Dreams (24 page)

And the Beatles had played at Candlestick Park and I'd missed the show.

I still have my unused ticket. Could probably sell it on eBay for a king's ransom.

I clicked on the little box and a check mark appeared.

What was my second choice?

I was starting to feel slightly more ambitious. I've always loved history and wished I could have witnessed the events that decided the course mankind would take. The Manhattan Project fascinates me, the dramatic events, Albert Einstein's famous letter to President Roosevelt, the development and testing process, Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, Klaus Fuchs.

Would Dreemz.biz have a file on the original test, the world's first nuclear explosion? I scrolled through the online catalog with my fingers crossed and there it was. Trinity, White Sands, New Mexico, July 16, 1945.

Click.

Check.

And what would my third free sample be?

Right then I was sitting at the computer, filling out the form. I swung around in my chair and scanned the walls of my study. The room was lined with bookcases, the books arranged by category. One bookcase was devoted to computer manuals and user's guides. One was filled with reference books—almanacs, dictionaries, atlases, collections of quotations and records and trivia of every sort. And one was filled with my relaxation reading, my guilty pleasures, what my favorite literary critic calls lurid trash.

I rolled over to the last of those and pulled down a volume of collected stories by H. P. Lovecraft, the eccentric antiquarian pulp author of Providence, Rhode Island. I flipped through the pages reading a striking phrase here, a familiar scene there, in one after another of my favorite stories. There was "The Dunwich Horror," "The Rats in the Walls," "The Shadow over Innsmouth," "The Colour out of Space," "The Shadow out of Time." I dropped the book on my desk and let it open where it would, and it fell open to "The Call of Cthulhu," probably Lovecraft's most famous story.

With the book lying open on my desk I keyed in my specs for a custom Dream. I wouldn't Dream "The Call of Cthulhu." I would be there in the room in Providence as Lovecraft wrote the story. I would
be
Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Once I'd sent off my order to Dreemz.biz I experienced buyer's remorse. What was I getting into? Was this some new internet scheme? Was Carter Thurston Hull a racketeer who would empty my bank account, ruin my credit rating, and destroy my life? Was Dreemz.biz a cult? Would a couple of men in black come calling at my door while ominously silent helicopters hovered overhead? I considered logging onto the website again and canceling my order, but I didn't do it. My curiosity was fighting my caution, and curiosity was winning.

A couple of days later a FedEx truck pulled up in front of my house and the driver handed me a package. I'd ordered software this way in the past and the driver was a regular. We exchanged some small talk, then he said, "I've been delivering a lot of these lately. Never heard of Dreemz.biz myself."

I told him this was the first time I'd dealt with them and I'd let him know what I thought of their product after I'd tried it out.

You understand, I was still working as a technical editor for a Silicon Valley startup that had barely survived the dotcom bust and was struggling to get back into profit. They let me telecommute part-time and show up at the office the rest of the time. On top of this I was raising a thirteen-year-old girl, which, if you've ever tried it, you know can keep you busy forty-eight hours a day. But eventually I was caught up with my work, or as caught up as I ever managed to get, and my daughter was in bed for the night. I felt I was entitled to relax.

A glass of good Scotch helped, and some fine music cleared my mind and elevated my soul. I'm not a religious man, but Mozart's
Coronation Mass
can almost make me believe there is a God. By eleven o'clock I was ready for sleep. I climbed into my pajamas, performed my ablutions, and was ready to climb into bed when I remembered the disks that had arrived from Dreemz.biz.

All right, I thought, I'll give this thing a try.

I slid the first Dreemz.biz CD into my computer. It booted up just fine. I found myself answering some more questions about what I wanted to dream—or
dreem
—and hit
enter.
My monitor screen went nuts for about half a minute, with a variety of colors and images swirling around. Then it seemed as if a bolt of light shot out of it and bathed me for a few seconds. It was like the aura that Sri Babaloo-boom-a-lam-bam-boom claims he can see, send $14.95 for his book, only it was
my
aura. I felt a tingling and I think my hair stood on end although I can't swear to that. Then everything went back to normal, except I felt very tired. I shut the thing down and went to bed.

