The wizard’s iron staff was attached to many iron chains, and each chain was in turn attached to a dream that was now living under the hill with them. As the wizard moved his staff, the chains rattled, forcing the dreams to move under his command.
And so the princess learned that her dreams, and the dreams of the king, and the dreams of their dreams, were enslaved to the secret wizard’s will.
But one day, deep in the cave, the princess found the king’s lost sword. At first she did not remember this sword. She did not even remember who she was, or why this sword was familiar. But with this weapon in her hand, the princess did begin to remember herself, and the king.
She searched for the king in the darkness.
And just as light was fading outside the cave, she found him.
When the king saw his sword, both he and the princess suddenly remembered themselves fully, and realized that they had been trapped within this enchanted hill for an entire night, or perhaps a thousand years.
Both king and princess ran toward the light, together again. Their dreams and the dreams of their dreams pursued them, shrieking and growling and spurting fire, trying to stop them.
But the king and the princess escaped the hill.
Their dreams and the dreams of their dreams could not pursue them out of the hill, for they were chained to the wizard and his staff. The king and princess now understood how the wizard had imprisoned them with their fantasies and fears, and had fattened himself on their dreams.
But they were only dreams.
And so the king and the princess turned away from the enchanted hill and their dreams, and leaving behind both their fantasies and terrors, they returned to the castle where the feast of a thousand years was prepared for them.
When I finished computing this story, I had a small feeling of satisfaction. Just a few stray threads stuck out from the math, but not many. I didn’t have to account for them; they were within the standard deviation. What counted was that the unsatisfying story with a sad ending now had a happy ending.
But not every story can be recalculated.
* * *
—
Entering Julia’s house with Keith:
The happy domestic rush, kids running around and tumbling over each other, not even shy or regarding me warily, just exulting in their natural aristocracy, because of course the world exists expressly for them, they’re just romping in their palace. Keith leads me through it all, telling me Julia’s upstairs but she spotted you in your car, she saw you idling outside, she realized you probably didn’t know exactly which house ours was, our address should be clearer, gotta fix that, hey cheers, drink up, how many years has it been, it’s great to see you! Pure Keith, the same innocent goofball energy from before he made it big, trying to make me feel at ease, being humble about his house, as if anything was humble about this place: beautiful fifties modernist lines, old-growth redwood, Japanese elements but not overdoing it, carefully deployed curios but kids’ paintings on the walls too, clay wood-burning stove but plastic bowls of half-eaten cereal on the kitchen island, action figures underfoot…unfussy, charmingly untidy and alive, effortless. It feels like they’re saying: seriously, it’s not our money you’re looking at, it’s just the authentic expression of who we are! And hey: check out these windows! Twenty feet high. The city glittering below, the Golden Gate bridge, the entire ocean. Top of the world.
Do not think of your garbage home. Your condo, obliterated. Don’t even remember it. Dead men don’t have homes. We walk the land until someone finishes us off.
I’m dead.
Makes me reckless.
* * *
—
When Julia comes downstairs I’m stunned. She looks better than ever.
Like the mask of youth fell away and this is the real Julia. There’s a surprising gray streak in her hair that looks like it always belonged there. Fit. Skin glowing. Eyes alive. She’s become herself.
She says my name. We hug. My muscle memory is startled, recognizing the shape of her body. I’d forgotten what it’s like to hug Julia.
I shouldn’t have come.
I have only a certain amount of goodwill to spend here. Julia’s it’s-been-a-long-time goodwill. And her you-used-to-be-important-to-me goodwill. Keith’s you’re-the-ex-boyfriend-but-I’m-a-decent-fella-so-I-will-work-hard-to-make-you-comfortable-in-my-home goodwill. Make no mistake: that goodwill is finite as fuck. Stay an hour too long, tell the wrong anecdote, see how chummy Keith will be then. Be careful.
Don’t be careful.
