by Melanie Tem
He’d have to go home soon; it was getting late. His mother would already be worried, and he’d be in trouble if he wasn’t inside by the time his father got home from work. Children were allowed a few minutes of twilight sometimes, but none of them had ever seen real night. The evening routine was much the same when Stuart spent the night at a friend’s house as at his own. Before sundown they were fed dinner, and then the parents talked to them quietly about the day, while outside the kitchen window the sky took on more and more of the dusty opaque color of smoke.
Some parents, Stuart had observed, were better at this part than at others. His mother was very good. She talked to him soothingly about how to think about what had happened today and how to imagine what was going to happen tomorrow. Then she popped his pill into his mouth—cherry, raspberry, apple—and, while it was taking effect, sang to him. Not all parents sang. His mother’s songs were about light and color and uncomplicated love.
It never took very long for him to fall asleep, and when he awoke it was always morning. Even lately, when he’d been dreaming about dark flying things with teeth and tails, he never said so in the face of the bright morning sunshine and his mother’s bright morning songs.
His father wasn’t home very much these days, but if he was Stuart wouldn’t even get the singing and the gentle talking after dinner. He’d taste the pill in his milk—as if his father thought he might not take it otherwise—and he wouldn’t even get to see the sky turn gray, let alone black. He’d have to dream it, or imagine it for himself.
Just as, he allowed himself to admit for the first time, he had started to imagine the night. And other bad things without names. And dragons.
Stuart sighed, and must have tugged at the kite string, for the dragon swooped invitingly down at him. Its fanged mouth—a red-lined slit in the long thin black muzzle—was open and curved up as if it were hideously grinning. He reached with his free hand for one of its wings, but it bobbed and backed away out of his reach.
The wind swelled to fill the kite, opening it farther and farther. The kite changed shapes like the clouds in the sky, but these shapes, he knew, were dark, evil. Guiltily, he knew many of their names, although he’d never seen any of them outside the books he kept hidden from his parents. Long shiny black sides, scaled like a snake’s. Wings like a huge bat’s; he’d read that bats were blind but could always find you, that their wings were pronged and sticky and got tangled in your hair. Many legs like a spider’s, spinning a mysterious web of poison.
It occurred to Stuart that Eliahedron would know about snakes and bats and spiders, that probably he’d seen the real things, that maybe he’d know names for other creatures the kite was turning into. He glanced over at his new friend, and realized with a start how low the sun was, how gray and thick the sky. He had to be getting home. The dragon—snake, bat, spider, nameless creature with teeth and claws and spinning dark thoughts—rose through the evening sky, and Stuart recklessly tried to imagine himself flying with it, filling with wind and excitement, soaring, becoming more than he’d ever been before.
“Stuart!”
His mother’s voice on the belt unit was soft, but insistent. The sky above the dragon was turning dark and smoky in earnest now. If he waited much longer, his mother and maybe his father would come looking for him, and then they’d see the dragon, and then they’d know. “I gotta go,” he said to Eliahedron.
His new friend nodded. When he moved his head like that, colors rippled and black sparks flew. Stuart stared, then turned his gaze back to the dragonkite. Reluctantly, but with concentrated effort, he imagined it back into the kite his parents had given him, Snake scales elongated, softened, became yellow and pink feathers. The head grew rounder; the jagged snout became a bright blue beak. The wings fluttered, turned fluffy and rainbow-hued. The wind stilled, and the bright bird-of-paradise drifted to settle companionably at Stuart’s feet.
Eliahedron clapped his hands and said softly, “Bravo!”
“I gotta go.” Stuart gathered up the pretty kite, folded it into its carrying pouch, and turned to leave.
“I’ll walk you home,” Eliahedron said, catching up to him.
Stuart didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t have time to think about it. He raised a hand in hasty acquiescence, and together they headed across the brilliant green park—between the rose garden and the lilac bushes, both in full bloom—toward Stuart’s home.
