Dream Sequence

by Adam Foulds

  *

  He shouldn’t have come. This was too public. He was out of the protected precincts. At the top of a flight of stairs in a building by Borough Market, he’d found a group of strangers waiting, hanging up bags, changing into loose trousers, some of them stretching straightened legs or, seated, pulling on a foot. When he entered, he was observed with quiet curiosity. In a few faces, this thickened to recognition but no one said anything. They turned away again. Henry had nothing to fear. Lucy had already assured him that it would be fine for him, that he’d get what he needed. Lucy, his Ophelia, was young, barely out of drama school and hardly known. She would blend in entirely here. Henry observed a couple of art school–type kids sitting together. Tiny, with precise, ornate hair and wistful tattoos, they wore oversized black t-shirts. One was untying a shoelace. They were examples of the new exquisite, gender-fluid people who made Henry feel heftily male and crude. Henry had a quick look at his phone. No message from Lucy and no sign of her in the room. She’d said she might not make it. Henry concluded he was alone. Lucy had told him to go to the introductory talk beforehand and Henry looked around for who it might be who would give it. Maybe he should have had someone come to his place instead. It might have been an easier, better experience: some authentic Tibetan guy. Henry was steeling himself to ask someone about the talk when a shaven-headed man, barefoot, entered the room. He wore a black robe that swished, making a little rush of air. He said, “If there are any new people, would you like to follow me?” This man looked around, smiling, his bare head and neck turning turtle-like from side to side. Henry raised his hand. A short woman in black leggings and a long t-shirt stepped forward also. “Great. Good. Okay then. Come along this way.” The man spoke rapidly, forcefully. Henry fell in behind him as they went down a short corridor to an adjacent room. Whatever its usual purpose was—some kind of gym or dance studio?—it had now been arranged into a rectangle of rush mats and flat black cushions with a low wooden boundary at the near end. At the far end sat a Buddha on a small stand, a bell, an incense burner, a few flowers. By the door, meditation cushions were stacked ready for use.

  “Right. So here you collect a cushion and any of the smaller cushions you might need for support, under your knees maybe if you aren’t so flexible, and as you enter the space you bow like this.” The robed man demonstrated, palms together, bending at the waist with a straight back, as though hinged in the middle. “Or like this, if you’re holding a cushion, which you will be.” He repeated the action with only one hand held up. He was rapid and eager. If he had recognized Henry, he gave no sign of it. He led them into the meditation area and demonstrated how to sit with their hands in their laps, left hand over right, their thumb tips touching. He explained the correct angle of the head, that they should endure pain without moving until the bell rang, to allow any small discomfort simply to pass. Between rounds of meditation there would be walking, slow and conducted in a particular style. He pressed his hands down on the mat, swung his feet under him and was vertical to demonstrate. He sat back down. The point was, he explained, to relax and to focus. We are all of us in our everyday lives tired, distracted, busy. He did a physical impression of typing at a computer, hands wiggling under his chin, eyes half closed, mouth hanging open. “But here,” he brightened, straightened, “we sit up and breathe and focus.” Henry thought that the hook for an impression of this man was obvious, his rapid switching. When he was still, he crystallized. When he spoke or moved, he was completely active. He explained that they should stay focused on their breathing and allow their thoughts to pass. If they liked they could name them—planning, worrying, fantasizing—as a way of letting them go. “You can stay where you are, if you want,” he said. “Just turn and face the wall. I will go and get the others in to start the session.” Henry did as he was told. Outside the door, the man hit some kind of wooden block, a clean, bare sound, and Henry could hear the others coming in, could feel their steps on the floor. He thought he could feel the prickling of their attention on him, inspecting the vulnerable back of his head. Shapes in his peripheral vision were two people settling either side of him. No more bouncing of footsteps. The man in the robes seemed to be back, shifting about near the Buddha. He settled. There was a sharp whack of a small wooden block and then the mellow sound of a large bronze bell lingering away into silence. It had begun. They were meditating.