Have another drink! This ain’t no ten-dollar wine, that’s for sure. Now we’re sitting around the table with the kids. Two adorable daughters, one earnest son, and they’re voluntarily eating real food, salmon and quinoa, not screaming for mac and cheese. Who am I, they ask? Oh, Mommy’s friend from college. Keith says: If only you lived here in San Francisco!
Framing us as equals. Nice try. I couldn’t even afford to rent a one-bedroom here.
Julia answers my question: “No, I haven’t seen anyone from the old gang. You know, with kids…”
Wait. If Julia hadn’t told anyone I was in town then how did Ron Wolper know?
Put a pin in it.
Work stuff—don’t even think about it.
It’s a strange thing, though. I feel so at ease here—why? Why has my tension melted away, why am I so relaxed?
Then I realize: no computers. And yet they must obviously own computers. Oh—Julia must’ve turned off all the laptops, shut down every tablet, powered down every phone. Because she knew how they’d make me feel.
She’s considerate.
She wants me to be okay.
More than I deserve.
Should I bring up the blue envelopes? Over dinner? No. It could freak her out. Wait till it’s just the two of you. But I can’t leave tonight without asking.
Presumptuous.
She probably threw away those envelopes long ago.
Maybe this was a mistake.
The dinner conversation goes on and the kids take center stage, as they should. The older daughter is a Girl Scout and she’s just built her own computer from a kit. (Julia’s eyes flash to mine—will it be okay? Of course it will, her computer’s very simple, it barely makes my stomach flutter.) The daughter shows off the computer—it works! Pixels flashing across the screen! She’s only ten! Even I am charmed!
But Girl Scout must’ve learned a few truths about The Way The World Works because her clear young eyes slice right through me. She is not charmed. She correctly intuits I’m a nobody. Well, of course—think about other friends of the family who must’ve had dinner here, other movie producers, technology honchos, maybe even famous actors. After all, Keith’s studio does those computeranimated movies where an anthropomorphized saucepan or cockroach will make you cry more than any human could, the emotional payoff laser-guided, perfect. As for me, I’m just some dude Mommy sidestepped on the way up. So Girl Scout is nice to me, but in a limited way, making it clear her niceness is strictly a function of her graciousness, not reflecting anything about my worth or…
Jesus. Get a hold of yourself. The girl is ten.
Mambo music! Peppy, sixties-style mambo music! The younger girl just put it on; it’s music from Keith’s studio’s new movie, which he cowrote and which will be released this spring. She tells me the whole plot in the breathlessly self-absorbed way kids have in that they assume of course you must be interested in every little thing they say, although it’s disconcerting to hear her gravely yet accurately use phrases like “inciting incident” and “the second act reversal.” But she comes by it honestly, like Keith does; it’s the air she breathes. This movie, she tells me, is about a fussy anthropomorphized library book that gets stolen from a rare book room by a spunky bookworm girl because the girl is the only one who recognizes the handmade book is in fact an unfinished manusc
ript by her favorite sci-fi author, a legendary recluse. The unfinished book manages to escape from the girl, because all it wants is to return to its cozy rare book room. But the book gets sidetracked and lost and falls in with some other print old-timers—a motormouth discarded newspaper, a know-it-all volume from a 1960s Golden Home and High School Encyclopedia set (from Nut to Pik), and a comically vain fashion magazine—and together they take a cross-country trip to find that reclusive sci-fi author so the fussy handmade book can have the ending of his story written. Second act reversal: the author’s dead! But the journey to find that author ends up taking decades, the whole latter half of the twentieth century rolls past, different styles and historical events, as print dies and is replaced by zeroes and ones, and our four heroes become more and more irrelevant, but guess what—when all seems lost, in the end we meet the spunky bookworm girl again. She’s an old lady now, we feel the ache of years, she’s a successful author herself but you can tell there’s something missing from her life. But by serendipity she comes across our hero, the unfinished manuscript of her almost-forgotten childhood favorite author, now tattered and damaged—but the girl recognizes it and she realizes that she’s the one who must write the ending for her beloved long-lost book!
