An Orphanage of Dreams Read online

  Norman came back. The bill of his captain’s hat had been shot away. He had lost his color. Amanda led him, a small gray man, to fetch Genevieve from the dungeon. They showed her the presidential pardon, and she wept. Millie came out of her cloud and found them still there sitting on the old broken sofa. They thought they would move to one of the southwestern states. Norman flew over Arizona and reported back: the shadows there are like house cats, he said, and there is nowhere to hide.

  The Awakening

  I know why I came. I don’t know why I stay.

  I was on the point of departure when I began to stay. I made many attempts at leaving afterward, but I never again got so close that I could honestly say I was on the point of departure.

  I sometimes blame the toaster oven. I really ought to have thrown it out at the very beginning, when I saw it would not turn off automatically and would have to be watched constantly, while there was still hope of getting a new one. I suppose I had scruples. It was not my job to throw out other people’s small appliances. I went on using it instead, but was assiduous about pulling the plug afterward, sometimes returning to the kitchen to double or even triple check.

  A bright side to my current situation is that I am now unlikely to leave the house with the toaster oven on, as I feared for a moment I was about to do.

  I mean I am unlikely to leave the house.

  I had already opened the front gate. Clutching a suitcase in each hand, I was about to step through to the street, when I remembered the toaster oven. I stood stock-still, while I tried to recall if I had unplugged it, a mental effort that is sometimes described as “ransacking the mind.” From my experience of other people, including people in films, in similar situations, I assume that my expression at that moment was completely blank.

  Imagine a man in his midforties, dark hair, of average good looks, though perhaps thinner than is considered healthy, standing in front of an open gate with a small pack on his back, a heavy suitcase in each hand, and a blank look on his face. He is wearing jeans, sandals, a Hawaiian shirt. The sun is shining. It is summer.

  Standing there, ransacking, I was able to recall almost every instant of the morning—snapping shut the two suitcases I had packed the night before, checking the window locks, sweeping the crumbs of toast from the kitchen table, and after finishing my coffee, rinsing the cup and pouring the remainder of the milk down the drain. But when it came to the toaster oven, I drew a complete blank.

  Picture a blackboard covered all over with writing except for a spot near the bottom where there’s a broad whitish smudge made by an eraser.

  There was nothing to do but check.

  I realize now how absurd that was. Instead of checking I could have just left, stepped right through the gate into the street and on down the slope of departure. I could have caught an afternoon train to Marseille and from there taken a plane back to America. I could have rented a car in Nice, driven to Milan, and grabbed a flight to Tokyo. I could have worked my way down to San Rafael and Genoa, taken a room in the latter city, and begun research on a book about Columbus.

  That’s easy to see now.

  I set down the bags and closed the gate. The latch, it seems to me now, fell with a dull thud. It fell with a small click.

  I ran back up the stone stairway that climbed from the gate up through the terraced garden to the front door, pausing on the next-to-top step to bend and retrieve a key from a little crevice underneath, where I had placed it a minute before and where I had found it at the beginning of my visit.

  I had expected, when I reached for the key at the start of my visit, a heavy old-fashioned key of a kind that I imagined was still common in France. But it was a Yale key of a type that is found everywhere.

  I say visit, but of course as things have turned out it really cannot be considered a visit. A stay, I suppose, or a sojourn.

  I bounded through the front room and the dining room and down the hall to the kitchen, which occupies a wing of its own at the rear of the house. The cord lay in neat coils on the counter next to the toaster oven. I no sooner saw it than I remembered coiling it in just that way.

  I was turning back when I noticed a smudge on the little glass door of the appliance. I tried to take it off with my thumb, but that only made it worse. I remember thinking that I would just have to leave it like that, even as I went about dampening a sponge with detergent and scrubbing it clean. I don’t understand why I did that.

