“Look! Just look!” And he gestured toward the middle of the yard, toward what used to be the towering oak tree. The oak tree towered once again. All signs of the lightning striking it had been erased and it loomed majestically over the yard. Situated at its top, as it had been for nearly as long as I could remember, was Zerostrata.
“Wow! You did fix it! How did you do that?”
“Remember when I fell out of Zerostrata the other day and my arm fell off?”
“How could I forget?”
“At first I thought it was something really serious like, ‘Oh, shit, my arm just fell off.’ But I didn’t let myself panic. I reached down and picked the arm up and knew I could put it back on my body with no problem at all. So I bent down and scooped it up and put it back on and it stayed there and it’s worked just like new ever since. So the next day, I went around and broke everything in the house I could find and then I tried to fix them using nothing but my hands to hold and my mind to fix the actual breakage, and I was able to do that too. So then I decided to tackle a really big project so I came out here and tried to do this and it worked. So I think I finally have my super special power and shouldn’t have any problem being Dad’s sidekick. Oh, and by the way, he no longer calls himself The Whirlwind. He said that was too nebulous and slightly confusing. He thought people would become leery about signaling him if he was called The Whirlwind because, you know, that sounds so destructive.”
“So what does he call himself now?”
“Now he’s The Commander.”
“The Commander. I think he called the other day.”
“I saw that. Mom really needs to learn how to take better messages.”
“I don’t think I really want to get any of the messages I’ve been getting.”
“No?”
“No.”
We stood in silence for a minute. I stared up at Zerostrata, feeling fatigue slug its way through my body. I wanted nothing more than to go up there and lie down on the warm wood floor, dozing off to sleep as the sun rose and filled it with light.
“So when are you thinking about heading out with The Commander?”
“I don’t know. I guess whenever he calls me up.”
“Well, if I’m not around when the time comes I want you to know I’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“I’ll come back.”
“Good.”
“So you don’t think you’re going to be around much longer either?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to be.”
“Things are going well with her, huh?”
“Better than I could have ever imagined.”
“That’s really good to hear.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m going to go in and get some rest. You going up?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, Mother has kept your room exactly the same for the past ten years. I think you would feel perfectly at home there.”
“But I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. I’d feel like an intruder. Or a nostalgic cynic, if such a thing exists.”
“Everything exists. You should know that by now.”
“I think I’m warming to the idea.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
I took the elevator up to Zerostrata, the lifting of darkness feeling like the lifting of some kind of security blanket.
Chapter Eighteen
Circus
I slept the next day away. Well, I slept as much of the day away as I possibly could. I woke up to the loudest racket imaginable. There was instant confusion upon opening my eyes. I was still not used to waking up in Zerostrata even though I wasn’t incredibly sure of where it was I had woken up before. The sun beamed into my eyes, bright and harsh. From somewhere below, there was something that sounded like the continual crashing of cymbals.
I went over to the window and looked down at the backyard.
Mother had hired a circus to come and perform. There was a large red and white striped tent that occupied the space from Zerostrata nearly to the back of the house. Around the tent, I could see the animal caretakers tending the circus animals. There were cheers and wild screams coming from inside the tent.
I had never really liked the circus and suddenly found myself wanting to be away. I imagined Mother and Mr. Donovan somewhere inside the tent, having a wonderful time, and that was enough for me. As long as someone was enjoying it. I took the elevator down to the bottom of Zerostrata, hopped on one of the circus camels and made my way to the edge of town. I instinctively knew where I was going. I had some things I wanted to discuss with Dr. Blast.
When I reached his office I wasn’t surprised to find he was no longer there.
Instead, there was a sloppily made piece of paper with his new location on it. It wasn’t any particular location. It was more like an area. This is what it said:
DR. BLAST’S OFFICE HAS MOVED. PLEASE VISIT HIM IN THE NEW OFFICE. GO TO THE OTHER EDGE OF TOWN AND LOOK FOR THE BOX.
So I hopped back on the camel and took it to the other edge of town. Halfway there, the camel told me its hooves hurt and I told it to keep on going, we didn’t have much further, but the camel revolted. He told me to get off and said he had to excuse himself. I did what the camel told me to do and hopped off. The camel turned and ran away on its hind legs.
The edge of town wasn’t as run down as it sounded. In fact, it was simply a middle class neighborhood. I didn’t think Grayson had anything that was lower than middle class. This made Dr. Blast’s office easier to find. His was the only box. Set up on the corner of a sidewalk in front of a Cape Cod-style house.
I wasn’t sure how one approached someone who lived in a box. I didn’t think it would be polite to simply barge in so I gently tapped on the cardboard.
He peered out of the tiny peephole he had poked into the cut-away door.
“Hansel?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Come in. Come in.”
I pulled the little cardboard door outward and stepped into his damp cardboard-smelling office as he stepped out.
“What’s with the new digs?” I asked.
“I had to scale down.”