Keith’s daughter tells the whole story to me in an excited rush. Keith shrugs at me as if to say, trust me, it’s more than that…or yup, that’s it, can you believe I get paid like a king to dream up garbage like this? But I think to myself, I wish I had made something like that, something that my sons could be that excited about. But what could I possibly do that would impress them? The last time I got anything like an emotion from them was when I was pitching at their charity softball game and some smart-ass batter socked a line drive straight at my head. I was knocked flat, went down like a sack of rocks. But even though I remember my sons looking down at me with concern, I couldn’t help but suspect what those stares really meant: there goes our college tuition.
Those “white trash skanks,” as Erin called them, were expensive in the end. Erin righteously sucked away every cent—present, past, and future. Well, what judge wouldn’t take her side? I gave her fucking chlamydia.
“Hey?” The grave little boy looking up at me. “You okay?”
Everyone at the table is staring at me. Lurch in my gut. Did I say something weird? Wait, did I actually just blurt “fucking chlamydia” out loud for no apparent reason? How much wine have I had? This wouldn’t be the first time…not knowing minute to minute what I’m doing. Christ, get it together.
“Uh,” I say, weakly.
Here’s what’s weird: I’m not focused on Julia tonight. I’m more fascinated by her gregarious husband, her charming kids. How wrong is it that I find Julia’s kids more compelling than my own sons? It’s wrong. I held my own boys close to me when they were babies, I sang them to sleep, I played with them for hours on the carpet, I helped them with their math homework…well, who cares. My sons scorn me now, so let me hang out with this ten-year-old Girl Scout who builds computers, let me spitball loglines with this eight-year-old script doctor, let me talk about the meaning of life with this serious little first-grade boy who is looking at me with more emotional intelligence than I’ve ever—
Christ! Shake yourself out of it.
“Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night!” I say, with what I hope is a jovial shrug, as though the reason I hadn’t slept was—why, I had plumb forgot or something! A careless mistake, and not because I was mathematically dead—so should I bring up the blue envelope now? Make it official? Julia, Keith, the whole family gathered around the table, wholesome scene, open it up, read it—surprise! they’re dining with a dead man—but no, I just say, “Uh, it’s so great to meet you, you should meet my sons, too, they’re about your age, actually a little bit older, more into sports but, you know, I should get that computer kit actually, if you could tell me the brand of that, and that library book movie, I can’t wait till it comes out, I know my boys loved your other movies, the one with the—the, uh, plants—”
Julia looks at me like I’m insane. She had been to plenty of movies with me, she knows I would loathe the kind of movies Keith makes. But guess what, that first movie he wrote, the one that catapulted him to Hollywood, where he’d been steadily climbing ever since—the movie with the talking plants? The neglected houseplant and the discarded Christmas tree who go on a road trip together? That movie actually made me cry, I admit it, even though the boys hated it, and they made fun of me for crying. They called the movie stupid.
Stupid, huh? Well, guess what: even though my sons are both older than Girl Scout here, they wouldn’t be able to assemble a fucking computer if their lives depended on it.
Eventually I put enough words between myself and the blurted “fucking chlamydia” that maybe it’s forgotten. The kids are looking at me like I’m normal again. Am I? Fuck it, I pour myself another glass of wine. Julia flicks her gaze to Keith for a second but I notice it. Am I a drunk ex-boyfriend crashing a family dinner now? Is that who I am? No, I’m not! I’ll prove how I can hold it together. I’ll show them.
Should I ask Julia about the blue envelopes now?
How conceited is it for me to assume she held on to them?
The son asks, You and Mom met in school? Like in kindergarten?
