Two
The boy continued to roll in the torment of sleep. Though the rays of his vision arced across the vast Serengeti, his body was in a prison. He lay fitfully dreaming in a small, dingy bedroom where the brightest color was gray.
A certain sound was audible in the room between the blare and thump of passing car radios, and when the distant wailing of police sirens briefly lapsed. The sound was the humming of frustrated electricity. In the lower half of the single window was a lazy fan, its propeller, spinning, slowly and noisily dying a dust-choked-motor death. A black, greasy soot had settled with time on the motor’s copper coil, so that the fan made an agonized moan when called upon to move the hot, still air of Willie’s room. Between the slow rotation of the rusted fan blades, dawn’s first light struggled in, but for the boy, the desert sun was already high and in full assault.
Although Friday was already dawning over Corona, surging up in places, stirring alive here and there in the start of a car or in the jingling keys and shuffling feet of some early riser, Willie Rivera was still lost in the riotous swirl of dreaming that traced its origin to Thursday night.
Two nights before that, Willie had begun to dream differently. The dreams were different, and they were also new. That much at least was certain. They were new and different for a single reason, but Willie had not been quite able to cup his understanding around it. There was a way in which the newness and the difference were relative. Which is to say that the new dreams made themselves prominent against a recollected group of old, familiar dreams, but still not in a way that was completely clear. There was no specific quality to either the newness or the difference, so as to enable one to say for example: “Well I’ve never dreamed in color before!” or “That was the strangest dream I’ve ever had!” No, nothing so conclusive nor so easily described. For if Willie could have made any such declaration, or even formed any such thought, then all his brooding on the dreams could have ended, could have been knotted-off like a balloon and surrendered to the wind. Instead, the dreams, or rather the thoughts of the dreams, pervaded his waking life. Miserably. The dreams could not be ignored, nor could the overwhelming sense that there was a reason to fear them.
As far as Willie was concerned, the most troubling thing about the dreams was the way they seemed to extend strangely into the daylight hours, making him ponder over them to the exclusion of any other thoughts. Truly, the dreams were changing the waking life. And this is where Willie became confused and alarmed, for he did not know how he understood this, nor could he find any evidence of this fact that the adult world might have held up to the light of understanding for him and, to his infinite relief, declared a childish silliness. The reason that Willie was able to understand what little he did understand, was that the dreams had been bubbling up from a new source of clarified meaning, sort of, from a place in Willie’s mind that was not entirely unlike the dusty shoe box which sat in a corner of his closet. The seeming relationship was such that whenever he tried with any measure of concentration to penetrate the strangeness of the dreams, he could never explain his findings to himself in any other way than by thinking: The dreams are coming from the shoe box.
It sat in a far and dark corner of his closet, and there were many other miscellaneous artifacts of boyhood stacked on top of it. The stacked items had taken on an arrangement which reflected the pattern and frequency of their use, so that the more likely items, such as the limp baseball mitt, the Frisbee, and a green-capped, clear-plastic canister for imprisoning insects, were always closer to hand and above the board games, which themselves were arranged with Parcheesi always on the bottom. Underneath it all, the shoe box squatted. It was an adapted thing, torn and frayed, filled so that the sides bulged, and the lid which had exploded apart long ago, was now only a sad, tramped down boundary between the contents of the box and all that pressed on it from above. Inside the box, were easily five-hundred things, and many of them could come apart if worked, making for even more individual pieces, and many could be joined together. So that the box was really like a place of infinite possibility.
The things in the box were truly odd bits, which anyone other than Willie would have found completely empty of interest or value. But for him, each notion and oddment, each nonsensical fragment of an irrelevant, forgotten whole, was positively infused, almost to the point of glowing, with a quality that made it impossible for him to throw it away. For one day, and this part was Willie’s most guarded secret, the contents of the box would organize itself into a thing of unimaginable importance. It was entirely unnecessary for Willie to try to guess at what that thing might be. He felt utterly confident that that revelation would be made only at the most necessary moment. To Willie’s thinking, all that was required to ensure that the special day of organization did in fact arrive, was that periodic additions be made to the box. For instance: the baby bird, wet and helpless, that had fallen, must have been, from some high, unseen nest, was found dead, allowed to thoroughly sun-dry on the window sill, then committed to the box with ritual silence and solemnity.