  Henry thought his posture probably looked very good. He was pretty ripped at the moment. Hamlet had kept him fitter than the gym with all the sword-fighting that needed re-rehearsing endlessly for health and safety. The choreography was still all there in his mind. He could get up and go into it now. His head was nobly erect, his shoulders wide and square, his legs neatly crossed beneath him, his hands serenely folded in his lap. Chap in robes could presumably see him and see what a natural he was. He did as he’d been told and attended to his breath, the narrow streams of air flowing in and out of his nostrils. A discomfort in his hips, a muscle on the right side gripping tighter and tighter, he resolved with a small adjustment in the angle of his spine. A few millimetres towards the right and the muscle let go; his weight dropped straight down through his buttocks into the floor. See, he was good at this. He had landed. That was the sensation he was after, to rest on the ground, earthed. How much time had passed? Probably only a few minutes. There were noises from the street outside, voices saying identifiable words. Were the other people ignoring them or could they tune them out completely, creating silence by concentrating? Not if the point was being present and aware. Surely then they’d hear the sounds more sharply than usual. He was thinking. What should he call this thought? Theorizing? Pondering? Back to the breath. A slight sensation of floating maybe caused by the stillness of his legs under him. He heard to his right someone’s stomach gurgling, a very vivid digestive sound. It stopped. The best part of Hamlet was, in a way, that drifting stillness at the end when he lay dead on the stage. First the big, thrashing movements of the sword fight, then speaking his last words, getting quiet and small and focusing the entire audience’s attention on his face, then dying in a cone of light from above. Bit more business. Horatio’s speech. Final words. Silence. The clattering outbreak of applause like a rainstorm, the relief. He was missing that already and it had only been a few days. At the end of a job you thought you wanted freedom from the demanding hours and the way your life has been frozen in place for months but then immediately your days collapse into shapelessness. Henry noticed his posture was wilting. He straightened again. Control and order. Going on every night, firing out line after line, beat after beat, the same blocking, the same gestures pretty much. He knew by heart Hamlet’s future at every moment and every word that had preceded. Such a contained feeling. Before and after were either side of him as he acted in the present moment, luminously detailed like a butterfly’s wings. All that formation was now dissolved, the cast scattered. You could feel it happening in the final show party, the hugs and professions of love intensified by the knowledge that they were moving apart. It set in earlier, of course. A week or two before the end, news of jobs a few people had lined up would arrive. Envy and fear then fractured through the group; the brief shared culture—the habits and in-jokes, the affairs and the arguments—all coming to an end. Philip Townsend, a shameless, scene-stealing Polonius, had remained as expertly detached as ever, clear in his air of bitter amusement. Henry couldn’t manage detachment or calm. Why else was he here, sitting on a cushion with these oddballs, staring at a wall and pretending to relax? He knew the answer. Everything was fine. Everything was going very well, in fact, but there was a shaking, a rattle in the engine, something small he couldn’t identify, a persistent, anxiety-inducing tremor. One day, so the feeling went, it might just tear the whole fuselage open. Philip, the other side of a twelve-step program, devoted to his garden and the most astringent gossip, was calm. Henry was not and he wanted to be. Big things might be coming. He was being seen for something that would mean levelling up, a big ro
le in the Marvel universe that would mean ridiculous money, personal assistant money, multiple homes money. He’d be everywhere, truly global, and he’d be gone, airlifted away. He wanted it badly, and he wanted it to happen before The Beauty Part hit the festival circuit and found distribution for its release. That was certainly part of the tremor, the feeling of dread it induced. He’d never felt right in the part. In the rushes, Henry had seen a mess, just destroyingly bad stuff, and he was now pretty sure that he was responsible for the first ever bad Miguel García movie. His American accent wasn’t even up to it. He’d used a de-energized, throaty drawl to pass, a croaked whisper half the time, and had come out sounding like Hugh Laurie in House. Please God they find a decent performance to put together in editing. If not, he knew what would happen: the timer would start ticking down, the offers would dry up. He blamed his own inadequacies, obviously, but he blamed García, too. García might be a genius, but it wasn’t obvious in what he said to actors. He hardly directed at all. It was like being back in the TV show, hitting your mark and spouting off. Henry and Sofie had worked out what to do for themselves while García, fat and unlikeable, sat low in his seat watching the screen and discussing things with his DOP. And the hunger, he’d almost forgotten the hunger through it all, how it made everything dim and grey, objects farther apart, how his concentration would suddenly break and the character would be gone from his body.

