Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  “Pick it up, you coprocephalic!” shouted Miz Smitcher.

  Ceese leaned over and picked up the baby.

  “Is it all right?” said Miz Smitcher.

  “Ain’t you gone ask if I’m all right?” demanded Ceese.

  “I know you all right, cause you giving me sass and acting stupid! Now what about that baby!”

  “He’s breathing,” said Ceese. “You got so many McDonald’s wrappers on the floor, I guess he didn’t hit all that hard.”

  “That baby plain determined not to die,” said Miz Smitcher. She flipped off the people behind her, who were honking their brains out. Then she turned on her blinkers like she thought that would make her car an ambulance, caught up with the truck, whipped around it, and kept on going at top speed till she lurched to a stop in the turnaround at the emergency entrance.

  Which is how Mack Street happened not to die under a pile of leaves in Baldwin Park, and instead got fostered out to Ceese’s neighborhood.

  Well, technically, he was fostered to Miz Smitcher, who took to calling him her little miracle, though more likely she felt guilty about jamming the brakes and throwing him onto the floor and she wanted to make sure if there was some brain damage or something, she’d be able to make it up to him.

  But Miz Smitcher worked nights and slept days, and baby Mack slept nights and yelled his lungs out while she was trying to sleep, so it turned out he was sort of fostered to whatever mother was home and willing to take him. Not a one of them took him to heart the way Miz Smitcher did, so mostly he just lay around until somebody remembered to feed him or wipe his butt, except when somebody’s kid decided he’d be a great baby doll or a cool squirmy football and incorporated him into a game.

  Some folks said that that was why Miz Smitcher gave him the last name Street—because he was raised by most every family on the block. Wasn’t a soul asked, and so not a soul was told, that Street was Miz Smitcher’s last name before she got married and divorced, and Mack was the nickname of her favorite uncle. Mack didn’t find it out till after she died and he went through her things. She just wasn’t much of a talker or a self-explainer. If she loved you, you’d have to guess it from her cooking and buying clothes for you, cause you’d never know it from a word or a touch.

  Still, despite the lack of affection in Mack’s life, he certainly didn’t lack for stimulation. Being fed mud pies or flying through the air as a forward pass is bound to keep a baby somewhat alert. By the time he started school he was pretty much fearless. He’d take any dare, seeing as how there was nothing he could be asked to eat or do that he hadn’t already eaten or done worse. “There’s an angel watching over that boy,” said Miz Smitcher, when somebody told her of another of the crazy things Mack did.

  Dare-taking was what he did to win a place, however strange it was, among the kids at school. It wasn’t where he lived.

  For Mack, the real excitement in his life came in dreams. It wasn’t till he was seven years old that he first found out that other people only dreamed when they were asleep. For Mack, dreams had a way of popping up day or night. It was the reason the other kids sometimes saw him slow down in the middle of a game and go sort of slack-jawed, staring off into space. When that happened, kids would just say, “Mack’s gone,” and go off and continue their game without him.

  Most dreams he could shrug off and pay no heed to—they weren’t worth missing out on recess time or getting barked at by grumpy teachers in school, the kind who actually expected their lessons to be listened to.

  But some dreams captivated him, even though he didn’t understand them.

  There was one in particular, it started when Mack was ten. He was in a vehicle—he wasn’t sure it was a car, because a car shouldn’t be able to drive on roads like this. It started out on a dirt road, with ragged-looked trees around, kind of a dry California kind of woods. The road began to sink down while the ground stayed level on both sides, till they were dirt walls or steep hills, and sometimes buttes. And the road began to get rocky, only the rocks were all the size of cobblestones, rounded like river rocks, and they hurtled along—Mack and whoever else was in the vehicle—as if the rocks were pavement.

  The rocks glistened black in the sunlight, like they’d been wet recently. The cobbly road started to go up again, steeper and steeper, and then it narrowed suddenly and they were almost jammed in between high cliffs with a thin trickly waterfall coming from the crease where the cliffs joined together.

