The Dream Operator

by Mike O'Driscoll

  The room was dark when he entered, except for a small pool of light at the far end. Thirty or so people sat in a semi-circle three rows deep around a man seated in a comfortable reading chair. Though it seemed greatly altered, Cleaver still recognised Strickle’s voice. It was deeper and more precisely modulated, but there was an underlying hint of that urgency and desperation he remembered from their first meeting.

  He moved to take a seat in the back row and listened to the story Strickle was reading. Instead of the warm glow of pleasure he had anticipated, he felt a deadly cold sink its teeth into him. The tale was not one he recognised. He began to shake in his seat, and as he tried to stand up, the small audience burst into applause. Strickle thanked them and when they had fallen silent, he said that he would like to read one final story. The skin tightened across Cleaver’s chest but he ignored it, leaning forward to see the book Strickle was holding. It was, after all, The Rediscovery of Death.

  Strickle’s gaze wandered across the small crowd and found Cleaver. He smiled then, and nodded, and for one fleeting moment Cleaver believed that yes, everything was as it should be. Then Strickle looked down at the book, opened it to a page right at the back and announced the final story. “This one is called ‘The Unravelling of Nicholas Cleaver’,” he said, and began to read.

  Cleaver tried to call out but the air seemed to rush from his body in one great scream that no one could hear. Shadows slid from the walls and closed over him and his last sensation was of the life leaving his eyes and falling like words into the book.

  Lost Highway

  The Dodge pickup hit a patch of ice four miles west of Downtown on Highway 11. It spun off the road and slammed sideways into a tree. Leland Burney sat for a minute or two, dazed, feeling blood trickle down his cheek. The radio whirred and buzzed as it automatically retuned itself to a local frequency. He stared through the shattered windscreen at the blizzard that raged through the trees with indiscriminate malevolence. The driver’s door was a mess. He unclipped the seatbelt and found a rag in the doorwell and wiped the blood from his face. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine whined but refused to turn over. There was no signal on his cellphone. It was coming up nine-thirty. He stared at the haggard face in the rearview mirror. The anger that had festered inside him all through the day was undiminished.

  He opened the glovebox and took out the .38 special, stuck it inside his jacket, slid across the passenger seat and got out of the car. From the back seat he retrieved the guitar case. The snow churned about him, driven on a wind full of spite. It was almost impossible to see anything, but he figured the truck was a write-off. He’d been stepping too hard on the gas, like he couldn’t wait to get it done. The skidmarks that were just about visible on the road told him which direction he’d been headed, but he had no real sense of where exactly he was. His back hurt like hell as he set off, and after a couple of hundred yards he was frozen half to death. Ice had formed on his cheeks and his hands were completely numb. Dumb fucking idea, he told himself.

  He huddled against a tree, trying to keep its bulk between his body and the biting wind. Lights appeared over the horizon. At first he thought he was hallucinating. His head, after all, was still fogged with alcohol and concussion. As he watched, the light condensed into two columns that arced across the trees further along the road, then broadened out as the car came round the bend. He moved from the shelter of the tree and stumbled into the road. The car swerved by him and skidded to a halt fifty yards further along.

  “Thank Christ,” he muttered as he staggered towards the vehicle. It was some kind of light-coloured, ragtop Cadillac. The passenger door opened as he approached. He crouched in the doorway and saw a fair-haired kid grinning at him from behind the wheel.

  Somebody moved in the back and Burney heard a thin, reedy voice say, “Hey there, feller. You picked a mighty fine night to go walking.”

  In the gloom all Burney could see was a silhouetted figure in a cowboy hat. “That’s for sure.” He gestured up the way he had come. “My truck came off the road a ways back.”

  “Well, we can take you as far as Knoxville. Always glad to help out a feller musician.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  The kid got out of the car and opened the trunk. Burney put the guitar case in. Back in the car the kid asked him how far it was.

  He looked about eighteen or nineteen, Burney guessed. “Four or five miles.”

  “We was trying for Charleston,” the kid said. “But this damn storm got the jump on us.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” the man in the back said. “Ain’t nobody tells you what’s coming up next.”

  “That’s for sure,” Burney said. He blew on his hands and rubbed them together, trying to work some life back into them.

  “We’ll lay up tonight in Knoxville and try for Canton tomorrow.”

  Burney glanced in the rear-view, saw the man pull a blanket up around his neck and cough. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the man’s laboured wheezing. Something cold and hard settled in his stomach, a small, untouchable core of rage. His thoughts were thick and sluggish, as though made gelid by the storm. He pictured the house back there along Kingston Pike, and thought about those who waited for him there.

  The blizzard intensified as they drove through the outskirts of Knoxville. Burney was struck by how few buildings there were along the road, how desolate and empty the city appeared. It was as though it had been abandoned, he felt, its populace driven out by the virulence of the storm. They passed by the Tennessee River on the right, a great expanse of blackness that curved away to the south. He rubbed the weariness from his eyes as the dim light from the streetlamps along Cumberland Avenue showed ghostly, colourless facades that seemed to have materialised from out of some other time and place. A strange disquiet came over him, a sense that he had somehow been cut off from the familiar world. He turned and looked at the man in the backseat. His head was just visible above the blanket and his eyes were closed but, as if sensing Burney’s gaze, he stirred and gave a weak smile.

