A Little Like Waking, page 8
Couldn’t hurt to just have a look, though. First. If they can. If they can can see through the fog to the dreamer in the bed, then they can know what’s what before anyone goes and does something rash.
She frowns and nods resolutely. Then she strides out of the wizard’s workshop and back into her own sunny sitting room. She has every intention of getting dressed, so she’s pleased to see she’s suddenly wearing a cute denim romper and yellow sneakers.
Patches is hot on her heels as Zelda climbs the stairs to her bedroom. “Care for company on your quest?” he asks.
“Man, really? You still want to be my cat after how I behaved in there?”
“I am my own cat. But I am your friend. And what are friends for, if not to forgive when one friend tries carelessly to murder the other by pinching their whole world into nonexistence.”
Zelda pauses her packing and looks the cat in his little face.
“I’m sorry it’s like this, Patches.”
“With respect, you do not know what it’s like. You dreaming me, me dreaming you, the king of Spain dreaming us both, who knows. One thing remains consistently true.”
“And what’s that?”
Patches purrs. “According to the novelist Erich Segal, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Which is idiotic, but still: forgive the lack of poetry when I say quite plainly that I do love you, Zelda.”
Sure you do, thinks Zelda. But not on purpose. You’re just a character in my dream—I made you to love me. But love doesn’t work like that.
They’re interrupted by the sound of a wizard knocking over a coffee table.
“Zelda?” calls Langston. “Are you still here?”
Zelda shoulders her backpack and finds Langston standing outside Erx’s door in her sitting room. The wizard himself is sitting on the davenport.
“Sorry about your coffee table,” says Erx. “Sometimes I forget the volume of my preposterous clothing.”
Langston has his own backpack. He steps forward.
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
“Um,” Zelda answers. “Are you?” She’s about two parts elated and one part annoyed to be spoken to like that.
“Oh,” says Langston, shrinking. “I don’t know. Can I? Sorry, in movies people say that, and it’s always fine.”
“Mm. So why do you want to go to the edge?”
Langston starts saying a number of things very quickly, about discovery and science and the landscape of the mind, but all the while he’s making another thought balloon. It’s an image of Zelda wearing a princessy getup. Surprisingly puffy. Something she’d never wear in real life. She blushes and does her best to ignore it.
“… And with any luck you can bring all that knowledge with you,” Langston continues. “You know, when you wake up.”
Zelda smirks. “You mean when Patches wakes up. He says he’s the dreamer.” She leans in close to Langston. “I don’t really look good in pink,” she tells him.
Langston pulls back and—pop—the thought bubble’s gone. Erx chuckles.
“Wh-why did you say that?” asks Langston.
“Just in case you were thinking otherwise.”
Erx slaps his legs and stands up. “I’ll leave you kids to it, then.”
He moves back to the cardboard door and studies it a moment.
“You won’t come with us?” asks Zelda.
“To do what?” Erx answers without turning. “Chaperone?”
Zelda’s a blusher, apparently. She’s never had the occasion before, but now it’s the Fourth of July, and this year they’ve decided to light all the fireworks at once. Patches rolls his eyes at her.
“I will escort you to the edge of town,” says Erx. “But no, I will go with you no farther, though I wish you well. You see, I’m not so certain this is all a dream—I think it might just be a story about a dream. And if it is a story, then I trust I am not the protagonist.”
This seems like a comment Zelda’s supposed to disagree with—Do these jeans make me look like a supporting character? “Nah,” she says. “Why … would you say that? You could be the main character. Easy.”
“You are the main character, dear,” Erx says to Zelda, and it’s jarring to hear someone state so bluntly what she’s kind of always believed in her heart. “Because other characters are more or less oriented toward helping you realize your journey, and because you’re the one with a talking animal friend.”
Patches saunters up. “Perhaps I am the main character,” he says, looking at Zelda, “and I am the one with a talking animal friend.”
“Hey, buddy,” says Zelda.