In the rose-colored house where Stuart lived, his mother waited anxiously at the wide picture window in the kitchen, adjusting the range controls to keep her son in focus as he hurried down the long hill toward home. Someone else was with him, a small thin figure she didn’t recognize at this distance, and she didn’t like that. But the impossible green of the grass, the very bright hues of the flowers calmed her somewhat, and thinking how Stuart would picture the house in his mind before he got here: white Colonial columns accenting the wraparound porch, lacy Victorian gingerbread at the peaks and eaves, delicately curved polycomposites outlining doors and windows. It was easily the nicest house in the compound, the most finely imagined. She was very proud of her son.
The sky was in her viewer, too, lowering and darkening alarmingly. Stuart had gone farther than he was supposed to and was later getting home. Night would fall very soon; they’d have to eat dinner the minute Stuart walked in the door, and there’d be precious little time for talking and singing. Fortunately, she and some of the other parents had been discussing just the other day that the children didn’t seem to need so much of that now that they were older, more independent, surer of themselves and their abilities.
Across the street, kitchen lights in the long, low, crystal-white Sanchez house and in the Bartholomews’ peach-colored dome had been on for some time, and she’d seen Abby Sanchez and Michael Bartholomew come home almost an hour ago. The huge yellow flowers on Abby’s mother’s apron and the red ones on the one Michael’s father wore had glowed cheerfully in the sun, which had still been high and bright. The flowers on Stuart’s mother’s apron were shades of purple, his gift to her because, when the aprons suddenly became so popular, she’d mentioned to him that her great-grandmother used to wear one like them, made, however, of polyester and cotton.
All over the compound, good parents in bright flowered aprons had already gathered their children inside, safely beating the darkness. Stuart’s mother bit her lip. She shouldn’t have let him stay out so long, wander so far; she should have made him come home. He loved the park, would play there all day every day if she’d let him; whenever she watched him race up over the brow of the hill and disappear out of her sight, she was profoundly uneasy, for the park was a place utterly beyond her imagination.
Hearing the heavy basement door slide open, she knew that her husband was home. She sighed in relief—he was later than usual, too—and consternation—he’d be angry to discover that Stuart wasn’t home yet and, if he’d been just a few minutes later himself, he’d never have known.
She stood with her fists in the apron pockets, debating. She should go downstairs to welcome her husband home, to help him change, but if they were both in the basement when Stuart came home he’d want to come down, too, and they couldn’t, of course, have that. So she contented herself with listening to her husband’s movements, cataloguing them to herself.
Now he was taking off his weapons, armor, mask; she heard the storage compartment behind the basement door whisper open and then shut again, heard the tiny pop as it sealed. Now he’d be unfastening his uniform and stepping out of it; uncounted times she’d watched it pool around his bare ankles like melted skin, watched him scoop it up distastefully and deposit it into the chute that led somewhere deeper than their basement—neither of them had any idea where. Now the shower came on; she could hear the hum. Although he was disinfected before he left work, he always stayed in the shower longer than he needed to, far longer than was recommended, letting the rays and the vibrations massage his skin until it felt loose on the bone, before
finally getting into the soft, loose clothing she had ready for him on the bench.
As he came up the stairs now, she heard him sniffing. She frowned; it was an irritating, unsettling habit, this constant sniffing for the odor that he said would not go away.
She turned back to the window as he came into the room. The more distant window of the sky was filled with thick gray-black, like the smoke she knew he’d been in all day. “He’s not home yet?” She clearly heard the criticism in his voice.
She didn’t turn around. “Almost. He’s just across the street. He took his kite to the park again.”
“His kite? I didn’t think he much liked it when we gave it to him.”
“I know, but lately he’s been taking it out almost every day. He comes home for lunch and then goes right back out again.”
“What about the other children?” She heard him rubbing his palms up and down the soft fabric of his pants, as if trying to get something off his hands. Another habit he’d developed lately.
“He doesn’t play with the other children anymore.”
