palace of winds

I had a dream the other night that Sara gave me a puppy. A corgi, specifically, a gorgeous blue-speckled corgi with huge foxy ears and big dark eyes. I thought, in the dream, that she was a blue merle, and maybe she was, but the great mysterious internet seems to suggest that blue merles must have irregular blotchy spots, and she was regularly and perfectly flecked, or ticked, or speckled, or whatever. Regardless, she was beautiful and ever-so-cuddly, and I was quite distressed since dogs aren’t allowed in my apartment. I had no idea how I could keep her, but very much did not want to give her up.

I think, periodically, about getting a cat. It’s clearly a bad idea since I’m never home, but I always turn to this perfectly sound explanation with a faint trace of guilt, because even if I were home more often there is a part of me that still would not want a cat. There are lots of cats out there who deserve good homes, but I really like being able to go out of town without a second thought, and never having to worry about hair or vomit or a litter box. That and I still can’t really think about my cat, can’t even think his name, without feeling like someone has pulled all my insides out. I almost didn’t make the horse decision for it.

Anyway, mostly I like the total lack of responsibility. Same sort of reason having kids (ever) doesn’t quite appeal to me. (That and the expense. Children are dreadfully, dreadfully expensive.) Is this something people get over before they get pets or have kids? Or is it something that just evaporates after the pets or kids have been acquired?

I have decided, for now, that I will not get a dog unless it is that blue-speckled corgi. Which is really a moot point because my new apartment doesn’t allow dogs either, but it’s one less decision to make down the road. Or one more window for fate: if that puppy materializes, I’ll know it’s time to move again.

Also, totally unrelated, IT IS STILL COLD and I demand that it STOP RIGHT NOW PLEASE. I’ve lost track of the number of days in a row that I’ve stepped outside in the morning and had my nose freeze shut a little. I want to get back to playing with my horse, please. Please? Pretty please?

The mood in the airport is one of veiled tension. There are all of the old trappings of the way things were — the scattering of kiosks full of last-minutes, all gum and sunglasses and cheap trinkets. The unmanned information counter. The bright posters promising eternal sun over sparkling seas and better teeth and perfect reception. And then there are the old checkpoints with the new guards. Young and nonchalant and a little terrifying for it. The lazy weight of their power. Their laughing assurance.

This is the last gateway; if we can make it through and onto our flight and into the air we will be free from here — this city, this country, this planet. My sister is at my elbow, my mother just ahead of us. We are a happy, dutiful, unassuming family; we are happily going on vacation, unaware of the way the world is turning now, the change sweeping through. Of course we plan to return. Why wouldn’t we?

And so we make it past the guards and are swept along in the general tide of traffic, but then the hallway bends and beyond us my mother is lost for a moment from sight, and then she is just lost. Vanished. We pretend not to have noticed, walking on, but shortly I see my mother’s work badge clipped on a storefront display. I take it as we pass, and a few stalls later I pause by another display, deftly removing two of my mother’s pins from a little rack of earrings and slipping them into my pocket with the badge. They are the only clues she’s left us, the badge she dropped and the valuables taken from her, already on display for sale.

If they have seen me I will be stopped for shoplifting, and it will be clear that I am suspicious about my mother’s disappearance. If I’m caught with these items, it’s over. And so when I see guards moving through the crowd up ahead, working leisurely my way, I turn and begin retracing my steps as my sister continues on. I slip my hand into my pocket and trace the hard corners of the badge, my heart in my throat. Do I dare keep it? Do I dare drop it? As I am passing through the Walmart clothing section I let the badge and pins fall, praying that no good samaritan will see and try to return them to me. I walk faster, veer right, heading into the tall labyrinth of the garden center. It is nearly deserted here, harder to hide. I reach the end of an aisle to discover a maintenance man. He looks up from his pitchfork and bucket and though we’ve never met we recognize each other at once. He steps forward and we fall silently in pace together, and a moment later he takes my hand. I am doomed but my relief at this small contact is staggering. Our fingers slide together, dark and light and dark, and he leads me onward, buying me what time he can. In other circumstances, in another life, if we make it out of here alive, we will be lovers, will be delirious with each other, will build a quiet private life on some secluded shore and make dozens of fat, happy babies.

After I am found I am taken to the children’s barracks, a big room with rows and rows of beds all crowded together and kids eight to eighteen, the scared and the devastated and those already hardened, snide, the old hats, the hopeless. All the orphans of this new regime. My brother finds me, Mark with his thatch of blonde hair and sharp ferret’s face behind round silver glasses. Mark, twelve, who should be too old for whining, for the fuss he raises, but behind it is fear and I quiet him, help him find a bed, tell him things will be all right.

Later the mothers are brought around, part of the charade that things are okay, that everything is above-board. We see her only briefly but already she looks older, exhausted, a little hopeless. We don’t get a chance to speak and I do not know what they are doing to her, what work they are making her do, what life they’re robbing, but I know she will not last long. And I know soon they will be taking me to the other place, me and the other girls, and if there is to be any chance for any of us we must act soon.