“It’s cozy.”
“Certainly is and it gives me all I really need.”
And this was, apparently, nothing at all.
“Have you come for another session?”
“No, I just came to talk.”
“Okay. Well, start talking then. I’m just going to take off my clothes and lie on top of the box but don’t worry, I’ll be able to hear you just fine.”
We talked about nothing in particular until Dr. Blast said one of his neighbors had noticed him and he needed to get back in the box before they called the police. There wasn’t room for both of us so I left.
Chapter Nineteen
The Graveyard of Dreams
By the time I got back home the circus had cleared. I went into the house but there wasn’t anybody there. A note lay on the kitchen table. It said Mother and Mr. Donovan had retreated to an undisclosed location to get married and she was sorry no one was invited.
I went down to the basement to look for Zasper but he wasn’t there either.
I had left a circus and come back to nothing.
I wandered around the house. This was the first time in a very long time I had been completely alone in the house. It felt comfortable. It felt good. Maybe, for the first time, I saw the house as an entity unto itself. I thought about it as part of the family. Certainly, it had been there just as much as Mother and Father. It had been somewhere to come home to and somewhere to leave. It was indifferent but there was a comfort to this indifference. I didn’t have to try and impress the house. Whatever I did would be greeted with the same indifferent thereness.
I worked my way through the whole house. It was empty for being such a large house. One would think someone purchasing a house of this size would have a lot of things to fill it with. I kind of zoned o
ut by the time I had worked my way back to the kitchen. I looked out over the front lawn. It was sunny and beautiful. It was only a few days ago that it was dark and gloomy. And the gloominess had seemed more than simply weather-related. It had been all pervasive. It had seemed oppressive but now I was actually happy to be standing there.
The phone rang and I jumped.
I didn’t want to answer it. It had to be Gretel’s grandmother, calling to try and scare me with a series of hollow but malicious comments. Then I decided I had to answer it. I had grown to secretly enjoy the old woman’s spite.
“Hi there!” I said cheerfully as I picked up the receiver. To my surprise, it wasn’t Gretel’s grandmother at all, but my father.
“Hello there yourself. This is The Commander.”
“Oh... Hi, Dad.”
“Never mind that. Have you seen The Fixer?”
“I saw him this morning.”
I was sort of surprised that, of all people, my own father did not try and make even the smallest small talk with me. He didn’t sound like his old jovial self. His tone was clipped and impatient—as though he was in the midst of some ultra-important work.
“If you see him again you do The Commander a favor and tell him I’ve been looking for him. I need him. It’s urgent.”
“Okay.”
Then the phone clicked down on the other end. I imagined my father flying over someplace (did he fly?) across the globe, on his way to rescue a doomed schoolbus or drag people from a burning building or stop an evil thief from robbing a poor innocent family that happens to stumble down a dark alleyway. I imagined him calling from some kind of cell phone that had been professionally fit into the cuff of his costume. I wondered what kind of costume he had chosen. Was it as ridiculously sinister as Zasper’s black jumpsuit?
Realizing I still held the phone in my hand, I put it back on the wall and wandered outside to wait. It wouldn’t be long before she came to me. I waited, trying to lose track of time until I saw her round the second turn and then, suddenly, I wanted nothing but time. I wanted the seconds to grind by so slowly they felt like days.
“Come on, we have to hurry before we miss the bus.”
She grabbed my hand and led me through the backyard and out to the front of my house.
“Where are we going?”
“Oh, you’ll love it.”
So I followed her to the front of the house.
A yellow school bus waited out on the curb.
The bus driver saw us and pulled the doors open. Gretel walked up the wide rubberized stairs first and I followed her. She whispered something into the bus driver’s ear as we sat down in the wide green seat behind him.
The bus driver wore a fake mustache, sunglasses, and a curly brown woman’s wig. He was creepy looking. It was hard for me to imagine him driving a bus load of kids around. He fought hard to stay awake.
Gretel and I held hands in the seat. I stared intently at the road ahead as the bus driver turned into town. I noticed he had a name tag that said “Greg.” It was one of those name tags that was really just a sticker. Someone with very bad handwriting had written his name on it. Probably him.
He had a hard time driving in a straight line.
“Where was it you said you was goin again?” he bellowed.
“I didn’t,” Gretel said.
“Well that’s just great. Now I won’t know where to go.”
“Doesn’t matter, we’ll find it,” she said.
“Look... I’m lucky just to be able to see the road.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I’ve taken so many drugs that I should not be operating a motor vehicle.”
“Do you drive kids in this thing?” I asked. What I really meant to ask was if he drove kids in this thing in his current state.
“Yeah, that’s what I do during the day but at night I more or less steal the bus and operate it as my own cash cow.”
“And you haven’t been caught?” I asked.
“Naw. I ain’t too worried about it.”
“Are there a lot of people who ride your bus at night?”
