Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll

  No luck. No divine lights rose up slowly behind them accompanied by a choir singing Handel’s “Messiah.” The stack of wildly different drawings did not vibrate or shape shift in Kaspar Benn’s hands. Nada. Nothing.

  “Well?” Vanessa widened her eyes questioningly.

  Kaspar could only shrug. He kept looking at the papers, still hoping something would happen.

  Dean didn’t notice their exchange because he was looking with interest at the elephant, the girl, the black chair, and then back at the child. “I know her.” He pointed. “We saw her on the roof the other day.”

  “That’s Josephine—she lives with me. She’s my daughter. Well, not really my daughter, but—” Edmonds was interrupted by Jane.

  “The daughter you were supposed to have but never did,” Jane said, more surprised than Bill as the words spilled from her mind and mouth.

  “And the chair was in the children’s book that saved you when you broke up with your girlfriend,” Edmonds answered her right back, just as stunned as Jane at what he said. He had no idea where the information had come from.

  “The elephant told you in a dream about the cancer when you were a kid, huh, Dean?” Kaspar said this next, despite never having seen nor heard anything about … Muba! The little girl had asked him earlier in the store why he didn’t remember that name!

  How could any of them know the intimate things they’d just said to one another almost simultaneously? Where had the knowledge come from? Why in a flash had they begun to see into the deepest recesses of each other’s minds, memories, and places where they kept their biggest secrets? It was as if they were now able to move in and out of each other’s heads.

  Whatever was happening to them was clearly out of their control. They were given glimpses, peeks under the curtain, flashes of understanding and insight into each other’s lives, histories, hearts, and secrets. It was jarring and riveting in its way but most of all unstoppable. As the five people stood there, the most intimate knowledge of each other’s lives entered each other’s minds in spits and spurts, fragments and odd-shaped pieces like shrapnel.

  The five of them reacted differently to the experience. Jane pressed the heels of both hands against her forehead as if suffering a migraine. Edmonds stared straight ahead, transfixed, as did Kaspar. Dean and Vanessa jerked their heads as if being poked from all sides by invisible fingers.

  Sitting in Blackwelder, Josephine clapped her hands and bounced up and down, much to the chair’s discomfort. It protested, “Stop that. Please, it hurts!”

  But the mechanic who had come to earth disguised as a little girl to help these five people didn’t stop bouncing because she was too excited. Finally it was happening—the joining had begun.

  SEVEN KLEEMS

  ONE

  He was distraught, alone, exhausted; it was early evening in a foreign city six thousand miles from home. Everything around him was dark and silent; it made the world in the room larger and more ominous. He was bleary eyed, blinking hard, and working to get his full sight back after a two-hour nap to drag his brain out from under the heavy tarpaulin of jet lag. He sat on the side of a spongy hotel bed in his underpants with a cell phone in his hand, trying through a thick head of just-woke-up/not-really-awake to figure out what time it was in the United States: six hours behind or ahead—noon or midnight? Was it all right to make the call now? He knew he must and whatever time it was over there didn’t matter. He was cold and only a moment ago realized he was shivering, but whether from cold or alarm he didn’t know. It was interesting to watch his free hand quiver on his bare knee. Although he held the phone in his other hand, he put it on top of the shaking one, but it did no good.

  Maybe he should pee. Stand up and go to the toilet, have a long satisfying piss, come back empty, and then make the call. He’d read somewhere a full bladder raises blood pressure. Right then he felt his blood pressure was probably high enough to lift the Hindenburg.

  When the phone in his hand vibrated and then a moment later rang he was so surprised he dropped it on the floor, his hand stiffening like it’d gotten an electrical shock. The small blue phone rang a second time, juddering on the wooden floor before he could retrieve it. His heart galloped inside his chest.

  “Hello?”

  “Kaspar, it’s Dean.”

  “Dean! I was just going to call you. Really, the phone was in my hand.”

