I’m sitting by the window, watching the snow fall. On the table in front of me I’ve spread out the contents of a box of memories: the casing for Gina’s demo tape. My twig people and the other things we made. All those letters and cards that Gina sent me over the years. I haven’t been able to reread them yet, but I’ve looked at the drawings and I’ve held them in my hands, turning them over and over, one by one. The demo tape is playing softly on my stereo. It’s the first time I’ve been able to listen to it since Gina died.
Through the snow I can see the gargoyle on the building across the street. I know now what Gina meant about wanting to live in their world and be invisible. When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different.
Thinking about Gina hurts so much, but there’s good things to remember, too. I don’t know what would have become of me if she hadn’t rescued me in that playground all those years ago and welcomed me into her life. It’s so sad that the uniqueness about her that made me love her so much was what caused her so much pain.
The bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral strike midnight. They remind me of the child I was, trying to stay up late enough to hear my cat talk. I guess that’s what Gina meant to me. While everybody else grew up, Gina retained all the best things about childhood: goodness and innocence and an endless wonder. But she carried the downside of being a child inside her as well. She always lived in the present moment, the way we do when we’re young, and that must be why her despair was so overwhelming for her.
“I tried to save her,” a voice says in the room behind me as the last echo of St. Paul’s bells fades away. “But she wouldn’t let me. She was too strong for me.”
I don’t move. I don’t dare move at all. On the demo tape, Gina’s guitar starts to strum the intro to another song. Against the drone of the guitar’s strings, the voice goes on.
“I know she’ll always live on so long as we keep her memory alive,” it says, “but sometimes that’s just not enough. Sometimes I miss her so much I don’t think / can go on.”
I turn slowly then, but there’s only me in the room. Me and Fritzie,.and one small Christmas miracle to remind me that everything magic didn’t die when Gina walked into the lake.
“Me, too,” I tell Fritzie.
I get up from my chair and cross the room to where he’s sitting up, looking at me with those sad eyes of his. I put my arms around his neck. I bury my face in his rough fur, and we stay there like that for a long time, listening to Gina sing.
WHERE DESERT SPIRITS CROWD THE NIGHT
If your mind is attuned to beauty,
you find beauty in everything.
—Jean Cooke, in an interview in The Artist’s and Illustrator’s Magazine, April 1993
All I ask of you
Is that you remember me
As loving you
—traditional Sufi song
Each of us owes God a death.
—attributed to Humphrey Osmond
1
Sophie didn’t attend the funeral. She hadn’t met Max yet, couldn’t have known that his lover had died. On the afternoon that Max stood at Peter’s gravesite under a far too cheerful sky, she was in her studio in Old Market, preparing for a new show. It wasn’t until the opening, two months later, that they met. But even then, Coyote was watching.
2
There is a door in my dreams that opens into a desert….
where the light is like a wash of whiskey over my vision;
where the color of the earth ranges through a spectrum of dusty browns cut with pale ochre tones and siennas;
where distant peaks jut blue-grey from the tide of hills washing up against the ragged line the mountains make at the horizon, peaks that are shadowed now as the sun sets in a geranium and violet glory behind me;
where the tall saguaro rise like sleepy green giants from the desert floor, waving lazy arms to no one in particular, with barrel cacti crouching in their shadows like smaller, shorter cousins;
where clusters of prickly pear and cholla offer a thorny embrace,’ and the landscape is clouded with mesquite and palo verde and smoke trees, their leaves so tiny they don’t seem as much to grow from the gnarly branches as to have been dusted upon them;
where a hawk hangs in the sky high above me, a dark silhouette against the ever deepening blue, gliding effortlessly on outspread wings;
where a lizard darts into a tight crevice, its movement so quick, it only registers in the corner of my eye;
where an owl the size of my palm peers at me from the safety of its hole in a towering saguaro;
where a rattlesnake gives me one warning rattle, then fixes me with its hypnotic stare, poised to strike long after I have backed away;
where the sound of a medicine flute, breathy and soft as a secret, rises up from an arroyo, and for one moment I see the shadow of a hunchbacked man and his instrument cast upon the far wall of the gully, before the night takes the sight away, if not the sound;
where the sky, even at night, overwhelms me with its immensity;
where the stillness seems complete… except for the resonance of my heartbeat that twins the distant-drum of a stag’s hooves upon the dry, hard ground;
except for the incessant soughing cries of the ground-doves that feed in the brushy vegetation all around me;
except for the low sound of the flute which first brought me here.
The sweet scent of a mesquite fire in the middle of a dry wash draws me down from the higher ridges. The ground-doves break like quail with a rushing thrum of their wings as I make my way near. A figure is there by the fire, sitting motionless, head bent in shadow. I stand just beyond the circle of light, uncertain, uneasy. But finally I step forward. I sit across the fire from the figure. In the distance, I can still hear the sound of the flute. My silent companion gives neither it nor my presence any acknowledgment, but I can be patient, too.
And anyway, I’ve nowhere else to go.
