Agents of Dreamland(21)

“You see all that?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I’m not afraid of Madeline, but sometimes I have thought that she wishes Drew had never found me in that alleyway. I think, maybe, she’s decided I’ve come to steal away her Titan for my own.

“What else do you see, little Chloe?” Drew asked.

“Towers, I see towers. Like an old movie about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or Sinbad the Sailor. A city of spiraling towers and crystal domes, a city in a desert of ebony sand, a desert at the edge of an ocean. But it’s not like any ocean we know. There aren’t any waves. There aren’t tides. It’s as flat and still as a mirror, Drew. It’s as flat and still as glass. And it isn’t water, either. It’s an ocean of methane, ethane, propane. Sometimes, I see mighty storms that march furiously across that ocean and march across the ebony desert and bury the city beneath blizzards of benzene snow.” And I wonder at the words falling from my lips, because I comprehend they’re not precisely, not entirely, my own. I am a vessel, prepared for a new purpose, and the messengers are free to speak through me. My eyes, my brain, my mouth, but the messengers are translators, intermediaries weaving my dumbstruck thoughts into the tapestry that Drew needs to hear.

For I have gazed in sleep,

On things my memory scarce can keep. . . .



“You’re my little poet,” he said, then turns on the car radio. There’s a Beatles song playing, and I know that Drew knew there would be.

In the backseat, Madeline made a sound that I might only mistake for derisive.

“Am I awake?” I asked.

“Love,” he said, “that’s nothing you should ever worry yourself about again. Waking and sleeping, you’ve found your way through the Cavern of Flame, and now you stand at the top of the Seven Hundred Steps. For you, the distinction between dream and waking thought has begun to implode, folding in upon itself. You’ve become a singularity to dissolve everything that separates the one from the other.”

And then he asked me to tell them a story, he and Madeline, and so I told him the story about the princess in her onyx tower and the Sword Forged of Lamentation and the tall, pale woman who was her lover and then became her champion. I told them about the dragon at the gate and the whisperers below the mountains.

I should get up. It’s hot, and it must be very late morning by now. It would be so easy to lie here in the sweltering day, even though my anxious excitement tugs at my belly, at the very centermost parts of me. The others will be waiting. Drew and Madeline left before dawn, and now it all falls to me. Now it all falls on me. I have been entrusted with the future, and here I am lying in bed half the damn day, getting turned around in my thoughts when there’s so much still to be done. I sit up, and the alarm clock across the room says that it’s only 8:47, and I breathe a grateful sigh of relief.

The house is quieter than it’s ever been.

“What if I’m not ready?” I asked Drew the night before, sitting there by the sea in his little red wagon, and he laughed and kissed my cheek.

“You’re ready,” he said. “You’re more ready than you can imagine.”

But you won’t be the first.

And my head jerked around then, as if I’d been stung, as if a bee or a wasp had slipped up my T-shirt and stung me in some especially vulnerable spot. I stared back over my shoulder at Madeline and the soft glow of her cigarette. But she was watching the sky, not me. And she hadn’t said a word.

“It’s okay,” said Drew. “In all the wide, wide universe, there’s no one in whom I have more faith than you.”

They’ll go before you, the thirteen, one by one by one, and you will only be an afterthought, dragged along in their wake. Tardy. Almost forgotten.

Madeline tapped ash on the floorboard, and Drew asked me to finish my story. It would be the last story I’d ever tell him, and he wanted to hear all the way to the end.

And as I look, I fain would know

The paths whereon thy dream-steps go,

The spectral realms that thou canst see

With eyes veiled from the world and me.



I never imagined a house could be this quiet.

My sweat has stained the sheets yellow, and I push them onto the floor. It’s not the first time I’ve seen that stain, but it’s the first time it’s ever struck me as unclean. I lean over and shove the dirty sheet beneath the bed, only half understanding that what I feel is not only revulsion, but shame, too. Like waking from a dream of bleeding to the shock of my first period and rose petals spread across the linen.

No. Never mind. Not like that at all.

I get to my feet, going slowly because the dizziness is worse this morning. No surprise there. I knew it would be. There should be no surprises whatsoever today. It’s all dot to dot, paint by number from here. This map before me is not terra incognita; I only have to fill in the blanks, and I’ve spent months learning the answers. I was born knowing the answers, 6,997 days ago, but must have been so terrified at the truth of it all that I did my best to forget. That was the road to an alleyway between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth streets in Westmont, desolation row, detonation boulevard, the road of needles, the f*cking path of least resistance. The Coward’s Way. But the willful scales fell from my eyes on the road to my own private Damascus, Drew’s Damascus, the television white-noise Damascus where the messengers sing from cathode ray tubes. One foot in front of the other. That’s all it takes. Go to the thirteen, now, and be sure everything is just exactly as it ought to be. You’re the fourteenth, and you’re also the midwife. There can be no greater honor, can there? Make certain that each crosses at her or his appointed time, that they all bloom and spread themselves to the winds blowing down from the Chocolate Mountains, the star winds, the mighty Coachella sirocco. And only when each has folded open may I sit down and follow their examples.