As they passed me I peered into the cabs and was surprised to discover no one was driving them.
On a break at my office the next day, I called the department of public works and asked if there had been street cleaners at work during the night, and I was told there had been. But when I asked if the machines had possibly been operating without drivers, I was promptly cut off.
The only other unusual thing was that it was early December, and bitter cold outside, and I recall being quite comfortable without a coat, and the sidewalk warm beneath my bare feet. Otherwise, the dream was entirely plausible, and I am still not certain it didn’t happen as I remember it.
Lucid
Our dinner guest, a self-taught expert on so-called “lucid dreaming,” which refers to those dreams so sensually detailed that they are indistinguishable from reality, and which, at least in our friend’s case, can be created and controlled at the whim of the dreamer, arrived with an ashen face and his right arm in a cast. During the meal, we asked him what had happened, and he told us, his eyes tired and voice heavy, that he had quit the dream-experimentation for which he had become so well known.
When we pressed on with our inquiries, our guest recounted his story. He had dreamt that he was in line at the post office, waiting to mail an elephant-shaped package wrapped in brown paper. As he waited, a circus clown came dancing in
the door, followed by a monkey wearing a fez and carrying a concertina. The clown distributed balloons to all the postal clerks, and then the monkey played the concertina while the clown sung an unintelligible song.
Lucid dreamers, our guest interrupted himself to tell us, have a standard “reality test,” which they use to assure themselves that they are dreaming: the dreamer passes his hand through a solid surface, and this impossibility confirms the dream-state. When he reached the counter, our guest administered his reality test, plunging his own hand into the hard countertop. The impact broke two of his fingers. As it happened, he had not been dreaming; in fact, he was mailing a stuffed toy elephant to his niece, and it so happened that one of the postal clerks had that very day turned forty, and the others had hired the clown and monkey to perform a birthday song in German, a language, they explained to our pain-racked friend, often used by the clerk for comic effect.
The incident had convinced our guest to give up his beloved pastime. However, his lucid dreaming has persisted. Only the control he once exerted over the dreams has been lost. Consequently, he has no means to escape what have become terrifyingly realistic nightmares, and his sleep has been profoundly unrestful.
When another guest asked him why he wasn’t certain that the entire experience of his disenchantment with lucid dreaming was not itself a dream, a wild look came into his eyes, and he thrust his bandaged hand into the dining table. The remainder of the evening was spent in the emergency room.
Virgins
The brief hysteria that overcame our town last year began when an elderly churchgoer, emerging from a morning mass, noticed that the colorful knitted scarf draped around the neck of a passing homeless man seemed to bear, in its variegated threads, the image of the Virgin Mary, and that, furthermore, the Virgin’s two crudely stitched eyes appeared to be secreting tears. The homeless man was quickly surrounded by amazed parishioners, and interrogated about the origin of the scarf.
It seemed that the man had been given the scarf by its creator, a plump, middle-aged woman, during the weeks before Christmas, though she had not told him her name. A search was promptly mounted for the mystery knitter.
But before she could be found, new Virgin sightings were reported: a weeping face chiseled into the weathered serpentine of a campus building; a sad, wizened countenance growing among the knots and twists of an old sycamore, its eyes dripping sap; a sobbing icon revealed in the whorls of ice that covered the lake. Indeed, Virgins seemed to be popping up everywhere, to such an extent that, according to rumor, representatives from the Vatican were on their way to confirm the miracles.
Before they could arrive, however, the scarf-knitter appeared and insisted that she had woven no Virgin Marys into the scarves she distributed to the region’s homeless over the holidays. The tears, she reasonably theorized, could easily have been melting beads of snow or ice. And as for the other sightings, she suggested, you could find Virgins anywhere, if you looked hard enough.
This seemed a cynical position to many, until a competing gallery of Jesus Christs was discovered and documented, and then a series of Moseses, and finally a suite of Donald Ducks. For some time now, townspeople have been reluctant to take anything at other than face value.
Twins
In college I knew a young man and woman, twin brother and sister, remarkable for their affinity: they were both slight, blond-haired and handsome; spoke with the same emphatic rhythm; walked with the same confident, long-legged stride; and liked the same music, food, art and film. They finished one another’s sentences and were adept at games of pantomime, during which it sometimes seemed each could read the other’s mind. The two were inseparable, and could occasionally be persuaded to tell the story of how their birth parents were killed in an auto accident, and how they came to be adopted by the dean of our college and his wife. They had been a campus fixture since their infancy, and were well known and loved by students, faculty and staff alike.
When they were about to graduate, the twins were gravely injured in their own auto accident. Though they survived, it was discovered in the hospital that not only were they not twins; they were not even related. Repeated blood tests confirmed this fact, and the story briefly became a national news item of the “strange but true” variety. After a few years, however, the story vanished, as did the twins.