  I had been late for the bus already, and now instead of racing for the door, I stopped in the front room to gaze out a window. I moved a chair to one side in order to pull open the casements, push out one of the shutters, and look down. I saw the walk and the gate below me, and my suitcases standing side by side in front of the gate. There was something oddly moving, even mysterious, about the arrangement of things: the walkway paved with blue tile and bordered by gray-green dagger-leafed yuccas and yellow-flowering cacti, the white-painted wooden gate, and the two incongruous suitcases. I was reminded of a surrealist painting, by Magritte perhaps, or de Chirico, the way all the elements conspired to evoke the person who ought to be standing there between the suitcases but who was, mysteriously, missing. It was like seeing myself gone.

  I heard the bus pulling away from the stop at the corner. I listened while it labored up the hill, the noise of its motor ascending from groan to whine and falling back to groan as it climbed a ladder of gears to vanish suddenly into silence. A silence that began, I suppose, with the driver lifting his foot from the accelerator at the moment the bus topped the ridge and started to coast down the far side, toward the Mediterranean and Nice in the distance. A foot in a regulation black shoe at the base of a blue-uniformed trouser leg, a shoe hinged on its heel, the toe slightly raised: and from there, from that minute motion, the lifting of the toe from the accelerator pedal, it—the silence—came rolling back in a vast cumulating wave over me and the house and the garden.

  I recall feeling something very odd and intense. I was acutely aware of myself standing there at the window and looking down at my bags planted side by side on the sunlit tiles, between the rows of desert vegetation, the spiked leaves and spines and the flowers that were too yellow, in front of the closed gate.

  I stood there a long time. Dark clouds had begun to float in from the west. Fearing rain, I went down and brought the bags up.

  Shortly afterward several drops fell, so few they made scarcely a sound, while dark splotches the size of nickels appeared on the walk. Then, a little later still, the sun came back out.

  Wee People

  They are extremely small. I hadn’t thought people came that little. I can’t help but think of them as “wee people,” even though that conjures up images of leprechauns and such, which they don’t at all resemble. If anything they resemble tiny bankers. That’s because of the little pinstripes and the black umbrellas they all seem to carry with them even when there is no threat of rain. “Wee British bankers” I think pretty well sums them up. Sums up their appearance, I mean, because they certainly don’t act like bankers. Several months ago, for example, I came into the kitchen and found one of them standing on the counter next to the blender. The instant it caught sight of me it jumped to the floor, using its umbrella as a parachute. It shot right past me and a moment later I heard the front door slam. That was the first time I had found one in the house.

  Silvia says they breed in the compost. I don’t think so. She says that because she is angry about the second composter. “You and your rotting vegetables,” she says, standing on the deck and pointing at my composters lined up next to the garage. “Is this a trailer park?” Of course she knows it’s not a trailer park. An overreliance on the counterfactual interrogative—“Are you an idiot?” “Is that your underwear in the bathroom?”—is one of Silvia’s tics. Composting, of course, has nothing to do with rotting, it is the work of thoroughly benign microorganisms, but when I try to explain that to her she just walks off or, if we are sitting, sticks her fingers in her ea
rs. I don’t think Silvia is aware of how annoying that is.

  In addition to bacteria, I try to tell her, you need nitrogen, oxygen, water, and the right mix of protozoa, rotifers, molds, and of course earthworms; you have to have earthworms. You don’t add them. They come on their own. Aristotle thought that all animals were born of other similar animals, except for flies, which he thought hatched spontaneously from dirt. Aristotle was not a composter or he would have believed the same of earthworms. The most rudimentary compost pile, left to itself for a few summer days, will slither with them. They just pop up. It’s like a miracle, I tell Silvia. Now that I think about it, that must be what gave her the idea that little people can arrive in that way.