  Soon the car pulled up in front of a tall redbrick. The sick man seemed almost weightless inside the brown overcoat as Burney helped the kid lift him out of the car. A man in a red uniform came out of the hotel and asked if they needed a hand. The kid told him they needed a room and a meal. Half-carrying the sick man, they followed as the guy in the uniform held open a set of doors and ushered them into an elevator and up to the busy second floor lobby where they lowered him onto a leather couch. While the kid spoke to a man behind the reception desk, Burney tried his cellphone again. Still no signal.

  The sick man called him over. Beneath his overcoat he wore some kind of gaudy suit embroidered with what looked like musical notation. “You know, I always like to buy a feller musician a beer.”

  Burney glanced down at the guitar case he held. “I don’t play as much as I used to.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  Burney nodded, and opened the case. The man took the guitar and held it on his lap. He strummed a few chords and nodded appreciatively. “That’s a mighty fine guitar,” he said, handing the instrument back to Burney. “I’m a Martin man, myself. But a Gretsch is awful nice even though I ain’t familiar with this particular model.”

  Burney put the guitar back in the case. “I’m looking after it,” he said. “For a friend of mine.”

  A pained expression crossed the man’s face as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a sheet of lined paper. “I been strugglin with this little bitty song and can’t seem to finish it. I’d sure appreciate if you could get your friend to take a look at it. I ain’t got much use for it no more.”

  Burney took the sheet and put it in his jacket.

  “Charley’s trying to rustle up a doctor,” the man said. “I need a shot a something. Once I seen him, I’d sure appreciate if you’d join us for grub.”

  “There’s something I need to take care of.”

  “Ain’t nothing that w
on’t still be there when this storm is done.”

  Burney looked out through the arched windows of the lobby and thought about Jewell. “All right,” he said. “I guess it can wait.”

  Charley took the sick man to a room while Burney found the restroom and cleaned himself up as best he could. The bar was crowded and on a dais at one end of the room, a dapper, dark-haired man played old show tunes on a piano. Most of the tables were full of smartly dressed men and women laughing and talking above the music. Something about them struck Burney as odd but he couldn’t work out what it was. At the counter he asked for a bottle of Heineken. The barman looked at him and shrugged. Burney pointed to what one of the other guys was drinking and was given a bottle of Ballantine Ale. He felt isolated and out of place.

  A few people watched him, curious, as he drifted through the bar and found an empty table in one corner. He took out the sheet of paper the sick man had given him and unfolded it. Most of the straggly handwriting had been scratched out. Only four lines in the middle of the page were still legible. Reading it, his vacillating mind itched with a nascent memory:

  your leaving still drives me crazy

  much more than I expected it to.

  was our loving really nothing

  more than the dying that we do?

  He wondered why the man hadn’t been able to complete it. What had robbed him of inspiration? Folding the paper he put it back inside his jacket. A weariness settled on him, and with it a sense of dislocation and loss. The sense of purpose that had got him through the day was diminished and he felt a little awed at the memory of the grim determination with which he had set out a little over two hours ago for the small house off Kingston Pike.

  *

  The jukebox in the Longhorn Saloon was playing Todd Snyder’s ‘Alcohol and Pills’ when the waitress came by the table with an empty tray. The badge pinned to her red blouse had the name ‘Corinne’ written on it. Burney caught her eye and asked her to bring him another Jack and Coke. She nodded and asked him what kind of music he played. He looked at her, confused, and she pointed to the case he’d set down beneath the table. “On your guitar.”

  “It’s belong to a friend of mine,” Burney said. “I hardly played it.”

  “That’s a shame,” she said as she moved off, picking up empties on her way back to the counter. She was shorter than Jewell, more rounded, and her hair was too dark and bunched up on her head. It would suit her, he thought, to let it grow out. Jewell always wore her hair long and on a bright day the sunlight would get caught up in it and follow her round till you couldn’t tell which were strands of hair and which of light. She thought it her best feature but that was her eyes and the bright sparks of curiosity that danced in them like fireflies in dark pools, especially when she saw something that excited her. Looking in those eyes could make any man feel alive.

  Outside, snow had begun to fall from the lead-coloured sky and Burney felt something nudge up against the dull edge of his pain, as though searching out some weak point. Something cold and immanent that, when he tried to focus on it, slipped away and left him dazed. That’s what happens when you spend too much time in the company of your own thoughts, Jewell would’ve said. You dwell on them long enough and you find things you never knew were there. A look or a word that you had thought meant one thing, meant something else entirely. Try emptying your mind, like people do when they meditate or practice yoga, she’d say. Lets you get in touch with your inner self. Burney believed he knew his inner self about as well as he wanted to. Besides, if he had known how to turn off his thoughts he would’ve flipped that switch a long time ago.

  He took out his cellphone and speed-dialled Jewell’s number. After ten seconds her answering service cut in. He broke the connection without leaving a message.

