Dreams, by Eduardo Galeano

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7 November

One night in 1619, when Rene Descartes was still quite young, he dreamed all night long.

As he told it, in the first dream he was bent over, unable to straighten up, struggling to walk against a fierce wind that propelled him toward school and church.

In the second dream a bolt of lightning knocked him out of bed and the room filled up with sparks that illuminated everything in sight.

And in the third he opened an encyclopedia, looking for a way to live his life, but those pages were missing.

*Trans. by Mark Fried

Pharaoh and servant

What can I do for you this night, master? asked the servant, kneeling before his Pharaoh.

The master paced the tile in shadow, free of headdress, as he preferred.

Arid breezes and swirling garments.

On cloudy nights they ceased their disciplined adjustment of mirrors that

sucked moonlight deep beneath the pyramids

where men and women worked tirelessly in deep chambers

and bacchanals flowed like wine through the night,

poets dawdling by candlelight, observing all.

On clear nights, servants were assigned to each mirror station.

The poets admired their discipline but not their fawning

or their status as servants.

A subterranean culture of nocturnal diggers, morticians, freaks, insomniacs.

Most worked through dawn, a manic colony of human ants

exploiting the desert

meeting it, absorbing it, becoming it.

Darkness and mystery deep as history and tradition.

Bring me a wife, said the Pharaoh.

His eyes burned in the half-light. The servant departed.

Myrrh and cinnamon on the breeze, hot as day.

Moonlight battled cotton clouds of aquamarine, gray, white.

What will become us, wondered the Pharaoh.

hunter/hunted

Lakeview

I hauled twenty-three loads this week, he said. I’m drinkin til I pass out.

We hefted oversized mugs of gold beer to our faces. The manager and bartender eyed us. A racist-sounding country singer drawled from the overhead speaker.

He said: Worst of em was Reno to Chicago. I rode a storm the whole way. Truck blowin this way and that.

His name was Nick and I met him at this shitty bar one hour and two mugs ago. Truckers are a lonely bunch. Nick came here to drink. I walked over from the stop because I was bored.

I said: I did twenty last week, so I feel you.

We’d started to settle into a drinking rhythm, a locomotive just catching full speed.

My wife’s asleep by now, he said, flipping his phone on the bar top.

We don’t ask after another trucker’s family, even if there’s something we want to know, even if we freely offer those details about ourselves. I looked at my watch.

Where you from? he asked.

We drank. I said: I’m from everywhere but right now I live in Vermont.

Vermont, he said, staring into the distance.

I noticed he was near done with his beer, so I gulped mine down. I motioned for the bartender to pour us another.

Nick said: Thanks.

You got the last one, I said.

Let me ask you, he said. You ever do time?

I thought it an odd question. Because I’m black? I wondered.

I made no expression, no movement.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I’m just fuckin with you, man! he laugh-shouted, smacking my back.

I drank and nodded. This beer would be my last. Darkness at the windows kept me from seeing night in Spokane. It was almost closing on a Tuesday night. Only a few other losers wasted their time in the place. Most of them worked there.

I fuckin did time, he said, humorless. Then he distracted himself with the monitors above the bar and drank down half the mug. A minute passed and he turned his head toward me, his eyes shiny and unfocused.

He said: We should get a hooker and tag team her.

I smiled. I thought he was joking, but he was serious. He lowered his voice to a whisper.

I can get us something young, he said, drunk, looking over his shoulder, then mine. I know a guy here in Spokane.

His eyes reached for mine and landed. The skin on my back rippled to my shoulders, riding a wave to my scalp. Again I made no expression. I nodded solemnly and drank.

Young as you want, he whispered, looking back to the TVs above the bar.

I must have misunderstood him. What we talked about after that is blurry, indiscernible. I don’t know how I got back to my rig. Most of the trucks were gone when I woke at dawn.

I saw him again ten months later in Colorado Springs. I’d thought about him every day, wondering if I’d imagined the episode. I saw him refueling at a hauler station and reintroduced myself.