The jet set down at SFO and Astrid and I put down our drinks and peered out the window. It was nice being back in San Francisco, although I had my doubts about playing in a football stadium. Brian got to the door first and made sure everything was copasetic before any of the boys climbed down the stairway.

It was a quick ride to the football stadium and they put us in a smelly locker room where they told us the local baseball team dressed for games. It was August, baseball season in America, and the baseball team shared facilities with the footballers. A couple of the guys had wives or girlfriends with them. I felt lucky that Astrid Kirchherr stuck with me. She's really a mothering type, and I've been having these dreadful headaches since that yobbo in Liverpool let me have it in the noggin with a steel-tipped boot after a show. I should have killed the thug but I was too stunned and nauseous to move.

There was a nice spread of American grub, fried chicken and potatoes and greens, and after the long flight I was ready to pitch in, and I did. Astrid said, "You haff ein schmear uff schmutz on your chin,
liebchen
," and leaned over and licked my chin with her pink little tongue.

We could hear the other performers from the locker room. They weren't very interesting except the Ronettes, but for some reason Ronnie Spector wasn't with them tonight. The other acts finished, I took a big hit off a joint and a slug of tequila, picked up my bass and headed for the runway.

They had to provide bodyguards for us, believe it or not. Some fool preachers had picked up on John's comment about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus Christ and there were a few demonstrators at the show who thought we were Agents of Satan and wanted to skin us alive for the greater glory of the Prince of Peace and the God of Love.

We made it onto the stage and some disk jockey from a local radio station gave us the big build-up which we really didn't need after all, but that was the way it was. There was a big crowd, mostly young girls. Some of them were screaming, some were crying, some were throwing things at us but the platform was set up in the middle of the field, too far for them to reach.

John gave a signal, Ringo started his countdown, and the three guitars rang out. I stayed in the back, near the drum-kit, laying down a bass line. We were playing "Rock and Roll Music." The sound wasn't what you'd call really perfect or even very good, I'm afraid, but it was good and loud and the kids in the stands went nuts.

Brian had told us to keep the numbers short, loud, and fast, and that's the way we played. We wrapped up with "Long Tall Sally" and got off the stage in half an hour, and that was that.

We didn't head back to the airport after the show. They actually put us in an armored car and took us downtown to a posh hotel. It was still early enough to do something else, so Astrid and I showered and dressed again and asked if anybody wanted to head out with us. George was alone on this trip and he said he'd like to, and we managed to sneak out of the hotel without anybody seeing us.

We wound up at a little club called the Keystone Corner. Muddy Waters was playing there. Can you imagine, a genius like Muddy Waters sitting on a rickety wooden stage all alone, McKinley Morganfield sitting in front of a room with maybe seventy-five seats, maybe a hundred seats, playing his guitar and singing that gorgeous blues and probably getting a couple of hundred dollars and a free meal out of it. And the Beatles just finished a show at a football stadium with, I don't know, thirty thousand, fifty thousand, I don't know how many teenaged girls wetting their pants for us.

After the show I went up to Muddy and introduced myself and my girlfriend and George Harrison and told him I was one of the Beatles and I really loved his music.

He said, "I done hoid of the Beatles. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Sutcliffe and Mr. Harrison, Miss Kirchherr."

That was the whole of our conversation. We had a couple of drinks. I offered to buy one for Muddy but he said he was tired and had to go wash up. We caught a cab back to the hotel and went to bed.

That was the high point of my trip to America.

My radio turned itself on with news of the latest political scandal in Washington and the latest war in the Middle East. I climbed out of bed and resumed my life. My name is Webster Sloat and I am a single dad with a thirteen-year-old daughter whom I love madly and who drives me crazy.

So that was the Dreemz.biz experience.

And today there was an all-day meeting scheduled at the office. Could I ever have done without that! But the bills don't stop coming, month after month. I think if I'd been alone I would have quit my job, sold my modest house in Sunnyvale for an absurd profit over the price I'd paid when I was married, and moved into a skuzzy apartment in the city. But having a teenager changes everything, and I mean everything.

