An Orphanage of Dreams Read online

  “I won’t say that.”

  “Yes, you will. And I will say, ‘Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy …’”

  She had turned away and was looking out the window. She had her hands over her ears. She was not listening.

  “In the old days they called them conies. That’s where Coney Island got its name. It’s really Rabbit Island.”

  “Why don’t you shut up.”

  We had left the blacktop for the long concrete causeway to the island. The tires sang an octave higher.

  I resumed: “I am going to fall asleep on the rug, only to be wakened later by shouting. The three of you will be standing over me shouting. It will be four o’clock in morning. I will open my eyes just in time to see you throwing Michelangelo at Paul. He will sail with his four legs outstretched and land on Paul’s back. They will make sounds of surprise and agony, each in his native tongue. Paul will sit down and Michelangelo will run upstairs. Everyone is going to feel very bad, and you won’t be able to find Michelangelo for several hours. None of us will sleep. I will make another scene at breakfast.”

  “What kind of scene? I hope not a threatening one.”

  “Not very threatening. I am going to tell about the mermaids.”

  “The ones you heard singing?”

  “Yes, singing each to each.”

  “That was such a long time ago. Are you sure you should bring it up again?”

  “Do you think my hair is growing thin?”

  “Yes, and your arms and legs as well. In a bathing suit everyone notices.”

  We slid to a stop in front of Paul and Linda’s. Their house stands on tall piers with its front door fifteen or so feet off the ground at the top of a long flight of wooden stairs. Paul and Linda were leaning on the porch railing. They looked down at us and waved as we climbed out of the car. We smiled and waved back. Adele walked in front, carrying a sacklike Michelangelo in her arms. I watched her trudge up the stairs. Halfway to the top she turned and looked back, not at me standing at the bottom, a hand on the railing, but westward at the sky, looked, I want to say, wistfully. I glanced up at the bronzed down-tilted faces of our smiling friends. They looked sleepy. Adele had reached the top. I called up, “I forgot something, be along in a jiff.” Strange, I thought—I had never said the word jiff before. I turned back to the car.

  I did not, as I drove away, hear any shouting. I drove back over the causeway and onto the blacktop, dropping an octave. It was dark by the time I reached the open country of scrub trees and trailers. The full moon was rising. The sky had changed, but I couldn’t tell if it had woken up or died.

  Rita

  When he thinks of Rita, he pictures her as she was then, though he knows that can’t be right still. Sometimes, if he sees an attractive older woman in the street or grocery, he’ll imagine that that is how Rita looks today, though the women are never as old as she would be now. He has no idea where Rita is. She might have come back to L.A. too, if things have gone badly for her. She was fond of L.A., despite everything. She could be dead for all he knows. Even if she has come back, they are unlikely to chance on each other. He once tried to calculate just how unlikely, but there were too many imponderables. For all he knows she is living around the corner. He is not sure he would recognize her if they crossed in the street. He would if he looked at her closely, but if she were just driving by in a car or sitting a few tables over in a restaurant, he might not look closely. Why would he look closely? She would drive on past or get up and walk out of the restaurant. He would never know they had brushed past each other. He feels sick when he thinks of that. He is not sure anymore about the picture he carries in his mind. It is not really a picture anymore, just an idea and a name. He wishes he had kept a photograph of Rita. He is not sure what shade of brown her eyes were. For all he knows she was standing behind him at the checkout last night. She might not have recognized him from the back. She wouldn’t have expected him to have put on so much weight. On the other hand, maybe she noticed that a guy in front of her was buying Heinekens. Maybe she remembered that he always drank Heinekens. Maybe she looked closely then. Maybe she knew all along that it was him in front of her, and still she didn’t say anything, because the pain is alive for her too. Sometimes he thinks the pain will never stop until he finds her. If he could talk to her just one more time, if they could sit down together and really talk for once, then maybe he would find out they have nothing in common anymore. He has thought about putting an ad in the newspaper or hiring a detective to look for her, just to find out if she is still alive. He sometimes has a weird kind of daydream. He is in line at the checkout. He turns around and she is standing there just as she used to be, as if there were no such thing as time.