Oh yeah, he said, eyeing me suspiciously before shaking my hand. Snow and cold swarmed us.

Yeah I remember you, he said.

You need a coffee? I asked, motioning toward the cafe next door.

I said: I’m buying.

He nodded.

Once seated at the table we layered down and thawed and danced around small talk before he leaned in and whispered to me, his breath smoke and coffee, cold sores, rotten teeth.

Last time we talked, he said.

He squirmed in his chair.

In Spokane. I mention anything to you about —?

I looked at him and sipped the coffee.

He said: I don’t know how to put this.

We told each other we’d both done time, I said. That’s what I remember.

Yeah, he said, relief refracting about the asymmetry of his eyes.

He leaned back in his seat.

I said: We said to keep in touch and I never gave you my card.

I plucked a business card from the back of my iPhone and handed it to him. He handed me his card and I put it in my pocket without looking at it.

If you’re ever in Vermont, I said, shaking his hand outside the cafe.

I pulled his card from my pocket once back in the cabin of my truck.

Nick McKesson. Address in Louisville, Kentucky.

Weeks passed and I couldn’t forget him. His odor. I trained both body and technique with him in mind.

Negotiations with crew mates and surreptitious questions to office personnel yielded nothing to Kentucky. When I finally landed a shift to Louisville, the load was light as the spring rain and I drove as long and hard as law allowed. I arrived at dusk and took a cab to three blocks away from the address on Nick’s card. It was hot and humid on foot, but breezy.

I knocked on the building door, unsure of my purpose. It was a trucker warehouse with no lights on. I waited. Footsteps, then the door cracked open. His eyes: squinty and hard and uneven.

What’you want.

Nick, I said, my voice as non-threatening as possible. My body language was bad.

We don’t want none, he said, and closed the door.

You gave me your card, I said to the door. Vermont. Remember?

I waited and the door cracked open again. A fly wandered in.

He sent a hard, suspicious look.

Sorry, he said. Round here don’t get a lot of.

It’s cool, I said. Just stopped in to say hey. I was in Louisville and remembered your card.

He nodded once, eyeing me.

Want a quick beer? I’m closing up.

Sure, I said, walking into the darkness after him.

Crazy you got me today, he said. I got in last night and I’m leavin in the morning.

The shop was empty of people and machines except one truck, likely his.

I said: I didn’t think anyone would be here.

He opened the refrigerator. Budweiser cans. I took one.

Just me, he said.

I don’t remember our conversation over the next several minutes as I drank the Budweiser. I was too far into my head. The can was empty and fragile in my hand.

Hey, I said, and paused.

I lied to you back in Colorado.

What? he said.

In Colorado, I said. I wasn’t honest with you.

What happened in Colorado? he said.

I remembered our conversation from Spokane, I said.

He was suspicious.

What’you talkin about, man? he said.

Then I hit him. All the attempts in my mind, all the square shots and the misses, the temple grazes, all the scenarios I’d played and replayed over the past eighteen months were nothing compared to the pulpy sensation of his nose and left cheekbone meeting the fist at the end of my right arm, bent slightly at the elbow as I leaned in lighting quick from the waist, a solid strike in any storm, any war, under any circumstances, just or unjust.

He staggered. He could take a punch. Adrenaline rocketed through his body and mind but mine was already in orbit. I pounced atop him with the other fist, then both. My physical shape and training made quick work. I knew what he was going to say when I arrived at the door, about not getting a lot of black folk around there. I thought about pissing on him but hit him once more instead. He lay there like the little girls he — I thought. Then I left.

