The Sandman: Book of Dreams Read online

She recrossed her legs and continued. "So, anyway, she rushes up to me and with both hands takes one of my arms, and she leans way, way too deep into my personal space, and says, 'I am your new neighbor, Countess Protopsilka, but you must call me Deirdre.' Because, see, the count was long dead, and anyway he lost his title when Greece stopped being a monarchy after the war. And the more she protests that she's not a countess anymore, the more I realize I'd better call her Countess or she'll hate me. So she tells me she's moving to town with her new husband, who ran an orange juice bottling plant in Jupiter, Florida, till his brother bought him out behind his back and ruined him.

  "And it's then that I see this little guy behind her, struggling with four suitcases, one in each hand, another one under each arm. A dapper little man with a pencil-thin mustache and ruby red lips. Lips I'd kill for. I smile at him and he winks at me. Which, you know--being the kind of girl I am--I accept winks from anybody. They're gifts, Darren."

  She paused, as if waiting for him to chuckle. His soft, quick, shallow breaths were all she got; she shrugged, as if they'd have to do.

  "Then the countess turns and says, 'Hurry up, Cary.' And I can't really continue down the stairs with the big old countess and pack mule Cary on their way up. So I back up two flights and then I'm at their apartment, which is above mine and one over. Filthy. Family of nine had lived there just before. Least, I'm assuming they were a family. Anyway, the countess professes herself enchanted by the place and asks me to stay for tea. And I tell her I can't because I have an appointment, not to mention she can't possibly have any tea things unpacked anyway, and she laughs this crazy laugh and kisses me.

  "Now, this is where I get the impression that maybe she's seen better days, and maybe not so long ago, and maybe the sudden change has made her a little crazy. Desperate-friendly, you know the type. I mean--okay, I'm not saying I'm not convincing, or anything. As me, I mean. My hair's my own. I've had electrolysis. But this countess babe is, like, nose to nose with me, and I mean, come on. She doesn't even give me a hard look. Instead she tells me, I'm a beautiful girl, and of course all beautiful girls are always rushing off to some romantic rendezvous or other, but I must agree to come and have tea with her and Cary very soon. I say, sure.

  "Then I turn and smile politely at Cary, who gives me this look like he'd ravish me right there if the countess weren't around to stay his impeccably manicured hand. I kind of swallow my disbelief at this whole Merchant-and-Ivory-on-the-skids scene, and bolt.

  "I don't even remember where I went. But that night, when I get home, I'm on my way up the stairs, right? And who do I run into but Cary. Gives me this silent-movie leer and asks why I'm unescorted. I put on my best Lewis Carroll and say, 'Because I do not have an escort.' He laughs, laughs, laughs. Then he insists on walking me up the stairs, and when we get to the door to my place, Darren, I swear to God, I have to fight the bastard off. He's, like, got one shoulder in the door, and he's pushing, telling me he understands me, he wants to 'comfort' me. I tell him he better go, I have a yeast infection, and that confuses him for just long enough for me to give him one big shove and get the door bolted on him.

  "Next morning, there's a knock, and I think, Christ, and start foraging around for my Mace, but while I'm looking I hear someone sing out my name so that it's, like, seven syllables, and I think, Gotta be the countess. So I open the door, and there she is in a turban and a big apron that says KISS ME, I'M WELSH. And she's got a tray of muffins in her hand, because she's sorry she couldn't offer me tea yesterday and this is to make up for it and aren't we going to be the best of friends.

  "Well, can I tell you? First of all, the muffins are wonderful. Cranberry or something. Little bursts of tang. And second, there's something kind of grand about old Deirdre--I mean, something romantic and indomitable. Something no queen can resist. I just looked at that face and kind of fell a little in love. So I'm like, yes, aren't we going to be the best of friends. And she starts telling me about the time she and Princess Grace had to share open toilets at an arms dealer's villa in Rangoon, and I'm going, no way am I talking to someone who saw Princess Grace take a dump, which till now I was quite certain she never did. And then in walks Cary."

  At this point, Wanda was interrupted by a knock at the door. She turned and found a youngish, gap-toothed duty nurse leaning into the room. "Just come to check the morphine feed," the nurse said in hushed nurse tones.

  Wanda got up and moved the chair to give the nurse access to the buzzing, squidlike monitor. She gave it the once-over, then said, "How is our golden boy tonight?"

