The MWL found himself with the gift of a day off from an anonymous employer. Without thinking about it, he set off for the park. But by the time he arrived there and climbed up on his perch, the feeling had grown and matured in him that this day was going to be different in a not entirely pleasant way. He took an inventory of the kinds of days he knew.
There are days and there are days.
There are days that submerge at the first light of dawn and only resurface at the instant one falls asleep in the evening.
There are days that seem to be a message left by a dream the night before, for another dream waiting to be dreamt the night after.
There are days that seem to be laced together by the anticipation of some impending disaster which never occurs, and never not occurs, but merely withdraws, receding infinitely slowly at a tangent towards evening. There are days that fracture in the morning and break apart in the afternoon and reach evening in a hundred small pieces that burn up like a meteor shower when they hit sleep.
There are days that begin with a warning shot fired into your heart and a whispered threat that if you don't shape up, a second shot will do major damage.
There are days that seem just a collection of randomly selected minutes thrown haphazardly together into hours of varying lengths.
There are days that never appear anywhere but on calendars, and then only after the fact, and there are other days that appear and reappear on privy doors and subway posters and the backs of animals and children's drawings and on beer advertisements on T.V., so that they feel like they have been lived in again and again, like an old house that has been occupied for centuries.
There are days and there are days. The MWL spent the first few hours of this day trying to figure out which kind it would turn out to be when it was over.
At the end of this review he decided that no matter how saturated with reality this particular day appeared, at its conclusion it would turn out to have been a dream. He knew for a certainty that, at the end of the day, as he lay on his bed in his jockey shorts and socks, exhausted and vulnerable, some bright faced little girl in a tutu would prance out of the shadows and shove a sign in his face which said, "Today was completely a dream," and all the figments of his imagination that he had met that day would leap up from behind bookcases and sofas and shriek "SURPRISE, WE KNEW IT ALL THE TIME," and he would be mortified and embarrassed and feel that he had been royally had.
He had seen a number of movies whose plot consisted of resolving an intractable reality by transforming it into a dream. The only trouble was that none of these films had given a hint of what you could do to get out of such a situation if you discovered that you were in the middle of it. At least he had not picked up any such hint if it were there.
He felt abandoned by both common sense and Hollywood, and he resigned himself to taking what the day was going to bring. But he resolved to watch it very, very carefully as it unfolded.
He was drawn back into the park rudely by a voice saying," I know just how you feel." When he looked down he found himself staring into the faces of a Mutt and Jeff pair staring up at him. The words had come out of Jeff's mouth.
Now the MWL was sure that he had only been thinking to himself and that he had said nothing out loud that a stranger could so easily empathize with. But he was in an extraordinarily cautious mood so he nodded noncommittally.
"I've had the same dream every night for the last 50 years," the little man in front of him said.
"This is Harry." The big man offered the introduction indifferently. "And I am Willie. We are strangers."
Aliens would be more like it, thought the MWL. The bigger man was absolutely big in every direction and he had protruding ears and a pasty sharp face covered with stubble. The little man seemed to have skin that consisted of pocks interspersed with pimples, no nose to speak of and glasses without lenses in them.
"I've had the same dream every night for the last 50 years," the small man repeated.
The MWL recognized that he was obligated to ask about the dream.
"What do you dream," he responded, knowing he would be told whether he asked or not.
"The first thing that happens in this dream is that I wake up."
That's an odd beginning thought the MWL, but not wanting to provoke the small man any more than he knew he was going to, he said nothing.
"I wake up in a large bed."
"Is it a wooden bed or a brass bed?" the MWL asked.
The little man seemed annoyed. "I never noticed. Sometimes details aren't important," he chided.
After 50 years you'd think you would have noticed, the MWL thought to himself.
"I wake up in this bed," the little man continued, "and I realize I have forgotten everything. Everything, I don't remember anything at all."
"A tabula rasa," chimed in the MWL, feeling he had to say something.
"Exactly," the little man echoed, "a completely blank slate. Empty. Null. I have this gnawing feeling that I was supposed to do something very important on this day, like pay my taxes, or get married, or declare war, something significant, and I will not do it because I can't remember what it is."
He rested while he caught his breath. "Then this woman comes in. She is tall and blond and beautiful. Even in the dream I know that she's a spirit, not a real person."
"Is it always a woman," the MWL inquired cautiously, indulging a speculation.
"Well," said the little man, "when I first started having this dream she was a girl, but she's been a woman for at least thirty years." He seemed to begrudge the MWL his insight and returned quickly to telling his dream.