Erx ignores this. “I fear that makes me the wise grandfatherly character who dies in the second act to signify the end of innocence or some such.” He opens the door wide and steps away from it. “I’d just as soon stay home and listen to records. But I will grant you a boon on your quest: Each of you may take one item from my workshop. Choose well, for—”
Langston’s eyes are saucers. “Dibs on the sword!” he shouts, before leaping past the wizard and through the door. If it were a cartoon, he would have left a Langston-shaped cloud behind him. But it isn’t a cartoon, it’s a dream, so instead he leaves a swarm of hummingbirds and three bars of the Canadian national anthem.
Patches bats at the hummingbirds.
“Well,” says Erx. “It would seem Langston has been window-shopping for some time. Patches? Young lady? Anything catch your eye?”
“Iw dake dis hunninggird,” Patches says with his mouth full of hummingbird.
Zelda says thank you, but no. Because the truth is she’s already taken something from the wizard’s workshop. She doesn’t want to be greedy.
EIGHT
THEY’RE STROLLING THROUGH HER OWN neighborhood, and at first Zelda feels staggered by the awkwardness of Erx, like a stone in her shoe. What must we look like, she wonders, walking alongside this D&D character down the sidewalks of Everytown, USA. He creaks as he walks—she can’t figure why—and trails a sulfurous mist behind him. He seems to be lit more distantly by a colder, insidious sun.
No one gives him so much as a second glance, though. A teenager points to his staff and says, “Cool stick.” Clara even—somehow—has a letter for him when they pass.
“From a mortuary,” Erx announces as he examines the envelope. “Advertising cremation services.” He holds the letter by its corner in his outstretched hand, and it disappears in a flash of pink flame.
“Doesn’t mean you’re going to die!” says Zelda. “You’re just walking us to the edge of town!”
“And not a step farther.” Erx sighs. “You children can learn your life lessons some other way.”
Zelda gives Clara a hug. “Better stop my mail for a while,” she whispers, and Clara says fare thee well.
“By the way,” she adds with a smirk, “who’s the cute boy?”
“That’s Erx,” Zelda answers. “He’s a wizard.”
Clara hitches her smirk up another rung and swats Zelda playfully on the arm. “Okay, then. You be good, Zelda baby.”
And they’re on their way again.
She sneaks glances. At Langston’s chin, his ear. At that muscle in his jaw that flares when he grits his teeth. Why does he grit his teeth? She knows he glances at her, too—she can feel his eyes like a hand on her cheek.
They walk for some time without speaking. Zelda tries to give the breezy impression she is enjoying the comfortable silence of old friends. She isn’t, though; it’s terrible. She spends the first five minutes trying to think of something to say, the next five wondering if it’s been too long to say something. After that, she starts wishing maybe an airplane would fall on them so they’d have something to talk about.
They’ve actually been going in the wrong direction, purposefully so. If town is the center of the dream, and the courthouse is the center of town, then to find the circle’s edge they need only walk in a straight line away from the courthouse. Or so their theory goes. “If you’re at the North Pole, there’s nowhere to go but south,” Langston said, back when they were all still saying things. It’s taking longer than Zelda thinks it should, and making her anxious. She’s usually a bit of a jaywalker. But Langston’s taken the lead, and the faithful way he waits for every walk signal, checks and double-checks every crossing, has Zelda feeling like a delinquent. So she waits, too, like it’s what she’s always done. Even though in her mind she’s screaming, Let’s go let’s go let’s go.
This is what happens when you meet someone new, she thinks. You pretend to like whatever they’re into.
So they’ve only now reached the square, and they turn away from it onto Beeline, the straightest avenue to the sticks. Everyone around here will tell you: If you want to get out of town, you take Beeline. They just couldn’t tell you where it goes, exactly, if you asked.
“Hey, Zelda!” one of the Frisbee bros yells after her. She waves back, happy just now for the attention. Can’t hurt to have Langston see all the attractive men about town calling her name.
“Hey, Zelda dude!” calls the other bro.
Well, that’s less good.
“Don’t you have a geography test?” the first bro shouts.
