An Orphanage of Dreams Read online

  I went a great many miles in this way, in pursuit of my bike, and what with the coming of warm days, the emergence of green leaves and flowers, the pleasure of breathing deep and steady and putting one foot in front of the other, I was loose and carefree. The only cloud in the sky was not knowing my name. I had been going a good long time without it before I noticed it was missing, as I saw nobody and was not in the habit of addressing myself in that way. At first the knowledge that it was gone gave me a chill, and I sat on the ground and hugged myself and felt afraid and alone. But soon enough I saw it was no good disjointing my head in search of it, and I rose and went on my way, thinking it would pop into my mind one day, and in the years since, a great many names have turned up in that place, but whether one of them was my old name is impossible to say. I would dub myself with this one or that one, as the occasion demanded, when ordered to do so by a policeman, the several times I was accosted by one of those, but none of them had the air of belonging to me and none of them stuck. Molly named me Ned, saying, “You look like a Ned to me,” but whether she chose that name on a whim or because she had an inkling of the truth, I never found out.

  She had glossy black hair and dressed like a Gypsy and had arrived in that town with a band of musicians that traveled in the wake of a circus. We met on a bridge in a park, she going one way and I the other, and we stopped in the middle to gaze on the swans.

  At first I was carefree and happy. I strolled in the streets with Molly on my arm, and I felt the envious eyes of other men upon us. I called her my little wife, and we talked together of a cottage in a valley with flowers in the window boxes and children at play in the fields.

  But I was still aching with some kind of hunger, though what it was for I couldn’t decide. I squinted and peered into the darkness, as it felt to me sometimes, and shaded my eyes against the glare, as it felt at other times, but never got a view of it in the one way or the other, and whether it was too close or too far I couldn’t make out. And Molly walked behind me in the streets, the sun flared and ricocheted from every tree and building, while I wandered in a tunnel of darkness, in the hollowness of that yearning, straining toward nothing I could name.

  Molly would play little tunes on a harmonica, and I would close my eyes and let the pictures come and go. I would wake in the night and listen to her soft, peaceful breathing in the bed beside me, and the thought of the open road would fill me with longing and terror. She had a little flashlight that she kept on a table by the bed, and I would make shadow puppets on the ceiling with my hands, and struggle against the anguish that was sprouting up in me, until the batteries grew weak and the figures on the ceiling faded, and the bulb became an orange glow and went out. I would shake Molly awake, and we would sit side by side on the edge of the bed and smoke and talk until the rectangle in the wall began to gray.

  Every morning, the moment she rose from bed, my Molly would go over to a calendar that hung from a nail by the window and stand awhile just looking at it. Because it was the morning after the day before, if it was Wednesday, the calendar would say Tuesday. After a good long time contemplating it, she would reach up and tear the page off and say, “Well, that’s that,” and throw the page in the trash can. She said the same thing every day, and whether it was my fancy stirred by the knowledge of time passing, or whether there was really a gradual change in her voice, every morning the way she said it seemed to me sadder than the day before.

  And so it went for that long while, with the fine days getting fewer and the bad days getting worse, until she finally had her fill of me, and then one day the tents of the circus were folded, the clowns shouted up from the street, and Molly ran down the stairs and went with them.

  I walked up and down in the little towns and the big ones, up to the logging camps and down at the river ports, looking for her. Some people remembered a circus having been there, but that was long ago, and others remembered it was a carnival or a freak show, and others said it was a traveling opera company. I went to those many places and never found her, and the places came to so resemble one another that I wasn’t sure, walking up and down in the one, that I wasn’t wandering in a memory of another, and I would become confused and stop people and ask for the name of the place, and they would say sometimes this and sometimes that, as if they didn’t know themselves where they were, and if they didn’t answer anything and just walked away, offended by my looks or my manners, I would get angry and curse them, and if they had given me money, I would throw it back at them.

  As I went along I would formulate my thoughts as best I could. I would chant them aloud or say them over under my breath, to prevent them from sinking out of sight and coming back later to torment me. I was sorry I had let Molly go, and I wrote her a letter expressing how I felt, where I promised to do better, though I knew it was a lie. But I had no address to send it to, so I carried it in my pocket for a good long while, and finally tore it to bits and threw the bits away, and that was how I got started.

  That was a great many years ago. I am old and Molly is old and I might not know her if we met, but even if I did know her, passing her in the street one day, and she did not know me, I would not turn back and speak. It’s no use thinking I would turn back and say, “Molly, don’t you know me?” I have thought of many ways the conversation might go after that and none make me want to begin. What’s finished is finished.