"'Don't worry,' she says softly. She seems to understand my dilemma. 'I will help you remember.'"
"What?" the little man reports he responds.
"'Everything,'" the lady replies.
"But I don`t remember anything," the little man reports himself saying, as if she might have second thoughts if she recognized the magnitude of the task.
"'Not to worry,' she says."
"And then," said the little man, "she starts at the very beginning. 'Remember, it was very, very dark,' she reminds me, 'and you'" the little man illustrated his story by vigorously pointing to himself "'you decided that now was the time.' I didn't remember anything of the sort," the little man whispers in an off stage voice, behind his hand, as if the lady were standing with them in the park, and he wanted to keep the secret from her.
"'You thought the very little thought of 'getting out', she reminded me. 'Up, down, sideways, anyway, but loose. That was exactly what you thought,' she insisted. Vaguely, I remembered something like that," the little man confessed.
"And she would go on from there and remember me everything that had happened to me, and how things felt, and smelled, and tasted, and what I was thinking. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, she remembered me the pieces of my life."
"That's very inspirational," the MWL said, hoping he could suggest that the little man quit while he was ahead.
"And when she had covered almost everything, she would say, 'and then there was yesterday,' and she would add yesterday to the line of days she had walked me though."
"And when she was done," the little man continued, "I remembered everything. I remembered what I was thinking the time I cut my finger on a piece of broken glass when I was six, and I remembered listening in the closet to my mother and father making love, and I remembered the pattern on the sheets on the bed on which I made love the first time and I remembered the appointments I had next week."
"When I was intact, when I had remembered everything, I would lay down on the bed and go to sleep in my dream and wake up at the beginning of a new day. My wife would be next to me snoring, and the kids would be playing the phonograph too loud. And if it was a regular day I would have breakfast and go to work, and if it were a Saturday...."
The MWL felt that the essential point of the story had been told and he resented the little man embellishing the tale with minor details. He felt no obligation to pay carefully attention to ornamental and irrelevant points.
The MWL looked at the little man thoughtfully. He half remembered having a dream a while ago something like the one he had just heard, but he could not be sure. The little man's story made him apprehensive and sad.
"Every night for 50 years I dreamed the same dream."
"Until?" the MWL added.
"How did you know there was an 'until'?" the little man asked suspiciously.
"Any five year old knows there is always an 'until'," said the MWL rather pompously. "There is, isn't there?"
"Well, there just happens to be," said the little man sourly. "This particular night, not so long ago, I fell asleep as usual, and I had my dream and the lady came and she remembered me my past, the way she had every night before, but...," the little man hesitated, "but then a strange thing happened. I don't know why, perhaps it was something I ate, perhaps something I should have eaten, but when my dream ended I found myself still in the bed in the room."
The MWL looked confused.
"Don't you see," the little man complained, "every time my dream ended before, I woke up in my own bed with my wife next to me and the kids playing."
"I remember," said the MWL quickly.
"Well this time," the little man continued, "I was still in the room in the dream. I had forgotten everything. I was a tabula rasa again."
The MWL waited for the little man to continue, but he seemed to need a push.
"Well, didn't the lady come?" he asked.
"I waited and I waited," wailed the little man, "but she didn't come. I panicked. I jumped out of the bed and ran around the room moaning and whimpering." The little man looked even smaller than he was and began to whimper and moan. "It was the only thing I could remember to do and then even the panic faded because I forgot the basics of panicking."
The MWL thought about it for a minute. He had never thought that a person had to remember the basics of panicking. In spite of himself and the little man's discomfort, he felt the story was getting interesting.
"Well?" he asked.
"I looked around and I felt the world tilting, and it seemed I was sliding towards the edge of a void. I realized that the only thing that would stop that motion was if I remembered something, only I didn't know how to begin. I couldn't remember how to begin to remember things."
The little man was sweating and making funny little noises between words. "I still don't know how I did it, but I started remembering. I guess for people the fundamental reflex is not breathing but remembering. I remembered myself. I started at the beginning as the lady did with the very first things. Only.... "
"Only what," the MWL asked.
"Without the lady I remembered an entirely different life. By the time it was done I had remembered an entirely different me than I had remembered all the times before."
A little quiet invaded the park where they stood.
"And then," the MWL asked.
"And then I woke up," the little man said decisively.
"That's an interesting story," the MWL said. He was uncomfortable and ready to change the subject, though he did have a few questions about the ending.
"You don't understand," the little man repeated. "I woke up."