“Not today!” Zelda answers. “Playing hooky!”
“Dude! Outrageous!”
“So outrageous!”
“You’re like the funny kid sister I never had, Zelda!”
Ohkay.
Langston sucks air sharply. Here we go, thinks Zelda, and she readies herself for some conversation at last. But no, he lets the breath back out again. He was just breathing. False alarm.
She circles her neck around like she’s stretching it, and steals another look at him. Tries to gauge what he’s thinking.
Is this what it’s like to like someone? It’s kind of exhausting, actually, Zelda thinks. Her brain keeping constant tabs on every little thing. The shape of her. The shape of him. The exact shape and size of the space between them. She likes the swing of his walk. It looks like it should be set to music, a loungy bass. She suspects her own walk has more of a fidgety kazoo quality to it, and she tries to relax. It’s a challenge to walk and think about how to walk at the same time, and she stumbles over a crack in the sidewalk.
“You okay?” Langston asks her.
“Yep!”
They spoke! To each other! Finally. It wasn’t much of a conversation starter, but Zelda implores herself to keep it going.
“Speaking of those Frisbee guys,” she says, though they absolutely hadn’t been. “I have never seen them in another context. It’s like I can’t imagine them doing anything if they’re not also giving or receiving a Frisbee.”
“Whipping a Frisbee around the produce section as they shop for groceries,” suggests Langston.
“Gently lobbing the Frisbee before a roaring fire as they celebrate their first Christmas together,” says Zelda with a sigh.
She makes Langston laugh. It’s great.
“You know,” Zelda says, “those Frisbee guys, and Clara, and everyone in town last night … they each thought they were the dreamer of all this.”
Langston huffs and shakes his head. “That’s silly.”
“Is it, though? Seems to me it should be kind of … hard to think of yourself as an extra.”
Langston smiles a tight smile and shrugs in a what can I tell you? kind of way. “I manage,” he says.
When Zelda knits her brow at him, he adds, “I mean, who are the townspeople kidding? I’ve watched this place. You’re queen bee around here. Everyone else is a drone. An unmanned drone, I guess.”
“Yeah,” says Zelda, with a twinge in her gut. “I feel weird about that … Until a couple days ago, it seemed so natural.”
“What happened a couple days ago?”
“Dunno!” she answers, kind of loud.
“And anyway, isn’t that just like a dream?” Langston continues. “Until a couple days ago, it felt natural. Natural that you’d be the center of everyone’s attention. Because, like, don’t we all have a map of the world in here?” He taps his own head.
“One of those really good maps,” Patches agrees. “Like a circle with dots in it.”
“A mental map,” Langston says, ignoring Patches. “It’s covered with all our markers and monuments, all the stuff we think is important, but always with a big YOU ARE HERE right in the center.”
Zelda thinks about her plaster constellations.
“Like a big ol’ statue of ourselves,” Langston continues, “because our sense of self has to be the biggest landmark of all. And when we dream, we go and mistake our map of the world for the world,” he finishes. “Or you do, anyway. I assume.”
“You don’t dream?” asks Zelda.
“I dream all the time. Usually remember them, too. But if I’m not the dreamer, then I guess when I dream that’s really … you dreaming of me dreaming.” He bites his lip. “You’re right: It is hard to think about.”
After a few seconds, she gives him a side-eyed glance. “Do … you feel like an unmanned drone?”
Langston considers this. “No,” he admits. “I don’t. As nice as that sounds.”
Zelda blanches. “Nice?”
“Okay, no—too far,” Langston says, and shakes the thought free. “I don’t want to be an unmanned drone. But wouldn’t it be great to have, like, a GPS, but for life?” He looks at her to see if this lands any better. “A little mental assistant, helping you steer in the right direction. They could play Cyrano, you know? The smooth-talking poet, feeding you lines, helping you know what to say to classmates and … baristas and whatever.”
Zelda laughs. “You are so weird.”
“It could be an app on your phone: Sirino. She whispers clever conversation into your earbuds so you don’t sound like a dum-dum all the time.”