  Wanda looked at him; he was fidgeting now, moaning faintly. "Little restless."

  The nurse hit a button that sent the LED indicator whirling into the numerical stratosphere. "Well, that ought to make it easier on him." She made a little notation onto a clipboard, and said, without looking up, "Keeping him amused, are we?"

  "That's the idea."

  She looked up, slipped her pen through the silver clamp, and smiled. "Doubt if he can hear you. Still, worth a try."

  I can hear you, thought Darren as the extra shot of morphine flowed through him like a potent, fiery steak sauce. I can hear you fine. I can see you fine. Stop talking about me like I'm in utero or something.

  Wanda looked at him fondly and said, "Yeah, worth a try," and Darren could see that her eyebrows were really strips of anchovy. I hate anchovies, he told her.

  The nurse left the room, and Wanda swam over to the chair and climbed back into it. She had a tail like a Shetland sheepdog that she had to shake dry. Then she said, "Where was I?"

  Cary just walked in, he told her.

  "Oh, yeah, Cary just walked in," she said as her hair began to grow and fill the room like time-lapse ivy. "So, I see him, and I get a sick feeling in my stomach."

  Barren sighed and leaned back into his pillow, and gave himself up to the story. "How," Wanda continued, "can I possibly tell the countess that her husband was raining on my lawnmower? Obviously, I can't. So I ask her to please die because I have to redistribute gravel for my morning appointment. And she smiles and says, 'Clandestine,' and leaves."

  Darren watched the countess depart Wanda's apartment, and as he did so he became increasingly aware that her turban was really an egg, and that it was broken and spilling yoke all over the carpet. Oh, no, he said, and he told Wanda he'd clean it up. And while he looked for rags, Wanda kept talking to him.

  "Darren, what can I say, I had to fight with Cary again to get him to matriculate. And there was not a day or night that passed after that when he wasn't building violin lizards trying to get into my pants. It got to the point where I couldn't open the nirvana slip of fluoride without him being there ready to pounce. Now, I'm a normal, healthy girl--no comments, please--and it just so happens that at this abbatoir of my aquatic filament, I was suffering a decided lack of love."

  Barren's heart broke for Wanda, whom he watched from across her apartment, where she languished at a window that was made up entirely of coloring book pages. As she poked holes in the paper panes with a lit cigar and listlessly peered through to the streets below, her right leg swung slowly back and forth. She was wearing metal swim fins, and as she moved her foot she was carelessly scraping the scales off an upturned alligator's belly.

  Stop hurting that alligator, he tried to cry at her, but he found that was a chair.

  "So," she continued, "much as I hate to admit it, I began to consider perhaps giving a dromedary to Cary's stucco mueslix lust. Especially since girls of my sort-- well, we can't exactly be too reflective napalm about a man who knows what's what with us, and still wants us, you know what I cinched arpeggio? But my prismatic envelope with the countess was worth a lot to me, too. What was I to slate?

  "Well, you can guess. I did it. Lost all my lyric longitude. Said yes. Let him in one evening, and he spent the whole night winking my demotic charnels, and don't even ask what else."

  Darren was shocked and dismayed by this development. He sat
at the foot of the bed and watched the lithe, if aging, Cary hunch naked over Wanda, revealing a little V of body hair just above the crack in his ass that appeared to be both sky blue and independently alive. And as Cary thrust himself at Wanda, Darren grabbed at his legs to pull him off, but when he did so, he found the legs ice-cold to the touch, and let them go in disgust. Wanda, he called out, push him away! But it turned out not to be Wanda lying beneath Cary's weight--it was Ray! Darren was overcome with love and gratitude, that Ray would selflessly take Wanda's place to save her.

  "The next morning, of course," said Wanda, "I was tubered with shame. Swore right window-thin lair that I'd tell the countess everything. But when she came down that evening with her mule filled with iconics and silvered actuary, I couldn't. And Cary saw that as permission to keep log tiling. And I let him. That night, and the one after, and the farm oscillator."

  Darren placed himself before Wanda's door and held it in place, but it was buckling between the hinges; someone on the other side--Cary, surely--was pushing, pushing to get in, and Darren couldn't stop him. There was a buzzing, too, loud and disorienting, like a fire drill on Mars.

