“Collie?” Leon wondered dazedly as they stood on a patio empty except for withered weeds, a rusty barbecue, a stack of leftover concrete patio squares in faded tangerine and aqua. Many were broken.
“It’s Cam Wilkes,” Rachel murmured.
“Who?”
Too late to explain. Anxiously they looked about them at pastel two-bedroom bungalows crowding in close at various angles. A moment later Cam Wilkes appeared behind the screen in profile, silvered, a trumpet to his lips. He played Embraceable You, segued into Sophisticated Lady, and seemed to go away.
Rachel whispered, “Leon, what are you doing here?”
“I freaked out in the 7-Eleven.”
And then the screen door slid briefly open, and Cam Wilkes’ arm emerged holding a tray containing two beer bottles in foam blankets followed by a cut-glass bowl filled with cheese curds.
What a poser, Rachel thought irritably, taking the tray. She washed down a cheese curd with a swallow of beer.
“Come on out, Cam,” she said testily, aware of Leon’s baffled eyes soft on the side of her face.
Wilkes declined. “Not after I lost my lawn.”
But of course she had seen him on that backhoe. “How did you lose your lawn, Cam?”
“Who can say? But I know one thing. This was no garbage bag. Clearly life in the Millpond is more unpredictable than even we suspected. And that means Dangerous, with a capital D. You folks drop by to join PAGO?”
“PAGO,” said Leon, like a man lost in a dream.
Handing out his aqua moiré calling card, Cam Wilkes gave Leon a pitch similar to the one he had given Rachel but with topical emphasis on the escalating danger of going out. He told Leon about PAGO’s recent efforts to incorporate the local chapter of Carrot-Top, the red-haired persons’ self-esteem raising group, which he described as the “touchiest, most volatile bunch of SOBs you’d ever want to meet,” and added, “With people like that loose, no wonder we’re afraid to go out.”
Leon kept nodding, mouth open, but his eyes, smarter, were giving Rachel is-this-guy-for-real looks. A soon as Rachel had finished her beer she made leaving motions to Leon, and he was very tractable.
“The only problem with having a friendship through a screen door,” Cam Wilkes joked sociably as she hurried Leon off the patio and around the side of the house to their cars, “is the conversation is strained!”
Leon reached home first because Rachel, the melody back full force, took a wrong turn. He was sitting on the chesterfield with a beer in his hand. There Rachel joined him, and he told her the story of how he had freaked out in the 7-Eleven that afternoon. He was paying for a three-litre Pepsi, reaching, he said, slightly forward across the counter to put the money directly into the girl’s hand, when suddenly he was seized by a vision of the Pepsi, himself, the girl, the cash register, the other girl busy making a Slurpee with her back turned, the sallow guy standing behind him with a cellopack of wieners and a bag of barbecue-flavoured corn chips, and the kid with the mauve mohawk by the magazine rack flipping through a Popular Mechanics, as all pawns in some pointless game or possibly unknowing components of one vast, pointless Mind. To Leon everything seemed at that moment drained of meaning, and he just wanted to go home and curl up in front of the TV. Abandoning his change and the Pepsi, he stumbled out to the Subaru. After driving for some time around the Millpond in a state of mental blindness, he found himself on Hillock Rise, a flat, curving street of bungalows. He pulled over to ask a kid with a bag of Wal-Mart fliers where Dell Drive was; the kid had no idea. It was then that he heard it. That melody, coming from a house with tinfoil in the windows and people staring into a crater in the lawn. The front door must have been open … He couldn’t actually remember. Leon was in a trance, a dream. He staggered in and flopped down on that bus seat, overwhelmed. The melody was so beautiful. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Tears flooded his cheeks and dried and flooded them again. Helplessness came over him. He felt as though a corner of the universe was being lifted to allow him a peek underneath … and then Rachel was grabbing at his arm.
Initially moved, Rachel now said, “Gee, you make me sound like a big nuisance.”
“You couldn’t help it. It’s just, there’s a difference between experiencing something like that on your own and as half a couple.”
