Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  “Who do you think you are, getting my boy up on that monster and letting him drive it! He got no driver’s license, you crazy bitch!”

  “Watch who you calling a crazy bitch,” said Yolanda mildly. “If I really was a crazy bitch, you wouldn’t have the balls to call me that.”

  Miz Smitcher turned to Mack. “You get off that bike, Mack Street, and get in that car.”

  Mack turned to Yolanda. What should I do, he wanted to ask her.

  She grinned at him. “I’ll see you later, Mack Avenue.”

  “No you won’t!” screeched Miz Smitcher. “You come within twenty yards of him and I’ll have you in jail for corrupting a minor! You hear me? There’s laws protecting young boys from predatory women like you!”

  “Mama bird,” said Yolanda, “I got no plans to steal away your little chick.”

  “I’ll have you out of this neighborhood, you and that bike! Now I see you using that thing to lure young boys into your den of depredation!”

  Yolanda laughed out loud. “A woman with tits like mine, why would I ever need a bike to lure boys!”

  That was so outrageous that even Miz Smitcher couldn’t think of a thing to say, and Miz Smitcher never couldn’t think of something to say. Instead she grabbed Mack by the wrist as he was getting off the bike and nearly made him lose his balance as she dragged him to the car and shoved him in through the driver’s side with a push so hard he smacked the top of his head on the glass on the other side. And in no time she had that car turned around and headed down the hill, but Mack could still hear Yo Yo’s laughter behind him.

  “She’s a minister,” he said.

  “You shut up,” said Miz Smitcher. “You ain’t thinking straight and you won’t be thinking straight for about two hours after having that woman’s arms around you and her kissing you.”

  Mack was outraged. “You mean somebody called you?”

  “Well I didn’t have no psychic vision if that’s what you’re thinking!”

  “She’s a minister, Miz Smitcher, it was a . . . a Christian kiss.”

  “Well, there’s a billion Christians in this world, and most of them got started with a kiss like that. So you’re not to go near her again, you hear me? I’ll get her out of this neighborhood if I have to buy a gun and shoot that bike.”

  “All right,” said Mack.

  “You agreeing with me, just like that?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Well, now I know you’re lying. A boy your age doesn’t just say yes ma’am about staying away from a woman like that.”

  Mack was thinking like crazy, trying to find a way to get Miz Smitcher out of this rage she was in. And then he got it. “Miz Smitcher, I just thought maybe she was my mama. Maybe she come back here to look and see what become of her baby.”

  That was it. That was the answer. Because all of a sudden Miz Smitcher’s eyes got all teary and she pulled the car over in front of the neighbor’s house and just hugged him to her and said, “Oh, you poor baby, of course you’d think she was your mama, her looking like she does. Exactly the kind of woman who’d have an abortion and leave the baby in the weeds.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Mack had meant, but it would do.

  “So you didn’t have the hots for her, you thought she was your mama!” Miz Smitcher began to laugh. She put the car back in gear and drove the thirty yards to the curb in front of her house and by the time she got the car parked she was laughing so hard tears were coming down her face.

  Two things stuck with Mack from that car ride with Miz Smitcher. First one was, that was the first time he could ever remember her hugging him. Second thing was, You tell somebody something they want to hear, and they’ll believe it even if it’s the biggest old lie you ever made up.

  He promised her everything she asked him to promise—that he’d never ride that bike again, that he’d never go to That Woman’s house again, that he’d never talk to her again, that he’d never even think of her again. The only true thing he said to her was when she made him say, “I know she could not possibly be my mama.”

  That night he halfway hoped he’d dream Yolanda’s dream, but he didn’t. He picked up half a dozen other dreams, including one that he thought might be Miz Smitcher’s, and which he never watched all the way through. Yolanda’s dream never came, but in the morning he realized, Well of course I didn’t dream her dream and I never will again, because I gave it back to her and now it’s for her again.

