The Dream that was Arcadia
There wasn’t anything with garlic, I told her. Just something Cajun I’d been working on, but nothing with garlic. The bathroom’s at the end of the hall, just across from the bedroom.
“Good,” she said. “I tend to get up and down in the night. By the way, I sleep on the right side of the bed.”
“No,” she said, dropping her bag on the floor, making her way down the hall to the bathroom. “I’ll just toss it on the bed.”
And she did.
“Do you have cable,” she asked, speaking from the bathroom with the door opened wide and her voice not able to drown out the sound of water splashing into water.
No. No cable, I said. No cable at all. I’ve never liked cable. I don’t watch much television really. I hate it. It’s not stimulating. It doesn’t do anything. It rots your brain. Someone should really work on making better television shows.
I ran out of things to say about television, and there was still the light ringing of water falling into water.
I’m a reader, that’s what I am. I love to read. I’ve got a huge book collection. Books, books, and more books. That’s me. It’s still raining outside I see. You’ve got to be soaked. Good thing it’s not chilly. Chilly and rainy and you could wind up sick. Good thing for you it’s not chilly.
“You already said that,” she shouted, the flushing toilet punctuating her words.
Oh, sorry.
“Do you always talk this much?”
No, not really. I don’t talk that much at all, actually. I’m a quiet guy.
“I can’t tell,” she said, walking from the bathroom to the bedroom, removing her clothes and paying me only the least amount of attention. In the middle of the hallway, she left a small, gray blouse with stitching across the cups and metal buttons down the center that shined like iron ore in a wet, strip-mined hillside.
“It’s cold in here,” she shouted. “What’s the thermostat on?”
Seventy-seven. I’ll turn it up.
“No,” she said. “I like to be cold. I like to wear layers. This blue shirt in your closet, is it all cotton?”
I think so.
“It feels like cotton. Yep, it is. I like it. It’s warm.”
I was surprised by how long it took to get the question together in my head. It was the shock of everything that distracted me. There, in the middle of my pristine, deodorized, freshly-vacuumed, two weeks from needing to be shampooed, previously unmarred and unviolated, Mother of Pearl colored carpeting, were size seven shoe prints traipsing from my doorway to my bathroom to my bedroom and here I was with dinner on the stove and no time to clean the carpet before the stains set because the roux I’d been working on for the last twenty minutes was already starting to burn from being unattended and if I didn’t get back to it immediately, the whole house would smell like seared oil for the next month no matter how much I shampooed the carpet or deodorized the furniture or steam cleaned the drapes.
Carpet stain or the perpetual odor of burned grease.
With that type of decision on my mind, I couldn’t worry about something as trivial as exactly who this woman was.
As it turned out, she didn’t much care for sleeping on the right side of the bed because the sun was always in her eyes, even when I closed the curtains and pulled the blinds. The sun still found a way to blind her first thing in the morning and she said she didn’t much care for being woken up that way. When I offered her my side of the bed, she said, “I sleep on the right side of the bed.”
The next day I turned the bed–headboard and all–so that my side faced the window, with it’s blinding ball of morning fire. In the middle of the night, she woke me with an elbow betwixt my ribs and said, “This side’s cold. The sun warms me up and I like to be warm. This side’s cold. This won’t work.”
I thought you liked to be cold.
“Not in the mornings. In the mornings I like the sun. It’s warm. It gives me good dreams, the warmth.”
I could turn the thermostat up in the night.
“No. That won’t work. This won’t work. When I wake up cold nothing goes right.”
The next day I moved the bed again–headboard and all. This time I positioned the foot of the bed towards the window of sun and heat and good dreams and, when the night came and went again, the morning eased in through the window and began a slow, seductive arousal by warming first our toes and then the soles of our feet, then our calves and our knees and upwards to our thighs.
I had a dream then, a dream of melting and drowning. I sank into a river of something thick, warm, and golden like buttermilk. First my toes dissolved; they became gold and fluid and slipped away downstream one by one, then the soles of my feet, my ankles, my calves, my knees. The current coaxed me under, down into a deep, penetrating, immersing warmth. At the end of the dream, my head eased below a surface of liquid gold and this was the best dream of melting and drowning I’ve ever had.
“Don’t move the bed anymore,” she told me. “This works.”
Okay.