  So they backed out—and here was where Mack knew it wasn’t him driving, because he didn’t know how to back a car. If it was a car.

  Backed out and headed down until the canyon was wide enough that they could turn around, and then they rushed along until they found the place where they had gone wrong. When the road reached the lowest point, there was a narrow passage off to the left leading farther down, and now Mack realized that this wasn’t no road, this was a river that just happened to be dry. And the second he thought of that, he heard distant thunder and he knew it was raining up in the high hills and that little trickle of a waterfall was about to become a torrent, and there’d be water coming down the other branch of the river, too, and here they were trapped in this narrow canyon barely wide enough for their vehicle, it was going to fill up with water and throw them down the canyon, bashing against the cliffs, rounding them off just like one of the river rocks.

  Sure enough here comes the water, and it’s just as bad as he thought, spinning head over heels, getting slammed this way and that, and out the windows all he can see is roiling water and stones and then the dead bodies of the other people in the vehicle as they got washed out and crushed and broken against the canyon walls and suddenly . . .

  The vehicle shoots out into open space, and there’s no cliffs anymore, just air on every side and a lake below him and the vehicle plunges into the lake and sinks lower and lower and Mack thinks, I got to get out of here, but he can’t find a way to open it, not a door, not a window. Deeper and deeper until the vehicle comes to rest on the bottom of the lake with fish swimming up and bumping into the windows and then a naked woman comes up, not sexy or anything, just naked because she never heard of clothes, she swims up and looks at him and smiles and when she touches the window, it breaks and the water slowly oozes in and surrounds him and he swims out and she kisses his cheek and says, Welcome home, I missed you so much.

  Mack didn’t have to take a psychology class to guess what this dream was about. It was about getting born way too soon. It was about getting to the lowest point, completely alone, and then he’d find his mother, she’d come to him and open the door and let him come back into her life.

  He believed his dream so much that he was sure he knew now what his mother looked like, skin so black it was almost blue, but with a thinnish nose, like those men and women of Sudan in the African Peoples book at school. Maybe I am African, he thought. Not African-American, like the other black kids in his class, but truly African without a drop of white in him.

  But then why would his mother have thrown him away?

  Maybe it wasn’t his mother. Maybe she was drugged and the baby was taken out of her and carried off and hidden and she doesn’t even know he was ever alive, but Mack knew he would find her someday, because the dream was so real it had to be true.

  Later he told the dream to a therapist—the one they sent him to about his “seizures,” as they called those trances when he stopped to watch a dream. The therapist listened and nodded wisely and then explained to him, “Mack, dreams come from deep inside you, some chain of meaning so deep it has no words or pictures, so your brain dresses it up in pictures that it already knows. So from deep inside there’s this idea of going down a passage that’s both a river and a road, so your brain makes it into a canyon and when it starts to push you and push you, your brain puts water in the dream, forcing you out, and when the deep inner story says that you plunge out into air, then you see it as a plunge out of a canyon, and then who comes and saves you? Your mother.
”

  “So you’re saying this is the way my brain makes sense of my memory of being born,” said Mack.

  “That’s one possible interpretation.”

  “There’s another?”

  “I haven’t thought of it yet, but there might be.”

  “But it’s my mother, anyway, like I always thought.”

  “I believe that in dreams, if it looks like your mother and you think it’s your mother, it’s your mother.”

  “Cool,” said Mack. All he cared about was that he knew what his mother looked like. Mack was as black as they come, but his mother was even blacker, and that was cool. But if she was under water, then that wasn’t so cool. He hoped that his dream didn’t mean that she was drowned. Maybe it just meant she swam a lot.

  Or maybe it didn’t mean a damn thing.

  That was the only one of his strong dreams in which he felt like himself, though, and the therapist didn’t have any explanation for that. “What do you mean, you don’t feel like yourself?”

  “I mean that in the dreams, I’m not me. Except that one about the road that turns out to be a river.”

  “Well, who are you then?”

