The Eater of Dreams

by Kat Cameron

  Near the equator, the dividing line, the sun sets every night at six, a flash of orange and red and it’s gone, falling into the line of the ocean. Stars shine in all the wrong places. A cross hangs in the sky. The dipper vanished and I couldn’t follow its handle down to the North Star. The nights are darker when the moon shines silver on unfamiliar waters and even the stars are strangers. I had to leave, turn tail and run south.

  Paul saw a flash of light from the other side of the fireplace. The glow blinded him. Bright spots danced before his closed eyelids. A whiff of rose petals. He opened his eyes to blackness.

  The past was a wave of dark water rushing towards him. Down and down he fell, the past overwhelming him: down past summer days of sun and laughter; down past evenings of music as they strummed their guitars, smoking bitter grass; down past nights when he and Cecilia tumbled together, like the balls of green and gold that Marina juggled in the daylight hours. Marina, her waterfall of shining hair falling to her knees, her smile as bright as a sunflower as she turned towards Jay. Marina laughing in the sun, while Peter basked in his brother’s shadow.

  Marina and Jay splashed by the dock, Marina floating on the water, her skin white in the July sun. Paul stood watching on the platform anchored out in the lake while Cecilia and Peter swam towards him, light shining off their brown arms, off the foaming wave kicked up by their legs, Cecilia reaching him first, grabbing his ankle and down he fell, into deep waters, over his head, choking, water in his mouth, his nose, water blinding his eyes, and then the slippery chill of Cecilia’s limbs against his, her hand in his, pulling him up, out of the water, out of the past, rising through layers of memory back into this moment.

  I fled south, from Cairns to Sydney, snaking down the coast, past endless ghost trees and dead kangas by the side of the road, past the Gold Coast where the money-makers roast their bodies brown as shit, their smiles white and deadly as the sharks’ teeth they wear around their necks. I came to a city with buildings like sails and miles and miles of sand, glittering like glass. I washed my feet in the fountain at King’s Cross where prostitutes showed their wares.

  They slept that night coupled like spoons, her back curved into his chest, his chin resting on the line of her neck. Her hair, still wet from the midnight swim, dripped against his cheek. He dreamt he floated in an immense blue lake of grinning sharks and grey trees with ghostly arms. Cecilia swam up to him, her eyes as large as saucers. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked. He stood in a garden of roses on the sandy floor and saw Marina by a rosebush, her loose hair crowned by a bridal wreath of crimson buds. Sunlight, falling through the water, struck her hair and turned it to fire. She held her hands out to him: red roses dripped from her fingers. “What are you doing here?” The words rose through the water in brightly coloured bubbles: green, blue, and gold. “I am tending his grave.”

  He woke to sunlight on his face. The soft murmur of voices rose from the kitchen. Someone said something, and he heard the chime of Marina’s laughter falling in perfect thirds, and then Jay’s voice joined in, a deep bass, warm and soothing as liquid honey. He struggled against the weight of the sleeping bag, trying to get up

  And woke in the small room in the pre-dawn quiet. Dust motes hung in the air. Beside him, Cecilia curled up in a ball, her head protected under her left arm.

  Paul slipped out of bed, out of the cottage. A mist was rising from the lake. He followed the path to the shore.

  Peter waited for him on the sand.

  In Australia, I was surrounded by water. The cities perch on the edge of nothing, cling to tide-swept beaches. I met this guy, another damned war vet, in a hostel in Sydney. We were going to drive to the centre, the heart of Australia. The rock. Uluru. But first he wanted to see this natural miracle, these pillars in the ocean. The apostles.

  After breakfast, they took the rowboat out. Cecilia wore a white robe over her swimsuit.

  Paul rowed slowly, staying close to the east shore. He passed the dock, the swimming platform. Behind him, over his left shoulder, were the two tiny islands.

  Out on the water, there was only a thick silence.

  They passed the first island, moved into the channel formed between the two. Here, the water was shallow: sharp rocks scraped against his oars.

  “Just past the island,” Cecilia said. “They found the boat just past the islands.”

  Paul rowed four more strokes, then stopped, shipped the oars.