Eviction

WWDNW

The writer who does not write arrived two days ago at dawn. He did not call ahead. He pulled a choking white pickup onto the driveway, unleashing a sonic assault from the neighborhood hounds. Into the house he skipped with his baggage and distractions. From one bag of tricks he pulled a television show designed to arrest two dozen hours of my attention. I told him to leave, that I didn’t want him around. He showed me a new engaging hobby to try. I told him to never return. He forced me into social obligations, he reminded me to exercise. I escaped to a secluded room in the house to read The Overstory by Richard Powers. I hoped my sudden and prolonged absence would drive him away. But he found me and interrupted my solace, he filled the room with balloons and feral animals. Finally I’d had enough and picked him up by his bloated habits and tossed him out to the April snow. Fuck off! I shouted, or he shouted.

campfire tales

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Three friends sat at a campfire in the dark beneath trees thrashing in the mountain wind. It was a cold night and had been a cold day during the search for the missing woman. Groups camping nearby had already doused their fires and retreated into tents for the night. The three friends by the fire took turns telling stories, huddled under blankets, with one friend recounting a tale from her youth in which she believed a ghost occupied her basement.

She said: I can’t express the doom I felt, the darkness inside my chest every time I went down there.

The second friend told a story about a small boat that set sail from her childhood town in Virginia and was never seen again. A storm had arrived just before the boat departed, and the vessel had likely been swallowed up.

She said: A handful of times through the years, and only at night, when the bay was particularly foggy, people have claimed to see the boat cutting through the water just off the shore, as if it were searching for land, searching for home, for a place to dock.

The third friend, the male in the group, spoke of an encounter that happened to him years earlier. He’d been repeatedly visited by a spirit as a child, he said.

He said: It wore a dark cloak and it was tall. Its face was always hidden in its hood. He — I don’t know why I assigned it a male identity — he would suddenly appear by my bedroom window and just stand there watching me. I was terrified in place, unable to move.

The man seated near the fire readjusted his body in the chair. He reached down for a thermos on the ground and hefted it to his mouth. Wind gusted at them, through them. The fire tossed orange ribbons and splashes of light into the air.

He said: The figure appeared at my window less frequently as I grew into adolescence. My life became more like a normal boy’s. I moved away from my childhood home and enrolled in college. Eventually I pushed those early experiences so far into the depths of my memory that I forgot about them entirely. I forgot about the figure and the terror he caused. I forgot about the nightmares, the fear of being alone in my bedroom at night.

He continued: Then on my 40^th birthday, just a few months ago, I woke in the night to use the toilet and grab a snack. My feet were cold on the wood floor. I remember feeling something strange in the air of the kitchen, like an inaudible hum or threads of invisible waves pulling tight around me. It reminded me of when I was a kid, the feeling I’d have just before the cloaked figure appeared by my window. All the hairs on my body stuck out like needles from my skin. There in the half-light of the kitchen I made out the shadowy figure that had often visited me in youth. It was just as tall, just as terrifying. I acknowledged it and closed the refrigerator door, surprised to see the faint but identifiable features of a human face deep in the hood.

He continued: I wasn’t scared like I’d been as a child. I was only curious or interested as I stepped toward the figure and peered into its face. It did not move as I approached. I looked past him to the window and out to the snowy expanse of my backyard. I was close enough to smell him (he smelled like the whisper of a tree) and to feel the odd vibration emanating from him. When at last I leaned in to peer closer at the face in the hood, I realized it was a woman’s face. The room was too dark and her features too gray and indistinct, but I could tell it was a woman. Then it began to communicate with me, it spoke without words, without sound, her ideas transmitted directly to me from her mind.

The man stopped talking to wrap the blanket tighter around himself. Both women watched him with their eyes wide. One woman took a long drink from her thermos while the other bent forward to toss another log onto the fire.

Friend Two asked: What did the figure say to you?

She told me she was a witch, he said. And that she was probably two hundred years old, but she didn’t know exactly how old because she stopped counting long ago.

Friend One asked: Do you know what she wanted from you?

The man stared into the fire. Its light reflected on his face.

He said: She told me that her face would be the last I’d see in this life.