  “Somebody different every time.”

  “Tell me about those dreams,” the therapist said.

  “I can’t,” said Mack. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “What do you mean? You can tell me anything.”

  “I can tell you my dreams,” said Mack. “But these ones ain’t mine.”

  The therapist thought that was totally crazy reasoning. “They’re in your head, Mack. That makes them yours!”

  And Mack couldn’t explain why he knew that the therapist was wrong, and they weren’t his own.

  He just knew that when he dreamed about finding himself as a baby, about his hands reaching down and picking up this infant, it wasn’t his dream, it was Ceese’s. Ceese still lived in the neighborhood, but he didn’t have much to do with Mack—it was Raymo who told the story all the time about how he and Ceese found Mack. The way Raymo told it, Ceese wanted to leave the baby and smoke weed, but Raymo insisted that they take the baby back and save its life, making out how he was the hero. But in the dream that came into Mack’s mind, he saw the real story, how Ceese was the one who did the saving, and Raymo wanted to leave the baby there in the leaves.

  But Mack didn’t talk to anybody about his dream of the true story, because they’d think he was crazy. Not that they didn’t already, but Mack knew that if they got to thinking he was really crazy, they’d lock him away somewhere. And the worst part of that idea was, what kind of dreams would they stick in his head there in the crazy house?

  Cause Mack knew it was other people putting these dreams into his mind. Most of the time he didn’t know whose dream he was having, though some of them, he knew they had to come from a teacher, and others, he had a pretty good guess who in the neighborhood was having this dream.

  The thing was, he didn’t know if they actually had the same dream, at least not exactly the way he saw it. Because the dreams he saw, they were always so sad, that if other people really knew they had such dreams inside them, how could they get through a single day without crying?

  Mack didn’t cry for them, though. Because it wasn’t his dream.

  Like the Johnsons, the ones whose daughter got brain-damaged when she half-drowned in their waterbed, Mack didn’t know if the dream he caught from their house was Mr. Johnson’s or Mrs. Johnson’s or maybe it was Tamika’s, a dream left over from back when she was a pretty girl who lived for swimming. In the dream she was diving and swimming in a pool of water in the jungle, with a waterfall, like in a movie. She kept diving deeper and deeper and then one time when she came up, there was a thick plastic barrier on the top of the water and she was scared for just a second, but then she saw that her daddy and mommy were lying on top of the plastic and she poked them and they woke right up and saw her and smiled at her and pulled open the plastic and lifted her out.

  If Mack hadn’t known something about Tamika’s story—or at least the story Mr. Johnson told about how it happened, before they took him off to jail—he might have thought this was just another version of his own dream of being born. Maybe he would have thought, This is how birth dreams come to folks who weren’t aborted and left to die in the park under a bunch of leaves.

  But instead he saw it as maybe Mr. Johnson’s dream of how he wished it had happened, instead of having Tamika trapped under the water all that time till cells in her brain started dying before he realized where she was and cut into the mattress and pulled her out. If only he’d found her right away, the first time she bumped into him from inside the waterbed.

  Or maybe it was Mrs. Johnson’s dream, since she never felt her daughter inside the mattress at all. Maybe it’s how she wished it had happened, both of them feeling her poking them so they believed it right away and got her out in time.

  Or maybe it was Tamika’s dream. Maybe this was how she remembered it, in the confusion of her damaged brain. Diving and swimming, deeper and deeper, until she came up inside her parents’ waterbed and they did indeed pull her out and hug her and fuss over her and kiss her like in the dream. The hug and kiss of CPR, but to Tamika, maybe that’s what love felt like now.

  The thing is, it was a good dream. Maybe when he woke up from it, Mr. Johnson cried—if he was the one who dreamed it. But it made Mack feel good. The diving and swimming were wonderful. And so was the opening of the plastic barrier and the mother and father waiting to hug the swimming girl.

