All I Ever Dreamed

by Michael Blumlein

  Later on, back home, when I held the skull in my hands and examined its shape and form, I had other questions, but these I was better able to answer. Why? Because I’m a bone man; I have a love of bones. The tiny brain cavity; the huge eye sockets, each nearly as big as the brain itself; the grooves for nerves and arteries; the sinus cavities to make the skull lighter; the skinny jaw, too thin to support any but the smallest, most compact muscles, just enough muscle to generate the force for the cormorant to open and close its beak, not near enough for it to chew. Which was a good thing, seeing as it had no teeth, at which point I recalled having seen an arctic loon swallow a herring whole that very morning, and then I remembered that cormorants were used by fishermen to catch fish, which wouldn’t work very well if they chewed them first, so that was another good thing about the absent teeth. I really liked studying the skull and figuring out how it all held together and how everything worked. It seemed so beautiful and economical and perfect to me, which made up for the slightly spooky feeling I had of holding what used to be a living thing in my hands, and not just any part of this living thing, but the head, the thinking part, the conscious part, the part where I located, for no particular reason and only if there were such a thing, the cormorant’s spirit. I wanted to be at peace with that spirit. I would like to be at peace with all spirits, not just the cormorant’s but the spirit of the bird whose nest I’d robbed, and ants I’d killed either deliberately or inadvertently, and people I’d wished bad things about or for. I thought of saying a prayer for peace. I didn’t then, but I’ll say it now.

  I love you, cormorant. You’re beautiful to me. I love your big eyes, they remind me of the saucer eyes of young children. Please don’t hurt me. Either in my dreams or when I’m awake. Don’t come alive and bite me or peck me or nip me. Don’t take revenge. I mean no disrespect to you. If it’s any consolation, I have other skulls. Will it help if I promise to will my own skull, when I die that is, to science?

  First a riddle, then an anatomy lesson, then a prayer . . . the skull of the cormorant was like a mantra to me, it was like a match, a tiny flame that led to a hot and welcome blaze. Compared to it, the fist-sized, damp and dirty-colored nest of sticks and leaves and duff seemed dull. Which is why I didn’t see the ants. Or the baby sow bug or the tiny leaf eater. Or, for that matter, the third ant, who was on the opposite side of the nest and seemed oddly disinterested in the other two.

  The pair of ants seemed linked somehow, buddies or something. Chums. Homeboys or maybe homegirls. When I first noticed them, they were scrabbling around kind of aimlessly, then one of them took off with a purpose, like a scout or something, while the other one stayed behind. The scout ant didn’t go very far, or stay away very long, and when it came back, the two of them faced each other, not head to head like dogs but full on, body to body, front to front, claw to claw. Imagine two people touching not just hands but feet, palm to palm and sole to sole. Or doing the same thing but on yourself in a full-length mirror. It was like that, and I felt a little like a peeping-tom, like I was spying on something I shouldn’t be, something personal. I thought of lovers rubbing up against each other, and I also thought of best friends giving each other skin, high and low fiving. I’m guessing that the ants were talking, passing information back and forth, and I expected the one who’d stayed behind to take off once it got whatever news the scout ant brought. Which was another mistaken assumption. Just because the homebody ant got information didn’t mean that it would do something about it. Like you say something to someone, a kid or your wife or maybe some associate, a foreign minister say, you give ’em a heads-up, you offer some advice, maybe a rebuke, or a warning, it doesn’t mean they’re going to listen. Sometimes the more you talk the less they hear, or maybe they do just the opposite of what you say. So then maybe you try an experiment, you say the opposite of what you want and see what happens. Or maybe you just throw something, a dish, a rock, a bomb. Whatever.