Many years later I learned, from a mutual acquaintance, that the twins had married. They invited most of their closest friends to the wedding, but few came, or even responded to the invitation. According to my acquaintance, who did attend, the dean and his wife were not there either.
Though my acquaintance saw nothing morally wrong with the twins’ union, she reported that their first dance together after exchanging vows was a shocking sight, and one she would never forget. The twins danced face to face, holding each other with passionate intensity, the line between them like a mirror that reflected everything but their gender. No one joined them on the floor, for that dance or any other.
The twins send out a family newsletter every year, complete with photographs and news. They have adopted a number of children of various races and nationalities, but have had none of their own. There is no consensus among their former friends about whether this is due to some fertility problem, or if it represents a final taboo that not even the twins themselves dared break.
Indirect Path
For many years a large table stood in the center of our dining room, blocking the most direct path from the living room to the kitchen and necessitating the development of an angled walking route that, over time, came to be visible as an area of wear in the dining-room rug. Recently we discarded the old rug and, since our children have grown and moved away and we now eat our meals in the kitchen, transferred our large table into storage. The dining room has been turned into a study, with bookshelves lining the walls and a narrow desk facing the front window.
Despite these changes, we find it nearly impossible to take the newly created direct path through the room, and continue to walk around the edge as if the table were still there. When occasionally one of us must enter the forbidden space, either to sweep the floor or to pick up a dropped item, we find that we wince in discomfort, as if anticipating a painful crash into the missing table.
The Bottle
Last summer, a bronze sculpture was stolen from the Square, a pedestrian mall at the center of our town. The sculpture, a full-scale rendition of a mother nursing her baby, had been bolted to a wooden bench that stands beneath a dogwood tree, and for some time had served as a lunch-hour companion to downtown office workers, a plaything for children and a symbol of our
town’s perception of itself as an open, nurturing community. At least once a year the sculpture appeared in the local newspaper half-buried under snow, or covered with fall leaves, or basking in the dappled sunlight of spring.
Though it was quickly established that the theft had occurred between the hours of two and four on a weekday, no one reported having witnessed the crime, and the investigation quickly fizzled out. How the thief managed to remove the sculpture in broad daylight, when the Square was filled with people, remained a mystery to police.
A year passed, during which most townspeople grew accustomed to the sculpture’s absence, and many forgot about it entirely. Then, one recent morning, the sculpture reappeared. Police told the newspaper that they had narrowed the time of its reappearance to somewhere between nine and eleven, again when the Square was filled with pedestrians; and again no one claimed to have seen the thief. But no one could mistake the change that had been made to the sculpture: the baby, once chastely giving suck to the mother’s breast beneath a fold of her blouse, was now quite clearly portrayed as drinking its milk from a bottle.
Police interrogated everyone in the area who had access to a bronze-casting facility, but none would admit to having altered the sculpture or could offer any suggestion about who else might have done it. Several of the artists questioned did admit that they admired the chutzpah of the thief, despite their disapproval of his stunt. The mayor’s office quickly issued a statement supporting breast-feeding in general, and local mothers’ right to perform it in public. The original artist, now dead, has been honored with a commemorative postcard. And the police have declared that anyone with information about the crime should contact them immediately. Soon, however, the incident will be largely forgotten, and few will remember that the sculpture was ever different.
The Hydrangea
We took many photos on our summer trip to a popular vacation spot, and when we returned, we brought the film to a processor to have it developed. At home, looking over the photos, we realized that they belonged to someone else: a plump couple in their thirties with two small children. They too had gone on vacation, and could be seen engaging in various recreational activities, gamely smiling at the camera.
As we were putting the photos back in their envelope to return them to the processor, we noticed something familiar in one of them: a curving stretch of beach that ended in a distinctive craggy overhang. On closer examination, we realized that the photos had been taken in the same oceanside tourist town we had ourselves visited.
We wondered if the chubby family had been there at the same time we had. Excited, we scanned the photos for evidence. One was of a large white coastal hotel that we recognized as the very one we had stayed in.
My wife reminded me that our balcony, which faced the beach, was for some reason the only one with a potted hydrangea sitting on it. The plant had obviously been forgotten by the staff, and we watered it daily to keep it alive. This hydrangea, with its large white blossoms, was easy to find in the photo, and to our astonishment, a thin, tall man wearing white socks and a red shirt could be seen pouring water into the plant from an ice bucket. It seemed certain that the man was me.
We returned the photos as planned, but kept this one for ourselves. When we were given our own photos, we searched them for the now-familiar other family, but they were nowhere to be found.
