Smithsonian of the Mind

Written for my dad's 60th birthday, based on a recurring dream he's had for years.  

They told him that he snored, and had apnea, and didn’t get quality sleep.  That his REM time was fractured, and no, cat naps while waiting out Wheel of Fortune for Jeopardy to come on did not count as real sleep.  He knew these things.  Make your room a peaceful, calm place, the sleep doctors said.  As opposed to what, a disco? he thought.  Peaceful was being surrounded by science fiction and bathroom readers, photographs and prints, design books and sketch pads, the checks and lines of plaids and tattersall.   And yet, often he woke in the morning as tired as he had gone to bed the night before, despite getting a full eight hours of “bed-time.”  He did not dread sleep like so many whose rest was less than restful, but was rather apathetic to it.  Except for the nights when he had “The Dream.”

Since he was a little boy he had always been a collector of “stuff,” of words and notions and scraps of knowledge, of bits and pieces of material detritus and refuse.  His wife was a tosser, but he closely guarded his stash like Smaug’s  treasure, embedding it.  Was he this way because of The Dream, which he had had since time immemorial, or had The Dream manifested because of this tendency?  Either way, they were inextricably linked. At some point he had come to know it for what it was, this nonreality day trip through his subconscious (it was always a pleasantly warm early afternoon during these twilight meanderings). But he couldn’t quite control it.  There was no beginning or end, no storyline or plot.  Just a bunch of poking about and exploring.  

He had been having The Dream in one permutation or another for as long as he could remember, but now, as he approached his 60th birthday, he was beginning to notice in it some changes that he found a bit discomfiting.  One of the things that gave him pause was the thought that maybe it had been changing all along and he had never taken the time to notice.  What shifts and turns had The Dream taken and foretold that he had been oblivious to before? And why was he cognizant of them now?  Was this the age old push toward retrospection in preparation for the time when the future all of a sudden seemed finite?  Was it finally that new memories and experiences were less exciting and meaningful than old ones?  Regardless, he was aware.  He was listening and watching, and he had been waiting.  

The essential frame and setting of The Dream had always been consistent, if not wholly static in the way that places in dreams had a tendency to shift and move without your consent:  He was a carpenter, as were his father before him and his grandfather before that, so it made sense that a large, rambling Victorian, interesting and comfortable and complete with attached sheds and barns, was built out of the collective subconsciousness of three generations.  He knew that this was not a construction of his own, but one whose dormers and elles had been cobbled and tacked on over not one, but many, lifetimes.  From its steep roof lines and modest gingerbread, he placed its cornerstone somewhere around the turn of the 20th century.  The house had shifted and twisted and turned until all of the beams were comfortable.  He recognized that notion as Vonnegut’s, and he wondered if Kurt had visited this same house in his own recollections.

  

In truth, he knew very little about the house as whole, and he often wondered who else might inhabit its other rooms, if they had adventures of their own in say, the pantry or basement, or if they knew he was there.  He knew the interior walls were painted a cheerful yellow with glossy white trim and that it smelled like molasses in the kitchen.  It was through the back kitchen stairs, by climbing a winding three stories, that he was able to get to The Door, which would lead him into The Attic, which spanned the entire top of the house and above the barn.  

Like anything that was off limits to a child, as a boy he had struggled to gain access to The Attic.  He would stand at the foot of the stairs and the door would be stuck or locked, or the treads on the stairs would be twisted and broken.  At one point, around the time he was wondering if he should be afraid of heights, the stairs changed to a stout ladder which led to a round Hobbit door.  Back then, once he made it to the top door, he was able to enter easily.  But now, as an adult, he found that he went longer between the times when he even saw the entrance, that when The Dream came, the bottom door stood open, but the stairway kept getting steeper and more narrow, and the door at the top was getting smaller.  Unlike Alice, there was nothing outside that said, “Drink Me” to ease his passage.  And the last time he had smelled smoke, had known there was a fire behind the door which he could smell and feel but not see. The door had stuck and he couldn’t get in. It was action, conflict, destruction, in a place where none had been before, and he needed to know  what damage it had done, what it meant, if the Smithsonian of his mind was still intact.  Because that is how he had come to think of The Dream: it was the non-tangible repository for the material artifacts, hidden wishes, and the memories both real and imagined of his waking and sleeping world.  But what would he find the next time?