“I’m your wife!”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?”
“You haven’t told me yet how you know this guy.”
Sullenly, with trepidation, Rachel described her encounter two weeks earlier with Cam Wilkes. When she finished, Leon did not say anything at first, and then he wondered quietly why she had not told him about this earlier. With lots of recrimination in her voice to compensate for any lameness, Rachel replied, “I didn’t think you’d be interested—” And throwing in a self-deprecating little laugh, she added, to avoid a total lie, “—the way I tell a story.” Refusing then to be daunted by thin lips on Leon, she stressed her doubts about Cam Wilkes’ sanity. She stopped talking when Leon held up his hand.
“Rachel,” he said in a voice of high seriousness. “There is something I think you should know.” He bowed his head a moment, then turned it to look her straight in the eyes, causing her heart to pound. “You’re aware,” began Leon, strangely formal, “that I have been writing down my dreams.”
“For a year.”
“And I take it you don’t know what’s been happening in them.”
“Because you refuse to tell me.”
“And you’ve never peeked into my dream diary? Not even once?”
“Leon, you keep it padlocked.”
“OK. What it all boils down to is this.” Leon rubbed his face hard with his free hand. “I keep dreaming about the same guy.
““Guy? Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Keep dreaming?”
“Once or twice a night.”
“For a year?”
“Possibly more. A year is as long as I have kept track.”
“And you have no idea who he is.”
“Right.”
“So what do you think it means?” “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Well, what do you—do with him in your dreams?” Here Leon picked a bit of fluff off the sofa and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m not ready to get into that right now.” “Why not!?” a little shrilly.
Leon gave her a sharp look. She took a breath, tried to be calm.
“Listen. Rachel. The important thing is this. All I know about him for sure is, he’s always accompanied by a tune, sort of a theme song—”
Rachel’s immediate thought was Love in Bloom when JackBenny used to stride back onstage after the show in that ascot and dressing gown. And then she cried, “You don’t mean—!”
“Uh-huh.”
“It couldn’t be!”
“Rachel, the shivers are qualitatively identical.”
Rachel thought about this for a moment. And then she said, “So what does this mean?”
“I have no idea. But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”
In Leon’s eyes was a look of focus and clarity that Rachel had been failing to see there for a long time. Even slouched beside her on the sofa his shoulders seemed to square a little.
Later, over Chinese food, Leon suddenly cried, “I’ve got it! I’ll join PAGO! It’s bound to be my quickest route to the heart of this thing. Besides, I really should get out more. A man has to be able to handle a 7-Eleven.”
——
In the Dream Centre, Alex Silver had pulled up a chair beside Rachel’s bed and was sitting in it rubbing the backs of his knees. He looked at his watch. “This is taking longer than I expected.”
Rachel’s eyes flew open. “You asked me and I’m telling you!”
“It’s fascinating. Really. So you were pretty surprised that Wilkes’ melody should have deep significance for both you and Leon, particularly when there was this dream guy involved.”
/> “Yes.”
“And what did you think?”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“How about feel?”
“Scared, baffled, one-upped.”
“I see. And you said nothing about any of these feelings to Leon.”
“Right.”
“So. We’ve finally got to what you’re here about, namely you and Leon’s dream guy.”
“Hal.”
“Hal? You never told me his name was Hal!”
“I didn’t want to confuse you. When he first had a name it was Hal.”
“OK. So. Better tell it as it happened. How did Wilkes and PAGO lead both Leon and you to Leon’s dream guy who was first known as Hal?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me what you’re going to do to me, so I can leave now if it’s too wacko?”
“You won’t want to do that. Tell it.”
——
The day after he first heard Cam Wilkes play the melody from his own dreams, Leon arranged to attend a PAGO meeting, two nights later.
Afterwards, he woke up Rachel and told her all about it while pacing the bedroom in a highly excited state.
