  The next dream came a few mornings later. I awakened at the moment the alarm went off and lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and I could remember my dream with perfect clarity. I was walking through a multilevel shopping center in the form of a gigantic full-service gas station (which is to say that the garage where the cars were repaired contained dozens of interesting shops on either side, and the gas station’s office contained still more) and it made me think of a gigantic indoor antiques mall that had been located somewhere along that long avenue where my father used to exhibit his sculptures and where he’d bought me the steak sandwich once and torn off the little bits that weren’t contaminated by the spicy sauce.

  Somewhere in this gas-station-cum-mall, there was a shop that sold “bumper pool” tables, the kinds with knobby obstacles scattered among the holes, and a gaucho type with a green scarf around his neck was demonstrating his mastery of the sport, which morphed into a kind of Skee-Ball game, except that at the very top of the game, where the smallest hole was, another man stuck his head through and caught the cue balls in his mouth and spit them back at the gaucho. I was merely an observer in the dream, and heeding Dr. Nemerov’s instructions, I managed to become minimally conscious, enough so that I could look past the absurd physical details and focus instead on my feelings, which, as I recalled them the following morning, were akin to those I experienced when watching, say, professional golf: a kind of abstracted admiration for a specialized skill that was far greater than mine.

  Then an efficient-looking American man in a short-sleeved white shirt and tie came around, and he made it clear to everyone involved in this game that he was a “bumper pool professional,” and in my dream, I found it exciting to anticipate him “showing up” the Argentine players. But large heaps of wrinkled laundry had suddenly appeared at the base of the table, and there were dirty socks and other odds and ends hanging from the Skee-Ball holes, and he became engaged in an irritated effort to clear all of the clothes away.

  Then the American turned to me and said, “Why is it that cats and dogs get to eat such savory foods but all horses get is straw and oats?”

  I didn’t know what this meant.

  The next day when I visited MariAngela, she was wearing sunglasses again.

  “Do you want me to shut the curtains?”

  “No, keep them open, please. I’m feeling okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, headache-wise.”

  “And otherwise-wise?”

  “The same. Maybe worse. I don’t know.” She sounded irritated. “What did you want to talk about today?”

  “The usual, I guess, if that’s ok with you.”

  “That’s fine, but I think you want to actually talk about something, Charlie.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t ask me, I just know.”

  “Okay. I mean, if you’re sure. There is something, MariAngela. I’ve been discovering a lot of things over the past few months, and as far as I’m concerned, one of the most important is to ask follow-up questions. Okay? Well, there’s a follow-up question I’ve been needing to ask you for a long time. When you came into my head and told me to wake up Alisa to tell her somethin
g, what was it? Don’t bother telling me that you don’t know what I mean, because you and I talked about it on the phone, you were out with your girlfriend, and you said, yeah, you wanted to talk to Alisa, ‘but it was nothing important.’ Well, I call bullshit on that one. So tell me what it was that you wanted to tell her, would you please?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Charlie, I just wanted to tell her to be nicer to you.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Did you think she wasn’t very nice to me?”

  “C’mon, Charlie, she was a bitch on wheels, you know that.”

  “She had a lot of facets, like anyone else.”

  “Yeah, well one of those facets kept on saying demented things to you. Is that the right word? Where someone puts you down?”

  “Demeaning.”

  “That’s it. Demeaning. Insulting. Why did you put up with it?”

  “Well, obviously I didn’t, at least not much longer, because I’m not with her anymore. But why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I did, Charlie. That night in the alley. That should’ve been enough for you, and now it’s too late.”

  Fortunately, my interview at Glennis went well, and they offered me a position as an account manager—a bit of a demotion from junior partner, but I was happy to take it.

  I had spent far too long with Gilbert and had become used to the contingent, churn-and-burn uncertainty of it all; the ugly, putty-colored cubicles; the low-level dread; the way that clients would come and go seemingly overnight, usually because we were understaffed, or because Gilbert engaged in highly theoretical “strategic” cogitations about “disintermediation” and “securitization” and “monetization” instead of focusing on building his clients’ revenues, or, just as often, because Gilbert would invite a client out for a “friendly” lunch and then bill the client $350 an hour for his time, not neglecting the fifteen-minute increment when they retrieved their coats from the coat-check and stood on the sidewalk saying goodbye. It wasn’t all that much better at Alisa’s agency—if indeed she were still working there.