Her name was Meredith, but everyone called her Mary except for a younger brother who used to call her M.D. because it sounded more fun and because he always knew his big sister would grow up to be a doctor one day. Apparently, Meredith–she specifically told me to call her Meredith–was a friend of Emmanuel’s ex-girlfriend and she and I had met at a party thrown by Emmanuel and his ex-girlfriend just before the two of them became ex’s because Emmanuel got caught cheating and his girlfriend–for the life of me, I forget her name–had been with tons of cheating men before and she wouldn’t take it anymore.
I didn’t remember this party. I barely remember Emmanuel. We worked together ages ago and I hadn’t seen him or thought about him in, well, ages. But Meredith assured me that she and I had been closer than two people who met at a party have ever been before. She said she couldn’t believe we’d been apart for so long. When I said that I didn’t remember her or the party or Emmanuel’s girlfriend and that I didn’t remember much of Emmanuel either, she told me not to worry because it would all come back to me.
“Trust me,” she said.
Apart from that, Meredith didn’t talk much about where she came from or how she wound up on my doorstep with her bag over her shoulder and those muddy size seven shoes tracking footprints across my Mother of Pearl colored carpeting.
Speaking of carpeting, it was a week of work to get those shoeprints of hers out of the material. I was forced to give the whole place a good shampooing one day while Meredith was at the store buying new bedsheets because the thread count of the sheets on my bed and in my closet was too high. She said it felt like sleeping on silk and silk didn’t feel like anything. She said she needed to sleep on something that rubbed against her skin as she slept because, when she was dreaming, it reminded her that the ground was still beneath her.
So, while she was at the store buying new bedsheets–and new curtains that she said would do a better job of keeping the moonlight out but still letting the sun in in the mornings–I shampooed the carpet, took the old bedsheets off the bed, washed the old bedsheets along with a load of her clothes–mostly jeans and an assortment of the same styled blouse in varying shades of gray.
I sifted through and organized the pile of Meredith’s CDs that had grown up around my bookcase.
There were scattered stacks of Jazz and Big Band discs full of blaring trumpets with toilet plunger caps held against the ends and whining saxophones with the reeds filed out a little to get more “whine” and cellos used for base and tons of drummers thump, thump, thumping just to compete with the sound of the trumpets–Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louie Armstrong, Cab Calloway. There were Classical discs with delicate piano notes needled with long, aching pauses between melancholy flicks of pale fingertips on shining ivory–Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Chopin. There were Blues discs full of men and women moaning to God about how much loss they’d seen in their lives and how, on some days, the sun just doesn’t shine–Ray Charles, Etta James, Billy Holiday, John T. Hooker. There were Rock and Metal discs full of roiling rage and palm muting that sounded like a State-sponsored electrocution; people screaming in what they imagined were demonic voices about how the world should be afraid of them and their pain and their anger over their pain–Mudvayne, Slayer, Disturbed. There were Rap discs full of rhyme and strange syllabications–couplets of consonance, slant-rhymed spoonerisms, end rhyme and assonance, internal rhyme that rose on wings of alliteration–everyone promising that, ultimately, they were “unfuckwitable”–The Roots, Common, Most Def, Cee-Lo.
There were more CDs than I personally cared for and they were all disorganized, strewn from here to there with no type of reason or rationally discernable pattern. They all glimmered with scratches, chips, nicks and cuts. Most of them were missing cases and every case that I did find was covered with veins of cracked plastic that looked like the stained glass windows of an abandoned church after the neighborhood kids have run out of rocks to throw.
I stopped my carpet shampooing–my folding of laundry, my prepping of dinner–and organized Meredith’s music alphabetically by genre, save for one: a disc covered in hard, deep scratches and sticky with something brown, like dried blood, that made it peel away from my fingers like Velcro. The title read, Learning to Heal Yourself! Disc 3.
I never found discs one or two.
It was the same conversation every time I left for work or left for the store or simply left to take the garbage out. If I left, for anything, it was the same conversation:
“You’re coming back, right?”
Of course, Meredith.
“When?”
As soon as I’m off of work. I’ll come straight home.
“You promise?”
I promise.
“Because, this is home, you know?”
Yes, I know.
Of course I knew. I’d lived in this apartment for five years. These walls, I’ve painted these walls every Easter weekend for the past five years.
The refrigerator, I defrost the freezer every August 15th.