For three of his ten years, Willie had done his part with the box. And as he knew nothing about it, the place in the mind that was the real source of the dreams, had looked after itself for nearly as long. It was by no accident of placement that the cerebral place was sort of at the bottom-most level of storage also. It was a well into which stray things had an overriding tendency to fall. The things that fell in were of course very similar to those things that made there way into the shoe box, in that they were never adorned with any obvious usefulness. Except that whereas the shoe box had its glowing promise, the Mind Well was a repository for things Willie was only to happy to put out of sight.
Indeed, though Willie had no sense of where they went, he did become conscious of being able to lose things down into the Mind Well. Occasionally, there were ideas which might have been excitedly stolen from the forbidden realm of adult knowledge, and then found to be quite glaring and unbearable when examined up close. There was, as well, much of the knowledge that is sometimes introduced quite prematurely into a young child’s mind by others, with the aim of “growing them up”. There were many things already awake in Willie’s mind that were certainly not yet needed, and also things for which it is doubtful that a clear usefulness might ever emerge. Some of these were troublesome questions which hung about un-answerable and irritating, droning like mosquitoes trying to draw their answers from unlikely places. And there were other strange bits of disassociated information, which were apparently answers to questions that the boy had never asked himself. All of these were hastily bottled down into the Mind Well, where to Willie’s conscious level a satisfying erasure occurred. Though there was not the dimmest twinkle of the knowledge in Willie’s mind, each time he dragged some deformed little thought to the edge, and sent it spiraling down, he was adding a bit of potency to the mix, hastening that fateful day of organization.
In this manner, the dragging-off and dropping-away had carried on for quite a time. Often, though never through mechanisms that were apparent to the boy, the Mind Well had saved him from certain catastrophe. When he had found himself quite infected with some nasty bug in the mind, some particularly distracting notion that carried within itself the power to push-out, to insist its way out of him as a dreadful act, a screaming question, a horridly physical Why?!, there was always a place where the thing could be avertingly lost. And when that happened, all day there was a sort of inexpressible gratitude in Willie’s step.
For the purpose of averting grief, the Mind Well had become a thing of inestimable necessity. And as the frequency of those mental infections increased, Willie might as often be found looking deep into the center of a plain object, such as a glass of water, for long spells, minutes of utter absence, all the while dragging and dropping away.
The previous Winter, during an episode of particularly urgent difficulty, an odd thing had occurred. While Willie was suffering an especially torturous anguish at the hands of his father, the Mind Well, into which previously things had only been lost, began incredibly to make emissions.
But these were not at all like the plaguing, aimless things that had been sent down. What came up were purposeful, secretly-directed things, born out of that stew. They sought out specific places in the mind. Though the boy knew nothing of it, and could still make his essential deposits, his memory had come under attack. The place of sacred storage, where childhood’s wealth is kept, inviolate and pure, was being contaminated. Alterations and substitutions were being made, subtle changes that would never raise his direct concern, a shift here, an erasure there. Where he had remembered that someone had smiled at him, in the changed memory, there would now be a cynical jeer; a dearly recollected moment of happiness was now steeped in ambivalence; people he remembered trusting were now justifiably suspect. And this was how the waking life was being changed, and why Willie felt such fear now, whenever he fished for something in his memory.
Had Willie tried specifically to find some sign of the transformation within him, he would have failed. While looking at his own surface in the bathroom mirror, as he often did for as long as a full minute, when his mouth was white with toothpaste, nothing spoke of the activity inside. Out of the Mind Well, things crawled with insect shame or flew with shadowy wings or walked like men. Randomly, and for long periods, only sounds emerged from the darkest bottom of the Well, and of the inner ear that listened, Willie knew not a thing. But he heard the sounds too well, and all the other sorties found their targets with consistent precision.