  Cecilia put on flippers, dipped her mask in water, and then fastened it. While Paul steadied the boat, she slipped over the side.

  “Hand me the flashlight,” she said. Her voice muffled, as if she was already speaking from underwater. A quick splash, a flash of red bathing suit, then flippers, and she was gone.

  He was alone in the small boat, on the blue of a lake studded with islands. This close to the spot, Peter was silenced. But over the flat surface of the water, skipping like light or a flat stone, came Marina’s voice. No words, none that he could understand. It could have been a Gaelic lament. To him, it was a wash of long vowels, as plaintive as the soft rain falling on the roof of the room where he and Cecilia slept. So many nights they had fallen asleep together while Marina’s liquid vowels tumbled above the chords of Jay’s guitar. They would sleep in one of the back rooms while Peter slept in the other, and Marina and Jay sang and played through the night.

  Cecilia rose to the surface, sputtering. “Damn mask.” Water sloshed against her cheeks above the seal. She pulled it off, disappeared again beneath the water

  This time he could understand the words to the music. Cat Stevens, one of Jay’s favourite singers. A lament for a loved one. The music transposed into a higher key so that Marina’s voice, as pure as an Anglican choirboy’s unbroken soprano, soared into the blue cathedral of sky.

  The song ended. Silence. The sun shone. Time dragged. Paul checked his watch. Cecilia had been underwater for close to four minutes.

  Looking over the side, he searched for the spot of light that would show her presence. The water was black in the shadow of the boat, green a little further off, white where the sunlight glared off it.

  Cecilia surfaced a few feet away. For a moment, she floated in the water, gasping for breath or weeping. Her hair clung to her head like a shiny black cap. She swam over, hooked her arms over the boat’s side. Paul pulled her in.

  “Nothing. Only the circle of my flashlight. And grey rocks.” From the towel at her feet, she took out a dried rose, its petals red as crusted blood. Around its stem, she wrapped a silver chain with a small cross. “It was Marina’s,” she said.

  Cecilia dropped the rose on the water. It rested for a moment, and then the anchor of the cross pulled it down and it sank. Paul grasped the oars and turned the boat around.

  Peter’s voice drifted out to meet them as Paul rowed the last few strokes back to the dock.

  The apostles. There are twelve of them, these giant pillars of rock. They were part of the mainland until the waves got them. The waves eat in every year, crumbling rock, mining the edges of the cliffs. Busloads of tourists come and take pictures. That’s what the ‘Nam vet was pretending to be — some dumb tourist. He even had a broken camera slung around his neck. There are signs posted: STAND BACK FROM THE EDGE. Crazy, but you know what I thought? I thought of the signs I’d seen in the city. No standing. It means no parking. I walked out to the edge of the cliff and stood there.

  That night they fried hamburgers on the stone barbecue built into the patio. Paul found some dry wood under the cottage eaves and burnt it down to coals. They drank red wine as the sun set, and then went back into the main room and lit a fire. And they tried again to put together the pieces.

  The last night of summer, the end of the hiatus, the end of dreaming. Their shadowy forms emerged: Paul in one chair with Cecilia on his lap; Marina in the other with Jay at her feet; Peter sitting on the hearth. A bottle of rye passed around the circle and a joint. It had been raining all day and they had a fire burning. The light
cast half of their faces in shadow, like Egyptian hieroglyphics. They talked and talked. Marina always talked with her hands, and he could see the patterns her white fingers traced through the air. At one point, Cecilia brought in crackers and cheese and brownies. Then they brought out their guitars, Cecilia played her flute, and Peter drummed time against his knee.

  And there the memory ended. Paul could see them grouped around the fire, Cecilia now standing, Jay and Marina cradling their guitars. But what happened for the next hours, what they played and sang and said and dreamed was gone. The next clear picture was the back room where he and Cecilia slept, cradled together. He had jerked awake to the panic of Peter’s sobbing, the frantic words “the boat, the boat” repeated over and over, a scratch on a record, the needle catching over and over. Then he heard Peter’s voice.

