Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies Read online

“Good morning,” she said feebly. “How are you?” She suppressed an urge to giggle. Why are you? “How... do you feel?”

  A ghost of a smile. He nodded politely, unwilling to complain. “As well as could be expected.” He walked into her room and stopped at the foot of her bed, like a ghost her father had once told her about. “I’m well-dressed. Too much so, I think. It’s uncomfortable.”

  Her heart was a little piston in her throat, pushing up the phlegm that threatened to choke her.

  He walked around to her side of the bed, just as the ghost once had.

  “You brought me out. Why?”

  She stared up at his bright green eyes, like drops of water raised from the depths of an ocean trench. His hand touched her shoulder, lingered on the strap of her nightgown. One finger slipped under the strap and tugged it up a quarter of an inch. “This is the distance between OP and OR,” he murmured.

  She felt the pressure of the cloth beneath her breast.

  “Why?” he asked again. His breath sprinkled words over her face and hair. He shook his head and frowned. “Why do I feel so obliged to...” He pulled down the blind and closed the drapes and she heard the soft fall and hiss of rayon dropped onto a chair. In the darkness, a knee pressed the edge of her bed. A finger touched her neck and lips covered hers and parted them. A tongue explored.

  He tasted of ink.

  In the early morning hours, Regina Abigail Coates gave a tiny, squeezed-in scream.

  Webster sat in the overstuffed chair and watched her leave the apartment. She shut the door and leaned against the wall, not knowing what to think or feel. “Of course,” she whispered to herself, as if there were no wind or strength left in her. “Of course he doesn’t like the sun.”

  She walked down the hallway, passed the doors of neighbors with whom she had not even a nodding acquaintance, and descended the stairs to the first floor. The street was filled with cars passing endlessly back and forth. Tugging out wrinkles from her dress, she stepped into the sunlight and faced the world, the new Regina Coates, debutante.

  “I know what all you other women know,” she said softly, with a shrill triumph. “All of you!” She looked up and noticed the sky, perhaps for the first time in twenty years; rich with clouds scattered across a bright blue sheet, demanding of her, Breathe deeply. She was part of the world, the real world.

  Webster still sat in the chair when she returned with two bags of groceries. He was reading her Bible. Her face grew hot and she put down the bags and snatched it quickly from his hands. She could not face his querying stare, so she lay the book on a table, out of his reach, and said, “You don’t want that.”

  “Why?” he asked. She picked up the bags again by their doubled and folded paper corners, taking them one in each hand into the kitchen and opening the old refrigerator to stock the perishables.

  “When you’re gone,” Webster said, “I feel as if I fade. Am I real?”

  She glanced up at the small mirror over the sink. Her shoulders twitched and a shudder ran up her back. I am very far gone now.

  Regina brought in the afternoon newspaper and he held his hand out with a pleading expression; she handed it across, letting it waver for a moment above a patch of worn carpet, teasing him with a frightened, uncertain smile. He took it, spread it eagerly, and rubbed his fingers over the pages. He turned the big sheets slowly, seeming to absorb more than read. She fixed them both a snack but Webster refused to eat. He sat across from her at the small table, face placid, and for the moment, that was more than enough. She sat at her table, ate her small trimmed sandwich and drank her glass of grapefruit juice. Glancing at him from all sides—he did not seem to mind, and it made his outline sharper—she straightened up the tiny kitchen.

  What was there to say to a man between morning and night? She had expected that a man made of words would be full of conversation, but Webster had very little experience. While all the right words existed in him, they had yet to be connected. Or so she surmised. Still, his very presence gratified her. He made her as real as she had made him.

  He refused dinner, even declining to share a glass of wine with her after (she had only one glass).

  “I expect there should be some awkwardness in the early days,” she said. “Don’t you? Quiet times when we can just sit and be with each other. Like today.”

  Webster stood by the window, touched a finger to his lips, leaving a smudge, and nodded. He agreed with most things she said.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she suggested primly.

  In the dark, when her solitude had again been sundered and her brow was sprinkled with salty drops of exertion, he lay next to her, and—

  He moved.

  He breathed.

  But he did not sleep.

  Regina lay with her back to him, eyes wide, staring at the flowers on the ancient wallpaper and a wide trapezoid of streetlight glare transfixing a small table and its vase. She felt ten years—no, twenty!—sliding away from her, and yet she couldn’t tell him how she felt, didn’t dare turn and talk. The air was full of him. Full of words not her own, unorganized, potential. She breathed in a million random thoughts, deep or slight, complex or simple, eloquent or crude. Webster was becoming a generator. Kept in the apartment, his substance was reacting with itself; shut away from experience, he was making up his own patterns and organizations, subtle as smoke.