Of the Well’s interior mischief, there were a scant few signs on the surface that the boy might have caught and brought to telling scrutiny, but they were hopelessly fleeting. And since no effort was made to look for these, either by Willie or by anyone else, the signs were, in speaking to the outer world, no more accomplished than the secret workings beneath the skin. Though he could not remember it now, there had once been a time when studying himself like that in the bathroom mirror would never lead to anything but hysterical laughter. The occasional rediscovery of his face as a wondrous instrument of expression would set off a series of experimental grimaces, whose function it seemed lay in finding a new limit of elasticity for the human face. But now, the long minutes of looking passed, without even the most distant threat of a smile’s appearance. At school there were also signs. Behind his desk, while Miss Biondi scanned for intelligence, Willie could easily lapse. When there was a question before the class, and there were more hands raised than not, Willie would want badly to fetch the answer down from within. That dire want of the answer often slipped into something else that gave rise to a tremor inside him. The tremor would die though, never reaching the surface. There was only the empty stare, the tiny face washed over with grief.
Thus his waking days revolved. The Mind Well made its sounds, and let out its sordid discharges, all of it utterly veiled in the sensory stream of boy life. Only at night, in the New Dreams, was any sign of the difference clearly evident. But of those dreams, Willie could not tell even what he remembered. In the service of description, mere words could not be brought to bear against them. When he aimed his thoughts at them, the dreams seemed too large, too strange, and would simply not let themselves be wrapped up in language.
When the dreams had first begun two nights before, there was a sense of gradual unfolding to their sequence. The dreams were a view to some obscure whole, seen only through the distortions of a kaleidoscope, whose colored crystals were falling slowly away, revealing what lay behind.
In Tuesday night’s dream, It had come at first like an exotic bird to Willie’s window. It came as a thing of seductive, feathered beauty, that alighted with a quiver. It seemed to Willie to be a delicate sort of bird-thing that hesitated within its shifting outline, and was wanting for a demonstration of good-faith, of affection, a thing that could only be had if lured in. In that first night’s dreaming, the bird had slipped behind a veil. It had remained elusive throughout, but offered Willie brief bursts of colored brightness and rushing episodes of delightful nonsense that revealed almost nothing, but that strangely made the soul yawn open with need. On Wednesday night, It had come in the form of a faceless friend; a wise and good friend that bubbled deliriously with excited recollections of moments Willie thought he’d lived alone. The friend danced and reeled and hung suspended in air, often laughing upside down, once even giggling something in another language. Although only an oval brilliance glowed whitely where a face should have been, Willie felt the smile, and was warmed by the somehow familiar presence.
The visitations of those first two nights had not imprinted very firmly on Willie’s waking memory, nor had they left any lingering suggestion of their special source. The bird-thing had trailed nothing more substantial in its wake than the feeling on Wednesday morning of queasy regret that often follows episodes of sensual over-indulgence. It was the way he felt after having two Mantecado ices, which was fully one more than his limit. That particular malaise had pervaded all of Wednesday, and had made him reluctant to follow any impulse to pleasure at all, for fear that it would lead invariably to more disgust. Nor of the faceless friend, who reminisced so gaily, was there any after-image. Instead, on Thursday, the fond reminiscences themselves had swollen up to be remembered as the only substance of that second dream.
Thursday too had passed without event, and was fleetingly recorded as a sad day. Then on Thursday night, in that period of habitual summation, of sifting through the day’s numerous struggles and defeats, just before letting the fullness of his pillow consume him, Willie had resigned to greet sleep with a tinge of melancholy. He had slipped first into that stage of pre-sleep, where the rhythms of beating heart and rising chest sag into a synchronous relation. Then, deeper into sleep without obstruction, indeed almost with the ease of one who is led, Willie had made his way quite unexpectedly to Africa