  On the other hand, maybe the ant was doing something, it was making a statement, or a point, by staying where it was, which is what it did, just like before. The scout ant took off a second time, and in a minute or two it came back. This time it walked over the back of the stay-behind ant, and then the two of them separated and began gesticulating to each other. It was the same face to face position, only this time they weren’t touching, and then they moved until they were standing side by side. They continued whatever they were saying, legs and claws busy in the air but bodies now butt-down, hunched over at the ant equivalent of a waist. They reminded me of two guys hanging out on a stoop, shooting the breeze. Or two girls at a lunch counter or a park bench, yakking. The stay-behind ant was more reserved than the scout, more economical in its movements, and after a while the two of them seemed to run out of things to say. First one became still, and then the other one did. They were still for a long time, a very long time, and I wondered if they’d died, perhaps from using up so much energy talking. I read a story once of a man who talked himself to death. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records. He talked for something like two weeks, non-stop, and then he died. It’s listed as a suicide, but maybe he didn’t have a choice. Maybe he couldn’t stop talking, even when he tried. I’ve heard of people like that.

  Or maybe the ants weren’t dead, they were just taking a rest. Or waiting for something to get them going again. Some new information from outside, something that only ants would notice. Or something inside, some inner impulse. Like a spark, something to get them jump-started. They looked like bumps on a log, inert, almost mummified, and I asked myself, do ants sleep?

  I decided that they do, mainly because when they did start moving again, it looked just like someone waking up. The scout ant was first. It snapped awake as if it had been startled by a loud noise, instantly alert and ready for action. The stay-behind ant woke up slower, bit by bit, as if sleep were some kind of blanket that it had to fight to push off. I found it interesting that two identical-looking ants could have such distinct personalities. I used to think that all of them, all the workers anyway, were alike. But obviously that’s not the case.

  As for the fucking, I have to confess I lost track of who was doing what to whom. In all honesty I couldn’t see exactly what it was that they were doing, except that one was behind the other and partway up its back, a position in other animals I associate with sex. I know that with most ants it’s just the queen that gets humped, and neither of these looked like a queen, though I’ve since read that in some species the worker females get in on the action too. These particular ants were very small and partially hidden by a leaf, and I had to strain to see them so I couldn’t tell if they were male or female. I couldn’t really tell anything for sure. Maybe if I had the big, fat eyes of a cormorant, I could be more definitive and scientific.

  Another option: I could keep the nest in a jar and examine it every day to see if more ants have appeared. If they have, I could say that one of the ants was a fertile female and did have sex, the result of which was babies. (Offspring? Antlings?) I could say this, but would I know it? Couldn’t there be other explanations?

  Here’s one: God did it. Here’s another. It was the stork. Maybe the babies came from another dimension, or maybe they just materialized—poof! spontaneous generation—out of thin air.

  And if no babies appeared? Maybe they were dry-humping. Maybe the female was sterile. Maybe the male was shooting blanks. Maybe it wasn’t sex at all.

  You can’t make assumptions, that’s all I’m saying. Things are not always the way you think they are, or how you want them to be, or how they seem. You have to open your eyes and keep them open, Chief. You have to open your mind. It’s a question of honesty. It’s a matter of respect. We have much to learn. The world’s a big place.

  THE ROBERTS

  Long before Grace, before Claire and Felicity, before the two men who wrecked his life, there was him and him alone, Robert Fairchild, first and only child of June and Lawrence, warm and cozy in his mother’s womb. He was two
weeks overdue at birth, as though reluctant to leave that precious, corpuscular, sharply scented, deeply calming place—determined, as it were, to remain attached. When at last his mother, weary of a tenacity that at other, less pressing, times she would come to admire, served notice and forced him out, young Robert, shocked and indignant, cried a storm.

  His father was a physicist, an academic devoted to his work, highly respected by his colleagues and rarely at home. Robert was raised by his mother, who adored him, and he learned, as many sons do, that love bears the face and the stamp of a woman.

  He excelled in school and, following in the footsteps of his father, chose mathematics as a career. But midway through college he was bitten by another bug and abandoned math for art. First painting, which proved beyond his grasp, then sculpture, which tantalized him. Sadly, his work was never more than mediocre; some of it, by any standard, his own included, was out and out ugly. And these were not the days when ugly was beautiful. These were the days when beautiful was beautiful, and beauty reigned supreme.

  His failure was discouraging, all the more because he expected to succeed, as he had all his life until then. He lost confidence in himself, a new experience, and on the heels of this his spirits spiraled down. Eventually, he decided to drop out of school. But on the way to deliver his letter of resignation, he ran into a fellow student—literally collided with her. She was standing at the edge of the sidewalk, a sketchpad open, a pencil in hand, utterly absorbed in the rendering of an old stone building for one of her classes.