Somewhere in my Beatles collection was a CD of the Candlestick concert. I put it on the speakers in the Saab. The music was wonderful, early Beatles rock and roll before they got all arty and experimental. But it was all John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Stu Sutcliffe wasn't on the record.

Or was he? I hit the
back
button and listened to one track in particular. "I Wanna Be Your Man." Was there an extra guitar on that track? If there were three guitars, then Paul was the third guitarist and that meant that Stu Sutcliffe was playing bass. I hit
back
again and tried to filter out the instruments and just hear the voices. Was there an extra voice? Was it Stu Sutcliffe? Or was that voice
my
voice?

I didn't want to try any more Dreemz.biz experiences after that. Not for a while, anyway. The Candlestick concert might have been only a dream, or a
dream,
but it was so real to me, I couldn't distinguish my recollection of the dream from a memory of a real event. Was I Webster Sloat or was I Stu Sutcliffe?

Sutcliffe had died in 1962 of a brain hemorrhage, probably caused by that kick in the skull at the Litherland Town Hall. At least, that's what I'd always believed. He wasn't one of the Beatles in 1966, he'd been dead for four years.

But I had a clear memory, a vivid, lifelike memory, of the Candlestick show with Sutcliffe playing bass and McCartney playing guitar.

No more Dreemz.biz for me, I decided.

There was no time limit on the three free Dreemz, and I went back to my life and tried to forget about them and about Mr. Carter Thurston Hull. I can't say my life was very exciting. Technical editing, reading for pleasure, listening to Mozart and Dvorak and Shostakovich and Locatelli. I don't know whether I'd grown away from rock and roll or it had grown away from me, but somehow the old pull wasn't there any more.

And of course, raising a thirteen-year-old. Sometimes I thought I should remarry just to have a woman in the house for my daughter to relate to, but I didn't think that was a good enough reason to marry. It wouldn't be fair to the woman involved and it wouldn't be fair to me.

One day my daughter came home from school and asked me for help with an assignment. She had reached the age where she knew everything and anyone older than high school age was a total ignoramus, distinctly including her father, so when she asked me to help out I was flattered, to say the least.

"What was Trinity, Dad?"

"You mean the religious concept?"

"No." She shook her head. "It has something to do with history. Something about an explosion."

I pondered. Aha, she meant the Trinity test in 1945. The first A-bomb explosion, in the New Mexico desert, before they used the bomb against Japan. I wasn't born for ten years after that, but I suppose to a thirteen-year-old anybody as ancient as her father had to have known Julius Caesar personally.

"How soon do you need this?" I asked.

"Tomorrow."

That wasn't time for anything except a quick peek at the encyclopedia and an internet search. Rather than do the work for her, I talked her through the process. There were plenty of sites devoted to the subject. She didn't need any prompting to pick the best sites and print out the documents. We went over them together, highlighting the key names and dates and events, and when we were finished she sat up for the next few hours writing her report.

I read it through and I was totally impressed. No question, this was
A-plus
work.

Of course, there was no convincing her that I didn't remember all the events she was writing about. Still, she actually gave me a good-night kiss before she went to bed. Now I was the one who couldn't get the events of the summer of 1945 out of my head.

The computer was still running so I sat down in front of the monitor and loaded the Dreemz.biz disk for the Trinity explosion. There was that display on the screen, colors and shapes swirling and blending, the bolt of light, the feeling that I was surrounded by a glowing aura, and then the return to the usual computer wallpaper and start-up menu. I shut the thing down and went to bed.

It was still dark out and it was cold in the wooden barracks but there was the sergeant walking up and down shaking us by the shoulder, his own uniform crisp and fresh-looking in the feeble incandescent lights. He growled out the same vulgar witticism that he had every morning since we got here, and nobody even bothered to pretend to be amused. We all grabbed our socks and the rest of our summer gear and got ready to face the glorious New Mexico sunrise.