  Henry felt an itch on his cheek, by his nose. He stopped himself reaching up to scratch. The itch intensified, fizzing, developing sharp edges that bit into his face. Henry breathed and waited and indeed it did begin to blur and fade. He didn’t need to come here to find this out; it had happened a couple of times lying dead on the slope of the Barbican stage, following a drop of sweat rolling out of his hair. Shame Lucy wasn’t here. When she’d recommended this place at the party he’d been in a coked-up rush of sincerity and exhilarated problem-solving. He could see her face now, the dark brows knitting, the uncertain eyes, saying, “I don’t know. It works for me. It makes me just like calmer.” She had made a downward gesture with an outspread hand in front of her body, to convey a settling of energy. She closed her eyes, becoming still and simple, and Henry loved her in that moment, was hollow with misery that the play was finally over and he was about to lose her, her tiny shoulders, her fierce frailty. And now here he was, doing as she’d said. Also, if you don’t follow up on these brilliant ideas you have when high, they linger as a humiliation, a memory to wince at, and it comes to seem a stupid mistake ever to take yourself seriously. It had been a good party: the right amount of chaos and affection, though there’d been no sex. He wasn’t sure why, he knew everyone too well maybe, or maybe Virginia. The image of Virginia, smiling and growing closer and caring for him, had been somewhere in his thoughts of meditation, exercise, perfect health and productivity. For a while now Henry had been thinking that they should try and be in the same city, and have a more regular life. How long had it been? More than a year of these occasional sprees together, without any commitment, keeping it light, keeping the party spirit going. Everything had been on hold for months because of the play, his life circling in one place. The day after the party, he had been disciplined about starting at things again, straightening out his flat, going for a run, putting in an Ocado order, writing emails, getting ready for the world. He wanted Virginia in it with him.

  Straightening again. He hadn’t noticed his posture going. The wall was drifting in front of him. He focused on a fleck in the paint, trying to get a grip and keep it still. It kept sliding then flicking back into place. He let it go again. How long was this going to go on for? Surely the walking was going to start soon. He should concentrate again on his breath but giving himself the instruction made him feel suddenly tired and sad. That was it: he was tired. With the realization, he felt the weight of his body on the ground, going nowhere. He wanted to close his eyes, to fall backwards onto the floor and sleep.