The meeting had taken place in Cam Wilkes’ living room, which Leon described as looking like the inside of a badly keptbus after an accident: seats everywhere; bumpers and tires lying around amidst scattered snack-food litter; windows and fenders leaning against walls. Altogether, including Leon and Wilkes himself, there were a dozen people.
One, a short, broad-hipped woman with blue hair and a wanton smile, had to leave early. (“That was Della,” Wilkes confided in a whisper to Leon after seeing her to the door. “My former wife. She’s one of our Honorary Members.”) Among those who stayed were a tall man with a twitch who wore dark glasses and moccasin-style loafers, a middle-aged woman in dark glasses chewing gum and humming incessantly under her breath, an elderly woman asleep behind dark glasses, a nervous teenager with a hawk on his shoulder, a young woman in winged dark glasses that sat cockeyed on her thin face, a guy of fifty or so wearing a Walkman and nodding to the music, a querulous old man who gripped his cane like a club—
“I met him,” Rachel said. “He’s from the Village Cane Fighters.”
Leon reconsidered. There must have been more than a dozen.
Cam Wilkes, also in dark glasses, leaned against the back of a bus seat, dangling one leg and smoking in his strange, filter-palmed way. From there he chaired the meeting. After the minutes and the treasurer’s report, the old man with the cane was introduced as a new member and Leon as a special guest.
Then Wilkes got down to the agenda, seven items in all, involving matters such as how negotiations with Carrot-Top, the red-haired persons’ self-esteem raising group, were going (“violent and irrational”); the breakdown of talks with SMILE, theretro feminists (who objected to Wilkes’ sexist perception of Jane of Dick and Jane); the purchase of a sign to take full publicity advantage of the hole in Wilkes’ front lawn; and the feasibility of setting up a task force to study ways and means of applying for a government grant to provide each PAGO member with a cellular phone. Discussion concerning all business was protracted and at times bitter. Several people tried to introduce motions that would effectively ban smoking at meetings, but Wilkes, lighting up, ruled these out of order. After catcalls when he reported that the subcommittee on venues was still deliberating and therefore the next meeting would as usual be held at his place, everyone adjourned for coffee.
Leon made use of the break to get to know some PAGO members. “Actually they were OK people,” he reported. “Not people we’d have over for drinks—”
“We don’t have anybody over for drinks.”
Ignoring this, Leon went on to the “heart of the meeting”: members standing up and recounting traumatic agoraphobic experiences. Falling to pieces in bank lineups; running in terror down the median of a Millpond boulevard under an empty sky; and the bottom line: cowering in the front hall too frightened to go out.
“It was sad,” Leon commented. “You knew how they felt.” Everyone was extremely warm and supportive. Everyone knew how they felt.
Soon Wilkes had entertained a motion to adjourn, and Leon was driving home.”Why was everybody wearing dark glasses?” Rachel had to ask.
“I know, I felt so naked. Agoraphobics tend to wear dark glasses.”
“I never knew that.”
“I did.”
“No dream guy insights?” Rachel wondered.
“His name’s Hal,” Leon replied irritably. “Call him by his name. Hal.”
“Pardon? Hal?” She tried to catch Leon’s eye, but he had started hunting around in the closet for his dressing gown.
Here the phone on the bedside table rang. It was Rachel’s mother. She had read an item in the city paper about those exploding garbage bags and was calling to express her concern. “Why don’t you both come and stay with me, dear, until they get things under control out there? You can sleep in my room. I’ll be fine on the sofa.”
“Thanks, Mother, but I think we can stick it out.”
“Why don’t I take that cruise. You could have the place to yourselves, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about my plants.”
“It’s just a few garbage bags, Mother.”
“Yes, but they’re exploding. Of course, I suppose there’s your job at that insurance company—”
“Millpond Indemnity.”
“You’d have to commute—But that wouldn’t be a problem for Leon, would it. Or is he—”
“No, not yet. But any day now. He’s looking really hard.”
“I was thinking he could look here, and then—”
“Mother, we’ll move back to the city when we move back to the city.”
“So you say.”