  My Writing Life: A Confession in Fable

  I want to say, this is how it was. I want to believe that this is how it had to be. I don’t want to rebel against fate. What could be more pointless than that? So I go on, thinking always of stopping. I lay myself down to sleep, on the pavement or in the leaves, and vow to stop tomorrow. I wake up and begin to scribble again. It’s not that I have so terribly much left to say, it’s that I have nothing left to say. I listen into myself, to the noises within, the whistling and muttering.

  I would like to have silence. I remember a teacher who would whack her desk hard with the flat of a ruler and shout, “I will have silence!” I will have silence. A silence within, genuine and profound, with which to meet the silence of the end, assuming there is an end.

  The noise is like the sound of wild animals sometimes or of machines or otherwise inhuman things like wind in pines and surf on rocks, and at other times it is like the sound of old people in rockers or children at play or whispering together or weeping in some dark place they’ve been sent to for punishment, and I sometimes imagine I could tolerate all the others if I could make those stop.

  So I go on writing, laying down one sentence after another. I lay them down like sponges hoping they will soak up the noise, the howling, the mumbling, the creaking, the chattering, that they will become swollen with the noise, grow fat on the absurdity of the noise, and come to an end.

  I lay them down in a little notebook that fits in my shirt pocket, with a pencil stuck in beside it. In the other pocket I have a little sharpener for the pencil, for when it gets dull from scribbling, though worse even than scribbling for dulling a pencil is the crossing out, which I do with vigor so as to totally obliterate the thing that was there and is not wanted anymore, in case anyone should have a desire to look at it.

  The current notebook, the one I write this in, has forty-four or forty-eight pages, I’m not sure, I counted them and forgot. I am not meaning that it still has forty-four or forty-eight pages, but in a recent past, no more than ten days ago, it had the one or the other, though it has only seven now, as I have just discerned by counting back from the end.

  When I have finished a page, I tear it out and throw it away, which is why in the current case, having reached page seven, counting from the end, I can’t say whether it is—or was when I first put pencil to it—a notebook of forty-four or forty-eight pages, counting from the beginning.

  When I have reached page nine, counting from the end, I buy another similar notebook, which I carry in the pocket with the sharpener. That being so, and having been so for years, it follows that there are periods of time, hours or even days, when I carry a notebook in each pocket of my shirt, or to be precise, a notebook in one pocket and the remains of a second notebook in the other.

  I don’t carry an extra pencil, I have learned from experience that I will only lose it. When I have just one pencil and it is lodged in my mind as the only pencil, I am careful to clap my hand over the pocket when I run, or pick up something off the ground, or lean forward for the flush lever, or otherwise bend over, tempting gravity in those various postures, which, while they hold risks for the notebooks as well, the danger is less, as the notebooks are firmly wedged between the two
layers of cloth that make such a thing as a pocket, and the sharpener lies deep at the bottom of one of them.

  Having a second notebook, still unsullied, as I think of it, in the other pocket keeps a great weight off my mind and I am able to go on my way with a glad step and only the thicket of words to trouble me.

  I have been going a long time, and stop only to sleep and to eat, and to relieve myself in an alley or behind a tree, though sometimes I eat while I walk, and lately to rest on a bench or a rock, or just sitting on the ground or on a fallen log if I am in the woods and there are logs, or in the leaves if there are no logs, and sometimes I sleep in the leaves and sometimes on a bench, and when it rains I don’t sleep at all but stand hard against the wall of some public building to get shelter from its roof, and I otherwise stop only when the urge to press my little pencil to paper is more than I can bear.