  When I came to the first place, looking for Molly, I was writing on scraps and dropping them on the roadside, half thinking that she would pick one up and know that I had come that way. And it happened a few times that a policeman saw me tossing away a morsel of paper I had picked up, scribbled on, and dropped, and made me go back and pick it up again, and it was useless to explain that I was only returning the paper to where I had found it, putting it back, I would add, augmented and improved with ponderings and musings and bits of verse. So I would walk back, as slowly as I dared, and pick it up and stuff it in my pocket, disposing of it there temporarily, and when I had gotten a ways off and was hidden by the corner of a building or some bushes, I would pull it out of the pocket and throw it away again, permanently for the most part, though it happened once that there was a second policeman, and while I was picking the paper up again under the eyes of that one, the first policeman reappeared, and while I was stuffing it back in my pocket for the second time, the two of them stood off a little ways with their caps together and discussed my case. They must have seen that I was old and perhaps not right in the head, for all they did was make me pick up all the paper I came across in the street for two or three blocks, which I was glad to do, while one of them strolled behind me whistling and twirling his baton.

  The policemen in the place I am now all know me, and I keep a distance from them. If one of them finds me asleep in a spot where I can be stumbled over, presenting a hazard to the public, he will poke me awake with his nightstick. There was a time, when I was younger, when policemen amused themselves by making music on my head and ribs with their sticks, but they’ve tired of that since and are satisfied with a few sharp pokes to the ribs, which I don’t much mind, and I always oblige by moving off in whatever direction they indicate, and am careful to thank them for pointing me the way.

  Even before I met Molly I hadn’t known where I was going, but after she went I began to suspect that wherever it might be I wasn’t likely to get there. All that time I had been looking for my life path, and now it was dawning on me that there wasn’t one, that my life was destined to be just a foolish meandering and a roaming around and about until there was no more strength left for it and it stopped. So I have taken my direction from the wheel marks of a bicycle, mine or another’s, it hasn’t mattered, from the traces and rumors of Molly in this place or that, and lately from the proddings and nudgings administered by guardians of the law, and one way of going seems to me as reasonable as another.

  But I am weary now of going up and down and swinging this way and that and the oscillation of day and night and the swerving of
my mood from merry to somber and back again. I don’t fear the end, I fear instead that death won’t be the end. I want to believe that life is like a bright light, and when it goes out it leaves nothing behind, but what I fear most of all is that I will wake up from death to the same life again, and eat the same apple and sleep in the same bed and walk the same road and love Molly again and lose her again and there will never be an end of it, a kind of hell, a torture, not because it is painful but because it goes on, because it won’t ever stop.

  There was an inconvenience to using scraps for my writing, apart from the fact that there might be none lying about when the urge came upon me. They were frequently of irregular shape, most were printed all over and useless for writing, and the rest had served for wrapping food and were greasy and stained. They had often been wadded and crumpled into tight little balls in preparation of being thrown, in which case I had to spread them open on a surface and rub them smooth with a flat stone that I carried in a trouser pocket for that purpose. As often as not, there was no suitable surface at hand, and by the time I had found one and had rubbed the wrinkles out, I had lost all trace of the bothersome thought that had prodded me to pick up the scrap in the first place, and it was these inconveniences that led me to the idea of carrying a little notebook of a size that would fit in my pocket, so as always to have a morsel of clean paper handy.

  Of the notebooks I possessed in the past, some had forty-four and some had forty-eight pages, as I mentioned before, but I never knew, at the moment of purchase, whether I had got the one or the other, the fat or the lean, and so the first thing I would do on leaving the shop was stop in the street and count them. There was a flaw in the manufacturing process, but I couldn’t determine whether, as a result of the flaw, I was getting four pages fewer than I ought or four pages too many, and whether, if the count was forty-four, I should go back to the shop and complain, or, if it was forty-eight, be off with a skip and whistle. That is the way it has always been with me, never knowing whether to count my blessings or curse my fate, waffling between happiness and despair.

  When the count of remaining pages reaches nine, as I also mentioned, I buy another identical notebook, which I carry in the pocket with the sharpener. Having it there means that if I am caught up in scribbling when I reach the bottom of the last page, I can let go of that one and grab the next with scarcely a break in the orderly transcription of the chittering and drumming in my head.

  Before I had gotten into the habit of carrying an extra notebook in the other pocket, I was, on reaching page nine, counting from the end, accustomed to walking back to the shop where I had bought it, to buy another, and with nine pages left I was able to stroll in that direction with a tranquil mind, confident of my goal, taking a roundabout path to gawk at the sights, even stopping to rest along the way.

  It was a cold winter morning, the air flecked with snow, so I had not dawdled and had all nine of my pages still intact, the day I discovered the shop locked tight and dark, and, according to a notice posted on the door, set to remain in that state for three days to come. I tried to get through those days, I bore up as best I could. Clasping the pencil in fingers numb with cold, I made my letters small and I scrunched the words so tightly together I could scarcely read them myself, but by the evening of the second day, there wasn’t a whit of space left, and any scraps I might have picked up and used instead were buried under the steadily falling snow, and I fell back to mumbling and chanting, until finally I couldn’t bear it any longer and nothing remained but to knock out a pane with my shoe, which I did, and I was standing in front of the store leafing through a notebook to see if it had forty-four or forty-eight pages, when a policeman came up and gave me some pokes with his nightstick and showed me the way to the jail, where I remained a good long time before I was, with the aid of several more pokes, ejected from that place in turn. I vowed I would never again venture into a place as devoid of suitable surfaces for bringing forth my thoughts as a prison, and I haven’t, and to that end I have made certain to have a notebook in the other pocket when I need it.