3
Given her way in the matter, Sophie would never attend one of her own openings. She was so organized and tidy that she never really thought that she looked like the typical image of what an artist should be, and she always felt awkward trying to make nice with the gallery’s clients. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, or even that she wasn’t prone to involved conversations. She simply felt uncomfortable around strangers, especially when she was supposed to be promoting herself and her work. But she tried.
So this evening as The Green Man Gallery filled with the guests that Albina had invited to the opening, Sophie concentrated on fulfilling what she saw as her responsibility in making the evening a success. Instead of clustering in a corner with her scruffy friends, who were doing their best not to be too rowdy and only just succeeding, she made an effort to mingle, to be sociable, the approachable artist. Whenever she felt herself gravitating to where Jilly and Wendy and the others were standing, she’d focus on someone she didn’t know, walk over and strike up a conversation.
An hour or so into the opening, she picked a man in his late twenties who had just stopped in front of Hearts Like Fire, Burning— a small oil painting of two golden figures holding hands in a blaze of color that she’d meant to represent the fire of their consummated love.
He was tall and slender, a pale, dark-haired Pre-Raphaelite presence dressed in somber clothes: black jeans, black T-shirt, black sportsjacket, even black Nike sneakers. What attracted her to him was how he moved like a shadow through the gallery crowd and seemed completely at odds with both them and the bright, sensual colors of the paintings that made up the show. And yet he seemed more in tune with the paintings than anyone else—perhaps, she thought wryly as she noticed the intensity of his interest in the work, herself included.
Hearts Like Fire, Burning, in particular, appeared to mesmerize him. He stood longest in front of it, transfixed, his features a curious mixture of deep sadness and joy. When she approached him, he looked slowly away from the painting and smiled at her. The expression turned bi
ttersweet by the time it reached his eyes.
“So what do you think of this piece?” he asked.
Sophie blinked in surprise. “I should probably be asking you that question.”
“How so?”
“I’m the artist.”
He inclined his head slightly in greeting and put out his hand. “Max Hannon,” he said, introducing himself.
“I’m Sophie Etoile,” she said as she took his hand. Then she laughed. “I guess that was obvious.”
He laughed with her, but his laugh, like his smile, held a deep sadness by the time it reached his eyes.
“I find it very peaceful,” he said, turning back to the painting.
“Now that’s a description I’ve never heard of my work.”
“Oh?” He regarded her once more. “How’s it usually described?”
“Those that like it call it lively, colorful, vibrant. Those that don’t call it garish, overblown….” Sophie shrugged and let the words trail off.
“And how would you describe it?”
“With this piece, I agree with you. For all its flood of bright color, I find it very peaceful.”
“It reminds me of my lover, Peter,” Max said. “We were in Arizona a few months ago, staying with friends who have a place in the desert. We’d sit and hold hands at this table they had set up behind their house and simply let the light and the sky fill us. It felt just like this painting—full of gold and flames and the fire in our hearts, all mixed up together. When I look at this, it brings it all back.”
“That’s very sweet.”
Max turned back to the painting. “He died a week or so after we got back.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sophie said, laying a hand on his arm.
Max sighed. “It doesn’t hurt to talk about him, but God do I miss him.”
You can say it doesn’t hurt, Sophie thought, but she could see how bright his eyes had become, only just holding back a film of tears. The openness with which he’d shared his feelings with her made her want to do something special in return.
“I want you to have this painting,” she said. “You can come pick it up when the show’s over.”
Max shook his head. “I’d love to buy it,” he said, “but I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Who said anything about you having to pay for it?”
“I couldn’t even think of…” he began.
But Sophie refused to listen. “Look,” she said. “What would be the point of being an artist if you only did it for the money? I always feel weird about selling my work anyway. It’s as though I’m selling off my children. I don’t even know what kind of a home they’re going to—there’s no evaluation process beforehand. Someone could buy this painting just for the investment and for all I know it’ll end up stuck in a closet somewhere and never be seen again. I can’t tell you how good it would make me feel knowing that it was hanging in your home instead, where it would mean so much to you.”
“No, I just couldn’t accept it,” Max told her.
“Then let me give it to Peter,” Sophie said, “and you can keep it for him.”
Max shook his head. “This is so strange. Things like this don’t happen in the real world.”
“Well, pick a world where it could happen,” Sophie said, “and we’ll pretend that we’re there.”
Max gave her a curious look. “Do you do this a lot?”
“What? Give away paintings?”
“No, pick another world to be in when you don’t happen to like the way things are going in this one.”
Now it was Sophie’s turn to be intrigued. “Why, do you?”
“No. It’s just … ever since you came over and started talking to me, I’ve felt as though we’ve met before. But not here. Not in this world. It’s more like we met in a dream____”
This was too strange, Sophie thought. For a moment the gallery and crowd about them seemed to flicker, to grow hazy and two-dimensional, as though only she and Max were real.
Like we met in a dream…
Slowly she shook her head. “Don’t get me started on dreams,” she said.