“Why do you even think you need that?” asks Zelda. “You’re talking to me just fine. You sound great.”
“A veritable mock-Socrates,” says Patches.
“Mockrates,” says Zelda.
“You did just call me weird,” Langston reminds her.
“Whatever. I don’t think you need an app. You’re a … charmer.”
He smiles a wriggling half smile, like he’s fighting to keep it in its cage. More, thinks Zelda.
“I’m doing better than usual,” he says. “I guess because now I know I’m only saying what your brain is telling me to say. I’m only doing what I’m told. You’re playing Cyrano, even if it doesn’t feel that way.”
Zelda knows this is true, but still she says, “Maybe not! Maybe this is all you. You know, you … could be the dreamer.”
She tries to follow how this idea plays out on his face. He purses his very nice lips at it, tries to dismiss it out of hand.
“No,” he says, shaking his head.
But. But then she’d swear he grows into it. He looks at her squarely—his stride slows. He looks at her deliberately. There is nothing casual about this glance. He’s drinking in all the light of her, and it opens him up like a flower.
That distance between them—of which Zelda had been so acutely aware—seems to vanish. She’d swear he doesn’t move, but she’s moved by him—by the sudden closeness of him, humming on her skin.
He says, “When you look at me, I feel real.”
It’s barely a whisper, before he turns his head and a subtle kind of panic sharpens his face.
“Zelda?” says Patches. He’s suddenly underfoot. “May I speak to you a moment in private?”
“Um,” says Zelda.
“Forgive the interruption,” the cat says to Langston, “but I need to discuss with Zelda a veterinary concern of the most personal nature.”
“Uh, yeah,” says Langston, his train of thought derailed. “Of course.” He slows to walk alongside Erx as Zelda picks up Patches.
“What are you doing?” the cat whispers to her.
“About what?” Zelda whispers back. “What do you mean?”
“You know full well. Why on earth would you even suggest to this boy that he might be our fantasist beyond the veil?”
“‘Fantasist beyond the veil’? Do you hear yourself?”
“It’s cruel, Zelda.”
“Wh—He has as much chance at being the dreamer as anyone else. C’mon.”
“Oh yes? How egalitarian. Why not tell yonder solicitor he is the dreamer, too?”
Zelda looks and sees who Patches means—there’s a man on the sidewalk, handing out flyers. Zelda takes one as they pass. Takes one and doesn’t stop to tell the flyer man he might be the somnambulant god of all creation. Patches pretends to be confused by this, and looks to her for an explanation.
“It didn’t come up,” Zelda mutters.
She examines the flyer. It seems to say GOBING OTTABEEZUS!! 40pees in block letters across the top. Below is every kind of punctuation. “Can you read this?” she asks Patches.
“It is a flyer, advertising a flyer advertising service.”
“Hm. Interesting.”
Actually, one small line at the bottom of the flyer jumps out at her with perfect clarity:
YOU’LL FALL FOR HIM IN THE END—BUT HE WON’T FALL FOR YOU.
She reads it a second time, and a third. It refuses to say anything else. “Psh,” Zelda huffs. She crumples the flyer and throws it aside. And hits a woman coming out of the bakery, actually. “Sorry,” says Zelda. She moves to pick up her trash.
“I’ll pick it up for you, Zelda!” says the woman, and she does. She beams and holds the wad of paper to her heart.
“Okay … thanks.”
“Thank you!”
A moment later, Patches says, “I notice you did not grasp that woman’s hands and tell her the good news. So just Langston, then? Will you be telling Erx he, too, might be the dreamer?” Zelda glances backward at the wizard. At the wizard and Langston.
Erx hums atonally as he walks. It’s possible he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Langston waves a tiny wave.
“Okay, you got me,” she says to Patches. “I guess I have an … interest in Langston particularly. I don’t like him thinking he’s a puppet. I don’t like thinking it, either.”
She remembers a girl back in fifth grade—what was her name, Shellifer? Chinny?—who drew a boy’s face on her own hand, and was caught kissing it behind the portables.