  “I tried and tried before but first you were flying and then I couldn’t get through. Anyway, you had the dream too, right?”

  Kaspar straightened, swallowed, and answered carefully. “Yes, on the plane ride over here. I don’t know how long it lasted. I slept a few hours but who knows how long the dream was. It blew my mind!”

  There was rustling and background noise on the other end before Dean spoke again. “Everyone else is here. I’ve got you on speaker phone so we can all talk about it together.”

  Kaspar rubbed his mouth. “Why did this happen when I was on a fucking plane to Europe? Can someone explain that to me? I’m home all the rest of the year. Why did it happen now?”

  In a quieter voice Jane offered, “Maybe there’s a good reason for it. Maybe there’s something over there you’re supposed to find that’ll help us figure it out.”

  “Like what, a Wiener schnitzel?”

  In the background Bill Edmonds asked, “Where is he again?”

  Vanessa said, “Vienna. Vienna, Austria.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s buying loden for the store.”

  “What’s loden?”

  “Dean?”

  “Yeah, Kaspar?”

  “What does everybody else there think? What do you say about it?”

  “Everybody has a different opinion. Basically the only thing we agree on is we all shared the same dream last night. Or all of our dreams were stitched together into one big one that we shared. A lot of what’s happening in our real lives was in it, but a lot was also wrong or distorted or just plain crazy.”

  Vanessa said, “We brought ourselves and our brains to the dream and they all got mixed up together in it like they’d been thrown into a blender.…”

  “Jesus, it’s true then; it really did happen.”

  “Plus we figured out each one of us brought an important secret from our lives to the dream too: Vanessa and I brought the elephant; Edmonds his daughter, Josephine; Jane the chair—”

  “Wait a minute.” In the background Jane’s voice got louder. “There was nothing from you, Kaspar. All of us brought something very important from our lives into the dream, some sort of talisman, except you.”

  Vanessa said, “Wow, right.”

  “It’s true—he didn’t bring anything.”

  This talk rumbled back and forth until Dean said, “It’s a good point, Kaspar. Why do you think that is?”

  Kaspar closed his eyes and squeezed them tight. “Look, I’m sitting here completely goggle-headed in Vienna, Austria, having just shared a dream on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean with four people in Vermont. And you’re asking me why I didn’t bring anything to the dream? How am I supposed to know the answer? I’m lost here, kids, totally lost. Can someone there tell me what’s going on so I can keep my head from exploding?”

  A silence followed, long enough for Kaspar to regain his composure and speak without any more rancor in his voice. “All right, just tell me what else you discussed. How did you all find out you’d experienced it together?”

  “Vanessa woke up this morning in a tizzy and said I had to hear about her dream. Naturally when she described it I went bananas. I told her I had the same one, we flipped out together, and started comparing notes about it. Then Jane called and told us her dream.”

  Jane said, “I called them because Bill called me before. But listen to this, Kaspar—Bill didn’t know my phone number. He said I gave it to him in the dream.”

  “Your telephone number?”

  Edmonds said, “Yes. In my dream she wrote it down in my notebook. I remembered th
e number when I woke up because it’s an easy one—555-8778.”

  Jane said, “But my number is unlisted. There’s no way Bill could have gotten it unless I gave it to him.”

  Kaspar rubbed his eyes and blinked hard several times to clear them. “What happened next?”

  “We all came here to Dean’s house to talk about it. When he couldn’t reach you on the phone earlier, he told us to come back later and he’d try again.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing—we just told you what we know.”

  “But it’s not enough! We went to sleep last night and all of us shared the same dream—”

  Vanessa interrupted. “No, you’re wrong, Kaspar. It’s one of the things we discovered by talking: we were all together in the same dream, but none of us knew what was going on inside each other’s head. It’s like we were all in the same movie or play. But we didn’t know what was going to happen from moment to moment or what the other people would say.”