  It comes upon me all of a sudden, and I stop in my tracks. Stop in my tracks psychologically speaking, as I am, as often as not, already stopped corporeally speaking in one of the ways I mentioned, sitting or standing, when the fit comes upon me, or am in transition between one posture and another, or am leaning against a lamppost, gasping for breath, or have already slid down the post to the ground and am lying on the pavement, too weary to go on. I sit up or sit down, depending, extract the pencil from my pocket, and, if the point seems dull, sharpen it by sticking it firmly into the little tapering hole in the sharpener and twisting. I remove the pencil, flick the shavings from my trousers briskly, and stifle a little sob as I recall the way my mother, on her knees in the cottage doorway, used to brush breakfast crumbs from my suit with a straw whisk before sending me off to school. I take the notebook from its pocket and open it on my knee. I ponder a moment, staring blankly before me. I bend over, place my face close to the page, and set down whatever thing has been nagging at me. And that done, I resume my journey with a new spring to my step, and I might even swing my arms as I go.

  Before I was in this place, I was in another place that looked almost the same. I had come to that place looking for my Molly. I was always hoping for a glimpse of her, and sometimes the hope would set me imagining I had seen the image of her reflected in a window glass or winking up at me from the bottom of a stream, as happened once when the thought of her came upon me while I was peering over a bridge rail. I once thought I saw her on a bus and ran after it shouting for it to stop, but it rolled on and left me choking in the dust.

  The second place is so like the first that if I did not remember leaving the one and traveling to the other, and sleeping by the roadside, and traversing a vast plain without any houses or signs of life except cattle, and if a building in the one place were not blue while in the other it was red, I would swear I had gone in a circle and come back to where I started.

  Molly wasn’t in the first place, no more than she is in this place, but I stayed in the one and now in the other because she travels and is as likely to come to where I am as to be in some other place I might go to.

  It was fear that got me started, fear and loneliness, scribbling on scraps of paper I found lying by the road. I knew nothing of notebooks then or of the orderly production and disposal of dreams and memories, but I was well on my way, having always a fat wad of paper scraps stuffed in a pocket.

  On a good day I can still get the mind clear enough that I can have my daydreams, think about the days with Molly or my home with the parents, the little I remember. I push away the other things that are always clamoring at me, begging to be thought about, elbow my way through them and get up close to the window glass, so to speak, and with a bit of my sleeve rub a little hole in the dirt and grime big enough to peer through, and I see, as in the oval frame of an old photo, a picture of the parents, stricken with age and bent, standing side by side in the cottage door, the brothers and sisters crowding in the hallway behind them. The parents always appear to me in that ancient way, when I get them in focus, though they could not have been very old when I left. Truth be told, in the course of my wanderings, what with the erosions of time and blows to the head, I have lost the actual memory of them and have in its place constructed a picture of them out of sundry bits and pieces I took from the cottagers and crofters, so to call them, that I encountered on the road, and that is just as well, as I have been going for a long time and they are old now, if they are still in the world with me, which is not likely.

  It was easy then to imagine I was just going out for a play day and would return in the evening to the cozy place I had set out from and where, after all, I really belonged. They stood in the doorway, and I with my bicycle, my biking helmet, my toe clips, reached across the handlebars and shook the hand of each in turn, beginning with my father. I mounted the bike and lurched up the hill, wobbling and tottering on the loose stones of the path, while behind me rose a din of farewell. My mother wailed as if I were being lowered into the grave, the brothers and sisters clapped and jeered, the dogs barked, even the cows and sheep let fly a chorus of lowing and bleating. I had nearly reached the high road when I looked back and saw that my mother, a little aproned figure far down in the valley, was out in the pasture waving her handkerchief.

  I reached the open road and fell in with the traffic. Whole villages were on the move in a turbulent press of vehicles and conveyances; donkey carts and pushcarts and bikes mingled with claxoning transports, taxis, prison vans, and bright-painted buses. Contents of entire houses swayed in mountainous piles on drays and wagons, with sometimes a tethered cow lumbering at the rear of a cart or a huddle of sheep trotting after. Choking on the dust of my fellow travelers, I bent over the handlebars and pedaled furiously, plunging into what I thought of as life’s great adventure.