  "Finally," said Wanda with a sigh, as she crawled beneath the carpeting and hid, "I nimbled to my senses. Not just like that, I admit. I was worm-rolling a pimento down at Penn Station one coffeespoon and I saw him. Cary. With another dolmen. A redhead. Nuzzling and dyslexing like they were head-over-heels in scuba nucleus. And I figured, okay, time to stint aorta. So I went to the countess."

  Now the door wasn't a door, it was something alive, alive and buzzing, and Darren's eyes were filled with bees that broke off from it like paint chips. But still he pushed against it, because he sensed that it was the only way to save poor Wanda from utter humiliation before the countess.

  "And guess what?" Wanda said, with a hint of wonder and delight in her voice. "I tell the old broad, 'I'm sorry, to the snack of my fawn I'm sorry, but I have to confess I've been dickin' your laminate for almost Croatian spray now.' And she near faints. Garlands her forehead and says, 'Wanda, that's not hoover den! You can't be shellacking ill tents with my dear cilantro, Nestor! He's still lowering nub dale in Jupiter.' "

  Who's Nestor? Darren asked. The door-thing gave way, broke over him like a wave.

  " 'Who's Nestor?' I ask her. And she says, 'My husband.' I say, 'Countess, what gives? I came to dim quotient that I've been ladling Cary for weeks now--' And she cuts me right off. 'Cary?' she says, and she starts to fibrillate. 'You thought I was married to Cary? And she's shaking, she's buxom so gland. And I say, 'If Cary's not your tipping, then who is he?' "

  Then Darren found he couldn't hear Wanda, couldn't see her anymore. Through the buzzing and the stinging he called out to her, Stop, I can't hear. He tried waving the bees away, as though they were nothing more than cigarette smoke or a bad smell, but they felt more like water-- flowing right back into the places his hands had cut through.

  He gasped from the effort and some of them flew into his mouth. He tried to spit them out, but they lodged under his tongue and between his teeth and cheeks. He curled up and tried to dislodge them, but more bees got in, and soon, in a blind panic, he found himself eating them just to be rid of them. And the taste, while unusual, wasn't unpleasant. Like blue corn chips and CoffeeMate. He reached out and shoveled some more into his mouth. Mmm. How long since he'd actually eaten anything, anything at all?

  He reached out for more, and--and there weren't any. Oh, the swarm of bees was still there, thick as ever, but he couldn't reach them. And then someone parted them-- parted them just like a curtain!--and stuck her head out, and glared at him with eyes of two different colors, neither of which he could name. A girl--no, a woman--no, a girl. With a shock of red hair. No--she was piebald. No-- she was--well, it was hard to say; even as he looked at her, she was receding, falling away.

  "wHAt's goJNg oN?" she asked. She sounded like a radio not quite tuned in to a station. "We wEre HAviNG So mUCHfuN!"

  And someone from Darren's right--and his left-- answered, in a voice like amber. He is but passing from your realm, to mine. That is all, my sister.

  "oH," said the girl-woman-girl, "i fOrGOT t/zAT SOmeTWes hAPPens."

  And will happen again, alas, added the newcomer, just

  AN EXTRA SMIDGEN OF ETERNITY 2O3 as the girl-woman-girl fell out of sight. He is to be my own guest but briefly.

  Barren closed his eyes, then, and found him: a tall, thin, emaciated man wrapped in black--looking just enough like Daniel Day Lewis to get Darren's heart gallumphing in his breast.

  The stranger put his pale face close to Darren's, and Darren waited to feel his breath, but he felt no breath. Little man, the stranger said softly, One foot in your own kingdom, another in mine, and ever resisting the inevitable pull of the next. What a dogged creature you are!

  And his face moved closer, and closer still, and then even closer, until it seemed to wash right over Darren, like a wave of milk, and then he was in his hospital room again, and Wanda was there by the bed, looking at him with great intensity, her hand clasped over her mouth.

  "Darren?" she said.

  He sat up. "I'm all right. It was just a bad spell. Finish the story. Who was Cary?"

  She leaned toward him and lay a hand on his leg. "Darren?" She shook him. "Darren."

  "Right here," he said, growing a little annoyed. "Finish the goddamn story, okay?"

  "Never mind the story," said yet another newcomer, whom Darren now saw seated on the windowsill. She was as pale as his last visitor, and evidently as fond of the Gothic look; a thin thing, waiflike, in a black halter top, black jeans, and black boots. Around her neck she wore a chain with some kind of amulet--an ankh, if Darren recalled the name correctly from his college explorations into the occult (which he only undertook because he was hot for that dreamy shaman lecturer).

