Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (3 page)

“Words mix in blood, my blood is made of words.... I can't stop thinking, even at night. Words are numbers, too. Signs and portents, measures and relations, variables and qualifiers.”

“You're flesh,” she said. “I gave you substance.”

“You gave me existence, not substance.”

She laughed harshly, caught herself, forced herself to be demure again. Taking his hand, she led him back to the chair. She kissed him on the cheek, a chaste gesture considering their state of undress, and said she would stay with him all day, to help him orient to his new world. “But tomorrow, we have to go out and buy you some more clothes.”

“Clothes,” he said softly, then smiled as if all was well. She leaned her head forward and smiled back, a fire radiating from her stomach through her legs and arms. With a soft step and a skip she danced on the carpet, hair swinging. Webster watched her, still smiling.

“And while you're out,” he said, “bring back another dictionary.”

“Of course. We can't use
that
one anymore, can we? The same kind?”

“Doesn't matter,” he said, shaking his head.

The uncertainty of Webster's quiet afternoon hours became a dull, sugarcoated ache for Regina Coates. She tried to disregard her fears—that he found her a disappointment, inadequate; that he was weakening, fading—and reasoned that if she was his
mistress,
she could make him do or be whatever she wished. Unless she did not know what to wish. Could a man's behavior be wished for, or must it simply be experienced?

At night the words again poured into her, and she smiled in the dark, lying beside the warmth of the shadow that smelled of herself and printer's ink, wondering if they should be taking precautions. She was a late fader in the biological department and there was a certain risk....

She grinned savagely, thinking about it. All she could imagine was a doctor holding up a damp bloody thing in his hands and saying, “Miss Coates, you're the proud mother of an eightounce ...
Thesaurus
.”

“Abridged?” she asked wickedly.

She shopped carefully, picking for him the best clothes she could afford, in a wide variety of styles, dipping into her savings to pay the bill. For herself she chose a new dress that showed her slim waist to advantage and hid her thin thighs. She looked girlish, summery. That was what she wanted. She purchased the dictionary and looked through gift shops for something else to give him. “Something witty and interesting for us to do.” She settled on a game of Scrabble.

Webster was delighted with the dictionary. He regarded the game dubiously, but played it with her a few times. “An appetizer,” he called it.

“Are you going to eat the book?” she asked, half in jest.

“No,” he said.

She wondered why they didn't argue. She wondered why they didn't behave like a normal couple, ignoring her self-derisive inner voice crying out,
Normal!?

My God,
she said to herself after two weeks, staring at the hard edge of the small table in the kitchen.
Creating men from dictionaries, making love until the bed is damp
—
at
my
age! He still smells like ink. He doesn't sweat and he refuses to go outside. Nobody sees him but me. Me. Who am I to judge whether he's really there?

What would happen to Webster if I were to take a gun and put a hole in his stomach, above the navel? A man with a navel, not born of woman, is an abomination—isn't he?

If he spoke to her simply and without emotion just once more, or twice, she thought she would try that experiment and see.

She bought a gun, furtive as a mouse but a respectable citizen, for protection, a small gray pistol, and hid it in her drawer. She thought better of it a few hours after, shuddered in disgust, and removed the bullets, flinging them out of the apartment's rear window into the dead garden in the narrow courtyard below.

On the last day, when she went shopping, she carried the empty gun with her so he wouldn't find it—although he showed no interest in snooping, which would at least have been a sign of caring. The bulge in her purse made her nervous.

She did not return until dinnertime.
The apartment is not my own. It oppresses me.
He
oppresses me.
She walked quietly through the front door, saw the living room was empty, and heard a small sound from behind the closed bedroom door. The light flop of something stiff hitting the floor.

“Webster?” Silence. She knocked lightly on the door. “Are you ready to talk?”

No reply.

He makes me mad when he doesn't answer. I could scare him, force him react to me in some way.
She took out the pistol, fumbling it, pressing its grip into her palm. It felt heavy and formidable.

The door was locked. Outraged that she should be closed out of her own bedroom, she carried the revolver into the kitchen and found a hairpin in a drawer, the same she had used months before when the door had locked accidentally. She knelt before the door and fumbled, teeth clenched, lips tight.

With a small cry, she pushed the door open.

Webster sat with legs crossed on the floor beside the bed. Before him lay the new dictionary, opened almost to the back. “Not now,” he said, tracing a finger along the rows of words.