The tile in the bathroom, I put that in during my third year here. I hate white tile and all of these apartments have white tile so that it’s neutral and can’t really offend tenets that get rotated in at the end of every twelve-month lease. But, me, I was offended by the white tiles. They were just a reminder that nothing really changes. They were reminders that, when I’m dead and gone, someone else will just move in and take my place and step on the same white tiles that I stepped on and there won’t be any proof that I was ever here.
So now the bathroom has blue tile.
And, still, with all of that, every time I go to leave, Meredith asks me, “This is home, you know?”
Of course I know this is home.
And every time I go to leave I say, Yes, I know.
And every time I go to leave, Meredith stands in hallway watching me disappear behind a wall of wood and deadbolts with her hands wringing the hem of her gray blouse–I’ve come to realize that she owns nothing but gray blouses, the same style of gray blouse purchased twenty different times along with whatever shirts of mine she commandeers. That’s all she ever wears.
The only things different about her from day to day are her jeans. When she first showed up I counted five pairs of jeans and a couple of pairs of shorts and I’ve noticed that the longer she stays here the more those numbers go up. At last count it was: Jeans 27, Shorts 13.
A blowout.
But, again, every time I go to leave Meredith stands in the hallway wringing the bottom of her uniform gray blouse with both hands, her lips swollen and pouting and her eyes sparkling with salt water. The weight of her body rocks back and forth from her heels to the balls of her feet and she looks like a sprinter warming up for the big, hard run; the run that’ll end all other runs.
As I close the door more and more I repeat a soft mantra, I’ll be back, Meredith. I’ll be back, Meredith. I’ll be back, Meredith. I’ll be back, Meredith.
And she echoes with, “Because this is home, you know. Because this is home, you know. Because this is home, you know. Because this is home, you know.”
After the door is closed and dead-bolted and lodged firmly between us, through the porous wood I hear the wet, choking sound of emotional collapse. I hear the low, firm thud of physical collapse. I hear the space between us as close, distant, and unanswering as the grave.
I hear the mantra rolling on without me, “Because this is home, you know. Because this is home, you know. Because…”
I lost track of how long Meredith’s been here–which is odd because I’m usually not the kind of person to lose track of something like that–but it’s been quite a while because the bathroom counter is full of shampoos and conditioners and perfumes that I don’t use. My closet’s slopping over with jeans, shorts, gray blouses, clothes that belong to me but have been worn by someone other than me and not washed or folded or hung back up on their hangers where they belong. My bookshelf is covered in CDs that I don’t own and have never listened to–Getting Past It! Disc 4.
I’ve got cable.
I’m not sure exactly how long Meredith’s been here, but the carpet’s been vacuumed twelve times and shampooed three times because she doesn’t ever wipe her feet and I refuse to be one of those people who has to get a welcome mat that completely goes against the aesthetic design they originally tried for when they tried to match up their furniture with their carpeting. I fought long and hard to find an apartment with Mother of Pearl carpeting–I’ve got a couch, a loveseat, a coffee table, a bookcase, all built on the foundation of Mother of Pearl colored carpeting–so it’s all I can do to keep the carpet clean and to keep the size seven shoeprints from becoming a brown stain-path leading from the doorway to the bathroom to the bedroom.
I refuse to get a doormat. I do. They’re common. They’re a sign of bad stock.
When Easter weekend rolls around and it’s time to repaint the apartment for the sixth time, Meredith tells me I can’t do it because she loves the apartment just the way it is.
But I’ve got to change it. I change it every year.
“Well, not this year.”
Don’t worry; you’ll like the new color. It’s called, Santa Monica.
“I hate Santa Monica.”
Then what color do you want?
“This color. I want this color. No changes.”
This color is called Southern Phoenix.
“Then that’s what I want. I want Southern Phoenix.”
Inevitably, I gave in.
Okay, I’ll just repaint it Southern Phoenix.
“No. I said no painting!”
It’ll be the exact same color.
“I don’t care. It’ll make the apartment smaller. I’ll get claustrophobic. I’ll suffocate. I’ll die.”
You won’t even notice.
“I will. I swear I will. The whole place will smell like paint for weeks. It’ll smell new. It’ll smell like no one’s ever lived here and it’ll be smaller. I won’t be able to breathe. I’ll die. I promise I’ll die.”
She promised she would die if so much as a single micro nanometer of paint caked up with the walls with the creamy, suffocating stench of enamel.
