Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (24 page)

I even went to a psychiatrist, and he at least listened, but when we were all done, he said I needed more sessions, and scheduled me in for twice a week. I told him that at the rate the dream was going I wouldn’t make the second appointment, and he frowned, scribbled a prescription for something and told me to try that. The pharmacist told me that it was a sleeping pill. Great help.

Meanwhile, numbers were getting pretty thin in the dream.

The road reached a couple of hundred yards into the swamp, but there were only eight of us left when I woke up in the dream, exactly where I had been when the dream left off last. He carried a six foot long double bladed ax now, with a little whistle device in the head so that when he swung it, it sang. Gruesome thing, and heavy too. It hardly slowed down passing through a body. I thought of that old horror story with a pendulum in it. This ax could have doubled for the pendulum.

He walked behind me, and my back felt naked. I shoveled more dirt into the wheelbarrow, waiting for the whistle, but it didn’t come for me. All night I loaded dirt and rocks, rolled it to the edge of the road, and dumped it. I imagined what it would be like to be him, to heft that heavy axe, to look at sweaty backs and choose and choose.

When I woke up in the real world (I don’t know. I can’t tell them apart any more. Not that it makes a difference), there were only two of us left and I knew that I would die the next night.

But it was unavoidable. Sleep, I mean. It was like a gigantic cold front moving across the horizon, first showing up as just a hint of darkness, and then towering higher and higher. I remember a picture of a farmer in a field watching a storm come. He is very small in the picture; the wall of blackness bearing down on his field, huge.

I pulled my blankets back, stepped out of my shoes, lay down and closed my eyes. You can’t stop the rain. I started to sleep.

That’s when I yelled “This is a dream! This is a dream!” But it didn’t do any good.

He threw a body into my wheelbarrow, a short woman with black hair. Not a mark on her. Perhaps he just looked at her and wished her dead. I don’t know.

She thumped hard, her head snapping sharply against the edge of the wheelbarrow.

“Put her in the road,” he said. Her hands had draped on the rim like she was going to come to life and pull herself out, like she was resting there and wasn’t really dead. I wondered how she would die in her other life. Maybe a car accident, or on an operating table, or she might just go to sleep and not wake up.

“You killed us all off. The road won’t get finished,” I said.

“The work doesn’t matter,” he said, but his tone was odd, like he was smiling when he said it.

“Was this better than being awake for her?” I was angry. You can’t stay scared forever. For a while I was petrified. He killed up and down the line. I saw death administered hundreds of ways, then, after the uppers incident, I got numb, like death was anything else that happened. It was no different than going to the bowling alley. But now I was mad.

“Of course.”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“So how’s that better?” I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Her arms flopped across her chest. He pushed his burnt leather face up to mine, but I didn’t back up. We locked eyes, his watery blue ones with my muddy browns.

“Before, she was always going to die. Here, she had a chance.” His breath washed on my chest. I thought about jumping him—he didn’t carry a weapon today—but I had seen him attacked before, two times. They both died horribly, slowly, in a great deal of pain.

“What chance!” I yelled. It was so stupid. He would kill me, and that would be that.

“The same chance you had, which was better than what you use to have over there in your waking life.”

“What?”

He sat down on a boulder the size of an office desk and crossed his legs under him.

“What do you think life’s about?” he said to me, suddenly angry. “Have you thought for a second what you do anything for?”

I tried to think, but I was too mad. I couldn’t figure what he was getting at, and I wanted to kill him. I’d never have another chance. What did I have to lose? I bunched my fist and slammed it into his throat.

It was like hitting polished marble, like punching a statue. He waited until I quit grimacing. My knuckles should have all been broken, but they weren’t. The skin wasn’t even bruised.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I can’t die, and that’s why she’s lucky and so are you.”

I must have looked stupid. “Huh?” I said.

“Nobody used to live,” he said. “You know, it was inevitable. Everybody died. One-hundred percent. But it’s different now. Things have changed here.”

I looked around. Behind him the gray desert hills mounded one on another. Behind me, the incomplete road reached into the swamp like a dock. “Where’s here?” I said.