Not quite kindergarten, kiddo! I deflect it classily, though, and I tell a sanitized story of how Julia and I met in college. By the end of it I sense I have Julia and Keith back on my side. The daughters aren’t idiots, though; they’ve figured it out, that this strange man was Mommy’s boyfriend once, that this piece of shit could’ve been their daddy. Keith gets activated for some reason, becomes even friendlier to me. He tells his kids the story of how I hadn’t laughed at Julia when her heel broke and she fell in the snow. Well, that’s a pretty tame story, and it makes me look good. The kids warm back up to me. This is a roller coaster…Wait, why had Julia told the broken-heel story to Keith?
There’s not enough time to wonder because now Keith is explaining to the kids what I do for a living, and how Julia used to work at the same company, selling the time and date you die. This interests the kids—so I’m one of those people. And that reminds me, I remember reading an interview with Keith online somewhere—fine, let me fully admit it, for a while I was absolutely cyberstalking Julia and by extension Keith, even though each internet session would end with computer nausea, and even vomiting from being online that long. But I couldn’t stop hate-reading everything about Keith, baffled by his semifame. Mercifully in the interviews Keith never said writer clich’s like “my characters have lives of their own, I just listen to them” or “I get my ideas from my dreams” (he said he didn’t recall his dreams), but in one interview he was asked about Julia’s time at Sapere Aude, and he said, “My job is similar to what my wife used to do at Dare to Know, I guess. Because every truly deep story puts death at the center, right? A story is a machine for reminding you that you’re going to die. We feel like we have infinite time, infinite resources. But we don’t. I’ll let you in on a trick. Here’s how to write any story and make the audience feel something. Take two characters. Make them care about each other. Then have time pass. It can’t help but end up sad.”
Garbage! Pretentious and childish. I hated Keith even more after reading that. “I’ll let you in on a trick”—fuck you. A story is a “machine,” a story is an algorithm—Christ, stay in your lane. It made me want to go back in time, to visit college-age me and Julia as we were watching one of the dumbass movies she would drag me to and whisper to my younger self that, guess what, you will lose Julia to a guy who creates crap like that.
But how different are you from him? Keith makes stories act like algorithms; you make your algorithms act like stories—I mean, your thanaton algorithm metaphor does take the form of fairy tales, right? And anyway, who’s laughing now, or crying actually, because Keith’s movies actually work for me, I cried at the Christmas tr
ee movie, so give Keith credit, that interview was obviously just Keith’s stream-of-consciousness way of talking, he wasn’t afraid of being a clown, Keith deserves this beautiful family, this beautiful house, he deserves Julia. He’s a better man than me.
What on earth am I thinking about?
I excuse myself and go to the bathroom.
Standing there, pissing, the world floating and spinning around me, a little bit of vomit rising up, I realize only now that I am truly trashed. Humiliating. Drunk dead man in the bathroom. I’ll bet you anything by the time I come back to the table, all three children will be safely packed off to bed, out of my toxic presence. I’ve disgraced myself. How bad was it? I’m looking at my face in the mirror. It might’ve been really bad. Dead eyes, dead mouth, dead face. You’ve been dead for more than a day, now. You’re giving off death rays. You make living people uneasy and they don’t know why. You think there’s still a chance of Julia showing you that blue envelope now? Good fucking luck. In my pocket I still have the cigarettes and the lottery ticket—what did I think I’d prove with those? Like Julia wanted to be reminded? Julia never looked back. She was never nostalgic. Well, you know what? Julia should look back, she should be nostalgic. Previous versions of Julia and me still inhabit their locations in space-time; they still love each other. Our past selves don’t know what they’ll become, but we should acknowledge those past selves, we should honor them, they still exist in a way.
Flush. Shut up.
When I come out of the bathroom it’s just Julia in the dining room. But she’s not putting away the dishes, or bustling about, or making herself busy, which would be an implied signal for me to leave. She’s just sitting at the table. She has her own glass of wine. The wreck of the dinner strewn around the table.
“Let’s go out on the deck,” she says.
Dare to Know Page 21