  But I still got my own dream, he thought. Nothing yesterday was really much like that dream of roads and rocks and cliffs and floods, except I was running down the street like hurtling along the canyon, and at the end of it, a woman reached out and held my head and kissed me and she tasted sweet as love.

  NOTES ON “KEEPER OF LOST DREAMS”

  Like “Waterbaby,” “Keeper of Lost Dreams” was conceived as part of Magic Street. Indeed, in a way it was this story where Magic Street finally came to life. I had known, ever since talking with Queen Latifah, that I wanted to have a motorcycle-riding woman of power in the book, and I knew magic was going to erupt into Baldwin Hills, and I knew that I was going to build the story around a black man as the hero, because that’s what my friend Roland Brown had asked me to do. But I didn’t know who that man was going to be, or how any of the pieces of the story were going to fit together. I had a fleeting image in my mind of a bunch of people rising into the air in a great circle, but beyond that . . . nothing.

  During the time when I thought I was going to have lots of short tales like “Waterbaby” in the book, I began to think: The hero needs to be someone who becomes aware of all their wishes. Somebody who knows all the people in the neighborhood and will understand the connection between their deep wishes and the terrible things that happen in the real world.

  It was in that idea that the character of Mack Street was born. The actual dream in this story is the result of free association and the geography of dreams, the way that places flow into each other in unexpected ways that are often truer than the way they fit together in the real world. I free-associated the dream the way I did the things that Ender finds in the Fantasy Game after he passes the Giant’s Drink. It’s just whatever cool stuff came into my head while I was writing, and then I made sense of it as best I could after the fact.

  In effect, then, this story was my exploratory first draft of Magic Street, the way that “A Plague of Butterflies” was a first draft of Wyrms. After writing this and then waiting for a while, I was able to start drawing together the elements that became the story as a whole. Without “Keeper of Lost Dreams,” there would be no Magic Street, which is, I believe, one of the best things I’ve ever written.

  I assumed the story would never be published, but, as with “Waterbaby,” I received a request for a story from an editor, in this case Al Sarrantonio, who was putting together an anthology of stories called Flights: Visions of Extreme Fantasy. The concept was to do a Dangerous Visions in the fantasy genre. I wasn’t sure how extreme “Keeper of Lost Dreams” might be, but I had the story, it hadn’t been published, and so I sent it to him and he decided that it fit the concept of the anthology well enough.

  I don’t really think of my work in terms of whether it’s “extreme” or not—at least not until after I’ve written it. I remember, early in my career, how shocked I was when people reacted to A Planet Called Treason as if I had written something offensively violent. I was just telling what my character went through—and I didn’t write the violence graphically, either. There’s no gore in my work. Still, the book was published by the SF Book Club with a warning that some might find it offensive. I guess that made me an “edgy” writer. I had no clue. I just did what I still do: Tell the story that feels important and true to me as clearly as I can.

  The same thing happened when my story “America” (part of Folk of the Fringe) was published. A reviewer commented that it was hard to believe that what might be the “sexiest” story so far that year had been written by, of
all people, Orson Scott Card. I didn’t know what to make of the comment. Should I be offended or proud that the reviewer was so surprised that a sexy story could come from me? But as I was writing it, I didn’t think of it as a sexy story. I thought of it as the way this character would experience these events.

  So it may be that readers who encountered my story in Sarrantonio’s anthology found mine the tamest and least “extreme” of the stories; or maybe this tale fit right in. I have no idea. I guess that’s what editors are for. Of course, at this stage of my career, I have no idea whether they’re buying a story because they actually like the story, or because it’s worth wasting a little space on it in order to be able to put my name on the cover. That’s the danger of being an established name in the field—my name carries a certain weight because of other things I’ve already written, so that it can be one of the reasons a potential buyer might pick up a book, irrespective of whether it’s one of my better stories.