  Her name was Claire. The class was architecture. Their collision marked the beginning of a love affair that lasted just a few short years, but of a career, for Robert, that lasted a lifetime. Everything that was unattainable and wrong in his work as a sculptor was uncannily right in his work, first as a student, then apprentice, architect, as if some slight, but fatal, flaw in his eye, or his compass, had been corrected. For this he credited Claire. She was his first great love. Through her he found his calling. Through her he learned, not incidentally, how sweet and vivifying love could be. She restored his confidence. She invigorated him and inspired his earliest work. In the brief time they were together she gave him everything, it seemed, a man could want, and when at length she left him, citing his self-centeredness and preference for work over her, she gave him something new, the devastating side of love, the heartache and the sorrow. For what she said was true, he had poured his love for her into his work, to a fault, neglecting the real live person. It was a terrible mistake, which he vowed never to repeat. He had a contempt for mistakes, rivaled only by—as an aspiring young architect—his contempt for repetition.

  After Claire left, he had an awful time. Guilt, anger, loneliness, self-recrimination, despair: the usual stuff. He couldn’t work, and that was worst of all, because his career was just beginning, and he needed work to feel like a man, to feel worth anything. And then in a freak accident he lost an eye, and what had seemed bad suddenly got worse. An architect without an eye? How about a bird without a wing? A singer without a throat? He felt castrated.

  He couldn’t see, or thought he couldn’t see. Everything seemed flat and drab and lifeless. There were ways to adjust and compensate, but he wasn’t into adjustment, not just yet, he was into bitterness and self-pity, which were new to him and gave him a kind of poisonous satisfaction. It was during this time that he met Julian Taborz, a bioengineer and fledgling entrepreneur, and they began a collaboration that was to culminate in the invention of Pakki-flex®, the so-called “living skin.” But that was years away, and at the time there was a real question just how long Robert would last. He was working for a firm, but his work was uninspired. He was getting stress-induced rashes, which itched and boiled and crawled along his skin like a plague. At length he was put on notice as a poor performer, but he couldn’t seem to correct himself. With each passing month, the world of architecture, which he adored, seemed to slip further from his grasp. Then he met Felicity, who changed his life.

  Felicity was an oculist, which was a little like being a jeweler. She had long, expressive fingers, slate blue eyes and a sweet ironic laugh. She gave Robert, not his first fake eye, but his first good one, that didn’t announce itself from a mile off, bulging like a tumor from its socket, making him look bug-eyed and cartoonish, or half bug-eyed, which was worse. He had developed the habit of averting his face, or, alternatively, whipping off his omnipresent sunglasses and confronting strangers, forcing them to choose where to look and where not to look, willfully inviting their uneasiness, fascination and disgust. These were angry, spiteful days, and Felicity put them to rest. It was a matter of craftsmanship, which she had in abundance, but equally, it was a matter of caring and empathy, of listening to a client, connecting with him, giving him the look, the picture of himself, he wanted. Felicity had that talent too, and Robert fell for her like a fish for water.

  The day she gave him his eye, in a little box, then helped him put it in, then stood beside him at the mirror, proud, almost protective, he was overcome with emotion. He asked if he could see her again. Gently, she refused. He asked if he could at least call her, and she gave him her business card and said, if he was having trouble with his eye, of course. He waited two weeks, then made an appointment. She made some minor adjustments, and a month later he was back again. Eventually, against her better judgment, she agreed to go out on a date with him. He took her home and showed her the design of a building that, he professed, she had inspired, a frothy concoction of steel and glass, his first new design in many moons. She didn’t know quite what to make of it, nor of his attention. He seemed so needy, starved for something she was not at all sure that she, or anyone, could provide. At the same time she was flattered. Several weeks later he showed her another building, also inspired by her, then another, and so it went, until at length he wore her down, overcoming her resistance. He was only a man after all, and if he insisted that she was heaven on earth, who was she to disagree? Putting wariness aside, burying suspicion, she stopped withholding herself, and from there the laws of chemistry, physics and biology (which, in the absence of compelling forces to the contrary, favored attraction), kicked in. She was already in some ways attached to him, and now that attachment grew. She looked forward to his company. She cared how he felt. And eventually the day arrived when she could no longer deny, nor had any wish to deny, that as near as she could tell, she was in love.

