Little Doors (42 page)

His mother. Dead these fifty years now, all her golden piled tresses first turned gray, then white, then boxed away below the ground. His father, dead even longer, from frantic overwork during the Depression, when their family had lost the big Edwardian house where the dreams had visited him. But by then the dreams themselves had been absent for decades.

That was how my personal golden age ended, though. Remember rather how it began.

Week after week this truncated sleep charade continued. He accepted all the humiliations and frustrations, however, after some initial puzzlement. The characters who cajoled him were so convincing! Invitation, strange travel, impassable barricade or physical failure, then a sharp jolting exit. And how some of those exits had hurt! Falling onto the spiky thorns, pierced by arrows, gripped in the claws of a monster crab—

It hurt! It hurt! Now, nearly a century later, those assaults still hurt!

“Mistuh, what’s wrong? Where’s it hurtin’? You want me to call the nurse? Use your call-button, that’s why you got one.”

The old man opened his eyes and muzzily discerned, close by his pillows, the familiar black face of the janitor assigned to the nineteenth floor. Half-hopeful, half-fearful, the janitor’s broad face seemed to the old man a dark sun radiating some kind of supernatural warmth. In one hand the janitor held a broom; in the other, he offered the patient the call-button dangling from its cord. A feather duster stuck in the janitor’s rear pocket and some rags tucked into his waistband made him appear to be wearing a plumed loincloth.

The old man suddenly realized that his pain was actual, not illusory, not a memory. Something was wrong in his chest. He scrabbled for the call mechanism, and the janitor helped him wrap his fingers around it.

“Yes, thank you, young man. I’ll call the nurse.”

The Princess

While he awaited some response from the overworked and generally uncaring staff, the old man tried to forget the battering ram beneath his ribs by concentrating on his memories.

How had he finally surmounted those harsh barriers separating him from that mystical, sidereal domain that beckoned him so strongly? How had he gotten past the gates and locks and labyrinths? Only with the advent of the Candy Kid. That gaily gentle psychopomp had done the trick, bringing the mortal boy for the first time into the actual proud avenues and grand chambers of his appointed dream country.

Suddenly the steady assault from the invaders besieging the castle of his heart faltered, then redoubled, forcing a gasp from the half- upright man. He tried to calm himself with a massive injection of nostalgia.

All the glories he had seen with his eyes closed.

The people.

The places.

The incidents.

And the way they had made him feel.

Consider the people first, then; and among those, the lesser before the greater.

For unknown reasons, circus life had been the dominant theme among the unearthly crowds and retainers in his new home. Clowns, mummers, harlequins, Pierrots by the score. Faces painted, necks ruffed, legs outlined by spangled tights, feet cased in pointy-toed or comically overbroad shoes. Hats conical, tufted, pom-pom’d and feathered. Then came the leopardskin-cloaked strongmen and aerialists, tumbling acrobats and dauntless animal tamers. A gaudy perpetual Barnumscape, those background mobs.

Other colorful figures always hovering namelessly around him seemed drawn from Ruritanian courts and pseudomedieval tapestries. Knights, dukes, earls, admirals, generals, countesses, grandees, diplomats, ladies-in-waiting, jesters.

Then came the impossibles from myth and legend: Father Time, giants, Santa Claus, dragons, Uncle Sam, mermaids, Neptune, wizards, witches, trolls, Mercury, pirates, Jack Frost, Martians even!

Finally, for balance, a few familiar figures from his waking world: Keystone Kops and bad boys and winsome orphan girls, mostly.

Yet somehow the whole outrageously heterogeneous mix had cohered into a well-sorted citizenry, a true community. Was it just the surreal logic of the dreaming, or had there really been some ordering principle at work, a governing deity shaping the chaos into living art?

Of course in theory, King Morpheus, stern and expressionless and rotund, ruled over all. Name him first among those with whom the young visitor had grown intimate. But ultimately King Morpheus seemed ineffectual, more blustering figurehead than domineering tyrant, happier when departing for a vacation in his floating summer palace than when seated on the throne. And no one else occupied a plausible position of omnipotence. Doctor Pill, Uncle Dawn, Granny Hag, the Professor, Mr. Gosh— They were all minor players, each with their powers and provinces, but none capable of ruling the whole infinite sphere.

But what of the three people closest to him? Could any of them have been the secret governor? This question had plagued him for decades.

Impie the savage buffoon? Certainly not!

Flip? Green-faced, cigar-smoking Flip? Well, Flip was an enigma beyond plumbing. Yes, it could have been Flip, nephew of the Dawn Guard—

And the princess?

His first, best, and, ultimately, his only love, asleep or awake? Could she have been pulling the strings all this time? Could it be her inexplicable spontaneous boredom or displeasure that had exiled him from his dream sanctuary?

No! They had been too much in love.

Children both, they nonetheless adored each other with an adult passion, innocent yet deep and complete. The princess’s longing for him had been the catalyst that brought him over the borders of sleep. Together every possible minute, they walked hand in hand through the dreams, clad in fanciful brocades and plumed hats, or bathing suits, or ballgown and tuxedo, or Eskimo gear. When, as often happened, they became separated by the unpredictable circumstances of that garish, hectic empire, they longed fervently for each other, wept and strove to reunite. (Although admittedly he had strayed from time to time, gotten swept up in events, taken bad advice, even stolen a cheating kiss or two from paper dolls or glass beauties.)

No, if the princess had indeed been the unacknowledged ruler of the world of his dreams, then surely she would not have forsaken him, her beloved, never have exiled him, cast him out forever. Powers beyond her control must have brought about their long painful separation. And certainly all would be different, if she knew now what he was undergoing—

“Bed 1905A! What’s the problem here now?”

