Eleven Twenty-Three (6 page)

“I don’t remember anymore what the last one
was, the happy one,” she coos. “I’m in the middle of something else
now.”

“Well better to wake up
now
while the
next dream is just beginning, right? Wake up, Sunshine.”

“Now I’m dreaming that I’m standing behind a
man…He looks like Mr. Scott, in a way…I’m standing behind a man
like Mr. Scott who’s typing something out on a computer…and now I’m
looking over his shoulder…Hold on…I’m reading what it is he’s
writing…”

“And pray tell: what does it say, creepy
girlfriend?” I ask, snickering to myself.

Tara has been working on her lucid dreaming
now for months, since before we left. After watching
Waking
Life
one night with Jasmine and Julie, Tara suddenly became
very interested in controlling and learning from the secret lives
carried out in her sleep. She went to Barnes & Noble and picked
up books on the subject. She read about the symbolism of the
subconscious. She browsed through multiple articles on Wikipedia.
She brought Saint Birgitta’s holy visions and Richard D. James’s
unnerving lucid dream-inspired music on the album d
rucQks
into daily conversation. Soon after, I was pretending to listen as
Tara read from her dream journal on a regular basis. Not long
before the flight East, she awoke with a start and regaled me with
a dream in which she was able to fly over the End and shrink
herself down to the size of a molecule in an anthill before
transforming herself into the living pain of my blackened lungs and
into her sister Chloe’s sniffling, wounded soul, lost among the
ghosts of a million waiters and cashiers.

She never had much luck with it in Suzhou,
though. In fact, with the exception of the recent nightmares
involving her mother, Tara could never recall a single emission
from the night before while we were living there. I told her it was
because in Communist China, dreams have
you
while they are
sleeping, but I knew the plain and simple truth: my girlfriend has
always dreamed in American, whether she admits it or not, and no
amount of her Internet research or soap box lamentations will ever
change that.

Tara suddenly tosses from one side to the
other and moans fitfully. She takes in two large gasps and clenches
her eyes shut even tighter.

“He’s a writer, Layne. Mr. Scott isn’t a
courier…He’s a writer.”

“And what is it that he’s writing, Tara?” I
ask, not laughing anymore.

“He’s—he’s writing out our deaths,” she
whimpers. “He’s
killing
us all. Layne—he’s killing us
all!
”

I quickly stub my cigarette out in the
ashtray and grab Tara gently by the shoulders. I shake her, but she
keeps moaning and tossing her head from side to side, as if
refusing to wake from her nightmare. I shake her even harder, and
her eyes flutter open and she goes limp in my arms and I let go of
my girlfriend and stand back, waiting for it to end.

06:57:00 PM

I hide everything but my eyes and forehead
underneath the covers in bed, watching Tara as she smokes marijuana
from a small pipe while getting ready for dinner. Outside,
everything is a shade of blue. The world is bathed in whispering
azure shadows and nebulous cobalt moonlight, the early winter
evening engulfing Lilly’s End. I keep glancing down at the darkness
below my waist and wiggle my toes to make sure they are there.
Tara’s pot smoke tiptoes toward me and I cough at it and think
about the nightmare she was having earlier.

He was writing out our deaths.

“Your cough is cute,” my girlfriend says.

“So is your ass,” I say, slipping completely
under the covers.

“I love you, Sunshine. You do indeed make me
happy when skies are gray.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll never know, dear, how
much I love you,” I sing-whisper, suddenly sliding the sheets down
and exposing my bristly face and sagging eyes to the soft light of
the bedroom.

I smile at Tara, who is wearing black pants
this evening and a blood-red sweater. She pouts her lips at the
mirror above the armoire and inspects her mascara. She sprays
perfume and slips on those stupid little earrings I hate.

“Please don’t take my Sunshine away,” she
mouths silently, but I catch it in the reflection and am
inexplicably moved. I blow her a kiss. She snatches it and pretends
to eat it, giggling.

“I’m nervous about dinner with my mother,” I
say finally.

“Because of your father?”