  I’m standing there on the edge of the cliff and I hear them screaming, “Get back here, you stupid bugger, you asshole,” and I keep standing there, waiting for the ground to crumble. I tried to walk out into the air, but my feet were fastened to the cliff. I perched there like a bird, clinging to the edge. And I knew. Even if I moved, the air would hold me up. There would be no falling into immortality for me.

  They left the cabin the next morning. In the city, they met each Wednesday at a downtown restaurant, sitting on a rooftop terrace while the traffic snarled below them. Cecilia drank red wine and the light glowed through it, staining the white enamelled table.

  In the city, Paul could barely hear Peter’s voice. He saw the Australian desert and its central rock, blood-red in the early sunrise; he heard the panting breath of the pilgrims as they climbed. Cecilia was wearing a T-shirt on which a tiny stick figure on a red boulder shouted: I climbed Ayers Rock.

  “He sent it to me,” Cecilia said. “He sent it to me the day before he climbed the rock.”

  He showed her the last postcard. The picture on the front was long cylindrical pillars, like the hoodoos of the Alberta badlands. An impossibly blue ocean lapped at the rocks, feathering the bases with whitecaps. Diagonal printing across the front of the card read: The Twelve Apostles. On the other side was Peter’s message. Water, water everywhere. Australia is surrounded by water. Even at the rock.

  Paul looked over the edge and saw the long fall to the red sand.

  They sat on the terrace, under the shade of a striped umbrella. Waiters in neon boxer shorts, patterned with black fish and palm trees, topped with white tank tops, wove by them with trays of drinks held high. The light fell around them in bright sheets, blinding their vision.

  Cutting Edge

  “RIGHT, IT’S AGREED. FRIDAY, WE infiltrate Cutting Edge and take back our work.”

  Harry had joined the writing circle after reading a notice in the weekly free paper, Look, calling for local writers to share their work in a nonjudgmental format. Their hangout was the Red Dog, a Whyte Avenue bar with beer-stained oak floors and a high black ceiling. At the first meeting, Harry read his latest song lyric, about a truck driver from Beaver Lodge who experiments with mushrooms and pines for a stripper.

  “Awesome. You should send that to The Fern,” said Rob, a weedy man in baggy jeans and a T-shirt with the Statue of Liberty holding a gun. Anarchist chic, from his matted blond dreads to his mud-stained Doc Martens. He’d had work read on CJSR and two years ago The Fern had sent him an encouraging rejection letter.

  “Don’t send it there.” K’lyn, the only woman in the group, had established her credentials immediately by reading one of her published poems. “The editor’s an alcoholic; he only takes stories about Guinness and bars. Why don’t you send it to Cutting Edge? It’s a local journal. Hell, we should all send something. We’re local writers. I wonder what they pay.”

  Harry sent his lyrics, disguised as poetry with some odd line breaks. Rob sent a twenty- page story about a one-legged cocaine addict who burns down a newspaper office. K’lyn submitted nine poems about breakups, complete with creative ideas for dismembering old boyfriends. They sat back and waited. Five months later, they were still waiting. Rob fired off some emails, and then called an emergency meeting.

  “This is bullshit,” he said. “They won’t even reply to my emails. What kind of journal are they running?”

  The plan was simple. Rob was a member of an anarchist group that had ties to the local Small Press Association, which shared an office in the downtown public library with Cutting Edge. Rob had gone to the monthly meeting of the Small Press Association and palmed a key.

  “We’ll break into the office on Friday night. No one has meetings on Friday.”

  Harry said, “I have a gig on Friday.” He played fiddle for a Celtic group. Maybe K’lyn would show up. After all, it was Celtic music and she was from Saint John. K’lyn had rippling red hair, pale skin dotted with clots of freckles, bright blue eyes. A classic recessive, created out of generations of Scots, Irish, and Acadians interbreeding with impunity, she was just what Harry imagined an Irish lass should look like, with a temper to match the red hair. He could impress her with his solo in McGinty’s Reel. Harry tried not to think about the fishing net draped in front of the stage at the Trap and Swill to deflect the beer bottles that drunks threw when the band didn’t play Great Big Sea covers.

  “So we’ll go early.”