The blurry female face above a dirty white blouse, swimming angrily into view, held no sympathy. The nurse gripped his wrist and took his pulse.

“Jesus, you’re off the charts. Did you get your meds last night?”

“No. Yes. I think so.”

She dropped his arm back rudely. “What a bunch of screwups they’ve got on that night shift. More effin’ work for us. Well, I suppose I’ll have to get the doctor now.”

“Yes, please. Get Doctor Pill—”

Doctor Pill

Of course his parents had taken him to physicians and alienists when the dreams showed no sign of dissipating after several months, but instead grew stronger and more dominant. Alarmed by their son’s constant references to his “imaginary” world (and by the way the hallucinations affected his school work), disturbed by his deteriorating relationships with his peers and with his loving relatives, his mother and father had appealed to various authority figures for an explanation and banishment of his delusions. All in vain. Nothing anyone could say— from school teachers to priests to medical specialists—could convince the little boy that his dreams were unreal.

And so after a time, he wised up. Said nothing more about his weekly visits to another realm, beyond a blurted phrase or two when he invariably tumbled with a start from his nocturnal sheets. He tried to re-engage with ordinary life, with the dull routines of school and home and church. He exerted himself but failed to find much charm in the shabby appurtenances and tinsel attractions of the waking world.

But how could he, really, after all he had seen? Oh, he had learned how to fake an interest in what occupied everyone else, especially after the dreams had ended. (And what a painful transition that had been, into and through his dreary blank adolescence and young manhood.) But the sights presented to his opened eyes were washed-out and bland compared to those viewed from behind lowered lids every Sunday night.

He had ridden impossible animals across turbulent skies and from sun to sun across the Milky Way. Boats and cars and airships of every conceivable stripe had ferried him from one locus of wonder to another. He had visited the Moon and Mars. He had swum with the sirens and helped any number of demiurges mismanage the diurnal workings of the cosmos. Seething jungles, tropical archipelagos, canyons with walls high as continents, sherbet-colored polar wastes, spiky caverns measureless to man: he had plumbed a vast range of strange climates and elastic geographies.

But most remarkable had been the abundant architecture of his dream civilization. Never had the greatest empire of any earthly paradise boasted its like.

The builders worked big in Morpheus’s kingdom. And in what exotic materials! Porphyry and travertine, sandstone and marble, onyx and jade, chrysoberyl and ivory. Embellished with gilt, mosaics, scrollwork and mother of pearl inlays. Prinked out in a pastel palette or with pyrotechnic panache. Cyclopean ceremonial structures whose glittering, shadowy arcades and architraves, lintels and loggias, roofs and rafters, columns and corridors, porticos and patios, towers and tunnels, all stretched to infinity. (Once he had climbed a staircase all the way to the Moon.) But the sizes and textures and hues, although impressive, were the least of the attractions—and frights—of this world. The changeability of the constructions outweighed by far their grandiose dimensions.

Everything was mutable: roads could become caves, fireplaces open onto stairwells, floors become ceilings. Buildings—entire cities—sank into the soil, fell from the sky, dwindled and disappeared, or sprang from nowhere. It took a flexible mind to accept such a continuum, and the boy had prided himself on his adaptation to the dream universe (although of course he could still be shocked, right up to his final dream, a dire event whose significance had been betrayed by no grand conclusion or apocalypse.)

And the distinction between organic and inorganic hardly counted there: snowmen cavorted, beds sprouted legs, a boy became rubber, buildings tore themselves up from their foundations and ambled about. Nor did conventional rules of physics apply. Gravity was abolished, inertia coerced, cause-and-effect confounded.

How then could even a Coney Island roller coaster or the Central Park zoo be expected to entrance or delight?

Or, later, women, song, or wine?

The doctor’s breath smelled of alcohol, and his high hat dislodged a shiver of snow onto the old man’s sheets, where the slush began to melt.

A cold stethoscope coined a minor discomfort against his chest, to match the greater one within. “You’d better not be malingering, old man. I was at lunch, you know.”

“No, I think it’s my heart—”

The doctor withdrew in alarm. “Nurse, nurse, can’t you recognize a goddamn myocardial infarction when you see one! Call the ambulance!”

Ambulance? What did they need an ambulance for? (Although truth be told, that was one vehicle he had never yet ridden, asleep or awake.) Just give him the wonderful wand he had wielded in Shantytown, and he’d cure himself—

King Morpheus

In his early twenties, he had finally admitted the truth of his sorry condition to himself.

The dreams were never going to return. At least not with the vividness of their original run.

And the succeeding years had proven his sad suspicion correct. During a couple of brief unpredictable intervals separated by decades, some paltry semblance of the dreams had actually recurred. But all the actors therein seemed mere lifeless simulacra, all the colors of the land beyond sleep now pallid and dull, all the events a rehash of the originals. And, worst of all, when he entered these frustrating reiterations, he entered as a five-year-old, not the adult he now was. The actual bodily reversion did not trouble him; that condition was probably a predicate of gaining his dream empire. But the fact that he also reverted
mentally
truly dismayed him. This shearing away of any wisdom or experience he might have gained over the years indicated to him above all other clues that these were not true mystical experiences, for they lacked any eruptions of grace or glory, but rather mockeries sent to him by some malignant counterforce.

So he had attempted to become a good, productive, functioning member of society. He had taken a job almost at random. What job it was he no longer even recalled, for at age one hundred he had been retired almost as long as he had been employed, and the job had never held any more of his attention or concern than was absolutely necessary to perform it with minimal competence. After the death of his father and the loss of his childhood home, his mother had gone to live with one of her sisters (the old man was an only child), and he had found lodgings for himself in a cheap boarding house, the first of many before his eventual consignment—because of failing health—to this cheap and tawdry nursing home called Slumberland.