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.”