“Not at all?”
“Very little.”
He leaned past her. “Who’s that with him?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite tell. One of the children from the other side of the compound. Maybe he’s just developed new friendships.”
“Dressed in black?”
She waved at the window as if at the coming night. “Hush now. Here he comes. We don’t want him to hear.” She turned and looked at him, put her hands on his shoulders, lightly kissed him. “Stop imagining things. You might imagine the worst.”
He leaned his forehead against her. He was always very tired when he got home from work, and tonight he seemed on the edge of exhaustion. “He imagines better than the rest of us. Better even than the other children.”
“Well, of course. We’ve always known that. What are you trying to say?”
He shrugged and pulled away from her as Stuart came in the front door. The window had faded completely to a dull gray that would very soon be black. “Let’s just eat and get him to bed. As soon as we can.”
Stuart dreamed, as he’d done every night of his life. He always remembered his dreams, of course, and deliberately replayed them in his mind, as he’d been taught, while he awoke into the sunny mornings. All the children did that, some better than others.
Their dreams were of the same piece, the same every night and the same as each others’. First there was always the sky, the hard line of it, the bubble that contained everything they knew and loved, the bell whose model sat at the front of every classroom and whose likeness hung on the wall of every kitchen so that parents and teachers could emphasize a hundred times a day in a hundred ways how vital a shape it was to them all. Every morning all the children, in concert and in their own minds, recreated the sky, refined and strengthened it, and then the world inside it. Every morning when they awoke it was all really there, and they all lay until their breakfasts were ready, imagining it all wakefully, fixing it in place.
Stuart and the others knew some of the story; the older they got, the more they were taught, in careful increments, at home and at school. The children were capable of imagining things that their parents couldn’t, because of something that had been done to them before they were born—before they were conceived, Stuart guessed, although it embarrassed him to think about that. “A great experiment,” some grownups called it; “the two years of hope.”
Stuart’s father sometimes referred to it simply as “the salvation.” For a long time Stuart hadn’t known what that meant, but he was beginning to understand it now and it made him nervous, thinking about his part in it.
Stuart listened sleepily to his father getting ready for work, as he did every morning, and incorporated the familiar sounds into his imaginings. His father leaving for work was part of the pleasant order of his life and the life of the compound.
Soon it would be time for him to get up, dress in his soft, bright, very clean clothes, and have breakfast with his mother, who would sing and touch his hair. Then he would go to the park. He thought of the kite, red and blue and feathery in its pouch on the shelves across the room, and did not think beyond that. He thought of the brilliant green of the park, the smell of the sunshine, the feel of the ground springy under his feet, and did not think of Eliahedron except to put him out of his mind.
“I’m a soldier.” His father was talking to his mother, who must already know that. Stuart hadn’t known that. He listened. “I imagine war. That’s my job and I’m good at it. I imagine faces exploding, cities collapsing, skin burning blue-hot, trees charring from the inside out.”
“Oh, honey.” If she was trying to make him feel better, Stuart wondered, why didn’t she just sing? Somewhat petulantly, he started to imagine it, but stopped when she went on. “You are good at your work, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You keep the war away from us, you keep it outside the bell. If the soldiers did less, then what would happen to us? That’s important work.”
“It’s primitive work. It’s pushing away, and shouting away, and thrusting and striking and gnashing and killing—it’s what I think about each day, what I fill those waking dreams I have at the control center with. Dreams human beings have been having since the apes, no better.”
“It’s what you have to do. You have no choice, if we’re to live as we do.”
“There’s more to it than that. The truth is, I—enjoy isn’t the right word. I need it. I’m addicted to it. The energy of it, the color. The battles take me out of myself somehow, elevate me to a higher plane. They excite me.”
Hearing that, Stuart found himself imagining the dragonkite, huge and black because he imagined it that way, cutting frighteningly through the sky because he imagined it that way, threatening either to pull the kite string out of his hands or to yank him up into the sky himself.
