Flashback

“I dealt with it,” said Nick. “It was the other Nick Bottom’s vision—or what he said was a dream-vision he’d awakened from—that Dara was interested in. She thought that I had just such a joyous awakening… an epiphany, she called it… in my future. That first night on our date, she recited almost the entire passage from the play from memory. I was very impressed.”

Danny Oz smiled, drew deeply from the joint, and stubbed it out in a coffee can lid he was using as an ashtray. He lit another cigarette—a regular one this time, which seemed to please him more—and squinted through the smoke as he recited:

“When my cue comes, call me and I will answer. My next is ‘Most fair Pyramus.’ Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout, the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.”

Nick felt something like a hot electric shock run through his system. He’d never heard those words spoken aloud by anyone but Dara. “As I said, you’ve got one hell of a memory, Mr. Oz,” he said.

The older man shrugged and drew deeply on his cigarette, as if the smoke were holding back his pain. “Poets. We remember things. That’s part of what makes us poets.”

“My wife had one of your books,” said Nick and was immediately and painfully sorry he’d brought it up. “One of your books of poetry, I mean. In English. She showed it to me after I interviewed you six years ago.”

Less than three months before she died.

Danny Oz smiled slightly, waiting.

Realizing that he had to say something about the poems, Nick said, “I don’t really understand modern poems.”

Now Oz’s smile was real, showing the large, nicotine-stained teeth. “I’m afraid my verse never attained modernity, Detective… I mean, Mr. Bottom. I wrote in the epic form, old in Homer’s day.”

Nick showed his palms in surrender.

“Did you and your wife,” began Oz, “on your first date, I mean, get into what Shakespeare’s Bottom was talking about in that passage?”

The Santa Fe knife wounds deep in Nick Bottom’s deeper belly muscles were hurting as if they were new, shooting threads of fire deeper into him. Why the goddamn hell had he brought up Dara and that fucking passage from the play? Oz wouldn’t even know that Dara was dead. Nick’s belly clenched in anticipation of what the dying poet might say next. He hurried to fill the silence before Oz could speak.

“Yeah, sort of. My wife was the English major. We both thought it was weird that Bottom waking from his dream had his senses all mixed up. You know—the eye hath not heard, the ear hath not seen, the hand is not able to taste—all that stuff. We decided Bottom’s dream had messed up his senses, like that real disease of the nerves… whatchamacallit.”

“Synesthesia,” said Danny Oz, tipping ashes into the coffee can lid. Another brief flick of what could have been a wry, self-mocking smile. “I only know the word because it’s the same one used in writing where a metaphor uses terms from one kind of sense impression to describe another, like… oh… a ‘loud color.’ Yes, that was very strange and Shakespeare uses synesthesia again later in the play when the actors in the play-within-a-play ask Theseus, the Duke of Athens, whether he’d prefer to ‘hear’ a bergamask dance or ‘see’ an epilogue.”

“I don’t really understand any of that literary stuff,” said Nick. He wondered if he should just abort the interview and stand up and walk away.

Oz persisted. His pain-filled eyes seemed to catch a new gleam of interest as he squinted through the smoke. “But it is very queer, to use an old word that’s coming back into proper usage. Bottom says at the end of his dream-epiphany speech that after his friend Peter Quince turns the revelation in his, Bottom’s, dream into a ballad, ‘I shall sing it at her death.’ But whose death? Who is the ‘she’ who will be dying?”

The knife twisted in Nick Bottom’s bowels. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Whatshername. The character who dies in the play the Bottom guy is putting on in front of the Duke.”