  It’s one of the dangers of being an established writer with a long track record—you can get careless and lazy and people will still publish your work. The trouble is, I don’t ever feel careless or lazy; would I even notice it if I did become that way? I have to watch the reactions of people around me very closely. I know how to write a story that feels professional, so I can fool even the people closest to me into thinking that a work is “done” long before it’s really ready. So I look for a spark of enthusiasm and surprise in them before I’m sure I’m on to something with a new story.

  Of course, that can backfire. I mean, at some point aren’t the people who love me best not supposed to show surprise when I actually write something good?

  MISSED

  Tim Bushey was no athlete, and if at thirty-one middle age wasn’t there yet, it was coming, he could feel its fingers on his spine. So when he did his hour of exercise a day, he didn’t push himself, didn’t pound his way through the miles, didn’t stress his knees. Often he relaxed into a brisk walk so he could look around and see the neighborhoods he was passing through.

  In winter he walked in midafternoon, the warmest time of the day. In summer he was up before dawn, walking before the air got as hot and wet as a crock pot. In winter he saw the school buses deliver children to the street corners. In summer, he saw the papers getting delivered.

  So it was five-thirty on a hot summer morning when he saw the paperboy on a bicycle, pedaling over the railroad tracks and up Yanceyville Road toward Glenside. Most of the people delivering papers worked out of cars, pitching the papers out the far window. But there were a few kids on bikes here and there. So what was so odd about him that Tim couldn’t keep his eyes off the kid?

  He noticed a couple of things as the kid chugged up the hill. First, he wasn’t on a mountain bike or a street racer. It wasn’t even one of those banana-seat bikes that were still popular when Tim was a kid. He was riding one of those stodgy old one-speed bikes that were the cycling equivalent of a ’55 Buick, rounded and lumpy and heavy as a burden of sin. Yet the bike looked brand-new.

  And the boy himself was strange, wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a short-sleeved shirt in a print that looked like . . . no, it absolutely was. The kid was wearing clothes straight out of Leave It to Beaver. And his hair had that tapered buzzcut that left just one little wave to be combed up off the forehead in front. It was like watching one of those out-of-date educational films in grade school. This kid was clearly caught in a time warp.

  Still, it wouldn’t have turned Tim out of his planned route—the circuit of Elm, Pisgah Church, Yanceyville, and Cone—if it hadn’t been for the bag of papers saddled over the rack on the back of the bike. Printed on the canvas it said, “The Greensboro Daily News.”

  Now, if there was one thing Tim was sure of, it was the fact that Greensboro was a one-newspaper town, unless you counted the weekly Rhinoceros Times, and, sure, maybe somebody had clung to an old canvas paper delivery bag with the Daily News logo—but that bag looked new.

  It’s not as if Tim had any schedule to keep, any urgent appointments. So he turned around and jogged after the kid, and when the brand-new ancient bicycle turned right on Glenside, Tim was not all that far behind him. He lost sight of him after Glenside made its sweeping left turn to the north, but Tim was still close enough to hear, in the still morning air, the faint sound of a rolled-up newspaper hitting the gravel of a country driveway.

  He found the driveway on the inside of a leftward curve. The streetlight showed the paper lying there, but Tim couldn’t see the masthead or even the headline without jogging onto the gravel, his shoes making such a racket that he half-expected to see lights go on inside the house.

  He bent over and looked. The rubber band had broken and the paper had unrolled itself, so now it lay flat in the driveway. Dominating the front page was a familiar picture. The headline under it said:

  BABE RUTH, BASEBALL’S

  HOME RUN KING, DIES

  CANCER OF THROAT CLAIMS LIFE

  OF NOTED MAJOR LEAGUE STAR

  I thought he died years ago, Tim thought.

  Then he noticed another headline:

  INFLATION CURB SIGNED BY TRUMAN

  PRESIDENT SAYS BILL INADEQUATE

  Truman? Tim looked at the masthead. It wasn’t the News and Record, it was the Greensboro Daily News. And under the masthead it said:

  TUESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 17, 1948 . . . PRICE: FIVE CENTS.