  After Mack talked to the therapist, even though he never told this dream, he tried to think of it the way the therapist did. This dream has a mother in it, and a father, so maybe it’s really my own dream about a mother and father, only I think it isn’t my dream because my real mother and father rejected me. So I had this deep dream about opening up a barrier and finding myself surrounded with loves and kisses, only on top of that dream, my brain supplied some of the details from the real story of how Tamika got half drowned in the waterbed. Maybe it’s all me, and I’m just sort of twisted up about who’s who inside my own head.

  Around and around Mack went, thinking about how his brain worked—or didn’t work—and why he had these dreams, and how he might be getting dreams sent to him from other people.

  Until the day when Yo Yo moved in to Baldwin Hills.

  She wasn’t down in the flat, where Mack lived, and all his friends. She bought a house up in the hills, near the top of the winding road that led to the very place in the park where Mack had been found. She had doctors and lawyers and big-shot accountants and a movie agent and a semi-famous director living on her street. There was a lot of money there, and expensive cars, and fine tailored suits and evening gowns, and people with responsibilities.

  But Yo Yo—or Yolanda White, as she was listed in the phone book—she wasn’t like them. She wasn’t trying to look respectable like those other folks, who, as Raymo said, were trying to “get everything white folks had in the hopes that white folks won’t be able to tell the difference, which wasn’t never gone happen.” Yo Yo rode a motorcycle—a big old hog of a cycle, which made noise like a train as she spiraled up the winding roads at any hour of the day or night. Yo Yo didn’t wear those fine fashions, she was in jeans so tight around a body so sleek and lush it made teenage boys like Mack fantasize about the day the threads just gave way and those jeans just peeled open like a split banana skin and she’d wheel that bike on over and get off it all naked with the jeans spilling on down and she’d say, “Teenage boy with concupiscent eyes, I wonder if you’d like to take a ride with me.”

  That wasn’t no dream, Mack knew, that was just him wishing. Yo Yo had that effect on a boy, and Mack wasn’t so strange he could get confused about the difference between his wishes and Yo Yo’s dream.

  He knew Yo Yo’s dream when it came to him. In fact, he’d pretty much been waiting for it, since he was pretty familiar with all the regular dreams in his neighborhood, and the
ones that turned up only at school. All the deep dreams that kept coming back the same. He noticed easy enough when the new dream came on a night when that motorcycle echoed through the neighborhood and somebody shouted out a string of ugly words that probably woke more babies than the motorcycle he was cussing about.

  The new dream was a hero dream, and in it he was a girl—which was always a sure sign to him that it was not his own dream. He definitely wasn’t one of those girls-trapped-in-a-boy’s-body. But in the dream, this girl had on tight jeans and Mack sure liked how they felt on him. He liked how the horse felt between his legs when he rode—even though when he came out of the dream he knew that in the real world it was a motorcycle and not a horse.

  In the dream, Yo Yo—because that’s who it had to be—rode a powerful horse through a prairie, with herds of cattle grazing in the shade of scattered trees, or drinking from shallow streams. But the sky wasn’t the shining blue of cowboy country, it was sick yellow and brown, like the worst day of smog all wrapped up in a dust storm.

  And up in that smog, there was something flying, something ugly and awful, and Yo Yo knew that she had to fight that thing and kill it, or it was going to snatch up all the cattle, one by one or ten by ten, and carry them away and eat them and spit out the bones. In the dream Mack saw that mountain of bones, and perched on top of it a creature like a banana slug, it was so filthy and slimy and thick, only after creeping and sliming around on top of the pile of bones it unfolded a huge pair of wings like a moth and took off up into the smoky sky in search of more because it was always hungry.

  The thing is, through that whole dream, Yo Yo wasn’t alone. It drove Mack crazy because try as he might, he couldn’t bend the dream, couldn’t make the girl turn her head and see who it was riding with her. Sometimes Mack thought the other person was on the horse behind her, and sometimes he thought the other person was flying alongside, like a bird, or running like a dog. Whoever or whatever it was, however, it was always just out of sight.