Patiently he waited for his next opportunity.  He couldn’t force or conjure it, but simply had to wait for old Morpheus to bring him to the door again.  He had never been anxious about it before, but then again, he had always essentially known what he would see when he opened the door presented to him.  The door would creak open and the smell of molasses would give away to that of sunlight brushing over wood and metal and dust.  Midday sun pierced through narrow windows on the gable ends, hiding and yielding different objects in the shadows each time.  The space was cluttered but surprisingly dry and clean, with objects ranging from ticket stubs to a full sized International pickup, starting along the short knee wall and pushing out toward the center of the room.  It would have to taken many lifetimes to sift through every article, and he wondered if that was the point.  Some things were landmarks for him, always present after their first appearance, like the long green Old Town canoe that had been there from his first visit as a little boy, propped up on saw horses at the far gable end and filled with life vests and fishing poles. He had recognized it as his grandfather’s and it grounded him when the whole scene had been overwhelming to his child mind.  Then he had been able to move around the room and explore, picking through tools, sitting on the floor sorting through old magazines or record albums, trying on clothing that smelled of mothballs and hung from nails in the rafters.  

Occasionally he could link a decision he made in his waking life to something he had seen in The Dream.  He opted to play drums in the school band after finding a battered birch snare covered by a half-finished patchwork quilt resting against the wheel from a Conestoga wagon.  He tried on religion for a while after coming across a worn ebony rosary.  Sometimes he got to visit the things he hadn’t done, like when a soldier from the Terracotta Army appeared dressed in tap shoes and jungle fatigues.  Old college textbooks propped up uneven table legs, on which sat  cereal boxes filled with sheet music from songs he wished he’d learned.  There were Danish cookie tins and coffee cans filled with coins from distant lands jumbled in with marbles and cufflinks and protest buttons.  As he passed through adulthood, he recognized some artifacts from his children’s childhoods mingled in the mix: banana seats from first bicycles, egg cartons filled with sorted Lite Brite pegs, a full tree house, shoe boxes full of horse show ribbons. Forever after the night he saw the news of the art heist at the Isabella Gardner, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” had sat propped against the legs of a cigar store Indian.  He always made time to visit it and thank Rembrandt for his efforts.  

On the morning of his 60th birthday, he woke disappointed, knowing he hadn’t dreamt the night before, or certainly not The Dream.  His head was full of the news of Boston’s attack and the latest sci-fi movie, but not of his Attic.  He passed the day pleasantly enough, getting clambered over and drooled on by his grandson, dozing to golf on TV, eating far too many enchiladas at dinner. His children and wife bought him thoughtful if uninteresting presents, and that night he went to bed a slightly older, content man.  So it surprised him when he found himself walking up the drive of the old Victorian, climbing the stairs of the porch and knocking on the side door.  He had never done that before.  Always, he had simply been in the kitchen, and he’d known where to go and what to do.  He had assumed it was his house, and that he was welcome there.  

A man of early middle age opened the door.

“Good afternoon, Rick,” he said warmly, one hand resting on the doorframe, the other holding a stoneware mug half full of coffee.  “Come on in.”

He stood there for a moment, blinking, trying to place the stranger’s face.  Instead, a name resonated in the interior of his mind: Guy Montag, protagonist, deviant villain, hero of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

“Ah, so you recognize me?”  Montag said, smiling bemusedly at him. “So you must know what that means, right?”

“The Fire.” A small groan escaped his throat.  He had hoped what he had sensed had been an aberration, a one-time scenario in the grander scheme.

“It was a pleasure to burn.”  Montag chuckled, knowing he would immediately get the reference. 

He closed his eyes and shook his head.  His heart had sunk to the pit of his stomach and lay there thumping uncomfortably like a bird that had smacked against a window.  

          

“Please, do come in.” Montag stood back from the door and graciously held it open for him.  “I’m expecting you would like to see what’s left.”

His throat constricted and he could only nod. Really, the last thing he wanted was to walk up those stairs and force open the warped little door to see the charred remains of his life smoldering under the open sky.  He pictured gaping rafters, pieces of metal bent and scorched, boxes wet and weeping with soot and water, because, surely, someone must have tried to put out the flames.  

Montag put his cup in the sink and beckoned him to the door leading to the back stairs.  He turned the porcelain knob and pushed it open to reveal a wide staircase with a polished oak railing, a worn Persian runner up the middle.  The flick of a light switch revealed a warm yellow glow from sconces along the wall.  