"I hope so," the MWL said quietly. "You woke up the other times too," he gently reminded the little man.
"You don't understand," the little man insisted. "I woke up in the bed in the room of the dream. The room was light, and I realized it was morning. But there was no wife snoring next to me, and there were no kids playing."
"You woke up a different person that you remembered going to sleep as," the MWL summarized bluntly.
"Yes," answered the little man, distraught.
"Which person," the MWL asked.
"Me, who I am now," the little man said. "For all intents and purposes, the man you see in front of you."
"Well," said the MWL, "then it's O. K."
"It's not O. K.," the little man shrieked. "It's not O.K.. I stopped dreaming the dream," he whined bitterly. "I miss that other person I was. I worry about his wife, his children. I miss the lady too. But that's not the worst thing," he added ominously, "not the worst thing."
"What's the worst thing?" the MWL asked, not really sure he wanted to know.
"The worst thing," the little man said in a trembling, uncertain voice, "the worst thing is that when I think about it, I remember going to sleep three times and waking up twice." His voice sunk to the floor of his despair. "I woke up from some dream I was dreaming in a dream, but I'm not sure which one."
The MWL felt he had been kicked, but he could not identify exactly where on his body the blow had fallen, nor could he tell exactly where the kick had come from; and something else generated an attack of anxiety that punished the spot that had been kicked.
"That reminds me of a dream," the big man said, without letting the MWL dwell on his condition.
"Is it as long as Harry's?" the MWL asked. He felt confused and disoriented. "If it is I may have to leave in the middle... I...." His discomfort went fishing for an excuse.
"No, it's quite short," said the big man.
"There's this other person," he began abruptly. "He's exactly like me only a little taller, a little handsomer and a little quicker on his feet. He always has the proper comeback to a wisecrack immediately, whereas it comes to me two hours after I need it. He's a bit wittier than I am with a little bit more style."
The MWL sat bolt upright and stock still. Just a few weeks ago, he thought to himself, I had exactly the same idea about a person who was almost exactly me only a little bit smarter and....
"Are you listening?" the big man asked pointedly. Without waiting for an answer, he continued.
"When he has to make a decision he makes it quickly, and he always seems to make the right choice, whereas I agonize over the pettiest of decisions, and always select the wrong alternative.
"You meet this pretty girl in the park," he continued, lost in his bill of indictment against his other self, "and you know if you could only say the right thing she would lend herself to you, but you learn to stutter on the spot, instantly, and while she passes you by, you can see him making the turn down the path he pointed to where the path turned behind the trees and she is giggling and he has his hand on her behind."
His voice was filled with venom, and the MWL knew exactly what he felt. Now you understand," the big man explained, "I never met this other me, not in real life, but I've envied him as long as I can remember."
Fifty years probably, thought the MWL to himself although he couldn't tell exactly why this thought came to him.
"I've never met this other me in real life, but last week we met in this dream."
"Whose dream?" the MWL asked.
The big man paid no attention to the question. "He was dreaming and I was dreaming and suddenly we were together in a dream."
"I remember saying to him when we bumped into one another, 'so it's you. ' He was pleasant enough and made some joke about two pods and one pea. And we talked for a while about experiences we nearly had in common.
Suddenly I had this idea. I said, 'Since I can never be as clever or sharp as you in real life I will envy you to the day I die. Envy will poison the relationship between us. I tried to play on his sympathy and sense of superiority. I can never be like you in real life. But in a dream.... Why don't we exchange dreams I suggested, I'll dream your dream and you dream mine.'"
"A brilliant maneuver," the little man suddenly yelled out, prancing and applauding.
The big man acknowledged the applause with a nod, and looked at the MWL's silence disapprovingly.
"The other me was generous. His sense of superiority blinded him. 'I don't see any harm in it,' he said. 'It's only a dream.' We exchanged dreams. He began slowly to dream my dream and I began dreaming his."
He waited for the MWL to draw the implications from what he had just said, but the MWL misinterpreted the silence to mean that the story was over.
"That's an interesting dream," the MWL said. "Did you ever meet him," he asked, "I mean after you woke up?"
"Woke up," the big man said, exploding like a bell attached to a trap springing closed. "Woke up," he bellowed. "I didn't say anything about waking up. Did I say anything about waking up?" He poked the little man in the ribs and repeated the question. "Did I say anything about waking up?"
"No," said the little man, jumping up and down. "I don't recall you saying anything at all about waking up." He dangled the joke in the MWL's face.
"But," the MWL started to say.