  Silvia is not a gardener, to say the least. She won’t even eat most of the things I grow. Of course eating them is not the point. I like being outside. Even when there’s nothing to do in the garden, I prefer being there to sitting in the house listening to Silvia’s friends. Sometimes I sit in the garage. I was in the garage when I heard the little people for the first time, heard their vocalizations, I mean; I can’t say they were actually talking. I peeked out the window. A pair of little ones—small even by their standards—were standing beneath a tomato plant in the garden. They seemed to be bickering. There was a rapid exchange of high-pitched squeals accompanied by threatening gestures with the umbrellas. Though I can’t say for certain that they were talking, the shrill vibrato chittering was exactly the way one would expect a very tiny language to sound—not just small in volume but composed of very tiny words. Sometimes when Silvia has her friends over and they are in the dining room all talking at once, I find myself listening away, so to speak, hearing the sounds but blocking out their meaning, and it was exactly like that—a shrill feminine chatter that, when listened to in that way, sounds exactly like squealing.

  Silvia enjoys making heavy-handed sarcastic remarks about me and my “little friends,” as she calls them. I usually manage to shrug those off, as I did just the other night. We had been watching the news on TV, when she abruptly leaned over and said in my ear, “Another politician in a sex scandal. What do your little friends think of that?” As if they could be bothered! I told her I doubted they would even know about it. I don’t think they have newspapers.

  There seem to be more and more of them. I know it sounds odd to speak of things that small as massing, but that is just what they appear to be doing. I saw them in ones and twos at first, usually in the garden, but lately I’ve noticed them in larger groups in the street out front. They seem to be talking about us, pointing the wickedly sharp tips of their little umbrellas at our house. I tried discussing this with Silvia, but she just walked off.

  She is upset over the missing money, even storming outside to shout at me, leaning over the deck rail and yelling down at me while I am bent over in the garden weeding. I don’t even look up when she does that. She is always losing money and then blaming other people. When I suggested that maybe the little people took it, she flew into a rage, screaming, “There are no little people.” Which was a stupid thing to say.

  Silvia has always earned more than me. Furthermore, she likes her job. I hated my job, could scarcely drag myself to work in the morning, and when the headaches started I would either have to go home or lock the door to my office and lie down on the floor. I liked getting home early and having the house to myself. So when I lost my position, I thought, why bother. Silvia was earning plenty for both of us. I thought I would do something creative, though I haven’t settled on anything yet, except gardening. Silvia says she doesn’t understand how I can sit around doing nothing. A remark like that tells you a lot about Silvia.

  I don’t know where they would keep the money if they took it. The pockets in their little suits would hold a few postage stamps at best, or a couple of dimes. But still they do have pockets and must use them for something. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had their own tiny currency.

  Silvia won’t let it go, complaining, squealing, and now threatening to take steps. Bluster, probably, but I’ve begun taking photos of them, just in case. And they seem to enjoy that, putting on poses and doing tricks with the umbrellas, as if they want to appear in the very best light, as well they should.

  Last week I found out that she had been putting down rat poison. I said to her, “Do you realize what you’ve done? They’re not mice! They don’t even look like mice.” The minute she left for work, I went around the house and gathered up all the pellets I could find. I did the best I could, but I fear I was too late. I think they know.

  Four nights ago we found a length of heavy twine stretched across the stairs, obviously calculated to send Silvia plunging down. She saw it just in time. Of course she was thoroughly shaken. She went into the bathroom and locked the door. I think I heard a sob.

  I am worried about the bankers. Yesterday I saw several of them at the kitchen window looking out at me while I was weeding. Since I began sleeping in the tent, I’ve seen nothing of Silvia. I’ve heard the phone ringing. It rings a long time, stops, and then begins to ring again. There are no lights on in the house. It’s possible that she has gone off somewhere, some place where she can rest, but I don’t think so. When the police come, I’ll show them the photographs.

  Walter

  “Walter is not well today,” Marie-Claire told the assembled crowd, and she paused a moment before adding, “I’m sorry,” as if she were responsible for whether Walter was well today, with the implication that she was somehow in charge of Walter. She had taken him on in a difficult period, that much was true, and of course we were all grateful to her for that, but answering correspondence and keeping an eye out for people coming in across the lawn were hardly tasks that gave her authority over his person, and one of us ought to have had the courage to stand up and say that to her face.