  He would just have to wait until this was over. Henry sat still in the tank of his exhaustion. He had an interesting sensation of something draining from his head, a slow cold pouring. He sniffed, widened his eyes. While he was wondering if that sniff had been too loud, the bell was struck. Somehow, after all the waiting, the sound was unexpected, shockingly loud. Henry’s heart raced. Everyone made the prayer gesture, palm to palm, bending forwards towards the wall, and stood up to walk. Henry did the same, uncrossing his legs and climbing up out of the discomfort he’d been ignoring. He felt it all now, a sour ache in his left knee, a numbness in the side of his left foot that start to tingle. He clasped his hands together as he’d been shown, his elbows jutting out at chest height. Another bell and the walking began. Henry thrust his right foot forward half a step and waited. The group moved so slowly that on his recovering legs Henry felt himself almost lose his balance. Thinking about walking, breaking it down into tiny mechanical components, was a hard way to walk. It didn’t make much sense to Henry. The head in front of him belonged to a man. Smooth brown hair with two curved strands at the crown springing up into the air. Jutting ears. The chain of a necklace above his collar, the clasp off-centre, almost on his shoulder. Henry tried not to look. He remembered his nostrils and breathed. He slid his left foot forward along the mat. Virginia could move in with him, if she wanted, or they could get a new place together. It was time for a new place. He saw Virginia in a pleasing, indistinct interior, smiling, sprawling on a sofa, eating mouthfuls of salad leaves pinched together in her long fingers, walking through the place in her underwear. A real life. The end of loneliness. Why weren’t they doing this? No more keeping it light, asking nothing. They could rescue each other. He saw them as children walking towards each other through the wreckage of success, miraculously unscathed. Some of the things she told him about her life. She’d told him about a friend of hers who had ended up on a yacht somewhere in the Adriatic or maybe even the Black Sea, a party of five or six, and things getting out of hand, usual scene but with a gun appearing and disappearing, too. And this was a businessman, an oligarch type, getting angry with anyone in his line of vision, not some sweet kid rapper messing around, swaggering around and shooting up into the night. An argument went on. Then this girl heard the engine start and someone said the phrase “international waters” and she freaked. Quietly she walked away from the group and climbed off the side of the boat. She swam for like half an hour back to the lights of the harbour. She heard shots fired, possibly—she didn’t know—towards her. Then it’s two in the morning and a model in a swimming costume and soaked shirt is walking barefoot through this town trying to find the cheap hotel she was staying in. She made it back, her feet a little cut up, showered and packed and went to the railway station immediately, waiting for dawn to head anywhere out of there on the first train. Virginia offered this as a funny story. Henry remembered her face after she’d told him. They’d been in a Japanese restaurant; with her chopsticks Virginia tweezered small amounts of translucent seaweed or black-eyed shrimps out of the lacquered compartments of a bento box as she told him. Half smiling, she waited for his reaction and Henry had the feeling she needed him to find it funny, to confirm that it was amusing, rather than miserable and awful. Henry had reached the end of the mat and now had to turn ninety degrees to the right. With which foot, inside or outside? How was this difficult? He shuffled around in a few small movements and stepped forwards again. He and Virginia had given each other permission to do whatever they wanted, to go where their chances took them, to whoever. Only now, in this room, he realized what they hadn’t permitted each other, the right to care. Out of nowhere, Henry felt his arms grabbed, his elbows pulled up so that they were horizontal again. It was the robed instructor. He walked away again as though nothing had happened. Henry kept shunting his feet forwards and tried to overcome his annoyance at being singled out this way. He doubted his elbows had been drooping that much. He couldn’t see where the instructor was now or whether anyone else was getting this treatment. Shocking, unf
air, like being sucker-punched, but like a good pupil Henry brought his focus back to the breath in his nostrils. The bright, sharp chime of the bell: again it seemed to arrive too soon or too late, out of nowhere. They returned to their places, bowed again, sat. Henry gathered his legs into the sitting posture, reassembling the discomfort exactly as it had been before. Again the bell was rung, a softer splash of sound this time that smoothed away into the air. They were meditating again. This was taking a long time. Henry saw the emptiness of the next half-hour ahead of him. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. He named the thought. Boredom. He breathed in through his nose and out again. Nose, he though. Boredom. Waiting.

  Bowing as he stepped over the wooden barrier to leave, stacking his cushion with the others, Henry thought that he hadn’t achieved one moment of serenity or not thinking or whatever it was you were supposed to get out of this. Not a moment. At least, walking stiffly out, he felt a tiredness that might produce a good night’s sleep. He glanced at others in the outer room, tying their shoes and swinging on their jackets. They all seemed satisfied, relieved in some way. Henry was about to walk down the stairs and slip out into his solitude when a voice said, “Excuse me. Hey.” Here it comes, Henry thought: the reason he shouldn’t have come. He turned to see one of the art school types he’d clocked earlier, a small man with pale skin and seventeenth-century facial hair, a short, pointed beard and horizontal moustache. “Yes?” Henry said. “What is it?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Sorry to bother you. It’s just, Lucy texted and said you might come along. I just wondered if everything was okay for you?”

  *

  Another day. So much time to fill in this tiring city. Kristin decided to visit the theatre where The Runaways would be so that tomorrow she would know where she was going. She had already been to the Houses of Parliament that morning. She had taken photos of the intricate brown façade and the tall familiar British character that was Big Ben and his clock face. She had crossed Westminster Bridge—the water below flowing down towards Henry—to get a shot of the whole building over the Thames.