  “I work until nine on Friday.” Drew worked at Staples. Each meeting, he’d read one of his bitter vignettes about work at an unnamed retail outlet, full of repetitive dialogue from a couple of Neanderthals, and then get shit-faced on a pitcher of beer.

  “Look, we don’t all have to be there,” Rob said. “I think Harry, K’lyn, and I can manage.”

  Harry glowed with pride. Rob preferred his help to Drew’s. At three hundred pounds, Harry was usually discounted from any physical activity. “So when’s the hit?” He felt like a member of Al Capone’s gang. He saw himself with his violin case loaded with a Tommy gun, blasting his way through the library. Redistributing those fat cat government grants. Getting some for the little guy.

  That night, he told his landlord about the planned heist. Marc, a functioning drunk who repaired musical instruments, had called him up to sample a twenty-five-year-old Scotch.

  “Sweet talk yer throat and burn yer arse it will!” Marc promised.

  Pulling over an old chrome kitchenette chair, Harry settled his girth, the chair legs bowing under the strain. He placed his bag of MacBaren Danish Burley amid the remains of a dismantled accordion and pulled his favourite Meerschaum from the inner pocket of his fleece. Marc, unlike the anti-smoking fascists at City Hall, encouraged indoor smoking.

  After they’d debated the merits of single malt, Harry lamented the state of Canadian publishing.

  “No one appreciates good writing. It’s all part of the dumbing down of society. Like that shithole of a Christian school in Grande Prairie. They didn’t teach; they just shoved Bible lessons down our throats. I didn’t read Hamlet until university. Plus, they beat the crap out of us any chance they got.”

  “Just like bloody England,” Marc agreed. “My headmaster treated us like conscripts, tried to beat some sense into us. He’d been a commando in the marines, you see. Not that it didn’t do us good. I can still remember some of the poetry he spouted.”

  Harry listened to Marc recite Tennyson’s The Kraken from memory, awed by this grasp of the great works of English literature. He’d been born fifty years and twelve hundred miles from where his soul truly belonged. No wonder he couldn’t get any work published here. His work was too deep. Editors, like magpies, were attracted by the simple and shiny.

  “Oh, and you’ll be owing me this month’s rent,” Marc said. “Just leave the money on the table, there’s a good lad.”

  Harry pulled out his wallet. Four lonely twenties stared back at him.

  “I’m a bit short this month, Marc.”

  “Are you now? If you wouldn’t be splurging on that fancy tobacco, you might have the money. Well, pay me what you can now.”

  Harry pulled out the eighty
dollars, woefully aware that it was less than a quarter of what he owed. “I’ll get you the rest on Friday, after my gig,” he promised. Well, he would have some of the money, if he remembered not to drink during sets. The last time the band played there, they’d ended up owing the bar money for the tab. It would be KD and tuna for the rest of the month.

  On Friday, he took a bus to the downtown library, threaded past the panhandlers guarding the front door, and waited twenty minutes in the reading area on the main floor, where old men slumped wearily on black couches, waiting to be thrown out into the night.

  K’lyn and Rob arrived together at seven-thirty. K’lyn insisted on browsing the poetry stacks before they went upstairs, so they would seem like regular library patrons.

  They hit a snafu at the elevators. The office was on the sixth floor. Rob pushed the button. The doors closed, and then opened again.

  “What the fuck?” Rob went over the check-out desk. Harry and K’lyn loitered by the elevators, trying to look inconspicuous.

  Rob came back with a bullet-headed tattooed security guard in his fifties.

  “I didn’t hear about any meetings tonight.” He glared at them. “You’re supposed to book meetings a day in advance.”

  “We just have to pick up a few papers.” K’lyn turned on him with a wide-toothed smile.

  “Well, I don’t know, little lady. What organization is it again?”

  “Cutting Edge. We’re on the poetry collective,” she lied coolly. “We have to pick up a batch of submissions.”

  “Well, if you’re quick about it.” Pulling a thick key ring from his belt, he slowly sorted through them, making them wait. Inserting a key into the electronic panel, he twisted it, and then pressed the sixth-floor button.

  “Thank you so much,” K’lyn gushed. As the elevator doors closed, her smile blinked out. “Could you believe that? Little lady. What a sexist pig.”