  “None of us expected a red elephant or a talking chair. They just appeared and we all saw them,” Jane added.

  “Or a men’s store that time travels back into a news store.”

  “A little girl who was never born. Oh yeah, and Keebler who was once a two-inch-high statue but came alive and grew,” Edmonds added.

  Phone pressed to his ear, Kaspar lowered his chin to his chest. “Is anyone there as confused as I am?”

  “We all are, Kaspar. None of us have the slightest idea of what’s going on or what it means.”

  Kaspar took his watch off the nightstand and looked at it. “What time is it there?”

  “Noon.”

  “What are we supposed to do? Does anyone know? Did the girl tell any of you what to do in the dream? She didn’t say anything to me except I had to get going. Then she burned my phone and called me Muba, which only now I know is the name of that red elephant with a map on its side. Not terribly helpful clues in unraveling this mystery.”

  The four people in Vermont looked at each other to see if there was anything to add, but there wasn’t. In Vienna, Kaspar rubbed the back of the phone nervously with his thumb and willed anyone on the other end of the line to say anything that could help.

  Dean said, “We have to figure this out. Let’s just start from there. What are we supposed to do? Why did we all share this dream and what are we supposed to do about it?”

  “Dean?”

  “Yes, Kaspar?”

  “I’ll have to call you back.”

  “What? We just started talking—”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  There was a click, a hiss, and the line went dead. Puzzled, Dean looked at the receiver in his hand. “He hung up.”

  “Maybe he had to go to the bathroom.”

  “Maybe.”

  * * *

  The reason why Kaspar Benn hung up so abruptly was a light went on in his toilet. Moments later someone walked out of there into the bedroom.

  Kaspar recognized the person instantly, but that did not make it any better. Under his breath he grumbled, “Shit!” but carefully, so as not to be heard.

  “Kaspar.”

  “Crebold. What are you doing here?”

  The other man smirked. Both of them knew damned well why he was there. “Kaspar. What kind of dopey name is that? Kaspar Benn.”

  “It’s German, so it’s just exotic enough–sounding for me to use it as an excuse for whatever mistakes I make here, and I make plenty of them, believe me.”

  “I’ve noticed. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  “No.” The visitor sat on the bed. Kaspar grudgingly extended a hand and they shook. “Well, here we are. Have you been enjoying yourself?”

  “I have.” But Kaspar’s voice did not sound like he was enjoying anything at the moment.

  “You’re a fool, Kaspar. You really screwed this up. The dream last night … oh brother, seriously dumb. How did you manage it?”

  “I didn’t do it—it just happened. Don’t blame it on me.” His voice was small, trying to be smaller.

  “What were you thinking, Kaspar? I mean, how stupid could you be?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I told you—”

  Kaspar’s voice was eager to agree. “Yes, you did. You absolutely did tell me.”

  “I told you not to come here like this, but you insisted.”

  “I was stubborn.”

  “No—you were stupid: profoundly, selfishly, blindly stupid.” Crebold slowly hit the mattress with a fist after every word, as if pounding a nail into wood.

  “All right—stupid. I get your point—I was stupid. I admit it.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “I am guilty of first-degree stupidity.”

  “Skip the sarcasm, Kaspar. You knew what you were doing. It’s part of the job description. We’re mechanics—or at least you were.

  “We know how things work; we fix them or adjust them and then move on. We don’t invent them and we sure as hell don’t alter them. I can’t believe what an idiot you are.” Crebold’s hands were very animated and expressive as he spoke. They danced along with his words; they pointed and sailed and made fists when the phrases called for it. They conducted the music coming out of his mouth.

  “I just thought—” Kaspar’s voice was one stop away from a moan.

  “You’re going to try and justify what happened? Don’t—you fucked up—the end, okay? Sharing last night’s dream with those other people was exhibit A of what happens when you go against policy. It’s a catastrophe anyone could see coming ten miles away. Especially you—a mechanic!”

