Exhaustion flowed through Moon’s veins, tugging at his consciousness. He nodded and lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and barely felt her lay down beside him. He hoped she understood that this meant nothing, that it was only a dream.
*
I am falling through a hole in the world but the sense of weightlessness is liberating. I feel curious like I haven’t felt in years. I come down in a soft, cool place where the air brushes against my face like the breath of a lover. I keep my eyes closed, not wanting to disrupt the illusion. Other senses tell me all I need to know. Brittle whispers scuttle across the floor like curious spiders, looking to sound me out. I feel safe here.
And then the voice confirms what I feel. “You came back.” It sounds familiar, and I can almost picture the face that speaks the words. I move forward through the darkness, walking across a spongy surface and each compressive step I take sends blue filaments into the air, ribbons of memory that attach themselves to my arms and legs, wrapping me in the colours of the past.
These threads of time have something to say. “You were always coming back,” is the message they imprint on my flesh. The meaning isn’t lost on me; it takes my breath away and when I peek through my fingers at this lost world, I feel that old familiar need. I can also sense the hurt that lingers in these memories of desire but I don’t shy away from them. Not even when something wet and slick touches my chest, sinks right through my skin and sets me in motion. It feels good to be back. I know this is where I belong. The only thing I don’t know is whether or not I came of my own accord.
*
Grey light filtered in through a crack in the curtains. Moon sat up, unsure of his surroundings. He was alone. His brain felt like it had been scraped raw while he slept. It hurt to think and for a moment he imagined he was still dreaming. The sweat cooling on his body told him otherwise. Strands of the dream lingered in his mind, offering glimpses of a life he wasn’t sure had been his. The mildewed walls with their black stains like runes, seemed to suggest he had taken on the dreams of others who had slept there. Even so, he felt a weird sense of elation.
On the landing, he remembered where he was but not why. It was like déjà vu but without the clarity. Voices rose up as he descended the spiral staircase. This could have been your life. A life that amounted to something more than what you have now, peopled by those you lost along the way. It felt real and enticing but just beyond his grasp. It’s not real, he told himself. He hadn’t dreamt in years. His Reverie habit put paid to that.
On the second floor he realised the voices were real. He followed the sound to the room the girl had showed him last night. He stood, listening for a moment, before pushing the door open. She sat on the mattress listening to a guy crouched in front of her, telling her it was no big deal. “It’s not what you’re thinking, babe. He’s on the level, really. They take care of you so you don’t hardly feel a thing. I’m gonna do a trial run, first. He already gave me the stuff.” The girl caught sight of Moon. She looked away but the guy noticed the movement. He turned and glared up at Moon. “Who the fuck are you?” He rose and took a couple of steps forward, fists clenched by his sides. “Get the fuck out of here!”
Moon stared at him. A couple of years older than the girl—you could tell by the hollow eyes and the pallor of his skin. He was restless and twitchy, and there was a slight tremor in his limbs. Moon spoke to the girl. “You all right?” The guy glanced at her and back again. “Hey, don’t speak to her! Look at me.” The girl stood. “It’s okay, Lucas,” she said, her voice strained. “He helped me last night.” Lucas wiped sweat from his face. “Helped you?” “She was looking for you,” Moon said. “And some guy spooked her.” “Looking for me? Fuck, Shan. I told you everything would be okay.” “How can it be okay?” she said. “When you’re gonna let them hurt you?” “I know what I’m doing, Goddammit,” Lucas said, an edge in his voice. “Haven’t I took care of you since we came, huh? Haven’t we been—” Moon interrupted. “Maybe you should ask her how she is?”
“This ain’t your business, man. What is it you want, anyway?”
“Nothing from you.” “Well why don’t you get lost? She’s my business. I take care of her.” Moon waited for the girl to speak up. When she didn’t, he gave her a nod. “Looks like your man’s got things under control.”