“No, not really, I mostly drive it to various houses on drug runs. Nobody would think to pull over a school bus.”
“That’s good logic,” I said.
“Besides, I lost the insurance on my own vehicle a while back and being a bus driver keeps me in a set of wheels.”
He jerked the bus back onto the road after nearly hitting a parked car. “That was close,” he said.
Gretel and I talked easily the rest of the bus ride. I was crawling with anticipation. I was hoping our destination would be something like the moon but then I figured she probably wouldn’t be able to take me to the moon every night.
“I’m going to stop the bus here,” the driver said. “I’m way too high to drive any more and I think I need to crawl in back and take a little rest. You folks enjoy your evening.”
The pneumatic doors hissed open and we walked out into the cool night, the moon shining down with bright familiarity.
I followed Gretel up a hill into what looked like a graveyard. We were no longer in town. I wasn’t really sure where we were.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“This is the family cemetery.”
“Really? That sounds cheery.”
“Oh, it’s not as grim as you think it would be.”
I followed her deeper into the cemetery.
“This is my mother’s tombstone,” she said.
It looked like a perfectly ordinary, modest tombstone until Gretel reached out and pushed a button on the lower portion of it.
The tombstone came alive, glowing, images slowly forming.
“Is that a television?”
“Something like that. All of the tombstones in this graveyard... They all have complete documentaries of those who have died. I won’t subject you to the whole thing. Some of them are rather long.” She reached down and touched another hidden button on the tombstone. The image skipped forward quickly. “The really interesting thing about it is that, not only did the graveyard capture her life through the documentary, but it also captured her dreams.”
“Wow,” I said. “Are all of the dreams captured?”
“From all the people?”
“Yeah.”
“Most of them. Some people never dreamt and those are the only sad tombstones in here. The dreams are pretty various. Some people thought of grand things that could never have existed. Some people were just slightly ahead of their time, dreaming of inventions that wouldn’t be invented for another ten years. Some were amazingly behind their times, dreaming of places that existed thousands of years ago. Some people dream about fishing. Some people dream about reading, of all things. Some people dream about music and some of the music is really quite beautiful even though I can’t imagine what the instruments used to make it are.”
“What did your mother dream about?”
Gretel continued, ignoring my question.
“And another thing about the dreams is that you would be surprised to find out how many people’s dreams actually came true.”
“Then it’s not really a dream anymore, is it?”
“Of course it is.”
She reached the end of her mother’s documentary, how she met her death in a grisly car accident and then the picture became a more nebulous thing. These were her mother’s dreams. I don’t know how they were captured and I felt wrong for watching them.
“See,” Gretel said, referring to her mother’s dream. “The only thing my mother dreamed was that I would be happy. And, amazingly, she dreamed that I would find you.”
The image on the screen showed Gretel, wandering through a vast field of golden wheat. It was very bucolic and picturesque. In the distance, I could see myself, dressed like a Dutch boy and skipping along the field. I chuckled slightly at this image.
“Well, the dream isn’t always exactly the way it is in reality but, see, she had the way you look
ed right and everything.”
“Is that why I was the only one you paid attention to during your running? The pirates told me about all the dirty old men and young boys who had taken to waiting for you on your runs but you were unfazed by all of them because you knew exactly what you were looking for.”
“Now you know.”
“I certainly feel enlightened.”
We wandered around the graveyard some more, hand in hand. We were both most interested in the dreams. Some of them really were quite fabulous. There were things I could never have thought of. Buildings that didn’t look like any buildings I had seen, constructed with substances that existed only in the dreamer’s mind. There were books, perfect books, meant only for the person who read them. Each dream embodied a sense of perfection. Some of the dreams may not have been spectacular or lofty but there was a sense of rightness with them. A sense that, for the person who dreamed this particular dream, this was their idea of some utopia. Maybe this was their afterlife, for all I knew.
We slipped out of the graveyard, behind the graveyard, under a large tree. We took off our clothes and laid them on the ground. For the rest of the evening, we explored each other’s bodies and I saw my own dream landscape looming somewhere behind my eyes, taking shape with each inch of Gretel’s flesh I ran my lips across or tasted with my tongue. Our lovemaking was not frantic this time but slow. Every second throbbed with some infinitesimal amount of pleasure and the pleasure grew as the seconds passed. By the time each of us reached a climax, I was unaware of time or place. It could have just been us, floating alone through space.
I don’t know how I ended up back in Zerostrata. When I woke up, I was alone and it was late the next afternoon. At first, I felt like I had been cheated out of last night but, slowly, it came back to me and I was happy and the only thing that could have made me happier would have been to wake up with her lying there beside me.
Chapter Twenty
Piss
I decided there wasn’t any reason to leave Zerostrata but my bladder throbbed. That didn’t mean I had to leave. I stood up and crossed to the window. I unzipped and aimed high. As the urine fell from Zerostrata, my gaze wandered over the trees in the middle of the neighborhood.
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