Dreamer

We ate mushrooms that night. Good ones, tasty ones, like morels and truffles, the kind you used to pay a lot for - all because cultivating them in the garden was so easy. And we sauteed them in butter until the mushrooms were just melting in our mouths. God, it was nice. That night I felt pretty sick when I went to sleep. Warm, feverish, whatever. I figured I must have had a bad mushroom or two, because the taste of one of them just had a mold to it you'd never try to cultivate. Pretty gross. I didn't tell mom, though, because there were worse things out there than getting sick for a night. She'd worry too much.

Anyway, I had a pretty good night's sleep, all considering, and the next night we had carrots. Had a nice creamy soup with all sorts of herbs, and carrots and beans. Great, substantive food. Felt good, and mom chilled the soup so it soothed my aching throat. I stopped feeling feverish, and coughing was the only extant part of my sickness. But I didn't have a great night of sleep.

· · ·

You know how sometimes dreams are - in story and character and setting - totally abstract but you feel them just the same? I had one of those. At first it was peaceful, and kind of serene. The weird thing is that I kinda felt like it was light outside, though I couldn't see any of it. Like, to my experience there was neither the presence nor absence of light. What I recognized as sight saw only an infinite grey or green or yellow mist in every direction, and yet, the sun was on my skin unmistakably. I wondered if I'd gone blind; just the same, it was placid in my world. Though I couldn't look anywhere (much less see) and all I saw was mist, I knew I was alive and it was sun on my skin. And it was alright.

Sounds of a typewriter, clicking away, and then a return of the carriage after a couple seconds. And then the jouncing began. I must have been the keys, because abruptly I was tossed and thrown and I immediately felt nausea and I could hear that same repetitive clicking. My head was cruelly shoved aside by what felt like hands and, then, after my head was explored and held, I felt a THWACK and then nothing. The carriage was returned. And then pain shot through me. My arm had been cut off! I didn't know how to explain it but that had to be what happened. I had felt sunlight all across my body except my arms and legs, but now my arm felt nothing.

· · ·

What an odd dream, though I woke up feeling fine, arm intact. I tried to figure out what the dream meant, but deep down I felt like there was no meaning. The world was harder-up than it had been 20 years ago, and sometimes you just feel it. I read through my poetry as mom insisted of me before we worked. And I found this in an anthology, by Omar Khayyam.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Talked to mom about this quatrain (as the anthology called it), and she smiled and told me Edward Fitzgerald translated that so well. She told me that Khayyam was a polymath, a genius in every field he touched, math, astronomy, religion, poetry - what we'd call a Renaissance man that predated Europe's rebirth by hundreds of years. But it took this Fitzgerald guy to hand it down to the people at large with his translation. More direct, much less worldly, Fitzgerald took what was great about the poem and formed a bridge to people so they could see what Khayyam had given them. Prometheus.

That night we had chicken. I'd picked it up a few hours before and slaughtered it myself. Mom had taught me well. Since the outbreak a decade or so ago, meat has been scarce and prices astronomical, though, of course, you could still raise your own at much less cost. Heck, the price of going to market once would outweigh the entire cost of getting a hen to maturity. We prayed a bit for the chicken, just to acknowledge that it was special that something had died for us, and mom cooked it beautifully. The skin and bone were on it and it was fried and crispy. I ate greedily, but this was a rare source of protein. As long as you'd earn your keep the next day, you could be greedy with chicken. My throat hurt a bit but it was more raw than pained, and I barely noticed it all day.

· · ·

That night I woke up in a green, open field. I walked around aimlessly, not too concerned with where I was, and ran in one direction looking for food until I saw the fence. No, it wouldn't be hard to escape, but beyond the fence who knew where I'd end up. I turned the other direction. A girl in the distance came from the house and walked towards me. I acknowledged her presence with my head and kept foraging the grass.

She kept walking towards me and wore a straw hat and blue denim overalls and a pink shirt and her long hair in a bun was blonde like mine, and she had the stocky build of a farmer's child. She had no eyes, just holes, and I thought nothing of the eyes or the girl or anything. I kept eating. She kept walking towards me and picked me up and then I was in the barn and atop a stump and she was saying "Sorry" to me and she held me down and I didn't think to escape and out of the corner of my eye a blunt ray of the sun through the metal and I saw nothing.

· · ·

I didn't wake up right away, and when I did wake up, I didn't feel sick. I felt like I should feel sick. Tears in my eyes and a soreness in my throat hardly spoke to the fear I felt. I put it out of my mind. I listened to music instead of poetry. Mom didn't question it. "Hey Jude" is a torrent of inexhaustible mercy, and I needed every drop.

I think we had carrots again that night. I thanked my mom a bit too profusely and she asked what was wrong. I couldn't tell her but she reassured me profusely - the news on the radio was all good, and she had nothing to worry about, so why should I?

· · ·

That night I don't know if I dreamed. When I woke up, I wasn't in my bed. I was in a big warehouse or factory or facility and it was night and there was moonlight through a large door and I walked towards it. The news hadn't been good, after all. All that day we'd seen people on the bottom of the hill in black cars and clothes, despite the heat that practically boiled black surfaces. They'd seemed rushed. I guessed my mom had thought I was worried about them. I didn't know where she was now and I prayed a little bit. One time she'd sung "Hey Jude" for me and I thought for many years she'd written it. With all her mercy she might as well have.