Outside, beneath an ash-colored sky, Moon headed towards the station. He checked his phone and found three messages. After half a block he heard the girl calling. “Wait,” she said, as she caught up with him. “Lucas didn’t mean anything. He’s not himself, really.” “I don’t care who he is,” Moon said. “He’s all I got. Since I ran off, nobody’s ever looked out for me the way he does.” She stood with her hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched up around her chin. “He’s not so bad, really.”
“Is that right?”
She sighed and rolled her head like she was working out a kink. “I trust him. He never made me do anything I wasn’t willing to. I knew what I was getting into when we came here.”
“You did? So what is Lucas getting you into now?”
“This dude’s we been working for, selling Rev, y’know? He told Lucas there was something else that might suit him. Said it would mean he wouldn’t have to be on the streets. Said he’d set up a meet with his boss. That’s where Lucas went yesterday.”
“He tell you what it involved?”
The girl looked embarrassed. “I told him I’m not doing it,” she said.
“We were doing all right, just dealing. He uses a little too much, but it’s no big deal. But since yesterday, the way he talks, the plans he’s making—”
The kid was a dreamer, Moon knew. “You take Rev?”
“I tried it but I don’t need drugs to dream. I got my dream right here.” She tapped the side of her head. “I carry it with me all the time.” She paused, looked him in the eye. “I thought you could talk him out of it.”
“We talked. It didn’t go so well.”
“Last night you said—”
“Last night I was drunk,” he cut her off. “If I was sober, it would’ve been different.”
She held his gaze. “I don’t think he knows what he’s getting into.”
Moon felt a headache coming on. “Kids like you never do.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Whatever it is, it’s never good.”
“Then talk to him, please. Why’d you stay with me last night if you didn’t want to help?” Her persistence unnerved him. “Look, girl—you asked me to.”
“It’s Shannon.”
“What is?”
“My name. It’s not girl. I’m nineteen.”
He wondered what it took to get through to her. “I can’t help you.” She chewed her lower lip and started to speak but Moon turned away. He got into a cab outside the station. As the vehicle turned into the traffic, he glanced back and saw her watching him, an accusatory look on her face that implied he owed her something. She was wrong, there was nothing between them.
She was a mouthy one, for sure, he thought. Maybe she’d come to her senses and head back to wherever it was she had come from. Except it never happened that way. These kids came to Provenance chasing all kinds of dreams. Not because they really believed they could make them real, but because dreams were better than whatever it was they’d come here to escape.
The cab dropped him in Wharfdale where he rented a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor. He showered and changed, and dug out a pack of low-grade Rev, the kind of shit he never touched when he was in his prime. In those days, he was a cartographer of dreams. It was a more elite clientele back then, when the drug had first been imported into Provenance by a man named Astorbilt. They said it was the Koreans who’d first synthesized it. They called it Deet but Astorbilt’s people marketed it as Reverie, the active agent of which stimulated the production of endogenous dimethyltryptamine in the brain. It made dreaming a sharper, more vivid experience, one that gave dreamers a measure of awareness. Some dreamers were able
to cultivate this awareness to the extent they could control their dreams. Moon was one of them.
That’s why Drake had sought him out. He recognised that if Moon could infiltrate the dreams of others, there was money to be made. He was trying to impress Astorbilt, and sold him on the idea helping wealthy men to indulge their most forbidden fantasies in the security of dreams.
That’s the past, Moon reminded himself. You don’t dream anymore. Last night was an aberration. He stuffed the drugs in his jacket and headed downtown. In a cafe on Sequoyah he drank black coffee and read the headlines in a newspaper someone had left behind. At noon he left the cafe and took the metro to Cockaigne where he sold three pills to a musician who dreamed he was a star. On Fourth and Ivy he sold another six pills to a failed comedian called Soapy who’d brought along a much younger girl she said was going to dream with her. Moon figured she’d try to dream herself funny again, if she ever had been. By early afternoon, he was done.