The big man interrupted him before he could get anything but the 'but' out. "Tell us one of your dreams," the big man demanded, effectively cutting off the MWL's line of inquiry into his dream. Somehow the MWL felt the request was a demand pushing him into a place where he already was.
"That's a problem," the MWL said. "I mean my dreams aren't memorable. I mean, I don't remember them. But I can tell you something that was like a dream more or less."
"What kind of a thing is like a dream more or less," the little man inquired.
The MWL ignored him. "This happened on a day a few weeks ago," the MWL began, "a wonderful day, more or less like this one. The sun was out and there was only one cloud in the sky just like that one," he pointed over the big man's shoulder, "and it seemed to move to just the right spot to block the sun from your eyes. I had no job that day, so I went to the park. I was sitting where I usually sit, about here, when two men whom I had never seen came up and stood in front of me and started a conversation."
"What did they talk about?" asked the little man suspiciously.
"Not important," said the MWL, holding very tightly to the story he was telling. "Not important at all. We talked about dreams. But what was said exactly wasn't important," he told the little man pedantically. "What is important is that they convinced me that I was really at home dreaming that I was in the park."
"Just how did they do that?" the little man asked pointedly.
"They confused me with their talk and stories."
"I don't understand," interrupted the big man, but the MWL knew that he did.
"They played to a weakness I have," the MWL continued. "They made me believe that I was capable of reproducing the world so exactly that my reproduction would fool me because it was indistinguishable from the real thing. It was the worst form of flattery."
"Was it sincere?" the big man asked.
"Sincere or not, they succeeded pretty well. After talking to them for a while I was confused. I really couldn't tell whether I was at home dreaming I was in the park, or actually in the park wondering whether I was at home dreaming I was in the park."
"Does it matter?" the big man inquired quietly.
"I thought it did," said the MWL. "I felt it was necessary, absolutely necessary, for me to be certain whether I was awake or asleep, dreaming I was awake."
"Did you decide?" the little man asked.
The MWL disregarded the question and mused out loud to himself. "The demand to be absolutely sure was what did me in," he said, reviewing the events he was recounting. "I think if I could have gone through the day undecided about which reality I was in, things would have turned out differently. I could have gradually sorted it out. But in my mind I had to make a decision." He excused himself. "I was shrewd. I was logical. I was careful." He sighed a genuine sigh. "I decided I was in a dream."
The little man looked disappointed.
"What happened" he asked, "after you decided you were in a dream?"
"Nothing changed much as far as I could see. We finished our conversation and they drifted off."
"Where did they go?" the little man asked earnestly.
"How should I know?" the MWL shot back annoyed. He found it hard to ignore the question.
"But they had done their work." He looked at the two men standing innocently in front of him. "I convinced myself I was really dreaming." The little man seemed satisfied.
"After they left I sat here. I mean I sat there on the ladder, thinking. Since I had decided I was in a dream I knew that none of what I was feeling, touching and seeing was real. But that only left me with the sense that the trees I saw, and the wind I felt, were even more real, but in a dream like way. I decided that if I was in a dream I might as well enjoy it."
"And use it," the big man added.
"And use it," the MWL echoed, not quite clear how the big man had sniffed out what was in his mind but unstated.
"What did I do?" the MWL ladder asked rhetorically trying to prolong the suspense.
"Well, I figured that since I was in a dream, the limitations of the real everyday world didn't hold and I no longer had to be constrained by them."
The big man looked at the small man who tried to make himself appear even smaller than he was.
"When I was a child, I wanted to fly. I mean not in a plane but the way Superman or Batman or Captain Marvel flew." The MWL looked down, and for an instant the little man appeared to be Billy Bateson resting on crutches, his leg pulled up, and the big man wore the face of Captain Marvel, and he thought to himself, "you both shouldn't be here at the same time." When he squinted at them, the illusion went away.
"I decided that since I wasn't held down by the million of little strings that tie us to our every day limitations, I would fly.
"And I did. I had to practice for a few hours until I got the hang of it. Flying turns out to be a lot like roller skating on one wheel, only a little tricker. But I managed to get me and the ladder off of the ground about a foot. And once I did this I, scooted up and down the grass, on the paths between the trees and over sand boxes."
"People think you have to go high in the sky to be flying, but it's not true. You fly just as much three inches off of the ground. I never went higher than a foot.
"It was a little hard for people in the park to take. I don't think they really saw me flying, only moving quite fast on the ladder; the blur, and the fact that they were characters in my dream, saved reality for them. They continued to behave as if the normal laws of the world held."