“Looks a little different now, doesn’t it?”

“But these aren’t my stairs.”

“Sure they’re your stairs.  They’ve just had some work done to them since you were last here.  You know, a little remodel.  Got the idea from HGTV.  Amazing what you can see on The Walls these days.  Here, you go first.  I’ll get the door behind us.”

He climbed the flights, aware that his footfalls were muffled by the nap of the carpets.  At the last landing, he saw not a tiny, mishung door or a Hobbit hole, but a set of glass front French doors. It was dark on the other side.  His heart-bird began to flutter and flip against his ribs.  He thought he might throw up.  His eyes were blurring and closing in the way they did when he had a migraine.  

“Well, are you going to open the door?”

“What’s the point?  If there’s nothing left, why would I need to see what’s in there?”

“How do you know there’s nothing left?”

“You said there was a fire.  The way things were jumbled together, a single spark would make the whole thing go up almost instantly.  Everything would be destroyed.  It was a Fire Marshall’s nightmare in there.”

“I said it was a pleasure to burn.  That doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?  I mean, something that is pleasurable can’t be all bad, right?”

“But everything I remember is gone, obliterated.”

“So you see fire as destructive, evil?”

“In this case, yes.  That was my world in there.”

“And yet, what purpose does fire serve in nature?  Is it about wanton destruction?”

He shook his head, numb, wishing the ache that was forming behind his eyes would go away. The fluttering had stopped, replaced by a dull, radiating pain in his midsection.  

“That’s right.  You know as well as I do that fire is a cleanser, nature’s way of pruning things up a bit when the undergrowth gets too thick.  And it was getting pretty dense in there, wouldn’t you say? All those memories and ideas stacked precariously? Something needed to give or someone was going to get lost, maybe hurt. It had to be done.  Just part of the natural process.  Now, this is my last offer.  I’ve got someone coming to rummage through the shed in a little bit, so you either need to go in now or turn around and leave.  What is it going to be?”

“If I don’t go in, at least I get to remember it the way it was. I can still remember the big things, and the things that have been there the longest.  I remember the last time I was able to look around, I found a little carving my grandfather had made. And my first pair of skis. All of that is gone now, isn’t it?  Why would I want to see nothing?  My memories are gone.”

“And if you don’t go...?”

He paused.  Somewhere, beneath the deep sense of loss and confusion, curiosity was trying to gnaw its way through the ropes of his despair.

“Look,” Montag said, turning to head back down the stairs, “you’ve got some daylight left.  Once it’s gone, the choice is no longer yours. If you don’t go in now, it’s lost to you forever.  If you do, you can decide if you ever want to come back. Same deal as always.  You can’t force your way in, but the opportunity will present itself.  It’s up to you.  Just remember to close the doors when you leave.”

He didn’t hear Montag reach the door back into the kitchen, but the lights on the staircase went out just before the door clicked closed, leaving him in the dark, inches away from the double doors.  He felt around for a second switch, but not finding one, he cursed whoever had wired this particular part of his brain for scrimping by leaving out the three way.   It would be easy to find his way back down. Still, he felt for the door handles and rested his forehead against the wood.  From within, he could smell the remains of the fire.  

While he couldn’t bear the idea that the room was empty, even more unsettling to him was the idea that, if he didn’t open the doors, soon, he would never be back in this place.  The house of his memories, the museum of his soul, would be gone, sold, forever off limits to him from here to the end of his days.  Could he live with that? Where would his mind wander or return to if not here?  Where would his new memories and experiences go?  They couldn’t possibly just exist without a place to hold them.  He knew he had to go it.

Bracing himself, he closed his eyes and turned the door handles, pushing himself into the darkened space.  He expected that he might fall through a hole in the floor, down the rabbit hole, into the unknown rooms below.  But he didn’t. 

Crossing the threshold, he opened his eyes.  The vast space was intact, with no smell of smoke, swept clean, and very nearly empty save for a table and chairs set under the window on the back wall. Slowly he walked toward them, familiarity dawning.  The pedestal was slightly off kilter, allowing the worn oak oval to list a bit under the weight of a large book set in the middle of it. 

Beside the book was a pen.  He opened the cover to reveal thick linen pages. Blank. But there was an inscription on the first page.

“All of your memories are here. Make them real again. Write.”