“Yeah. I’m not really sure how she’s taking
it. We didn’t talk long on the phone when she told me about it. She
didn’t
seem
too shaken up, but then again it’s my mother and
I’m clueless every time I’m around her. She’s the Queen of
Displacement and I’m the Prince of Apathy.”

“Your mother
hates
your father, Layne.
You know this. I’m not being a bitch, but you’d think she would be
overjoyed at the fact that the man who left her and her son alone
and destitute would suffer an untimely death. Um, like, wouldn’t
you?”

“It’s complicated, Tara.”

“It always is,” she mutters. “So anyway, what
do you think of that dream I had earlier?”

“It was…pretty intense?”

“Do you think it means something? Do you
think it was precognitive somehow?”

I ignore her questions and grab the remote
from off the floor next to the bed. I turn on the TV and switch it
to the station guide on Channel 99. I reset my watch—which until
now has been set to the all-country-inclusive Beijing time—to the
exact hour, minute, and second that is displayed on the television
screen. Then I flip through the channels until I find a random news
broadcast. A semi-Spanish female reporter is describing some kind
of poor weather making its way down to us in Florida, and she jokes
uneasily that it may be “a wet and cold Christmas season” before I
mute the channel and turn back to Tara.

“It was just a dream,” I say carefully,
feeling like the topic was long ago exhausted. “It’s been a long
day. Honestly, I’m more impressed with the fact that you could
narrate it to me than I am the dream itself. You’re getting pretty
good at that lucid dreaming thing of yours. In
this
time
zone, anyway.”

“It would be interesting to live and
experience the life and dreams of one of your closest friends for a
day,” she says, slipping her watch on and checking it against the
alarm clock to make sure she has the right time. “View yourself
through someone else’s judging eyes; be repulsed by yourself; fall
in love with your enemies; talk trash behind your own back with
your best friend; see someone else’s fantasies; grow aroused from
their darkest wet dreams; feel the terror of their nightmares. It
would be fascinating.”

“To be able to see yourself the way others
secretly do?” I repeat, lighting a cigarette. “Like most of us need
any more reason to kill ourselves.”

On the silent television: a sexy field
journalist reporting from in front of a police station; funeral
protests; a stretcher being loaded into the back of an ambulance;
soundless clips of black women sobbing on camera; and a reporter
mouthing quiet dreadful closure to the world. At one point, I think
I see the word “soon” flash across the screen, but I’m probably
just tired.

The news story ends. The next segment, this
one on Britney Spears’ latest trip to the dentist, lasts almost ten
minutes.

Tara finishes her routine and lights a
cigarette. She turns to me, waiting for something.

“We shouldn’t smoke anymore, sweetie,” I say.
“It’ll make us look older.”

“Not so far,” Tara says, inhaling deeply. “I
think we look okay.”

“You ever think we’re overly shallow and
obsessed with appearance?”

“Isn’t that the American way?”

“Yes, but aren’t we American expatriates?” I
ask.

“Not anymore, we’re not,” she says. “By the
way, Layne, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

And so it begins.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” I ask
tonelessly.

Tara doesn’t respond for a long time. Then
she says, “We should get married.”

I involuntarily release a sigh and look down
at the floor. I turn the TV off and wait for the argument.

“Or maybe not, if that bullshit sigh of yours
is indicative of anything,” Tara mutters. “We’ll just go on as we
have been for the past three years.”

“Which is how, exactly, Tara?”

“Layne, when you lost your job and the
prospect of teaching in China for a year arose, what did I do? Did
I complain? Did I overanalyze the idea and shake my head no? Did I
force you into some kind of commitment before I agreed to go with
you, even though we both knew it would be much easier for us over
there if we were married?”

“No,” I say, lighting a cigarette. “No, you
didn’t.”

“I have stood by you for three years,
Layne—”

“Three years on the eighteenth,” I remind her
stupidly. “It hasn’t been three years yet.”

“Did I just hear you say that out loud to me?
Did I
really
? Did the guy who forgot our anniversary
last
year because he was shit-faced in the bowling alley bar
with Hajime actually remind me
now
when we got together? It
is always incredible to me, Layne, how much misguided audacity you
truly have. It really is. If I didn’t want to rip your fucking head
off every time you acted like this, I’d almost admire it.”

