Nemonymous Night (6 page)

Instead of flying off on this carpet—as they would have done in a proper dream or an Arabian fantasy—they returned, as if by magic, to the room whence the carpet first emerged and where it had been downtrodden since time immemorial. Amy stretched and yawned, wondering how a carpet could ever have escaped from beneath the heavy legs of her bed. She had just been dreaming of the hawler—the first real image anyone had gained of such an entity, in dream or otherwise. It was as if each dream—each of everyone’s dreams in the city and of the city—had been straining at the leash, forcing itself to depict—gradually and painfully—the hawler himself. A wide-faced creature masquerading as a man that lurked at the coalface of some underground powerhouse, whose only duty was to gather up all the material chipped away each night by several miners (Mine! Mine! Not yours!) and transported to the surface for processing. The full description—other than wide-faced—was still unclear. Additional dreams—not necessarily Amy’s own—would be required before a fuller picture was obtained.

One irrelevant dream intervened, however, or it seemed irrelevant at the time—although the dream sickness as it developed and as it was better understood by dreamers and non-dreamers alike (and I think this was the first time it was pinpointed as a ‘sickness’ as such) did specialise, it seemed, in mock irrelevancy. This dream, then, was simply knowing—within the dreamer’s mind—that it was a horror film and that all the people in the dream were really actors, but they were unaware, apparently, of this fact. So when the dreamer him- or herself saw the birth of a baby ape, it was simply known—without equivocation—that this would grow into a giant monster. Indeed, looking through to the hall (to where the “baby ape” had fled), there were seen various people treating a gigantic human figure with some respect and unsurprise, not knowing it was a monstrous creature quickly grown from the “baby ape” and that it was pretending to perform on the stage in the hall as part of some talent competition. It towered above all the normal people. The dreamer fled from the hall—where these things had been seen—to warn the rest of the town of what was happening under their noses. Was waking, however, before or after being caught by the monster relevant?

*

In a part of the city, there was a zoo. And it was known by the Authorities that any dream sickness affecting the rest of the city did not affect the zoo. There seemed to be individuals in charge of the city that the ordinary citizens failed to recognise—or ever to know they existed at all. These Authorisers, so-called, had some mandate to keep parts of the city as reservations of clear sense—where dream was clearly recognised as dream and real life as real life, and never the twain should overlap. Strangely, perhaps, the zoo grounds were one such reservation and those citizens suffering from the dream sickness often resorted there—on their holidays—just to be certain about themselves and about reality and, indeed, about the dreams that they still dreamed when at the zoo but they actually knew they were dreams, knew them for what they were. How they knew this fact was similar to going abroad to sunny climes for one’s holiday—away from the cold, dank, often dark city—and believing it was for the sake of enjoyment and recreation, not the chore a holiday surely always was.

Here, at the zoo, the citizens knew similarly that they were free of deceiving dreams and what they saw—as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure—were
real
animals and creatures. Only when the citizens were asleep, at the zoo hotel, did they know they would be in danger of dreaming—unlike in the surrounding city itself, where waking was no safeguard against surreptitious dreams taking over the minds: not day-dreams, but full-blooded dreams which one thought were real life when experiencing them. In the zoo grounds, however, such dreams were dreams, whilst waking was waking.

The entrance to the zoo was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in terraced back-to-back two-up-two-downs in the less desirable parts of the city. There was a turnstile—just a cover to indicate that this was a place for which you needed admission, as most zoos in other cities would need. No money changed hands and when people had time off from work they came here—all jolly and familified—and entered the place that was hidden by tall grey walls which made them feel they were indeed going to work all over again on their holiday! The turnstile was unimpeded and they emerged into an area around the first enclosure. In the distance could be seen the starts of corridors between lines of cages, the contents of which could not yet be seen, though their hubbub of loud meat could certainly be heard from this auditory vantage point just inside the turnstile. The first enclosure was empty, unlike the other enclosures beyond the cages, which, as visitors who had been here before could attest, were full of living exhibits yet to meet the gaze of greenhorn visitors. Why an empty enclosure was the first exhibit often mystified initial visitors, but this was soon explained as the various themes panned out in interlocking concertinas of myth and logic and as the total exhibition of the zoo revealed itself to the unpaying customers filing past.