  It was evident in every facet of her life. At work, on the street, in the car, the kitchen, the living room, in bed. Robert was as fine a lover as she had known, attentive, responsive, creative, energetic, kind. Unlike many men, he did not despise or fear women, but rather he exalted them, on the whole a more forgivable offense. Felicity was sun and moon to him, and when they were together, he couldn’t get enough of her, which made up for his tendency to be with her rather less, now that she desired him, than she would have liked. Thanks to her, his career was on the upswing. The drought of ideas had ended (the rashes as well), and he was now working for himself, working feverishly, frequently missing meals and spending the night—and sometimes two or three nights on end—at the office. Six months after they moved in together he won his first major commission and in quick succession several more, each of which required that he travel. Not uncommonly, he was gone for a week at a time. As his business grew, his travel time increased, until he was away nearly as much as he was home. By this point the press had caught wind of him, “the one-eyed architect,” in their thirst for copy suggesting that his missing eye conferred a singular and authentic vision, like an extra sense. Privately, he would never submit to such nonsense; publicly, he was shrewdly dismissive. Celebrity agreed with him and was good for business. He gave interviews. Clients flocked to him. Taxis, airports and his drafting table saw him more and more; Felicity, less and less.

  His love for her never wavered, but it was subsumed by a greater love, and she learned how it felt to be demoted. From sun and moon she went to being but a planet. Sometimes visible,
sometimes not, like Venus or Mercury. And like Venus and Mercury she had no moons to orbit her, and none on the way, because Robert didn’t want any. And so, after many years together, she left him, and for the second time in his life he was alone.

  For a while he did all right. Professionally, he was thriving, and he had the occasional confectionary fling. In addition, the long collaboration with Julian Taborz had finally reached fruition. Pakki-flex was now on the market, and it was revolutionizing the construction of buildings. A bio-epidermic membrane applied to a matrix of polycarbon activating thread, the “living skin” took the place of traditional roofs and siding. It was responsive to the elements, thickening in winter cold and summer heat, thinning in milder weather. It also changed color, both inside and out: its exterior surface responded to ambient temperature and light; its interior, (if desired), to the prevailing moods of the building’s inhabitants. Neither surface required a protective coating, be it shingle, tar, slate, tile, varnish or paint, which was a big money saver. It was flexible, it was durable, it was economical, but its biggest selling point was that it mended itself. The Domome, an award-winning, one-of-a-kind, trophy home topped by a soaring, onion-shaped, Pakki-flex dome, which Robert designed and built for a wealthy patron of the arts, was a consummate example of the product’s strengths. It was also an example, hitherto unknown, of its fatal weakness.

  Pakki-flex was composed, in part, of cells—living cells, as living cells were needed for it to work its magic. The immuno­competence of these cells, the mechanism by which they protected themselves from harm and guarded the surrounding extra-cellular environment, had been enhanced. In the parlance of the lab these were vigilante cells. Like vigilantes, they were well-armed, and like vigilantes, easily triggered. This served well for incursions of external agents and provocateurs, such as wind, rain, sleet, ice, ultraviolet radiation, rodents, bolts of lightning and flying objects. It served less well when directed inward, and indeed, this same property made the cells susceptible to internal corruption and self-attack. Three months after moving in, on the night of a banquet to entertain their hundred closest friends and celebrate their newest acquisition, the proud owners of the Domome noticed a small bubble in the dome. Over the course of the evening the bubble grew and slowly filled with a pale yellow fluid, which, save for its size, bore a remarkable resemblance to the common blister. By the time dessert was being served (a wonderfully evoked whipped cream, meringue and rum eclair), it encompassed most of the ceiling. The gracious guests, fearful of slighting their hosts, did not begin to flee until the fluid began to drip, and most, mercifully, were well on their way when, with a groan followed by a deep, bassoon-like ripping sound, the waters of the blister burst. As one of the departing guests ruefully remarked, it was as if the house, mimicking the inaugural mood within it, were giving birth.