He shrugged. “All places are the same place. Heaven, I guess, if you want a word. But you’re in it all the time, sleeping or awake.” He put his hand on his leg, fingers wrapped around something. “Only now, not everyone will die. We get to choose a survivor.”

Maybe it was his calmness about our conversation. Maybe I just didn’t have any anger left, but all of the sudden I just felt empty. Everybody in the dream but me was dead. I said, “Before, no matter what I did, I was going to die anyway.” It was more a statement than a question.

“In the end.”

“And now I’m not going to, ever?”

He opened his hand and held it out to me. It was, naturally, the black bordered patch with the gray background. In the middle, in black, 1/1,000.

“No, never.”

He walked away, into the desert, and from the other direction I heard feet marching, a thousand sets of feet. I pinned the patch to my shoulder and waited for the troops.

Rock House

F
rom the highway where I parked my car, to the door of Rick’s house, my school-years friend, I climbed a mile of twisting, scrub oak-lined, tree-shrouded path that looked more and more to my satisfaction like an animal track the farther from the highway I traveled. Every foot into the late spring woods was a foot farther from everything else. When the sound of the last diesel truck faded in the leafy rustle, it was as if I had stepped back in time. Tree bark grew rougher, with gaps wide enough to slide my hand into. Roots crossed the trail like great, vegetable veins, and when I stopped the third time to recheck his instructions in the letter I’d received the week earlier, something large and ponderous crushed through the underbrush just out of sight. I stood, my heart paralyzed, his letter fluttering in my fingers, until the heavy snap of branches vanished in the distance and an unafraid mountain jay lighted on a rock near the trail to look me over.

Despite everything, I almost turned around then, but I’d lugged my suitcase so far already.

Rick’s eccentricities drove him to excess when he was young. He’d been a bookish, pale shadow in college. So had his sister, Lynn, but I’d been a reader too, and we’d found camaraderie in our novels, swapping books, discussing imaginary lives between classes. They were trust fund kids, unbound by finances, and their worries were not the world’s worries. By my junior year, I’d fallen in love a little bit with them both, but we didn’t have any classes together my senior year. Lynn grew increasingly quiet and absent in the way pale girls can, and Rick started haunting used bookstores for rare editions, expensive leather-bound volumes with cut edges and sewn in bookmarks. I remember the second to last time we talked. He put an old book with an indecipherable title on the table beside him, which, in idleness, I picked up. He snatched it from my hands, his cheeks suddenly red, like blood under the snow, and I saw in his eyes a rage that frightened me. The next day, he tried to apologize, but all I saw was the rage. His skin became a furnace with it, baking me. We never spoke again, but I passed him or Lynn on the quad every once in a while, and I mourned the darkness in their eyes, the burnished silk of their hair. Few people know books. Few like to talk about them.

So we drifted fifteen years apart, until his letter importuning me to visit, to see the “strange edifice of my rock house home,” as he put it, to “salve his maladies and afflictions.” As misfortune would have it then, time lay heavy on my hands, and my office found me useless. Three weeks vacation and “more if you need it” became my prescription. A week in the mountains with my old friend, Rick, seemed like the best of the bad options. If there was a way to arrange it, I wouldn’t go back. Nothing in the world seemed worth the effort.

Two turns more up the tree-shrouded track, then I came to a small clearing in the woods, thigh-high with alpine grass and spring flowers. After the aged forest’s overhanging gloom, the sudden space should have lightened my spirits, but instead I felt a twinge of agoraphobia, as if the overwhelming branches held me to the Earth, and their disappearance marked the opening of a gate between me and a gray abyss. My stomach rose. I staggered a step before shaking the impression away. His letter said the clearing was his front porch, but it seemed like any other undisturbed forest space. Certainly nothing manmade marked the scene at first. I looked for a minute to find it. The mountain’s shoulder swelled at the clearing’s other side into a black limestone cliff shot through with bright mineral lines. At its base, cut into the stone, stood an entrance, tall and pointed like a medieval cathedral’s, and when I drew close, the grass tips brushing against my fingertips, I saw that the door was stone too with a stone knocker in the center. Grotesque carvings lined the recessed archway, hideous heads no bigger than my fist, all caught in mid grimace, tiny mouths filled with cat teeth and sharp tongues. Human faces, just barely. I smiled at the sight. Rick lived on a better Earth, a literary one, and where I’d failed in my bookish dreams, he’d clearly pressed on.