Back at the apartment he stripped down to his shorts and streamed Brad Anderson’s Detour to his TV. This was his habit now, instead of dreams. Old Noir movies. Nothing much after 2000. They made him feel good about himself; there was a certain pleasure to be had in watching guys like Al Roberts fuck their lives up over women like Vera. He poured himself a large Mule Train and watched Bill Pullman nurse a coffee in a diner and act like a man who hadn’t yet realised his dream was a lie. He was still someone who could believe that hitching a ride with Charlie Haskell was a lucky break instead of the wrong turn that would lead him to Linda Fiorentino and his own undoing.
But for once, he couldn’t lose himself in the film. It wasn’t the booze so much as the traces of the dream that still lingered in his mind. He hadn’t dreamt in years—not without Reverie. And he hadn’t taken a single dose in almost four years. Towards the end, it had stopped working, no longer transporting him to the places he wanted to go. It had simply left him on a dull, featureless plain, devoid of colour and texture, the way he imagined death to be. He felt tense and irritable, and cramps tightened the muscles in his limbs. It felt like the early stages of withdrawal, which was crazy. He knew it was something else but he was wary of bringing it out into the open. It pressed against the back of his eyes, thrumming like the wings of some frantic insect demanding to be set free. The dream and something about going back. The memory had wormed its way up out of his unconscious. Something reaching for him, pulling him back to the past. He stopped the film and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep. His mind raced. It wasn’t just the dream, he realised. There was the girl. He couldn’t get her out of his head. She’s just an illusion, he told himself. There’s nothing you can do for her and you have nothing she wants.
*
Early evening was dead time in The Coal Train. A couple of drunks were passed out in a corner booth and the prostitute at the counter who’d given Moon a quick glance when he’d entered, had evidently decided that he wasn’t worth the effort. He figured she was right and drank a schnapps and half a bottle of Anchor Steam, and tried to forget about his day. The only valid reason anyone had for being there was to forget, and for him this erasing of the days had become habitual. It beat remembering how things used to be. The city was made up of outsiders. Refugees, immigrants, people on the run from history. Provenance gave them a chance to create new identities for themselves. He stared at the washed-out man in the mirror behind the counter and saw no trace of the dream that he’d had of himself. He looked older than his twenty-nine years, like a man whose good times were already behind him.
From across the street the row of dormers that swept across the roof of the Orpheum looked like sharpened teeth. He waited for the voice in his head to tell him to go home, but it didn’t come. It was the dream that brought him back. He thought it had meant something, which was crazy because he knew better than most that looking for purpose in dreams was like trying to follow whispers in a fog. Forget meaning—what you want is to feel something again. Something real.
The foyer seemed different. The damp-stained walls were brighter somehow, and the smell of rot less pervasive. It was as though the process of decay had been temporarily suspended. As he approached the grand staircase, he heard a voice. “I knew you’d come back.”
The girl stepped out of a shadowed alcove, her face obscured beneath the hooded top. Moon waited until she approached. “How?”
“I just did.” She rubbed her hands together as though trying to knead the cold from them.
“You have too much faith in people. Where’s your boyfriend?”
She shrugged and asked him for a cigarette. Her hand shook as she held the cigarette while he lit it. “They gave him some kind of high grade Rev,” she said. “Lucas said it took him places he’s never been before.”
“There’ll be a price to pay.”
Shannon inhaled and held the smoke. “I guess he’ll find out this evening. This dude he’s working for is taking him to meet some people.”
“Did he say who they were?”
“No.” She sat on the bottom step and took another drag. “Lucas has these ideas, y’know? He makes plans but these guys he’s got in with, I think they’re using him. I told him that but he doesn’t always listen to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I couldn’t stay in my room alone. Too many freaks wandering about and I was scared that asshole who grabbed me might come back. I went looking for where you took me last night but I got lost up there. So I been hiding down here where I can see who comes and goes.”
“You’re going to stay here?”
She nodded. “I won’t walk out on him.”
Moon shook his head. “I’ll take you to the room, if you want.”