A Dream Explained
As a child, and until I was a young man, I was plagued by minor infections and common colds that sometimes persisted for weeks and, especially during the winter, seemed to follow on each other’s heels with almost no healthy days in between. Occasionally a fever would accompany one of these illnesses, and if the fever lasted into the night I would invariably have the same dream.
In it, I was standing alone on an undulating desert or beach. The sand below me was brightly illuminated, but the sky itself was utterly black, with no apparent source of light. I bent down and picked up a single grain of sand, and as I examined it, it fell from my grasp. When the grain hit the ground, every grain of sand was instantly transformed into an enormous boulder several times my size. I realized then that it was my job to find the grain of sand I had dropped, a task made all the more difficult now that the scale had changed, and as the dream ended I began the arduous climb over the endless field of gray boulders.
I seem to remember a hill as well, but my suspicion is that the myth of Sisyphus, which features a hill and a boulder, has tainted my memory of the dream.
A possible explanation of the dream is a trip I took with my boy scout troop when I was very young. We were to go to a place called Ringing Rocks, and were each instructed to bring along a hammer. Ringing Rocks proved to be a field of boulders, much like the one in my dream, except encircled by trees. The boulders were supposed to contain an unusually high percentage of some metallic ore, so that they rang when struck.
I remember being terribly disappointed. I’d expected the rocks to peal more sharply than they did, and I was not convinced that they were any different from ordinary rocks; so far as I could tell, most of the ringing was coming from the metal heads of the hammers.
The image I most powerfully recall is that of my fellow scouts, fanned out across the boulder field in their green uniforms, monotonously pounding, and the dull sound they made, like prisoners in a quarry with their pickaxes.
3. Lies and Blame
A tree that grows on the property line between our land and our neighbors’ land for years served as a playground for the children of both families, and was happily considered a shared asset, to be maintained and enjoyed by all. But recently the tree was uprooted during a storm, and crushed a passing car. The resulting lawsuit has led to a property dispute, a flood of certified letters and the complete dissolution of our friendship.
The Manuscript
A local poet of considerable national fame completed a new collection of poems that had, due to a painful and scandalous series of personal problems, been delayed in editing and publication for some years. When the revisions were finally finished, the poet typed up a clean copy of the manuscript and got into his car to bring it to the copy shop for reproduction.
On the way, however, the poet was pulled over for running a red light and was subsequently found to be drunk. Due to a new and unforgiving drunk-driving law in our state, his car was taken from his possession and his license revoked.
Upon regaining sobriety, the poet realized that his poetry manuscript was still in the car and asked the police to return it to him. The police, however, maintained that the contents of the car no longer belonged to him, and refused. Their refusal resulted in a protracted legal battle, during which our beloved poet died, leaving uncertain the fate of the manuscript.
But the poet’s publisher, eager to issue a posthumous volume, struck a bargain with the police department: if someone at the station would read the finished poems over the phone, an editor could transcribe them and issue them in book form without the manuscript changing hands. After all, the publisher argued, even if the manuscript legally belonged to the city, its contents did not, as they were devised outside the poet’s car. The police agreed to this scheme, the phone recitation took place and the book was issued to great acclaim, assuring the poet a place in the literary canon that he had not enjoyed in life.
Eventually, however, the poet’s estate won its legal battle against the city, and the original manuscript was recovered. We were shocked to learn that it bore little resemblance to the published book.
It was not long before a city policeman confessed to having improvised much of the manuscript during its telephone transcription. His only explanation was that he saw room for improvement and could not resist making a few changes here and there. Almost immediately the policeman was asked to leave the force, and the acclaimed book was completely discredited. The true manuscript was published in its entirety, to tepid reviews.
The policeman has continued to write poetry. Most agree that it is excellent, but few will publish the wor
k of someone known to be so dishonest.
The Belt Sander
With our mail came a thick personal letter addressed to our neighbor. I might have acted immediately, dropping the letter into his mailbox while he was not at home. However, I had, some weeks before, lent him thirty dollars, which he had promised, and failed, to repay by the week’s end, and which I wanted back as soon as possible; so, intending to visit him in person to ask for the money, I held on to the letter.
But later that day I remembered a book our neighbor had lent me almost a year before, which I had not returned because I found it self-aggrandizing, opaque and in poor taste, and had not wanted to have to lie to him that I liked it, when in fact I had not been able to finish it.
This reminded me that our neighbor had borrowed my belt sander when he moved in five years before, and never returned it. But my having forgotten this fact called attention to my own reluctance to undertake household projects requiring the sander, and I was filled with self-disgust.
The following morning I tossed the letter and book into the fire and bought a new sander, ignoring the least expensive model in favor of the one costing exactly thirty dollars. Why this choice should make me feel morally superior to my neighbor is unclear; nonetheless that is the way I feel.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 4