  Then the newcomer smiled brilliantly, and Darren knew who she was.

  "I know who you are," he said.

  She smiled even more widely, slipped off the windowsill, and approached him. Wanda didn't notice their new distinguished guest, but instead kept shaking Darren's leg and mumbling, "Darren! Oh, God, Darren!"

  "You're here for me, aren't you?" he asked, as he realized exactly what her presence meant.

  She nodded. "Mm-hmm. Come on, hon," she said, extending her hand, "time to hit the road."

  Darren was surprised to find that he liked her; he really did. If he'd known all along that she was what awaited him at the end, he might not have minded so much, fought so hard. Even so, he folded his arms, slumped into the pillow, and said, "No."

  Her eyebrows arched, and she puckered her lips. "No?" she said, in a kind of amused disbelief.

  He shook his head. "Sorry--but I'm not going anywhere till I hear the end of that story."

  "Well, it doesn't look like Wanda's going to tell it." And sure enough, Wanda was right beside him now, holding his arm as if checking for a pulse, and saying, "Oh God, oh God, oh God."

  His heart sank, but he refused to submit. "Listen," he said, "you look like a nice pers--well, you look nice. Try to see this from my point of view. Stories are important. They're all that we've got, really. Growing up, I was spat on, ridiculed, beaten, ostracized--and the only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different--you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency."

  She shrugged. "I know some who would agree with you."

  He almost jumped out of the bed. "Well, then! This is my last story! It may not be much of one, but it's still my last ever, before you take me off to get my wings, or whatever it is you do."

  She giggled and sat cross-legged on the bed. "I don't do that!"

  "Like I said, whatever. Just let Wanda finish, please? Then I'll go quietly."

  She sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair. "Listen. First of all. Um--how sho
uld I put this? The best part of stories--that's the part that comes between the beginning and the end. Right?"

  He was wary of a trap, so thought carefully before answering. "Rrrright."

  "Because that's like eternity, isn't it? It's like being held aloft, or something. So, you should probably look at this as kind of like being in that story forever. Like a little extra smidgen of eternity for you. How 'bout that?"

  He drew a breath (or at least that's how it felt) and said, "Well, eternity is supposedly infinite, isn't it?"

  It was her turn to be wary. "Uh-huh."

  "Okay, then, if eternity is infinite, how can I have a 'little extra smidgen' of it? You can't get more of something that has no limits."

  She glared at him a moment, then stuck out her tongue. "Oh, pooh on you!" she said. "Don't be so darn literal. You know what I mean. Being in the middle of a story is like being suspended in time--it's a kind of blessed existence. A charmed state. And you're lucky, because you get to be in that state forever. Right? And really, you might as well get used to it, because Wanda's the only one who can tell you how the story ends, and she's just not going to. Not now."

  As if to illustrate this, Wanda got up and walked dolefully to the door, then stuck her head out and said, "Excuse me. Please. I think--I think--" And then she burst into wracking sobs.

  A flurry of nurses rushed in, like a flock of swallows descending on Capistrano, and examined Barren--or rather Barren's body, because by some means or other, the essential Barren now found himself sitting in a chair opposite his visitor, watching the activity.

  "Damn," he said, turning to her. "Don't you know how it ends?"

  She shrugged her shoulders and grimaced.

  "So," he said, as two of the nurses drew a sheet over his remains and the others left the room to console Wanda. "That's it. I go through the rest of timeless time, on a new, higher plane of existence, and as I float godlike among the insubstantial void, all I'll ever be thinking is, Who the fuck was Cary?"

  She giggled again and took his hand. "For what it's worth," she said, "floating godlike among the insubstantial void is probably not something you'll be doing a lot of." An orderly in plastic gloves and a filter mask arrived with a stretcher on rollers. "You'll get used to this, you know. Where you're going, there's lots more to occupy you than the ending to a gossipy little story."

  He pouted and wouldn't look at her. "It's the principle. It's my last one." He took a studied look at his fingernails. "And I haven't had the easiest life, you know. Or the easiest death."

  She narrowed her eyes. "Others have had worse." Immediately, she softened. "Oh, darn. Don't know why I let you get to me, you old fussbudget! But, listen, you're a sweet guy. I hate to break the rules like this, but, shoot, what are rules for?"