I try, for the most part, to be vigilant about my packratishness. On the lookout for it, for that sly way it has of nudging open the back door and inviting in whole hosts of things I could do well without. I keep all sorts of extra things in boxes with their similars, and periodically comb through them. It’s meant to be a housecleaning sort of thing, and almost always turns into this long, dreamy period of reminiscing. Sometimes I wake up to myself hours later, things and things scattered all around me. I think I am going in the right direction in general, though — or at least not taking on much more than I’m weeding out.

Tonight I found an old envelope with a dream jotted on it. I’m always pleased with my past self for having taken the time to jot these sorts of things down, and then for not having tossed them away later, tempting as it is (especially the sort that are scribbled in shorthand on odd bits of paper — this one an envelope from a bank I belonged to briefly my senior year of high school, because they gave me a debit card without a cosigner even though I was a minor) — because usually the bit of scribble is enough to bring at least pieces of the dream back as vividly as when I first woke from it. And sometimes the gaps prove just as interesting.

In this one my dad and I are lost, trying to find our way to a movie theater; we’ve stopped and in order to navigate parking in a tight T-intersection my dad lifts our car as though it weighs nothing. My notes say there is a bus stop and my dad “walks across but no one will let us sit down because people are like that in this town.” And then there is a bit with a dark elevator shaft and a gas bomb and a shooting and a narrow escape to an occult shop where we pay an entrance fee and are later asked to pay it again, and I end up screaming at the owner. I’ve written that I order him to sit down and then I tell him the story of the day my dad and I have had — but when first reading my own scribble I thought it said that I scream, “Don’t yell at him. Now sit down. Tell him the story of your day.” And it seemed just the most delightful, delirious dream sort of thing to’ve happened, that I would order this man to sit down and tell us about his own day. Like there was this niggling of some universal life lesson beneath it all in my dream, this town being wretched because no one cares for one another, for the details of life on such a small, human level; that caring about someone’s day would transport us out of trouble. (Though of course that wasn’t the dream at all.)

And I’m afraid this will make no sense to anyone else, the way people’s dreams often don’t make sense to anyone but the dreamer. They’re such strange things, dreams; they mean in such unexpected ways that it’s hard to talk about them sometimes. Like trying to describe a color you’ve seen for the first time, or a taste you’ve just first tasted. Experiences too immediate for language.

I woke in the middle of last night laughing. My memory of the dream was scattered away by my surprise; I’d never woken up laughing before. I highly recommend it.

I also highly recommend free lunches at nice restaurants. It’s hours later and I’m still stuffed full of exquisite tomato basil soup, and a salad that included grapes someone had peeled and cut nickel-thin, and that glorious apple cobbler (which I last had two snowstorms ago, huh — apparently there’s something about picturesque winter weather that makes me want caramely cobbler). I really shouldn’t've had dessert since Jo and I are going out for Restaurant Week tonight, but — well, I did. And as long as I can get un-full in the next two and a half hours, I shan’t regret it. Fingers crossed.

Also, does anyone know where February went? I seem to have mislaid nearly all of mine. (Eight days to San Diego?! How did that happen?)

My dreams lately have been the ordinary gone strange. Two nights ago I am Neil Gaiman having a usual morning with my wife and daughter, all toast and tea and then getting ready to leave on errands and discovering that the paparazzi have surrounded the house, and then needing to take some medication — there is the alternating vague sense that it is for anxiety, or a heart condition, or asthma. The big white pills stick in my throat and I keep casting around for something to swallow them with; I find can after can of diet coke with only a half swallow left and the pills are going bitter and sticky and I can’t get them down. (I wake with a faint shame at having dreamt myself into Neil Gaiman’s personal life; I feel sorry and a little creeped out on his behalf.)

Last night I am attending a wedding; it is an evening affair, all a whirl of preparations, fine food, fine gowns. The ceremony itself is in a smaller building separated from a stately stone mansion by an enlarged version of my back yard. I am in simple peach silk and I’ve come out of the main house at last to head back to the festivities. It is a dark, damp evening; though the stars are all out now it had previously been raining, and shortly the soggy ground gives way to a marsh, and a little further still a whole lake has formed. I stand just where the water begins, my shoes sinking a little into the soaked grass. There is no other way to the wedding; I hesitate and then, knowing there’s no helping it, wade in. The water is cool and very clear; beneath everything is black-green, a world of waving velvety vegetation and old tires and the occasional silver glint of fish and stars. I dive down, skirting tree trunks, all sleek silk and drifting hair.

(Not, that is to say, that we have old tires in our back yard, because we don’t. But if your brain is dreaming up an eerie nighttime world where your yard’s gone all towering oaks rising from dark water there’s bound to be some interesting, if inauthentic, lakebottom debris involved.)