The door turned out to be a large garage door and it was opened to the starry night. I just walked around for awhile. I don't think I was asleep for only a few hours. Things in the sky that I had never seen glowed with purpose, outshining the moon and street-lighting the world entire with a bluish glow. There weren't any trees, though the circular mounds of dirt along the grounds once must've fit maples. I felt the energy of Christmas Eve or something. I never got to go to socials as a young person. That had been taken from me. But I figured that this is what it must have been like, past curfew, outside, under a limitless sky. I found a road that looked vaguely familiar and walked, the white fences providing a guideline from which I could return if I so chose. But that factory felt claustrophobic. The factory looked new, and I didn't know how anything was built new in this day and age. And so it felt right to fear it.

Black cars had crashed into the fences every couple of miles. The crashes must have happened long ago, and I could see that the dried blood looked more like an old cutting board than recently-clotted. The doors on the cars were closed, and there were assorted chunks of long-rotten drivers and passengers. But mostly the cars had been sucked mercifully dry. 

After eight or ten miles the road began to look familiar, and though there were these odd, new structures now on the ground and in the air, the lay of the land, the way the road kinked at least gave hope of something familiar. Though to the left here, and to the right there, in my memory I saw farms. There were people. There were a couple of lights that motion would have triggered. And only the bluish light and some extant orange streetlights hit the dirt road and the white fence astride it.

I saw me and mom's farmhouse up on its slight incline. The white house with simple balconies and a big basement stood with a defiant persistence, as it always had for me, through it all. No animals howled or acknowledged my arrival, and I noticed the barn door was open. Vegetation mingled with the crops. I could see the weeds even with the faint bluish light.

I found our housekey in the hidden place and opened up the door. I checked my bedroom and the bed was unmade. I must have been snatched or something. I called out for my mom and went to her room and nothing was locked. I saw calendars showing (with fastidious "Xs") that at least 16 months had passed since I had gone to sleep with carrots and had not dreamed nor woken. I saw papers mom had put together in a search for me. And I didn't find her. I went all through the house and found little to eat, but the house itself was well-put-together. I looked everywhere for her, even in the basement. Even in the attic. No sign of her. I shuddered and thought that maybe she'd gone and done herself in. Without me, there was no one she could tell.

My throat still hurt, I realized. The walking and the throat and not knowing what had happened... I crashed on my unmade bed. And I dreamed. I felt extreme tension knowing what was coming. This one seemed twice as long, and the carriage returns of the typewriter seemed to be pounding out an entire monograph. The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on. 

"Get on with it, then," I said. Finally, after what felt like hours, the arm was removed and the typing began again. I woke up shortly thereafter, arm intact, obviously.

I did another and more thorough search of the house: the barn, the fields, looking for anything that would testify to mom's whereabouts, alive or dead. I went through fields as I gathered food for the day from the fields. I did my chores just as mom had taught me: I checked the burners, the water filter, and the bathrooms. Everything was working. The record player was working and I played some old Byrds records.

I finally thought to check the radio. Mom had never wanted me to hear it and I respected that, so I hadn't even thought of it, but if ever there was a time.... 

But there weren't any stations on-line. Short-wave, AM, FM, XM. All with nothing but static. Maybe it was a reception problem. Without saying it all, I thought But maybe not. A couple of the frequencies had odd patterns, not music, not human, but probably caused by some sort of radiation. Who could tell.

At night I cooked up some of the meat I'd found in the freezer and thawed. It was good, though I burnt my sauce and the flour I'd mixed into the sauce felt lumpy and the herbs didn't feel right. How long could I stay here? ran through my head as my inferior cooking was at least warm and well-flavored. Salt and meat and carrots and butter. And I headed for my bed.

· · ·

I wake up and run outside. They took her a long time ago and it hurts me to recall. And she didn't even know what or where or how. The world is empty now and I run outside shouting. I don't heed the curtains or the barn door. She's never coming back and the world will never be whole again. The station in the air carries a bluish luminescence. The drop point of the others. Over 2 years we've been in the station's thrall and I couldn't find any poems that would help me anymore. I wave towards it and sure enough the station before long has a black silhouette and I feel tears welling up and I drop to my knees in ecstasy. Oh, there was no mercy in being a survivor; take me now. And it is nine feet tall and it looks somewhat human, if too gray and undistinguished, but its eyes look somehow carved out.

And it doesn't move whatever lips it has, but I hear it say that she's alive and that she'll survive but that you'll have to go, because one look at us is fatal unless you've been afflicted. And you'll not make it back to your home.

Watch over Cara then, I say, preserve her then, for the love of God!

And they say she will be preserved, and we love all your people, and we're sorry we couldn't preserve you. And that's all my strength and I fall.

· · ·

When I woke up, I planned to walk back to the factory after a short breakfast. I packed my books and some supplies, and, before I left, I supped once more of that song mom had given to me in happier times.

I thought better of burying her.