The big man seemed a little bored. "Is there any sex in this dream?" he asked bluntly, as if he was deciding whether to listen any more. The MWL was amused at the question but he looked at the big man sternly, forcing him back into his the role of listener.
"After flying, I decided I would like to be rich for a while. I took the easy was out. The quickest way I knew of getting a lot of money was to find it. It was easy. My flight had carried me to a part of the park that was infrequently used because someone had been murdered there. I looked down and there was this bag, a bank bag, I think."
"Was there money in it?" the little man inquired.
"A lot of money," the MWL replied.
"I picked it up, took out as much as I wanted, and threw the bag down again where I found it. It was like a dream."
"How much did you take?" the little man asked, hungry for details.
"Oh, ten thousand or so," said the MWL.
"I gave it away. I stopped Mary, one of the bag ladies and gave her $500. 'Shop wisely,' I told her. I gave Pete, who plays chess in the corner there, three hundred. 'Buy a new chess set', I told him. I was wildly generous. It didn't last too long but it was great fun."
"And then?"
"I went home. I went home and there was my wife, but since I knew this was a dream mimicking reality, I expected her to be there.
For the first time in a long time I looked at her not the real her but her image in the dream and I was overwhelmed by love, a love that in real life somehow was always half enslaved and enshrouded by the reality of married life. I loved her, and it seemed to me she was beautiful. I told her so."
"You told her so." The big man echoed the statement as a question.
"I just said to her 'you are beautiful and I love you,'" the MWL related. "I would never have done that except in a dream because..." He stopped in front of the explanation and looked at it. "I just don't know exactly why, I just wouldn't have. Never that way.
"She looked at me oddly. 'Thank you,' she said softly, 'I love you too, but you don't seem yourself.' Then she added as an afterthought, 'when I look at you sometimes I get excited.'
"'The right eye never marries,'" I said back to her. "'You're right though, I'm not quite myself.'"
'"You're telling me,' she said.
"I had this feeling she would wink or give me some sign that she knew we were in a dream, but she didn't. She behaved as if it was just the tail end of a tilted, normal day.
"I could see she wanted me to stay and explore our new found loving, and to tell the truth I wanted to see how far we could take it, but I was just to bushed. Dreaming was almost as hard work as real life living.
"'Time to get up,' I said to myself and I went into the bedroom and lay down in my bed where I was convinced I belonged. I tried hard to fall awake. I lay there and tossed and turned just like a cartoon figure in the movies. I got up and got a book and read for a while. I put the book down and reviewed the commotion of the day, the flying and the money."
"And the conversation," the little man added.
"Yes, that too. I wanted desperately to wake up. I waited patiently and I waited impatiently but I didn't. I fell asleep."
"What do you mean by that?" the little man asked, searching for some hidden meaning.
"Just that, I fell asleep. I didn't wake up, I fell asleep."
"You weren't dreaming," the big man concluded.
"No, it was a real day. My wife woke me up after an hour and asked me whether I wanted dinner or if she should call a doctor. I remembered everything about the day."
"Bizarro," said the big man, bizarro himself.
The MWL ignored him. "When I realized it had been a real day my first thought was what kind of damage have I done to my marriage, but my wife treated me as if it was just a pleasantly quirky episode. I knew that although she remembered, she understood enough not to let it worry our life together."
"Well," said the little man, "you did learn to fly."
"I thought so," said the MWL. "The next day I got the ladder out and went to the park. It was early and there was almost no one around."
"You flew again," the little man said genuinely excited.
"No. I couldn`t make even the littlest motion in the air."
"You lost it."
"I'm not sure now I ever had it. I tried for hours but I just couldn't fly. No way, no how.
"As the park filled up people came up to me and thanked me for my generosity the day before, some of which I remembered, some of which I didn't.
"I actually found a hundred dollar bill stuck in the ladder which I tucked away as a bribe for my wife just in case she decided to hold me responsible for what I said in the dream, but that was all. I wandered around to where I had found the bag of money but there was nothing there."
"That's an interesting dream," said the big man.
"Not a dream," repeated the MWL.
"O.K.," said the big man agreeably, "it's an interesting story." He turned to the little man who was clearly thinking about the story the MWL had told. "We have to be going," he said to him. And they walked off.
The MWL watched them go and felt a little tug on the ladder but he sat very still until it went away, and he pressed himself very tightly against the rung he sat on.
"This is going to be a long day," he said out loud, bracing himself for the intrusion of the little girl in the tutu with the sign.