Regina's mouth dropped open. “What are you looking at?” she asked, tightening her fingers on the pistol. She stepped closer, looked down, and saw that he was already up to VW.

“I don't know,” he said. He found the word he was looking for, reached into his mouth with one finger and scraped his inner cheek. Smeared the wetness on the page.

“No,” she said. Then, “Why…?”

There were tears on his cheeks. The man of dry ink was crying. Somehow that made her furious.

“I'm not even a human being,” he said.

She hated him, hated this weakness; she had never liked weak men. He adjusted his lotus position and gripped the edges of the dictionary with both hands. “Why can't you find a human being for yourself?” he asked, looking up at her. “I'm nothing but a dream.”

She held the pistol firmly to her side. “What are you doing?”

“Need,” he said. “That's all I am. Your hunger and your need. Do you know what I'm good for, what I can do? No. You'd be afraid if you did. You keep me here like some commodity.”

“I wanted you to go out with me,” she said tightly.

“What has the world done to you that you'd want to create me?”

“You're going to make a woman from that thing, aren't you?” she asked. “Nothing worthwhile has ever happened to me. Everything gets taken away the moment I ...”

“Need,” he said, raising his hands over the book. “You cannot love unless you need. You cannot love the real. You must change the thing you love to please yourself, and damn anyone if he should question what hides within you.”

“You
thing
,” she breathed, lips curled back. Webster looked at her and at the barrel of the gun she now pointed at him and laughed.

“You don't need that,” he told her. “You don't need something real to kill a dream. All you need is a little sunlight.”

She lowered the gun, dropped it with a thud on the floor, then lifted her eyebrows and smiled around gritted teeth. She pointed the index finger of her left hand and her face went lax. Listlessly, she whispered, “Bang.”

The smell of printer's ink became briefly more intense, then faded on the warm breeze passing through the apartment. She kicked the dictionary shut.

How lonely it was going to be, in the dark with only her own sweat.

The White Horse Child

When I was seven years old, I met an old man by the side of the dusty road between school and farm. The late afternoon sun had cooled, and he was sitting on a rock, hat off, hands held out to the gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song. He nodded at me as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious, but I knew better than to get involved with strangers. Nameless evils seemed to attach themselves to strangers, as if they might turn into lions when no one but a little kid was around.

“Hello, boy,” he said.

I stopped and shuffled my feet. He looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes were brown and gray and russet, and his hands were pink like the flesh of some rabbit a hawk had just plucked up. His face was brown except around the eyes, where he might have worn glasses; around the eyes he was white, and this intensified his gaze. “Hello,” I said.

“Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school,” he said.

“They got air conditioning.”

“So they do, now. How old are you?”

“Seven,” I said. “Well, almost eight.”

“Mother told you never to talk to strangers?”

“And Dad, too.”

“Good advice. But haven't you seen me around here ?'

I looked him over.”No.”

“Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are ?'

His shirt was gray, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn't smell bad, but he didn't look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white, and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. “All kinds of colors,” I said.

“But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?”

“I guess so,”I said.

“That's because I'm not here. You're imagining me, at least part of me. Don't I look like somebody you might have heard of?”

“Who are you supposed to look like?” I asked.

“Well, I'm full of stories,” he said. “Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they'll listen.”

I started to walk away.

“But only if they'll listen,” he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to.

The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.

Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.

It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I'd forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the gray rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day's muted light. “Hello, boy,” she said.

“I don't recognize you, either,” I blurted, and she smiled.

“Of course not. If you didn't recognize him, you'd hardly know me.”

“Do you know him?” I asked. She nodded. “Who was he? Who are you?”

“We're both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren't afraid of us, are you?”

I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. “No,” I said. “But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?”

“Ask for a story,” she said. “One you've never heard of before.” Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn't see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn't have any whites.

“I don't want to hear stories,” I said softly.

“Sure you do. Just ask.”

“It's late. I got to be home.”

“I knew a man who became a house,” she said. “He didn't like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbearable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after.”

I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. “That's silly,” I said.

“Then here's another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It's practice. There was a little girl about your age—might have been your sister, but she won't admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother's dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn't deny it.”

“How'd she get back to be my sister again?”

“She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too.”

“My sister did break a pair of Mom's glasses once.”

The woman smiled.

“I got to be going home.”

“Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?”