  When a page is covered top to bottom and side to side with scrivenings, I draw a big X across it with my pencil, and I say to myself, “Well, that’s that,” and then I tear the page out, and then I throw it away, in the manner of Molly disposing of our days. And sometimes, in place of an X, I strike out the words by drawing a thin line through them. But struck through or x-ed over, the writing stays legible, should anyone care to read it, the x-ing and the striking signaling more my own relinquishment of the bit of life I have pressed into the words than any attempt to conceal them. I leave them legible out of vanity, I suppose, or loneliness, imagining as I walk along that somewhere behind me someone will pick up the page from where I threw it.

  Other times, I cover the page with a dense cross-hatching, so the writing is hard to make out, and I think that a person reading it, if there is such a one, will be looking at my soul through the wire of its cage, or the other way around, that my soul is peeking out through laced fingers at the mystery of the world.

  Most often, though, I take the pencil in my fist, and, moaning and cursing furiously, scribble all over the page until it is thoroughly blackened. I regret the times I was unfaithful to Molly, or cruel to her, and it would be a weight off me to blacken those pages, but I can’t anymore.

  When I have finished a page, filled it top to bottom and side to side with scribblings that I have crossed out in one of the ways described, or blackened, I remove it from the notebook by a series of gentle tugs, neatly severing it from the little line of stitches that anchor it to the book. I am careful to keep a rein on myself while I am tugging and not give way to the frenzy of impatience that surges within me at the prospect of a final and utter obliteration of my thoughts, and claw or tear it out. Performed correctly, the gradual sundering leaves the remaining pages firmly in place, but if my emotions get the best of me and I claw and tear or otherwise snatch at the page, I can weaken the armature of the book in such a way that the other leaves drop out of it. The stitches fly open and the pages escape, fluttering and tumbling to the ground at my feet. As often as not I am still occupied with the disposal of the page, blackened or otherwise, that provoked the frenzy, and fail to observe what has happened. Sometimes, if there is a breeze, the pages are already scattered about in the street, if that is where I am, by the time I notice, under vehicles and so forth, or they are fluttering in the air and sailing over walls and hedges, and I have to run after them, or, if I am not in the street, I might have pressed them into the mud with my shoes. Having recovered all the loose sheets I can, I stuff them in a pocket, with all the inconvenience that follows on this the next time an urge to scribble overtakes me—removing the wad from the pocket, extracting a crumpled page, replacing the wad in the pocket, smoothing the sheet with a stone, and so forth. In my extreme agitation I have on occasion thrown away the empty covers, hurling them into some inaccessible place, into the river once, down a street drain another time, and as a result had nothing to press on while I wrote, and was forced to make do with whatever hard surface I could find, a tree or a bench, rough surfaces not suitable for writing, and ended up driving holes in the paper with the pencil point, and with the usual consequences—shredding, balling up, and so forth. Once, after attempting to write on a page I held up against a sycamore, I flew into a rage and bit my pencil in two and hurled the pieces from me. Five minutes later I was crawling about on the grass looking for them. The sun was setting, the grass was damp, I could scarcely see the ground in front of me and was feeling about with my hands, when I finally touched one of the pieces, the shorter one, scarcely big enough to grasp between thumb and forefinger. After pocketing that bit of pencil, I discovered I had lost the sharpener, and I had to get back down on my knees and grub about for it half the night while cursing myself for not keeping a leash on my temper.

  Sometimes I simply drop a severed page, let it flutter to the ground at my feet or sail away on the wind. Other times, d
epending on my mood, I fold it into a little packet, or I crumple it and roll it between my palms into a tight little ball that I am able to hurl a good distance from me, and sometimes I tear it into fragments.

  When I have torn out a page and disposed of it in one of the ways described, I feel I have made a little progress, though toward what I can’t say, and whether it is really progress and not regress or just standing still, I find impossible to discern, the jumble and jangle in my head being the same as before, but for a moment or two there is a great weight lifted off me.

  Having removed, excised, and on occasion annihilated a page of my scribbles, I ought to be quit of them, comfortable in the thought that there have gone words and sentences I won’t have to write again in this life, but it never works that way, and as I go along I mull on the fate of the pages I have abandoned along the way, that I have left lying in the road or in the grass in a park or in a field, bleached by the sun, dissolving in the rain, buried by snow, caught by a wind and blown with the dry leaves into gutters and streams, gathered by street sweepers, mingled with food wrappers and newspapers, discarded with the other refuse, stepped on by the polished shoes of strolling policemen, trampled by sheep, and so forth.