  Of course Richard, for one, had said those things to her face countless times in the most abusive ways imaginable, accusing poor Marie-Claire of being a martinet and a shrew, among other things, but no one ever paid attention to Richard, Marie-Claire least of all. And I would have said them to her if she had not been so prickly about criticism from other women, holding us at arm’s length, emotionally speaking, and acting as if we were all out to sink our hooks into Walter, as if in my case that would even be possible.

  We had been waiting over an hour already, uncomfortable and shivering in the hard little folding chairs that Walter had brought in ages ago, after he had noticed that people were nodding off during the talks. In fact only a handful of people had been nodding off, chins on chests, one young man snoring a little, and that was not the fault of the cushy armchairs we had back then—they nodded off because they were on drugs, as was obvious to everyone but Walter, who was absorbed in his work and so isolated and spiritual he practically lived in another universe. In the old days, we used to drag and shove those heavy armchairs into a cozy circle around Walter, who would perch on a high wooden stool and just talk to us. By making us sit in folding metal chairs so hard and uncomfortable that after fifteen minutes you wanted to scream, Walter was in fact, without even knowing it, punishing everyone for the sins of a few, though of course no one pointed this out or even complained slightly, because everyone was afraid of Walter, except Marie-Claire, of course, and me, and Richard.

  They had, as usual, turned the air-conditioning so low we must have looked like rows of lumps or bundles in our colorful hoods and parkas. It was kept that way for Walter’s sake, so naturally we didn’t complain; we just dressed appropriately. And of course the commotion from the people milling around outside was putting everyone on edge. The crowd had been out there in the sweltering heat for hours, and now some of them were shouting and banging at the doors, as if it were our fault they didn’t have tickets. And meanwhile the people inside were fidgeting and squirming about on the metal chairs, trying to get comfortable, and some had stood up and were stamping and flexing their legs, fearing blood clots, none of us being really young anymore, and everybody
just waiting for Marie-Claire to wheel Walter out. I had dropped by the lodge that very morning, thinking I might just as well bring Walter over, and Marie-Claire had told me he wasn’t well. “Walter’s in bad shape,” was how she put it. A masseuse from the New Life Foundation was in with him, trying to work him into shape for the talk, and I was not to go in there, she said flatly. She used her foot to block the door from inside when I pushed, so I came on over alone, determined to raise the incident with Walter when he arrived.

  I was wondering whose decision it had been to leave him behind the curtain all this time—and whether this was not just one more example of Marie-Claire’s deciding things on her own despite having agreed years ago that important decisions would be made as a group—when Richard jumped to his feet and began shouting, “Show him to us, we want to see him.” Everybody was thoroughly tired of Richard’s outbursts, so most of us just studied our feet and pretended we didn’t hear him, which was always a gamble with Richard—it would sometimes just enrage him. I am convinced he would have grabbed his chair and actually thrown it at Marie-Claire if Bill Ekman, sitting directly behind, had not planted both his big wingtips on the back rung. Richard was tugging at the chair and shouting, “We want to see him,” over and over, when it dawned on him that something was fastening the chair to the floor. He looked down and saw Bill’s big feet, and then he looked at Bill, who was staring straight ahead as if he didn’t know anything about the feet. Richard gave the chair a final halfhearted tug and sat down. His face was bright red. Richard didn’t belong there.

  Meanwhile the chanting outside was growing louder. There were several tremendous thuds at the door, followed by cheers, as if they had found some sort of ram and intended to batter their way in. It was thoroughly wrong of Marie-Claire to post the conference online. At the last planning session, when it was already obvious there was going to be trouble, I asked her why in the world she had posted a private meeting online for all the world to see instead of just mailing the tickets the way we used to. I also pointed out once again how useless it was to put a keycode at the main gate if people could just come in across the lawn. “Well, that’s how Walter wants it,” she said, as usual.