The empty enclosure at the start of the tour—it was discovered—was a symbol of the loneliness of life and the even greater loneliness of death. Yet many claimed it was not a greater loneliness in death: for it was a greater loneliness in life. The paradox was not lost on the gaping citizens as they took their time off in the zoo. Many of them peered into the empty first enclosure, the children bawling in disappointment:

“Where are the animals, Mummy?”

“You told me this was a zoo, Daddy!”

The parents tried to pacify their children by pointing to the corridors of cages where the zoo proper, apparently, would start—or so they promised. Meanwhile, it was their beholden duty to pause here a short time to view the empty enclosure in almost religious calm. Nobody, it was clear, took account of the insects that threaded the loose soil of this enclosure. Nobody realised this was an otherwise empty enclosure for insects. They wanted to see big things in a zoo. Life needed big things in the city.

Soon after by-passing the first enclosure, most visitors, in awed contemplation, would enter the first corridor of cages—a silence soon broken by the snorts, squeals and snickers of the first set of exhibits. Kept apart hardly at all by the cages, the exhibited could stretch limbs through the bars towards each other—and even uncomfortably close towards the visitors themselves. The latter cowered from the first cage only to find themselves backing towards another cage where something else was putting out feelers.

The remarkable fact—despite the circumstances—none of these caged creatures were as nightmarish as one might have assumed. Nothing could be nightmarish because this was one hundred per cent not a dream... and only dreams and their like could house nightmares.

Mike turned towards the others and said: “Quite sweet, aren’t they?”

Nobody replied. They weren’t so sure, because these initial cages seemed to house versions of the apes, a baby one of which had indeed featured in a dream dreamed by at least one of the party before entering the zoo grounds. Yet here, the apes could be clearly seen for what they were—apes with no potential to grow into man-mountains like Gulliver. That, Mike assumed, was what differentiated dreams from non-dreams. In the former, anything could grow into anything else. In the latter, things stood still ever as themselves. The status quo. They may be monsters in a non-dream, but they couldn’t transmute into worse or different monsters.

They wandered further into the maze of cages, Mike in the lead. As a hawler, he could see things more clearly than the others, since he had travelled further underground in his consciousness and established fixtures and bases from which all else could be interpreted and evaluated: thus neutralising their ability to terrorize. Terror did not breed more terror, but less. Hence, Mike’s justification in dredging more terror and horror into view, so as to neutralise it. He had not thought these things consciously—but when between bouts of dream sickness outside the zoo grounds, this had indeed been clearer, with the dreams themselves adding a needed logic of their own. Here, inside the zoo, Mike—although an instinctive leader—learned, from this prior in-built experience of dream negotiation outside the zoo, that, paradoxically, he felt himself to be at a loss in the uniform non-dream world of reality represented by the zoo around them.

The next set of cages was frightful and, if it hadn’t been for the certainty of his logic, Mike would have been quite perturbed by the sights as they unfolded. It was as much as he could do to pacify the others in the face of a tentacular monstrosity that even the infinite star-fields (and what potential life they could conceivably hold) would not have been powerful enough to make possible.

Here they found Amy and Arthur whom they had been seeking all night throughout the city. They were pressed up to the cage bars as if in some desperate embrace with the monster that was contained by them.

Yet, nothing, surely, could be nightmarish outside a dream, a nightmare being merely a species of dream. Yet the two children—as Amy and Arthur still were inside the zoo—seemed actually tied outside the cage to its bars not by ropes and bindings but by the long locking claws of the beast that the cage contained. Mike and the rest of the search party quickly shuffled identities between them as none wanted to be responsible for leading a rescue mission towards this cage with a view to releasing the two children. Yet, this cowardly act could not be cowardly for long, because no sooner did one feel the cowardliness coursing through their veins than that same person felt an equal counterbalance of bravery... and they lurched forward to prise the children’s fingers from the bars only quickly to realise that the fingers were not all the children’s own—and cowardliness returned with redoubled force.