  Even lying still, waiting for the slight movement of air through the window to cool him, he worked inside, and his breath filled the air with potential.

  Regina was tired and deliciously filled, and that satisfaction at least was hers. She luxuriated in it and slept.

  In the morning, she lay alone in the bed. She flung off the covers and padded into the living room, pulling down her rucked-up nightgown, shivering against the morning chill. He stood by the window again, naked, not caring if people on the streets looked up and saw. She stood beside him and gently enclosed his upper arm with her fingers, leaned her cheek against his shoulder, a motion that came so naturally she surprised herself with her own grace. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “No,” he said tightly. “The question is, what do you want?”

  “I’ll get us some breakfast. You must be hungry by now.”

  “No. I’m not. I don’t know what I am or how to feel.”

  “I’ll get some food,” she continued obstinately, letting go of his arm. “Do you like milk?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want you to become ill.”

  “I don’t get ill. I don’t get hungry. You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I love you,” she said, with much less grace.

  “You don’t love me. You need me.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Shall we get out today?” she asked airily, backing away, realizing she was doing a poor imitation of some actress in the movies. Bette Davis, her voice light, tripping.

  “I can’t. I don’t get sick, I don’t get hungry. I don’t go places.”

  “You’re being obtuse,” she said petulantly, hating that tone, tears of frustration rising in her eyes. How must I behave? Is he mine, or am I his?

  “Obtuse, acute, equilateral, isosceles, vector, derivative, sequesential, psych-integrative, mersauvin powers...” He shook his head, grinning sadly. “That’s the future of mathematics for the next century. It becomes part of psychology. Did you know that? All numbers.”

  “Did you think that last night?” she asked. She cared nothing for mathematics; what could a man made of words know about numbers?

  “Words mix in blood, my blood is made of words.... I can’t stop thinking, even at night. Words are numbers, too. Signs and portents, measures and relations, variables and qualifiers.”

  “You’re flesh,” she said. “I gave you substance.”

  “You gave me existence, not substance.”

  She laughed harshly, caught herself, forced herself to be demure again. Takin
g his hand, she led him back to the chair. She kissed him on the cheek, a chaste gesture considering their state of undress, and said she would stay with him all day, to help him orient to his new world. “But tomorrow, we have to go out and buy you some more clothes.”

  “Clothes,” he said softly, then smiled as if all was well. She leaned her head forward and smiled back, a fire radiating from her stomach through her legs and arms. With a soft step and a skip she danced on the carpet, hair swinging. Webster watched her, still smiling.

  “And while you’re out,” he said, “bring back another dictionary.”

  “Of course. We can’t use that one anymore, can we? The same kind?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head.

  The uncertainty of Webster’s quiet afternoon hours became a dull, sugarcoated ache for Regina Coates. She tried to disregard her fears—that he found her a disappointment, inadequate; that he was weakening, fading—and reasoned that if she was his mistress, she could make him do or be whatever she wished. Unless she did not know what to wish. Could a man’s behavior be wished for, or must it simply be experienced?

  At night the words again poured into her, and she smiled in the dark, lying beside the warmth of the shadow that smelled of herself and printer’s ink, wondering if they should be taking precautions. She was a late fader in the biological department and there was a certain risk....

  She grinned savagely, thinking about it. All she could imagine was a doctor holding up a damp bloody thing in his hands and saying, “Miss Coates, you’re the proud mother of an eightounce ... Thesaurus.”

  “Abridged?” she asked wickedly.

  She shopped carefully, picking for him the best clothes she could afford, in a wide variety of styles, dipping into her savings to pay the bill. For herself she chose a new dress that showed her slim waist to advantage and hid her thin thighs. She looked girlish, summery. That was what she wanted. She purchased the dictionary and looked through gift shops for something else to give him. “Something witty and interesting for us to do.” She settled on a game of Scrabble.

  Webster was delighted with the dictionary. He regarded the game dubiously, but played it with her a few times. “An appetizer,” he called it.

  “Are you going to eat the book?” she asked, half in jest.

  “No,” he said.

  She wondered why they didn’t argue. She wondered why they didn’t behave like a normal couple, ignoring her self-derisive inner voice crying out, Normal!?

  My God, she said to herself after two weeks, staring at the hard edge of the small table in the kitchen. Creating men from dictionaries, making love until the bed is damp—at my age! He still smells like ink. He doesn’t sweat and he refuses to go outside. Nobody sees him but me. Me. Who am I to judge whether he’s really there?

  What would happen to Webster if I were to take a gun and put a hole in his stomach, above the navel? A man with a navel, not born of woman, is an abomination—isn’t he?

  If he spoke to her simply and without emotion just once more, or twice, she thought she would try that experiment and see.