“I’m just saying, Tara. Well anyway, why is
it so crucial that we get married? What will it do for us that
we’re not already reaping the benefits of now? Is the sinful nature
of our sexual activity finally getting to you?”

“It’s not that, you idiot. It’s because we’re
in
love
, Layne. It’s because we’ve been together for three
goddamned
years
. It’s because we’re one of those rare
couples who’ve been faithful to each other for all three of those
years, through all sorts of trials and tribulations. That’s no
small feat in these dark times, might I remind you.”

I swallow.

“So—” I begin, but stop.

“Because that’s what couples who are happy
do
, Layne. They grow. They evolve. They put their love in
writing. They get tax breaks. They share checking accounts. They
hang out with other married couples and go on vacations and have
kids—”

“I hate couples with kids,” I remind her. “So
do you.”

“You’re missing the point,” she sighs. “You
know what? Just forget it, Layne. Just
forget
it. God knows
I’m not going to beg you for this. If you don’t want to grow the
hell up and get married to the girl who loves you so much it’s
stupid, then fine. Go to your mother’s house and have your fucking
dinner and drink your fucking wine and forget I even fucking
brought it up.”

“That’s an awful lot of ‘fucking,’ Tara—”

“But make sure to take a good look around
when you’re sitting over there tonight,” she says, eyeing me in the
mirror. “Take a look at your mom as she opens her second bottle of
cheap wine and goes on another rant about how cute her two cats
are. Watch the way her eyes tear up when you mention
us
.
Look at just how sad and depressing her life is, and just remember:
that’s you if things don’t change, Layne. Time is running out.”

“Tara, my mom is that way
because
of
marriage. Are you forgetting that, or are you intentionally
overlooking it in order to make some kind of half-assed point?”

“Your mother’s life is like that because she
gave up, Layne. She gave up after what your father did. And so are
you.”

“How am I giving up?” I ask bitterly,
inhaling on my cigarette. “I’m an ESL teacher in
China
,
Tara. You are too. We teach at one of the finest universities in
that part of the country. How is that giving up?”

“You
know
how,” she says. “Layne, that
guy I knew in college who caught Chlamydia from the girl doing
whippets at Preston Nichols’s New Year’s party is now a teacher in
Hangzhou. Let’s be fair about this: it really isn’t all that hard
to procure a position in our field, is it? I mean, come on,
Sunshine—you just gave up on even
trying
to teach anymore
here in the States. What happened at Kennedy is not the end of the
world. It’s not even necessarily the end of your teaching career.
You could have just gone to another county and taught there. Or we
could have looked into moving out of Florida, if need be. We both
talk about how much we hate it here in Lilly’s End anyway,
right?”

“I know we do, Tara. And isn’t that why we
moved to China?”

“That’s why
you
moved to China, Layne.
Not me.”

“What was your reason then, Tara?” I say. “Oh
wait, let me guess: you moved there for me. Is that right?”

“You know it is, asshole,” she snarls. “You
had to know that I didn’t really want to go.”

“I didn’t twist your arm. Besides, it was
your
idea to move out of the States in the first place.” And
then I add under my breath, “Sort of.”

“It was my idea because I wanted to help you,
Layne. No, you didn’t twist my arm to go. And do you know
why
you didn’t? Because you didn’t
have to
. I went
because I want this to work and because we love each other and
because I don’t want to ever give that cunt Olivia Glatz the
pleasure of adding the disintegration of our relationship to the
list of things she destroyed last spring. But now—”

“But now we’re home,” I finish for her,
sitting up and grabbing my shoes from next to the bed, “and you
don’t want to go back at the end of the month. Right?”

Tara does not say anything.

“Admit it.”

“Not without a commitment to our future, I
don’t,” she finally says. “I’ll go back and finish out our school
year, Layne. I
will
do that. For us. But what I won’t do is
go back to a country I really just don’t like that much and endure
a bad back, post-shower body rashes, and the rude stares of seven
hundred million Chinese men if it’s not all building toward
something.”