  Kaspar sat still and stared unseeing into the darkness. “I’m not a mechanic anymore—I’m retired, remember? And I didn’t do anything! I didn’t make them share the dream. The memory—I really believed I could handle it. I thought I could have both.”

  “You were wrong on both counts, friend. Now we’ve got a major toxic spill here that needs to be cleaned up ASAP.”

  Kaspar’s phone rang again. He flung it away. It hit a wall, caromed off, and bounced several times on the wooden floor where it continued to ring. Temper flaring, he stood up, intending to crush the thing with his bare foot.

  Crebold reached over and grabbed his arm. “Leave it.”

  Kaspar puffed his lips in frustration. “Shit.”

  The waiter didn’t like twins. He’d never liked them, even though he’d never known any personally. Like Afghan dogs, vegans, and Christian Scientists, all he knew about them was what he read and saw, but it was enough.

  Twins dressed the same, wore the same haircuts, and married exactly the same sort of people. Even when separated at birth and moved a thousand miles apart, twins somehow weirdly managed to mirror each other right down to their politics, professions, sports teams they rooted for, religions they joined, and the number of kids they had. It was a fact. Weird, weird, and weird. The waiter had recently seen a documentary on TV about twins that reinforced everything he believed: Twins = freaks = stay away from me.

  And now first thing on a Monday morning there were a pair of almost identical-looking twins sitting at one of his tables! The only good thing about it was they were dressed differently so it was not difficult telling them apart. In fact they were night and day different. One looked sharp in tip-to-toe expensive everything—the man clearly put serious money, thought, and care into what he wore. In contrast, his brother was dressed in dull and duller. He looked like an East German Trabant salesman in 1967: a cheap-looking, ill-fitting blue suit, thin black tie with a too small knot, and a white shirt with an oversized collar fifteen years out of fashion. The waiter noticed all these details because off duty, he was one spiffy dresser himself and had the ladies to prove it.

  “Gentlemen, what can I get you?”

  The dull-looking twin ordered—get this—a glass of tomato juice with a poached egg inside it. The waiter paused while writing this down to look over the top of his eyeglasses at the man
to make sure he’d heard correctly. The guy didn’t even have the courtesy to look back. He just continued speaking to his brother. He was not only a twin, but rude too.

  Making eye contact with the waiter, the well-dressed one asked for a cappuccino and smiled.

  “That’ll be one cappuccino and one tomato juice with a poached egg in it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  When the waiter was gone, Kaspar asked his “brother” Crebold, “Why are you doing this? It’s not necessary.”

  “Our waiter doesn’t like twins; he thinks we’re weird. So I’m going to prove he’s right.”

  “Don’t be a jerk, Crebold. Just let the man do his job.”

  “Oh, like you did yours, huh?” Crebold leaned forward and put both elbows on the table. He rested his chin on his hands. “Kaspar, I do not want to be here. I seriously don’t. You have no idea how many other things I would rather be doing than sitting in a smelly, smoky Viennese café with you, figuring out how to clean up the mess you’ve made on Earth. Remember the time you went skiing?”

  Kaspar frowned. “I loathe skiing.”

  Crebold pointed an index finger at him like a gun. “Exactly—and I feel the same kind of loathing being here. But I must be here because of you. So let’s work together to fix this as quickly as possible so I can leave and you can go back to selling shirts.”

  “You say it with such disdain.”

  Crebold leered. He’d obviously been anticipating this exchange. “Do you really like selling clothes? Is it satisfying measuring men’s asses with a tape measure so their new trousers fit correctly? Is the customer always right?”

  Kaspar started to answer, hesitated, and chose to go in another direction. “Where are you going when you retire, Crebold?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll let them decide. But when they do, I will be blissfully unaware of their decision. Even if I end up measuring men’s asses too, I won’t remember where I came from. Unlike you, I will not ask to keep my memory.”