The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

As she reaches the parking lot, now gasping for breath, she sees the Times Arts & Leisure section flipping lazily through the grass on the breath of a light breeze and thinks, Never mind. Herman Wouk is still alive and writing a book about God’s language. Herman Wouk believes that the body weakens, but the words never do. So that’s all right, isn’t it?

A man and a woman rush up. The woman raises her own cellphone and takes a picture with it. Pauline Enslin observes this without much surprise. She supposes the woman will show it to friends later. Then they will have drinks and a meal and talk about the grace of God and how everything happens for a reason. God’s grace is a pretty cool concept. It stays intact every time it’s not you.

‘What happened?’ the man shouts into her face. ‘What in hell happened?’

Down below them a skinny old poet is happening. He has taken off his shirt to cover one of the other bodies. His ribs are a stack outlined against white skin. He kneels and spreads the shirt. He raises his arms into the sky, then lowers them and wraps them around his head.

Pauline is also a poet, and as such feels capable of answering the man in the language God speaks.

‘What the fuck does it look like?’ she says.

For Owen King and Herman Wouk

Where do you get your ideas and Where did this idea come from are different questions. The first is unanswerable, so I make a joke of it and say I get them from a little Used Idea Shop in Utica. The second is sometimes answerable, but in a surprising number of cases, it’s not, because stories are like dreams. Everything is deliciously clear while the process is ongoing, but all that remains when the story’s finished are a few fading traces. I sometimes think a book of short stories is actually a kind of oneiric diary, a way of catching subconscious images before they can fade away. Here is a case in point. I don’t remember how I got the idea for ‘Under the Weather,’ or how long it took, or even where I wrote it.

What I do remember is that it’s one of the very few stories I’ve written where the end was clear, which meant the story had to be built carefully to get there. I know that some writers prefer working with the end in sight (John Irving once told me he begins a novel by writing the last line), but I don’t care for it. As a rule I like the ending to take care of itself, feeling that if I don’t know how things come out, the reader won’t either. Fortunately for me, this is one of those tales where it’s okay for the reader to be one step ahead of the narrator.

Under the Weather

I’ve been having this bad dream for a week now, but it must be one of the lucid ones, because I’m always able to back out before it turns into a nightmare. Only this time it seems to have followed me, because Ellen and I aren’t alone. There’s something under the bed. I can hear it chewing.

You know how it is when you’re really scared? Sure you do. I mean, it’s pretty universal. Your heart seems to stop, your mouth dries up, your skin goes cold and goosebumps rise all over your body. Instead of meshing, the cogs in your head just spin. I almost scream, I really do. I think, It’s the thing I don’t want to look at. It’s the thing in the window seat.

Then I see the fan overhead, the blades turning at their slowest speed. I see a crack of early-morning light running down the middle of the pulled drapes. I see the graying milkweed fluff of Ellen’s hair on the other side of the bed. I’m here on the Upper East Side, fifth floor, and everything’s okay. The dream was just a dream. As for what’s under the bed—

I toss back the covers and slide down to my knees, like a man who means to pray. But instead of that, I lift the flounce and peer under the bed. I only see a dark shape at first. Then the shape’s head turns and two eyes gleam at me. It’s Lady. She’s not supposed to be under there, and I guess she knows it (hard to tell what a dog knows and what it doesn’t), but I must have left the door open when I came to bed. Or maybe it didn’t quite latch and she pushed it open with her snout. She must have brought one of her toys with her from the basket in the hall. At least it wasn’t the blue bone or the red rat. Those have squeakers in them, and would have wakened Ellen for sure. And Ellen needs her rest. She’s been under the weather.

‘Lady,’ I whisper. ‘Come out of there.’

She only looks at me. She’s getting on in years and not so steady on her pins as she used to be, but she’s not stupid. She’s under Ellen’s side, where I can’t reach her. If I raise my voice she’ll have to come, but she knows (I’m pretty sure she knows) that I won’t do that, because if I raise my voice, it will wake Ellen for sure.