“Mother? Don’t worry, OK? We’re fine. And I’ll call you soon—”
Rachel went down to the kitchen where Leon had gone to tuck meditatively into a bowl of Harvest Crunch. “So will you go back to PAGO?” she asked.
“I might.”
“Hey, Rachel,” he added as she remained standing on the other side of the table. “Let me hit you with a couple of Hal dreams. Give you the flavour of this thing.”
“You bet,” and Rachel lowered herself into a chair for Leon to tell her a dream about Hal open-air ice-fishing at Buckshot Hole, calmly continuing to fish even after the ice had gone out. As Leon detailed the dream—that miniature school principal Hal was using for bait, the short trek back across open water with the trout snapping at his heels, the chinook feel of the breezes—Rachel thought, he’s opening up. For the first time in a year he’s in focus, he’s on to something. So why do I feel so anxious?
When Leon finished recounting the Buckshot Hole dream, it was as if he found himself at the top of a long motel corridor, doors opening all the way down, a Hal dream behind each one. “Huh,” he said, in the tone of a man on the frontier of a few discoveries, and he set off to check out the rooms: Hal with unlitmoving cigar stub and green eyeshade dealing blackjack on the QE II; Hal and Leon flipping a rupee to see who will be the first to jump off of Mount Everest; Hal as Jet Rink in Giant, passed out in his consommé …
In her mind Rachel scrambled after. But Leon, a real dream and memory hound these days, kept going back and back until she knew that this was not so much time they were moving deeper into as a secret reach of her husband’s heart that for some reason he did not care anymore whether she knew about or not, and she got scared.
It didn’t stop there. Wired from his evening at PAGO, Leon must have gone on recounting Hal dreams at the kitchen table that night for two or three hours. In the weeks that followed they would flash unexpectedly into Rachel’s mind: Hal in flight, hair floating, for home plate; Hal’s Neat, eh? grin across the popcorn in the fizzy blue air of the Boseman rec room; Hal a hairy coot singing Heart of Gold in joual on a Paris streetcorner; or else G-grab hold, Leon! and here was Windsurfer Hal extending a brotherly hand to his foundering pal. Sometimes L
eon would start out describing just such a flash, and the whole dream would come back only gradually, as he talked. When it was all over, when he had told maybe three dozen dreams, Leon could only cluck, shake his head, and murmur, “What a guy, what a guy,” in an admiring, wistful voice.
“And still you don’t know who he is?” asked Rachel, weary and incredulous.
“Nope.”
“But the melody is always there?”
“Hal’s Theme, uh huh. In the background.”
To which Rachel, in a small voice, said, “Leon, why would you say you dream about this Hal so much?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“I mean, who is he?”
“Search me. Maybe I need a friend out here.”
——
“Reasonable enough hypothesis.” In the Dream Centre, Alex Silver had an ankle on his knee and was filing his nails. “What were your feelings?”
“Distress and panic.”
“Why?”
“Come on, Alex!” Rachel rose on an elbow. “What did it mean? Once or twice a night for a year? Who wouldn’t be distressed?”
“Yes, but don’t forget. You’d naturally overreact from all the repressing you were doing around the relationship. Also, look at Leon. Anxiety runs the projector. Worry about last night’s dream and you can bet it’ll be on again tonight, ‘significant’ or not. Damn things snowball.”
“But why was Leon worried?”
“Put our heads together, we could easily come up with a dozen reasons why Leon was worried, or why he’s not around today, and we still wouldn’t know a thing. Fortunately what matters here is why you were worried. Why should your husband’s dream life be such a big deal? In some ways the middleclass really is post-Calvinist, you know. People let others, even their spouses, dream anything they like, as long as it doesn’t show up in behaviour. Murmur the wrong name at the wrong moment and you could be in trouble. Otherwise, nobody worries too much, except, of course, the dreamer. That much hasn’t changed. But anyways. Who did you think Hal was?”
Rachel settled back and closed her eyes. “I’d rather not say.”
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