  A few solitary drinkers had staked out their places along the bar, and another two or three sat alone at the tables along the walls, staring into their drinks as if to divine their futures. Above the counter a silvered paper chain spelled out HAPPY NEW YEAR, and a string of coloured lights had been draped above the small wooden stage at the rear of the bar. A station wagon rolled into the parking lot out front. Four women dressed to the nines got out and came in the bar. Burney watched as they laughed and talked loudly about what they were going to drink. Jewell drank vodka with apple juice. She called it a vodkapple and her eyes would crinkle when she sipped, the same way they used to when he told her he loved her.

  Corinne brought his drink to the table. Burney took out a photograph and showed it to her. “You seen her before?”

  “Lemme see that.” Corinne took the picture, stared at it for a moment and shrugged. “I can’t say. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I guess I seen her once or twice.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  “With somebody?”

  “I can’t rightly say.”

  Burney nodded and took the photograph from her. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  Corinne walked away. She was younger than Jewell, by seven or eight years. He tried to remember what he and Jewell had been like at her age, the kind of dreams they had shared. They’d never imagined themselves past thirty and still in Knoxville. Not Jewell, anyway. She would have seen herself escaped into some other, more wondrous part of the world, away from the dead weight of the past. Except nobody ever really escaped their history, not entirely. Eugene was proof enough of that, he thought. Eugene Habron who, twelve years back, had set out with not much more than a guitar, a bunch of songs and a notion that he was all done with Knoxville. Burney could still remember the calls Eugene had made the first years after he had gone. Calls in which he built up his minor successes into something bigger than they actually were. He got a band together in Nashville and one time Burney took Jewell to see them support Lambchop at Douglas Corner Café. For months afterward every time Eugene called, he’d remind Burney how Kurt Wagner had told him his band were “pretty fucking tight.”

  He’d moved down to Austin and had managed to sell a half dozen songs, one of which Steve Earle had covered. They’d lost touch three or four years ago and Burney had figured Eugene was still out there somewhere, chasing his empty dreams. So it had come as a surprise, six months back, when his friend had returned. Recognising the diminution of the determination to make something of himself that had once defined Eugene Habron, had been a painful reminder to Burney of his own faded aspirations.

  A crowd of people came in the bar wrapped up against the cold. One woman wore a red ski jacket, the hood pulled tight over her head. He had bought Jewell a jacket just like it on a visit to Chicago a while ago. They had never skied but she liked the jacket and always wore it when the weather turned cold. Inside it, with the hood pulled up, she looked like a small bear. She growled like one too, when he made love to her. It was a secret thing between them.

  There was a hunger inside Jewell that scared him. She was always wanting to go places she’d never been, to see things she might not otherwise see. One time they took the Greyhound Bus to New York, and stayed five days in a cheap hotel in Queens. She’d dragged him all over the city, to bars and clubs she’d read about, to museums and galleries, all of them blurring into one another in her quest to see everything she wanted. In the Museum of Modern Art she’d talked endlessly about the works on display, trying to make him see what she saw but it had been too much and after three hours his mind had begun to melt. On their last night in the city Jewell told him she could see herself living there one day. It was just a dream though, one of those flimsy notions people sometimes get and work at till they’re convinced it’s something they really want, like a child thinking she can grow up to be a movie star. No harm in those kind of dreams, Burney knew, long as you kept both feet on the ground.

  A red-haired girl in a ripped skirt, black fishnet stockings and Nick Cave t-shirt approached his table and stood there, a cigarette dangling from her lips. They were as black as the hollows around her ey
es. “Can I get a light mister?” she said, scowling nervously, light bouncing off the silver stud through her nose.

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “What’re them?” She gestured at the softpack of Newport Lights he had put on the table.

  He stared at the pack for a moment. “Not mine,” he said.

  She held his gaze for a few seconds, as if she sensed a weakness in him. He was glad when she muttered “whatever,” and turned away. Alone, he picked up the empty pack, crushed it, and let it fall to the table. Nothing left, he reminded himself, thinking about Jewell, only a cold certainty that turned his heart to stone.

  *

  At ten that morning, Burney had parked his truck across the street from the small, two-storey house off Kingston Pike. Paint peeled from the walls and the roof shingles needed an overhaul. The lower half of the downspout had come loose from the upper and the wind had pushed it six inches or so out of plumb. A cane blind hung lopsided in the front room window. A dusting of snow covered the scrub of grass that passed for a front lawn and a crate of empty bottles stood on the ground beside the stoop. A stand of naked, crabby trees lent the house a forlorn indignation, as if to disavow its own sorry state.

  Burney called Eugene’s number on his cell. After a few seconds Eugene’s voice came on the line. “If I’m not here then I guess I’m elsewhere. Try me later.”

  Burney got out of the truck. His breath misted in the wintry air as he crossed the street. The doorbell didn’t work so he knocked loudly and waited. Nobody came to the door. He took a key from his denim jacket and tried it, and wasn’t surprised when it opened the door. In the cramped hallway he called out, “Hey there, Eugene. You home?”