“Why’re you helping me?”
“Does it matter?”
“Tell me your name.”
“I’m Garrett.”
She nodded and followed him upstairs. Moon tried to figure whether he had come back for her sake or for the chance to dream again. Both were illusions. Neither had anything real to offer. The girl would bring him nothing but grief. And the days when he had been able to shape his own dreams were long since gone.
In the room, she lay down on her side and hugged her knees to her chest. He felt wary of sleeping, despite the compulsion that smouldered in his head. Her eyes followed him as he moved to the window but she said nothing. How easily did she dream, he wondered, tempted to ask her about them. Outside on Hennepin, vines and creepers twisted up around the streetlights, and strange nightflowers blossomed along the wires slung between utility poles. The window glass misted under his breath and he saw the beginnings of a face there. Voices whispered from beneath the floorboards. He looked to see if Shannon had heard them but her eyes were closed. He joined her on the bed.
*
The featureless walls tell me nothing at first, but as I walk I begin to notice the stains that slide along the surface and coalesce into topographical patterns that could be a map of the road I’m walking on. The sound of distant tides seems to confirm that I’m following the right trail. Stopping outside an unnumbered door I press an ear to it, hearing the ebb and flow of water beneath the sound of my own breathing. The door opens and I step inside. At the far end of a small wooden pier, a girl in a floral patterned dress sits with her feet dangling above the lake. She has her back to me and seems unaware of my presence. “Keep the night burning, baby,” she sings. “See the smile on your face.” Something stirs inside me, something that hurts so bad I can barely move. But the song draws me on and I walk onto the pier only for the girl to fall silent. After a second or two she speaks and I stumble to a halt. “I knew you’d come back.” I try to tell myself it’s not me she’s talking to. “That’s why I waited.”
I give up the pretence, even though I don’t know who she is. She starts to turn, her face slowly shedding time as it comes into view. Her name is on my lips but before I can say it I sink through the pier into the dark water.
There’s a light up
ahead and I’m drawn to it like a moth. I surface in another room where the air is warm and soft-edged like butter against my skin. I feel a sense of urgency as a parade of strange thoughts crowd into my brain. They don’t feel like my own. I reach out but can’t get a hold on them. Maybe I’m trying too hard. I wait and after a while a familiar scene fades into view. It’s the room in which I’m sleeping. There’s Shannon on the bed beside me. I can feel the vibrations of her own fretful dreams. The sensation unnerves me and I pull away and tumble into another dream.
The world slips by with giddy speed but I think and move in slow motion. Laughter spills across the void and Lacey tells me she doesn’t dream the way I do. But then, nobody does. There is a design to what I dream and because of that, others have designs on me. My arms stretch out into the darkness and my fingers touch Lacey’s face. I tell her I’ll dream enough for both of us. Light flickers and images spill across my gaze. I hold a strip of film and see her silhouetted in the frames. This is who we were, she says. You and me, dreamers of our own world. Untouchable, forever. It can still be this way, Lacey says. If you want it enough.
Forever lasts only as long as it takes for the dream to run its course.
There’s no way to tell if it really is Lacey, because as I run the film through the light, I see a face with no features. There’s just an expanse of flesh pulled over a skull, a few indentations and protrusions to indicate where eyes and mouth and nose should be. “Are you her?” I ask, but she has no mouth with which to respond.
A clown with feet for hands steps out of the reel. “She’s a distraction,” he says. “You must see that.”
“Show her to me,” I ask. “Let me help her see what I see.”
The clown tap-dances across a keyboard, spelling it out. “We have other things in mind for her.”
Other things in mind, but not in mine or Lacey’s. They don’t say what these other things might be. Time crawls by and takes her away. I don’t know if this is Lacey’s, but it feels just like the kind of second-hand dream she was always chasing. I should never have come. I try to dream her back the way I used to. She never came then but she does now. She squeezes my arm and says, “I always knew you were coming back.”
The Dream Operator Page 28