1.
When very young I used to imagine a little girl, just my age, who lay beside me in bed and breathed softly. If she dreamed I dreamed, and we walked a red-brown path together, clasping hands. If she felt behind her the wind of pursuit, then so did I; and when she cried out in her sleep I cried out, little worn-out cries, without any volume to them, arousing no one in our dark house to comfort us.
Lately I’ve begun to imagine the little girl again: I’ve heard her breathing with me in and out in the night, a sound like the roaring of great waters, and dreamed that I walked with her on a long red-brown path. I have even, on occasion, woken to see her lying beside me instead of Arthur, with her eyes half-open. In the years since I last saw her she has grown, as have I: she is approximately twenty-seven, as I am approximately twenty-seven. But her skin has a waxy white pallor and her eyes are a clear, vanishingly bright blue, whereas my skin is olive in tone, and my eyes, narrower and more slanted, are such a dark green as to appear black, and filled with darting lights.
In the office, too, it is all too easy to forget about Arthur, the one I love. Above my desk there hangs a painting of a man sitting in a tree. Rather, he seems lost in the tree, dreaming into the tree, unable to rise from it. His eyes are the pale green of new wood, his hair the withered grey of hoarfrost. He tilts his head as if he listens for something just out of his hearing; his head is fitted into the crook of his arm, almost as if to encircle himself, to capture his own sound at his center. Why do I seem to know what this man is listening for? I myself can hear nothing except, at night, the sound of the sea.
2.
Today at work I read through a manuscript of particular interest. It was a children’s book, as far as I could tell, each chapter of which began with a large, ornate, black-and-white letter illustrated by the author. The protagonist’s name was Sylvia. This Sylvia kept a thin wax candle by her bed. Every night the shadows cast by the candlelight scurried up the wall, and there, in the center of the ceiling, they formed a dream. At least this was what her mother insisted. In truth Sylvia never dreamed. She pulled her covers up over her chin, and rested her lids patiently on the tops of her cheeks, and waited. But she simply would not dream. The shadows shoved at each other in discontent and alarm, making faces at one another, but a dream never came; and in the morning the shadows were whisked away, and the thin candle stood shrunken in a puddle of yellow wax.
Sylvia’s mother, Satchred, slept with a black-white-and-gold pocket watch under her bed. She liked the sound it made, its steady rhythm, like a constant knocking at the door. Satchred never had trouble with dreaming; in fact, a dream sprang upon her as soon as her breathing slowed and she sank down a chute at the back side of her head and fell asleep. Sylvia often heard the ticking, but it did nothing for her. Sylvia often wondered idly about that pocket watch. If she were to take it away from her mother during the night, would her mother stop sleeping? Would she stop breathing? Sylvia couldn’t remember a moment in which her mother had been there but the pocket watch had not. It was black and white and gold, like a prayer book with gold edges.
I told my office mate this story. She listened with moderate interest, her hands resting folded in her lap, her eyes nodding closed every so often, as if she herself might go to sleep.
“That’s…tremendously interesting,” offered my office mate.
“I thought you might like it.”
“Though a bit far-fetched,” added my office mate. “Not really my style.” She turned away and began shuffling and squaring her papers.
“Far-fetched,” I said.
“Erring on the side of the supernatural.” She licked her thumb and turned a page of the manuscript before her.
I looked at her for a moment in puzzlement
“Don’t you ever dream, for example?
“In moderation,” said my office mate.
“Every night,” I said, “just as I’m falling asleep, I think I must be dying a little bit. And when I dream it’s even more like dying. It is just the same when I see my reflection in the mirror…or in a pool of water. It is that sense of that other life, the life that is mine but looking at me from across a gulf, the one I can’t have, or once had, or can’t have yet…And of course that’s what the pocket watch is, I mean the one kept under the mother’s bed, it is that life that is hers but outside her, it’s her death, you see, the possibility of death inside her…I find that completely rational.”
My office mate lifted her head at this. Her dark hair had fallen into her eyes. She appraised me levelly.
“Rose,” she said. “You don’t seem well. You mentioned death about five times just now. And look at your hands—they’re trembling.”
“I’m perfectly well,” I said.
Nevertheless I came home early. I fell upon my bed and slept instantly. I slept most of the day, not wanting to wake. I dreamed I was crossing a great fast-moving river, steely blue-grey with flashing hints of brown. I sat in a little tossing coracle, oared by a faceless cloaked figure. All night I heard the roaring of great waters.
Tomorrow I’ll take a train to sea.