  What kind of joke was this, and who was it being played on? Not Tim—nobody could have known he’d come down Yanceyville Road today, or that he’d follow the paperboy to this driveway.

  A footstep on gravel. Tim looked up. An old woman stood at the head of the driveway, gazing at him. Tim stood, blushing, caught. She said nothing.

  “Sorry,” said Tim. “I didn’t open it, the rubber band must have broken when it hit the gravel, I—”

  He looked down, meant to reach down, pick up the paper, carry it to her. But there was no paper there. Nothing. Right at his feet, where he had just seen the face of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, there was only gravel and moist dirt and dewy grass.

  He looked at the woman again. Still she said nothing.

  “I . . .” Tim couldn’t think of a thing to say. Good morning, ma’am. I’ve been hallucinating on your driveway. Have a nice day. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  She smiled faintly. “That’s OK. I never get it into the house anymore these days.”

  Then she walked back onto the porch and into the house, leaving him alone on the driveway.

  It was stupid, but Tim couldn’t help looking around for a moment just to see where the paper might have gone. It had seemed so real. But real things don’t just disappear.

  He couldn’t linger in the driveway any longer. An elderly woman might easily get frightened at having a stranger on her property in the wee hours and call the police. Tim walked back to the road and headed back the way he had come. Only he couldn’t walk, he had to break into a jog and then into a run, until it was a headlong gallop down the hill and around the curve toward Yanceyville Road.

  Why was he so afraid? The only explanation was that he had hallucinated it, and it wasn’t as if you could run away from hallucinations. You carried those around in your own head. And they were nothing new to him. He’d been living on the edge of madness ever since the accident. That’s why he didn’t go to work, didn’t even have a job anymore—the compassionate leave had long since expired, replaced by a vague promise of “come back anytime, you know there’s always a job here for you.”

  But he couldn’t go back to work, could only leave the house to go jogging or to the grocery store or an occasional visit to Atticus to get something to read, and even then in the back of his mind he didn’t really care about his errand, he was only leaving because when he came back, he’d see things.

  One of Diana’s toys would be in a different place. Not just inches from where it had been, but in a different room. As if she’d picked up her stuffed Elmo in the family room and
carried it into the kitchen and dropped it right there on the floor because Selena had picked her up and put her in the high chair for lunch and yes, there were the child-size spoon, the Tupperware glass, the Sesame Street plate, freshly rinsed and set beside the sink and still wet.

  Only it wasn’t really a hallucination, was it? Because the toy was real enough, and the dishes. He would pick up the toy and put it away. He would slip the dishes into the dishwasher, put in the soap, close the door. He would be very, very certain that he had not set the delay timer on the dishwasher. All he did was close the door, that’s all.

  And then later in the day he’d go to the bathroom or walk out to get the mail and when he came back in the kitchen the dishwasher would be running. He could open the door and the dishes would be clean, the steam would fog his glasses, the heat would wash over him, and he knew that couldn’t be a hallucination. Could it?

  Somehow when he loaded the dishwasher he must have turned on the timer even though he thought he was careful not to. Somehow before his walk or his errand he must have picked up Diana’s Elmo and dropped it in the kitchen and taken out the toddler dishes and rinsed them and set them by the sink. Only he hallucinated not doing any such thing.

  Tim was no psychologist, but he didn’t need to pay a shrink to tell him what was happening. It was his grief at losing both his wife and daughter on the same terrible day, that ordinary drive to the store that put them in the path of the high school kids racing each other in the Weaver 500, two cars jockeying for position, swerving out of their lanes, one of them losing control, Selena trying to dodge, spinning, both of them hitting her, tearing the car apart between them, ripping the life out of mother and daughter in a few terrible seconds. Tim at the office, not even knowing, thinking they’d be there when he came home from work, not guessing his life was over.