4
“There are sleeping dreams and waking dreams,” Christina Rossetti says in her poem “A Ballad of Boding,” as though the difference between them is absolute. My dreams aren’t so clearly divided, not from one another, and not from when I’m actually awake either. My sleeping dreams bleed into the real world; actually, the place where they take place seems like a real world, too—it’s just not one that’s as easily accessed by most people.
The experiences I have there aren’t real, of course, or at least not real in the way people normally use the word. What happens when I fall asleep and step into my dreams can’t be measured or weighed—it can only be known—but that doesn’t stop these experiences from influencing my life and leaving me in a state of mild confusion so much of the time.
The confusion stems from the fact that every time I turn around, the rules seem to change. Or maybe it’s that every time I think I have a better understanding of what the night side of my life means, the dreams open up like a Chinese puzzle box, and I find yet another riddle lying inside the one I’ve just figured out. The borders blur, retreating before me, deeper and deeper into the dreamscape, walls becoming doors, and doors opening out into mysteries that often obscure the original question. I don’t even know the original question anymore. I can’t even remember if there ever was one.
I do remember that I went looking for my mother once. I went to a place, marshy and bogled like an old English storybook fen, where I found that she might be a drowned moon, pinned underwater by quicks and other dark creatures until I freed her from her watery tomb. But I came back from that dreamscape without a clear answer as to who she was, or what exactly it was that I had done. What I do know is that I came back with a friend: Jeck Crow, a handsome devil of a man who, I seem to remember, once bore the physical appearance of the black-winged bird that’s his namesake. Is it a true memory? I don’t know, he won’t say, and our relationship has progressed to the point where it doesn’t really matter anymore.
I only see him when I sleep. I close my eyes and step from this world to Mabon, the city that radiates from Mr. Truepenny’s, the bookstore/art gallery I made up when I was a kid. Or at least I thought I’d made it up. It was the place I went when I was waiting for my dad to come home from work, a haven from my loneliness because I didn’t make friends easily in those days. Not having anyone with whom I could share the fruits of my imagination, I put all that energy into making up a place where I was special, or at least had access to special things.
Faerie blood—courtesy of a mother who, Jilly is convinced, was a dream in this world, a moon in her own—is what makes it all real.
5
“Who was that guy you spent half the night talking to?” Jilly wanted to know as she and Sophie were walking home from the restaurant where they’d all gone to celebrate after the opening. Sophie had asked Max to come along, but he’d declined.
“Just this guy.”
Jilly laughed. ” ‘Just this guy.’ Oh, please. He was the best-looking man in the place and he seemed quite smitten with you.”
Sophie had to smile. Only Jilly would use a word like smitten.
“His name’s Max Hannon,” she told Jilly, “and he’s gay.”
“So? This means you can’t be friends?”
“Of course not. I was just pointing out that he’s not potential boyfriend material.”
“It’s possible to be enamored with someone on an intellectual or spiritual level, you know.”
“I know.”
“And besides, you already have a boyfriend.”
Sophie sighed. “Right. In my dreams. That doesn’t exactly do much for me in the real world.”
“But your dreams are like a real world for you.”
“I think I need something a little more… substantial in my life. My biological clock is ticking away.”
“But Jeck—�
��
“Isn’t real,” Sophie said. “No matter how much I pretend he is. And Mabon isn’t a real city, no matter how much I want it to be, and even if it seems like other people can visit it. You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy.”
“Yeah, but it’s an imaginary line,” Jilly said. “Who really decides where it gets drawn?”
They’d been through variations on this conversation many times before. Anyone who spent any amount time with Jilly did. Her open-mindedness was either endearing or frustrating, depending on where you stood on whatever particular subject happened to be under discussion.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Jilly went on when Sophie didn’t respond. “A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.”
“All of which has nothing to do with Max,” Sophie said in an attempt to return to the original topic of their conversation.
“I know,” Jilly said. “So are you going to see him again?”
“I hope so. There’s something very intriguing about him.”
“Which has nothing to do with the way he looks.”
“I told you,” Sophie said. “He’s gay.”
“Like Sue always says, the best ones are either married or gay, more’s the pity.”
Sophie smiled. “Only for us.”
“This is true.”
6
The desert dream starts in the alley behind Mr. Truepenny’s shop—or at least where the alley’s supposed to be. I’m in the back of the store with Jeck, poking around through the shelves of books, when I hear the sound of this flute. It goes on for a while, sort of lingering there in the back of my mind, until finally I get curious. I leave Jeck digging for treasure in a cardboard box of new arrivals and step past the door that leads into the store’s small art gallery. The music is sort of atonal, and the instrument appears to have a limited range of notes, but there’s something appealing about it all the same. I walk down a long narrow corridor, the walls encrusted with old portraits of thin, bearded men and women in dresses that appear far too stiff and ornately embroidered to be comfortable. The soles of my shoes squeak on the wooden floor in a rhythmic counterpoint to the music I’m following. I stop at the door at the far end of the hall. The music seems to be coming from the other side of it, so I open the door and step out, expecting to find myself in a familiar alleyway, but the alley’s gone.
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