  She bought a gun, furtive as a mouse but a respectable citizen, for protection, a small gray pistol, and hid it in her drawer. She thought better of it a few hours after, shuddered in disgust, and removed the bullets, flinging them out of the apartment’s rear window into the dead garden in the narrow courtyard below.

  On the last day, when she went shopping, she carried the empty gun with her so he wouldn’t find it—although he showed no interest in snooping, which would at least have been a sign of caring. The bulge in her purse made her nervous.

  She did not return until dinnertime. The apartment is not my own. It oppresses me. He oppresses me. She walked quietly through the front door, saw the living room was empty, and heard a small sound from behind the closed bedroom door. The light flop of something stiff hitting the floor.

  “Webster?” Silence. She knocked lightly on the door. “Are you ready to talk?”

  No reply.

  He makes me mad when he doesn’t answer. I could scare him, force him react to me in some way. She took out the pistol, fumbling it, pressing its grip into her palm. It felt heavy and formidable.

  The door was locked. Outraged that she should be closed out of her own bedroom, she carried the revolver into the kitchen and found a hairpin in a drawer, the same she had used months before when the door had locked accidentally. She knelt before the door and fumbled, teeth clenched, lips tight.

  With a small cry, she pushed the door open.

  Webster sat with legs crossed on the floor beside the bed. Before him lay the new dictionary, opened almost to the back. “Not now,” he said, tracing a finger along the rows of words.

  Regina’s mouth dropped open. “What are you looking at?” she asked, tightening her fingers on the pistol. She stepped closer, looked down, and saw that he was already up to VW.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He found the word he was looking for, reached into his mouth with one finger and scraped his inner cheek. Smeared the wetness on the page.

  “No,” she said. Then, “Why…?”

  There were tears on his cheeks. The man of dry ink was crying. Somehow that made her furious.

  “I’m not even a human being,” he said.

  She hated him, hated this weakness; she had never liked weak men. He adjusted his lotus position and gripped the edges of the dictionary with both hands. “Why can’t you find a human being for yourself?” he asked, looking up at her. “I’m nothing but a dream.”

  She held the pistol firmly to her side. “What are you doing?”

  “Need,” he said. “That’s all I am. Your hunger and your need. Do you know what I’m good for, what I can do? No. You’d be afraid if you did. You keep me here like some commodity.”

  “I wanted you to go out with me,” she said tightly.

  “What has the world done to you that you’d want to create me?”

  “You’re going to make a woman from that thing, aren’t you?” she asked. “Nothing worthwhile has ever happened to me. Everything gets taken away the moment I ...”

  “Need,” he said, raising his hands over the book. “You cannot love unless you need. You cannot love the real. You must change the thing you love to please yourself, and damn anyone if he should question what hides within you.”

  “You thing,” she breathed, lips curled back. Webster looked at her and at the barrel of the gun she now pointed at him and laughed.

  “You don’t need that,” he told her. “You don’t need something real to kill a dream. All you need is a little sunlight.”

  She lowered the gun, dropped it with a thud on the floor, then lifted her eyebrows and smiled around gritted teeth. She pointed the index finger of her left hand and her face went lax. Listlessly, she whispered, “Bang.”

  The smell of printer’s ink became briefly more intense, then faded on the warm breeze passing through the apartment. She kicked the dictionary shut.

  How lonely it was going to be, in the dark with only her own sweat.

  The White Horse Child

  When I was seven years old, I met an old man by the side of the dusty road between school and farm. The late afternoon sun had cooled, and he was sitting on a rock, hat off, hands held out to the gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song. He nodded at me as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious, but I knew better than to get involved with strangers. Nameless evils seemed to attach themselves to strangers, as if they might turn into lions when no one but a little kid was around.

  “Hello, boy,” he said.

  I stopped and shuffled my feet. He looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes were brown and gray and russet, and his hands were pink like the flesh of some rabbit a hawk had just plucked up. His face was brown except around the eyes, where he might have worn glasses; around the eyes he was white, and this intensified his gaze. “Hello,” I said.

  “Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school,” he
said.

  “They got air conditioning.”

  “So they do, now. How old are you?”

  “Seven,” I said. “Well, almost eight.”

  “Mother told you never to talk to strangers?”

  “And Dad, too.”

  “Good advice. But haven’t you seen me around here ?’

  I looked him over.”No.”

  “Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are ?’

  His shirt was gray, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn’t smell bad, but he didn’t look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white, and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. “All kinds of colors,” I said.

  “But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?”

  “I guess so,”I said.

  “That’s because I’m not here. You’re imagining me, at least part of me. Don’t I look like somebody you might have heard of?”

  “Who are you supposed to look like?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m full of stories,” he said. “Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they’ll listen.”

  I started to walk away.

  “But only if they’ll listen,” he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to.

  The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.

  Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.