“But,” his father went on, “I never can imagine the compound. The living trees, those enormous bright flowers the kids like so much, this house. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine this place. So every time I come home, it’s a revelation to me.”
Now his mother sounded impatient. She didn’t talk like this very often, and he listened carefully. “But you know that. We’ve all always known that. That’s what the compound is all about, have you forgotten? That’s why Stuart is who he is.”
Killing. Fire. Smoke. Dragons. If Stuart’s parents found out that now he had those bad images in his mind, too, they’d try to take them away from him.
Dutifully, he lay in bed a while longer and imagined, as all the other children all around the compound were doing. The pretty houses, the loving families, the aprons with flowers, the smooth blue sky. But he was bored. It all seemed so ordinary, so easy and plain. His thoughts kept sneaking off to his father’s war, and to the dragonkite, and to his new friend Eliahedron who might already be waiting for him in the park.
“Did you know,” Eliahedron asked him, “that dreams sometimes used to upset their dreamers? That dreams used to sometimes be about bizarre things that people were afraid to think about while they were awake?”
Stuart kept his attention on the dragonkite, black and scary and beautiful against the still blue sky. The kite was flying so high and fast now that he thought it might be bumping against the bell, scratching it, tearing holes with the sharp tips of its wings. He didn’t reel it in, although he was confident that he could if he wanted to.
He wouldn’t answer Eliahedron, either. Everybody knew that it was dangerous to talk about, or, worse, to think about anything bad.
“What kind of things?”
At first, Stuart thought that Eliahedron was talking to himself, had asked himself the question. Then he had to admit that his own mouth had moved, that the voice asking the question—asking it again—was his.
“What things?”
“War,” came the prompt reply.
At first Stuart thought that he himself had somehow given the answer
, that now he was talking to himself. In fact, he did seem to feel the vibrations of the forbidden words in his own throat as Eliahedron uttered them.
“Violence. Cruelty. Death.”
“If they dreamed things like that,” he demanded, not sure he should believe any of this, “then how did they make the world?”
“The world had bad things in it. As worlds must.”
“And if they dreamed things like that, what did they imagine?”
“All sorts of things. Evil things. Boring things. A few were able to imagine peace. And love. And beauty. Other choices, to go beyond the bad. But that’s always been hard, and in order to do it they had to use everything.”
“Everything?” Stuart repeated in a small voice.
“Imagine, Stuart,” Eliahedron urged softly.
Suddenly the dragonkite leaped. The string stretched taut and cut into Stuart’s hands. Then it relaxed, and the kite floated rapidly downward. Stuart rewound the string frantically, afraid it would tangle, and at the same time found the exact spot in the sky where the kite had been. There was a slit, a tiny break in the sky. Already, gray-black smoke was seeping in.
“Stuart,” Eliahedron murmured again from somewhere behind him. “Imagine.”
“I can’t!”
“You’re talented. You’re the best I’ve ever seen. You can.”
“Leave me alone!” Stuart whirled to face this strange man and found that he had turned into other, terrible and enchanting things. A demon with a bloody mouth. A devil with horns.
“A demon is a god unrecognized,” Eliahedron whispered. “War is peace unimagined.”
Stuart wrenched his frightened gaze away from the leering, muttering Eliahedron in his many guises, but couldn’t get the creature completely out of his line of vision. Everywhere he looked, a piece of Eliahedron was there, both obscuring Stuart’s world and highlighting it.
Terrified, he looked for the kite. He couldn’t find it; he thought he’d lost it. The smoke drifting across the sky disoriented him as he squinted, tipped his head, turned from side to side. Eliahedron, some part or version of Eliahedron, was always there in his peripheral vision, confusing him. He heard distant sounds that he’d never heard before but recognized at once—sobbing, shrieking, Eliahedron’s imprecations which Stuart could have been making himself. A coppery odor filled his nostrils, and then his mouth was coated with it. He found it oddly stirring.