I used the knocker, the sound no louder than a pebble tapped against a boulder, but a few seconds later, the door drew back.

“Allan, welcome to Rock House,” said Rick, shading his eyes against the clouded sky. “I didn’t realize it was day.” He laughed. “I didn’t realize it was spring.”

He’d become even more slender since school, still as pale, but his face had developed middle-aged character. Distinct lines crossed his forehead. A patrician patina surrounded his mouth. His hand rested on the door’s edge, and he opened it more to let me in as a waft of cool air brushed my face, smelling of dark stone and deep places. Awkwardly, I stepped across the threshold and into the gloom. The door closed behind me.

My eyes adjusted slowly. Thankfully, I put my suitcase down. “That’s a long way to carry groceries.” Two hefty lamps at either end of a dark couch provided the only light. The ceiling was high, maybe twelve feet. Later I would notice the engravings that marked its surface, but now it only seemed black except for a foot-wide crystal vein that meandered diagonally across the room.

“Backpacks are the secret.” Rick gestured toward the couch.

No carpet covered the floor. The same black stone, polished to a glassy sheen, absorbed the light, and although it looked slick enough to reflect an image, I could see nothing of myself within it, not even a shadow. Glad to be done with the uphill climb, I sat. Rick stood beside the couch, his arms crossed, a scattering of nearly white hair falling across his forehead and over his eyes.

“Your house is spectacular.” I turned in my seat. The walls bowed around the room, a rounded square, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. Tapestries alternated with bare stone. A log smoldered in a niche cut into the wall. “It must have cost a fortune.”

“I had it built.” He leaned against the couch, partly sitting on the arm. For a moment he gazed around the room, perhaps trying to see it as I saw it. “It took time to find the right location.”

“But the effort! How long would something like this take?” I imagined craftsmen dynamiting the cliff face, burrowing into the mountain, and then widening their shaft into this chamber. The floor alone would have taken hundreds of hours to turn from raw rock into a slick black plane. Slowly, out of the darkness, two other doors took shape. It wasn’t just a single room. How big was Rick’s house?

“A project like this never stops. It takes a life of its own.” His voice sounded wan, like his complexion. “Remember, we used to talk about living in stone?” He rested his hand on his knee. “Beautiful, gothic palaces. Wuthering Heights. Prince Prospero’s castle. Gormenghast.” He sighed. “Khazad-dum.”

“So, a nice brick bungalow in the suburbs wouldn’t be enough for you?”

He smiled. “No, not for me. Not for Lynn either.”

I didn’t have time to reply. The shadow that marked the door on the left shifted, and a ghost filled it. I started half from my seat, but then the ghost said in Lynn’s voice, “It’s been a long time, Allan. The sun must be abroad.” I’d almost forgotten how low she spoke. How she drew that contralto note from such a narrow reed, I never knew, but it recalled the nights in her brother’s dorm, the three of us sprawled across his bed on our backs; Rick at one end, listening; Lynn at the other, propped by a pillow, a book in her hand reading out loud. My back against the wall, I crossed the two in the middle, our legs intertwined. I could almost feel Rick’s bare foot braced against my thigh; how Lynn’s leg draped over mine so that when she reached a climactic moment in the story her calf muscle tensed, pulling me closer to her; her voice soothing us both, like a steady wash of waves against a rocky beach. Now, her face and hair reflected the table light perfectly, but from a distance, a far moon behind thin clouds, and her white dress hung from her shoulders to her feet in an unbroken line.

She walked a step closer, and the lunar glow grew stronger. Where Rick had aged, Lynn had improved to lustrousness. She smiled and pushed her hair away from her ears. “Do you want to see the rest?”

The door on the right led to a kitchen and storage room. The chrome surfaces seemed out of place in the stone chamber.

Rick opened a cabinet beside the stove, revealing a large tank. “Propane for cooking and heat, although I prefer the fireplaces. There’s solar panels outside and battery storage for electricity. We have to budget our use, I’m afraid.” He turned off the lights. “We’ve grown used to darkness or candles. Books by candlelight, ah, that is the way they were meant to be read.”