The three of them listened quietly to the wind rushing through the trees. They watched the fire dance before them, hypnotized by the heat, the flashing light, the unpredictable movement. They each thought of the missing woman and how they’d spent the day combing the mountain for her. Not one of them would speak about it, but they all thought the missing woman was already dead, that they’d likely stumble into her carcass rather than hear her crying out for help or see her waving from a distended rock. Each of them hoped secretly that it wouldn’t be them to find her.

They agreed to extinguish the fire and retire to their tents. The following day would be long and exhaustive. The man had a strange dream in the night in which the cloaked figure from his past returned to him. In the dream he was seated at the fire just as before, except his two friends weren’t there. He was alone. A noise behind him made him turn in his chair to behold the cloaked figure standing tall and facing the light of the fire. She reached an arm up to remove her hood and reveal the half-decomposed, worm-eaten head of the missing woman.

the shrink

I sat back in the chair opposite the shrink. I didn’t want to look at him anymore.

How about hypnosis? he asked.

I averted my eyes and my mind jumped from thought to thought like a frog on a pond.

What about it? I asked.

The shrink was an older man but not old, bald up top with a neatly trimmed beard dyed brown. His eyes wandered from my face to the tablet in his lap and back to me again. I thought of paradise and tried to picture the idea in my mind.

Have you ever thought of hypnosis to treat some of your … symptoms?

His eyes were gray like his hair would have been or as his beard should have been. But one could hardly see the color of his eyes through the squinty coin slots they’d become, or perhaps always were, since his childhood in the rich neighborhoods of Manhattan or Massachusetts, back when the other kids made fun of him for his briefcase — for simply carrying it with him at all times merited their ridicule, but adding insult to injury, as they say, was the appearance of the briefcase — brown mixed with green or what the kids called puke-green, the worst of all possible colors. Making matters worse yet, the briefcase was several decades old, and thus, beat up and disastrously out of style.

I’m not sure about hypnosis, sir, I said.

Thoughts cascaded down the vined walls of my mind. The shrink’s hands were small and weak — just as one would expect. I’d have challenged him to an arm-wrestling match but I tweaked my wrist earlier that day at baseball practice.

I don’t believe in … histrionics, I said, proud of myself for using the word in a sentence.

The shrink paused with an expression of consternation.

I don’t think that’s the proper use of the term, he said.

He sat back in his chair, uncrossed, then re-crossed his legs. He leaned forward again, toward me.

He said: Hypnosis is highly effective on younger people.

His lips were small and pink and his mouth barely opened when he spoke.

He said: Adolescents are highly susceptible to the power of suggestion.

I was tired of looking at him. The window behind him opened to the vast, sun-swept city.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, he said.

I’ve been hypnotized before, I said proudly, shifting my weight in the seat.

He leaned back. His clothes were bland and ugly and probably cost a lot of money.

Is that so? he asked.

I looked out the window. My friends were out there somewhere, running around aimlessly, breaking things, looking for girls. They were like me in that they did not know the world was theirs.

Yes, I said. My mother had me hypnotized because she thought I was lying about some money that went missing.

I realized I’d been wringing my hands, playing with them. The shrink stared at them as I spoke.

Did you take the money? he asked.

He looked at my face to gauge my reaction. His face was white, pale, bloodless.

No, I said.

He wrote on the tablet with a stylus.

I had been seeing this girl, Elaine. She was short and dark-haired with big, brown eyes. We kissed once and I reached up to touch her chest but she pushed my hands down. I thought maybe I loved her but I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t tell the shrink any of this.

What do you want to do when you grow up? he asked.

Elaine’s mother was also a shrink. I questioned the character of those who chose to listen to other people’s problems for a living. I didn’t tell the shrink that I hadn’t given my future much thought. I’d probably play baseball or run my dad’s print shop when he retired. I’d marry Elaine and she’d write plays and we’d have a baby or two.

I’ll probably fly airplanes, I said, without knowing why I said it.

He leaned toward the small table between us and hefted a cup of steaming tea. He sipped it.

I didn’t know you were into aviation, he said, smacking his lips together and leaning back in the seat.