Meanwhile, Greg the office worker had rejoined the group unexpectedly—having followed the others after his lunch break into the zoo grounds—and had no time to be infected by the switching identities caused by an alternation of cowardliness and bravery. He had no second thoughts but to rush towards the cage and pulled the children away from whatever it was that kept them bound to the bars. Indeed, there was nothing in the cage... except a threadbare carpet lining the floor, a carpet peppered with indeterminate tiny droppings and sown with holes that needed darning.

The group were pleased to escape the zoo—via the back entrance which was not far from the underground market. They hadn’t paid to get in but, somehow, they needed to pay to get out—as a man stood at a turnstile with his hand out. But the two children went free. All were pleased to escape without having their faith in the clear dream/reality dichotomy of the zoo undermined. They knew, however, once outside the zoo, each and everyone would be susceptible to the dream sickness. They needed a drink, so they sought Ogdon’s pub—but the streets round the market had somehow changed from a negotiable pattern to one of mazy confusion. The two children were no longer children—and, having been rescued from their kidnapping, they returned to a more adult appearance and behaviour, treating Mike as if he were a child. Mike couldn’t see Susan any more—but a certain loyalty to her memory forced him to stick by his promises to protect her against the onset of dreams, giving himself a more steadfast or statuesque image: a landmark around which the dreams revolved but which they could not affect. Susan would soon be able to return to this fixed point of Mikeness given the time and the inclination. He hoped against hope. He still loved her. This facility to be a fixed point amid the whirlpool of dreams that existed outside the zoo was akin to the ability of hawling: reaching to the core of the earth for one’s bearings—and mining them for certainties and immutable compass points of direction.

He looked up into the sky. There was something lovely about a sky that was brightening with the arrival of day dream: dissipating the cloying nightmares that had just started to vanish from within themselves. A good hawler could plumb heights as well as depths for this brand of substance, sustenance and reassurance. Whilst it had been until now mostly land-locked, embedded with stone and grit, the sky (as he watched it) became the underbelly of a huge flying-carpet flowing diaphanously from horizon to horizon. Who flew upon it, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, were the nemonymous ones: angels and finer vessels of thought and spirituality. Beneath his feet, on the other hand, were weirdmongers and others of their name-driven ilk. A hawler, he knew or at least he hoped he knew, was a filter that worked in both directions of flow. But he only knew or at least hoped he knew for a while till he even forgot he was a hawler.

*

Susan woke beside her husband Mike in the bed she simply and unsurprisingly recalled falling asleep in. No better reassurance could there possibly be for getting one’s waking feet on the ground. She wondered how—in her dream—she seemed to be named Amy. And Mike had been called Arthur. She wasn’t sure how long the dream had lasted, but the actual reality within the dream had seemed to last a whole lifetime—until she awoke some time during the zoo sequence. Mike (or Arthur) had a role to play that nobody else could. As with most dreams, its sense of reality was fast fading as she continued to reach a full waking state—and the name given to this role tantalisingly escaped her.

She soon saw Mike standing at the open bedroom window watching a jet liner slowly cross from one side of the sky to the other. She left the bed and tip-toed along the carpet so as to give Mike a hug from behind. He would soon be off to the office and she to her barmaid’s job. They had never made love other than at spontaneous moments. No pre-planning, and she reached round his body to see how hard he was. She nestled up to his buttocks, listening to him sigh, as they shuffled their feet deeper into the waking moment of the working day. The city was laid out in front of them like a map, the two of them being so high up as far as storeys were concerned. She yearned for the sea, where she had been brought up—yet the sight of the huge ship in Dry Dock on the city’s horizon was more than just a little recompense. She listened to see if she could hear their daughter Sudra waking. This was her first day back at school. They had decided only to have one child—even though they both knew how difficult it was for ‘only’ children in later life. Mike and Susan both missed their brothers and sisters... almost as if they had once existed. Mike turned round—the sun etching his head like a black hole—and he took Susan in his arms, lifting high the bottom edge of her nightie so that she could snuggle up to him even closer. No fear of peeping toms—because the open window was a good Blackpool Tower or two above the now enlivening streets below. She felt him come inside like a huge welter of comfort—and the friction was just a side effect. It was at that moment Sudra had quietly opened their door—and she was old enough to laugh at her parents’ predicament upon discovering they were being watched.