  It had seemed, viewed from the safety of childhood, so much fun, and yet it wasn’t, and after a good many years I saw it had not been the right thing after all, though of course by then it was too late. One of the aspects of the great adventure is the impossibility of revision. That is, so to speak, the tragic aspect. There were bad choices at the beginning, and bad luck, a bad leg, a lost bike, blows to the temple, tendencies to inebriation and sloth. They warned me there would be no second chances, but I trusted to luck and soldiered on. The problems came in part from the imperfect view I had at the outset. I was, after all, still young, the field of action, if I may call it that, was enormous, the goal obscured by something like fog.

  I was young and trusting and it seemed to me that so many people going in one direction would be going that way with some purpose, though none could tell me what it was, and whether they were fleeing something or seeking something, I didn’t know, but I saw no other way, and for a long while I followed the traffic and ate their dust, and each time I came to a new place, I would look around me and say, “Here I am at last,” and then discover I wasn’t. And yet I blundered on, in plain view of the mountain of carcasses, so to speak, of others who had made the attempt before me. I don’t remember how long I fared in that manner, my memory is a rusty sieve, but I know that my bike that had flowed smooth as water when I set out now squeaked and rattled as it went.

  After a time, seeing no prospect in that direction, I turned aside and chose smaller roads, and sometimes not roads at all but footpaths and rutted lanes, walking and pushing my bike and sleeping by night in woods and fields, and I saw nothing but farms and small towns and vast empty spaces. The nights were cold and if I was not near a habitation where I could seek shelter in a barn or beneath a hayrick, I built a fire in the woods and lay down beside it.

  I seldom met other travelers, or so it seems to me now, though perhaps I met a great many and even became friendly with two or three to such a point that I was sorry to part from them, but have forgotten them since, as seems more likely. But I seem to recall one who came upon me all of a sudden, walking out of the night to where I sat huddled in a blanket by a fire I had built at the edge of some water, though whether that was in a lake or ditch I can’t recall. He was a pale, dusty beggar of a man, and he looked half-st
arved, though I don’t otherwise remember his particulars, except that he had a funny way with his cap, which he would take off when he spoke and clap back on his head the instant he fell silent. He sat on the other side of the fire from me, his knees drawn up to his chin, and I seem to recall a lively conversation with a great deal of back and forthing and a corresponding quantity of doffings and donnings, but if he told me his name I have forgotten it, and if I told him mine he was the last to hear it.

  Whether the cause was the tediousness of the conversation or the warmth from the fire or the weariness from the long road, I dozed off where I sat. Alerted by a rustling at my back, I opened my eyes to see the stranger towering above me and holding a great long log, and before I could lift my arm or speak he had heaved it in the air with his two hands and brought it down on my head.

  When next I opened my eyes, the sun was up. I rose, braced myself with one hand against a tree so as not to fall down again, and felt myself all over. I discovered a painful big lump on my temple and another on my crown. I looked around, but my attacker was nowhere to be seen. In the mud of the road, I saw the marks of his footsteps coming up the one way and the marks of my bike wheels going off in the other.

  I had lost my bike, and the several blows to my head had knocked great gaping holes into my memory. I was in confusion, not able to recall the particulars of my journey, where I was intending to go, or why. Standing there in the muddy road, I stared down at the wheel marks and took stock of the fact that I had either to stay where I was or to go, and so I went. And once I was in motion, I had to go this way or that, and having no memory of my destination, or the life path I had marked out for myself, I followed the tracks of my bike.

  For a long time I had no other goal than to follow my bike. Sometimes I lost the tracks after a rain or when I struck a bit of pavement, but I soon found them again, though whether they were the tracks from that bike or some other I couldn’t know, and it was the same to me either way. One day was like another. Free to go on, or free to stay, I went on, driven by the boredom that overcame me when I stopped any place for long, looking about me at the same trees and rocks. And once I was going I went in the direction my bike had taken, and while I walked, I thought about this and that, and as there was nothing on the road to ponder but bushes and rocks and such that were, as I said, similar from one day to the next, I was led to recollect what I could from my past, and in the course of rummaging in the bygones, I discovered a great many gaps and holes and other such punctures and perforations where something must have been in my head that had gone missing. I couldn’t recall the name of the place I had come from, the number of months and years I had been gone from there, the names of my brothers and sisters, or how many I had of the one and the other.