He wrote on his tablet. His socks had brown diamond patterns and his shoes looked new, like today was the first he’d worn them. He seemed smaller after drinking the tea, as if it had shrunk him.

Why are you smiling? he asked.

I looked down to the animal-hair carpet and out the window to the city. When I looked back at him he appeared even smaller, like a large adult child. He was shrinking rapidly, deflating, losing volume, as Mr. Potter would say.

Nothing, I said, trying and failing to hide my amusement. Nothing.

That’s okay, he said. You don’t have to tell me.

The office was small but the shrink’s desk at the window was large. The wood was reddish-brown and looked heavy.

He cleared his throat and continued to shrink, to biologically regress. His feet no longer touched the ground; they dangled and swung over the animal carpet. His tablet was now the size of his torso. I stifled a laugh. His face reddened.

Okay, now, he said raising his little hand with the oversized stylus.

His voice was higher in pitch, like a child’s, or as if he’d swallowed a balloon of helium. One giant shoe fell off a foot to the animal carpet. Then I laughed — I couldn’t hold it.

All right, that’s enough, he giggled, his voice that of a delighted toddler. The giggling rose to a crescendo of gut-laughter, uncontrollable and tiny.

I lost it, falling onto the animal carpet, laughing, laughing.

Shotgun

In the dream she rode shotgun, slouched sleeping against the window while her grandfather drove through the cloudless Montana night. The dash lit his face and he smoked while he drove, Salem after Salem, flicking the ash out the cracked window and the air howling there. The movement and vibration of the vehicle settled him. He thought he could drive a truck for a living once they were in Canada, but the thought of it was like being in a room of rising water, except the water was loneliness. The granddaughter stirred and settled back to sleep. Seventy more miles and they’d be in Critt’s Creek, bare and homely, but functional. He’d fill up the tank there and buy more Salems. Five times in the past fifty miles he saw a tent pitched by the highway. But the road was his alone, a clean gash through the valley to freedom. They were close enough that he could taste it. * The detective lay in the motel bed naked save his socks. He watched the vehicle’s movement via satellite on a tablet. The woman stubbed out her Salem and stood to dress. He thought she moved like a cat in the dim lamplight, though she’d been aggressive before. She glanced at him and tucked the cash deeper into her clutch purse. She always put her heels on last in case she needed to defend herself. She said nothing and left, closing the door quietly. He set down the tablet and dialed his boss, the sergeant. Hey boss, he said. Got lucky back in Yellowstone. They left the vehicle to hike and I planted a tracker on it. They’re headed north on 15 out of Great Falls, to Critt’s Creek. He’ll need to refuel there, and that’s where we’ll get em. He was quiet a while, listening to the voice on the other end. Yes sir, he said, and disconnected the line. He stood to dress and gather his items into the pack. He took a final blast of cocaine and washed it down with a shooter of cinnamon whiskey. Then he lit a cigarette and looked back at the room to make sure he didn’t leave anything. The fresh air was silk on his face.

A fly in the marketplace

I have become a fly in the marketplace. I buzz and irritate my fellow men and women. Capitalism has done this to me — entrapped me in the public domain, away from my solitude. Now I fly and buzz with the others, content with a lack of desire and inspiration, poised to interact in the marketplace, consume, procreate. I spread the disease of mediocrity and uniformity as an instrument of the capitalist machine.

From Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you defeated with the noise of the great men and pricked by the strings of the little men.

Forest and rock know well how to be silent with you. Be like the tree again, the wide-branching tree that you love — silently and attentively it hangs out over the sea.

Where solitude ends, there the marketplace begins; and where the marketplace begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies.

Even the best things in the world are worthless without those who first present them. People call these presenters great men.

The people have little comprehension of greatness, that is to say: creativeness. But they have a taste for all presenters and actors of great things.

The world revolves around the inventors of new values; invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and fame; so the world goes.

The actor has spirit but little conscience of the spirit. He always believes in that with which he most powerfully produces belief — produces belief in himself!