So for all of Easter weekend I sat in my apartment with Meredith and did no painting and she watched cable and listened to CDs and the walls didn’t get painted and I was sentenced to another year of Southern Phoenix when I’d had my heart set on Santa Monica.
I’m dreaming when she wakes me. I’m at the beginning of my good dream again, my dream of melting and drowning in warm gold. My dream of slow dematerialization. I’ve disappeared up to my ankles when Meredith wakes me with an elbow betwixt my ribs.
“My feet are on fire,” she says.
I look at her feet.
No they’re not. You were dreaming. It was just the sun.
“But they were on fire.”
No, they weren’t. You were just dreaming. But it’s over now. You’re awake. Your feet are fine.
Meredith pulled her small, slender feet beneath the covers and away from the sun. “I can’t sleep anymore. I can’t dream. My feet are on fire.”
You’re delirious. You’re half-asleep. You’re stuck in a dream, that’s all. You just need to wake up.
“No,” she said. “My feet are on fire.”
I drifted back to sleep with Meredith curled into a tight, shivering ball beneath the covers next to me. I lay my arms across her. She shivered that much harder. In my dreams, I heard some woman saying that her feet were on fire, over and over and over again.
When I had finished my dream of drowning and rubbed the mattress next to me in search of Meredith, she wasn’t there. I called her name, but no one answered. As I made breakfast, expecting her to come through the front door at any moment and settle into a place across from me at the table, I had the sneaking suspicion that the apartment was changed. Things seemed moved, shifted, relocated. There seemed to be gaps here and there that may or may not have been there before. It was early and I couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
I dined on breakfast alone: three blueberry pancakes, two strips of Canadian bacon, one link of sausage.
After breakfast, there was laundry to be done and it wasn’t until I was halfway through the spin cycle that I could put my finger on what was askew with the world in which I lived. The laundry score had changed: Jeans 21, Shorts 9. As for the blouses, I’d never bothered to do an official count-where’s the point in counting clones–but I could tell, sense, feel, imagine that there were fewer gray blouses than there had been before. I estimated that six, maybe seven, had gone missing.
Of course, Meredith’s bag, the only thing she’s shown up at my door with, was gone. On the Mother of Pearl carpeting were size seven shoeprints disappearing into the wall of wood and deadbolts that serves as my front door. I imagined her walking through the door without ever opening it. In my mind, I saw her vanishing like a ghost or a good Hollywood “dissolve.”
Cable’s been rotting my brain.
Some hair care products were missing from the bathroom. Some CDs were gone. The entire set of Getting Past It! was still there, but Learning to Heal Yourself! Disc 3 was gone. I never found discs one or two.
I don’t know exactly how long Meredith’s been gone or exactly why she left or exactly why she came, but I’ve finally gotten around to putting Santa Monica on the walls and I have to admit, the rooms do feel smaller. Logically, I know it’s an immeasurable difference but, viscerally, there is a difference. It grates against my skin, it brushes against the hairs on the back of my neck sometimes, the difference does.
Every once in a while, I have a hard time breathing and everything smells like creamy, suffocating enamel–no matter how much deodorizer or room freshener I use or no matter how many windows I open to the world–the scent just won’t move and sometimes it’s all I can smell and I’ve never been claustrophobic, but I’m learning fast.
Yesterday, I turned my bed again, headboard and all. I turned the entire thing around and the last dream I remembered having this morning was a dream of being lowered head first into an amber cocoon like a mosquito from the Paleozoic–or possibly Cretaceous or maybe even Jurassic–Era. Everything around me was dense and slow and sticky.
The world was syrup. My hands were syrup. My feet were syrup. My spine was syrup. My eyes were syrup. My lips, tongue and lungs were syrup. And then everything hardened, suddenly and permanently–think rigor mortis–and when I woke up I could hardly breathe and the lactic acid in my muscles–because I had quit breathing while I was dreaming and that stuff builds up fast when you don’t breathe–the lactic acid had sunken down and bottlenecked below my ankles, all at once, and I could have sworn my feet were on fire.
And for whatever reason; blame the lack of oxygen, blame it on a bit of undigested dinner from last night, blame it on alien abduction at two a.m., blame it on global warming, genetic predisposition to mental instability, too many paint fumes, inhalation of too many deodorizers, blame it on whatever you’d like, but, for whatever reason, I was wracked with the feeling that, for whatever reason, this wasn’t home anymore.
Appears in “The Thomas Wolfe Review”
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