In the faint light I could just make out red and blue smudges floating on the white head- and footboards. They could have been stringed balloons or thin-tailed fish—tadpoles, I suppose, although they looked like sperm to me. The idea that the tiny mattress they hovered over would hold a baby in six or seven months’ time was no less fantastic than the idea that the building I’d inherited from my mother contained a treasure hidden within its walls, or that the man awaiting me upstairs was my father, or that he cared enough for my body to lie down with it, not man to boy but man to man, viruses trumping age, experience, history, whether real or invented, whether projected onto you or injected into you. But babies, unlike buried treasure or boyfriends, came whether you believed in them or not, and I abandoned that and every other idea to the future, and set out, once and for all, to eradicate my past.
Fever Dreams
First was the animals. One by one they came and licked my upturned hand.
Don’t be afraid
is what I thought my palm was saying
, I’m not afraid
is what I thought the tongues answered. A cat’s rasp, a dog’s sloppy lap, the long curling swipe of a cow. But soon I realized it was the tongues that soothed me.
Don’t be afraid
, they said, a horse’s velvet muzzle, a deer’s tiny pricks
. I’m not afraid
, my hand said. A lion’s tongue pillared by curved yellow incisors, the soft mossy bloat of a hippopotamus.
Don’t be afraid. I’m not afraid
. At the last a mouth opened before me like the entrance to a gaping cave, a tongue scrolled out like a carpet and licked up not my hand but my entire body and took me inside, where the darkness was pink and the tongue pulsed to the beat of a heart as big as I was.
Don’t be afraid
, the tongue pulsed.
I rubbed the tongue.
I’m not afraid.
Come with me
.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie, not
again
! Calm down, calm down! Jamie, what the—okay,
okay
. I’ll rent another car. Good God, do you have any idea where this—Jamie, calm the fuck down! I’m calling now. Look, I’m
dialing
.”
I lay on the back seat. On the glass above me: Dutch Street, a transparent reflection thin as skim milk or watered-down memory. The embedded lines of the antenna broke up the buildings as neatly as a draftsman’s rendering.
A door opened. A door slammed.
“Damn it, Reggie, get
out
the car!”
The reflection of the dying city scrolled down the windshield like an afterimage, an afterthought. After Effects was the name of that famous screen saver in which lights illuminate a cityscape one by one, but the dying city was fading—first in the glass, then literally. The buildings fell away like daisy petals, he loves me, he loves me not, but what I heard was he is, he is not, then the buildings were gone and we were on a naked bud of land. The glass above me reflected the asphalt below me, a gray veil so thin you could poke a finger through it.
I poked.
Is.
Is
not
.
Rental cars like Buddhists are constantly reborn, but bits of former lives linger. Magnetized checker in the ashtray, seven of hearts beneath the driver’s seat. Activities to head off the bored child’s Are we there yet? In this car: Scrabble’s Y. Ideogram: fork in the road, jet veeing off runway, hero with upraised arms. Adjective-maker: mess–messy, sex–sexy, word–wordy. Value: 4.
“I told you, I have nothing to say. You want to tag along, fine, but I won’t answer any—what the? Jamie! Stop banging on that glass, it’s driving me—goddamn it, Reggie! Do
not
light that. Ugh! The two of you! I’m taking the Thruway because the one thing K. told him is that it’s west of the river. No,
K
. H-I-J-
K
. No, he wasn’t his
girlfriend
. I don’t know
who
he was.”
Was I dreaming? No, I wasn’t dreaming. I was feverish but the fever dreams were in the past. I was looking for someone and the fever dreams tagged along for the ride. What I mean is, I’ve never had dreams more vivid than the fever dreams, but even more vivid are my memories of them. If a dream is a cinematic projection of hopes and fears, then a memory of a dream is twice removed from reality. A counterfeit forgery, body colored in, edges softened, offensive parts painted over with self-censoring fig leaves. Dream: dreamy.
“He just
gets
like this. One day everything’s fine then bam, he wakes up a raving lunatic: ‘I’ve got to find him, I’ve got to find him!’ I told you, some guy. He disappeared a month ago, two. This is the
fourth
time we’ve come looking for him. I
told
you, I don’t know. They had a date and then—damn it, Reggie, I told you: no questions. Trust me on this one. You don’t want to know shit. Not unless you want to end up like him in the back seat.”
Still, I always knew what was happening. Almost always. In the beginning the fever dreams were as strange as soft stones and in the end as familiar as the many colors of my own skin, but I always knew where I was and I always knew what was happening. I always knew I was dreaming.
Almost always.
Six days I lay in bed. After the third the fridge was empty. After the fourth I was: what was in me had poured out through my skin as through a faucet. But all that was preamble. When everything else was gone the dreams began to flee too. That’s what it felt like: my thoughts took material form—balloon, tadpole, bank loan—and floated and floated and floated away. Maybe that’s why I clung so hard. Maybe that’s why I cling still. When even the memory of them is gone I’ll truly be dry.
“How you know this kid?”
“He’s Ginny’s son.”
“You mean that white bitch Parker—
shit
.”
“I guess he never knew her. Jamie, I mean. He never knew his mom.”
“What’s Endean got to say bout all this?”
“We’re looking for a road called Old Snake. He says it’s in the Catskills.”
“I can’t imagine she’s taking this laying down.”
“Endean can take care of herself.”
“Yeah, but can she take care-a you too? Baby, what is going
on
?”
“Old Snake Road. I tried looking for it on the map but couldn’t find it anywhere.”
I floated. On a green raft, a leaf, an iceberg, a pinprick of land that poked through the water’s surface from a floor too distant to be seen; on my own buoyancy. It didn’t matter: a dream needs no transition. Or rather a dream is nothing
but
transition. The water was cold but the fever warmed it. Where waves rolled into me they sizzled and sighed into the sky. Once I tried diving down but roiling water shot me out like a ball from a vapor-charged cannon. Eventually I turned on my back and let the water hold me. Clouds of steam enveloped me: it was the fever itself, pushing out of me, making shapes in the water. The shapes were the ghosts of all the lives I would never lead now, now that the one life I would lead had chosen me. One by one my alternate futures shimmied out of me and shimmered away, a great rushing horde that slowed to a hissing trickle. The last ghosts were tiny, almost embarrassed. They lingered near me as if afraid of the long search for another body to inhabit. The final one was just a thin limbless snake rising from my navel, and when it had curled all the way out of me the first fever broke and I woke up in Selden and knew that whatever I had been and whatever I was now, I was
myself
and nothing more.
A
thousand stalks of goldenrod advancing on an equally vast army of purple loosestrife, a stand of Queen Anne’s lace waving its delicate pennant in surrender. Then the colors were gone and it was just grass again, and trees. Now a swamp. Flatter than mere water, a level expanse of phragmites, sawgrass, cattails, a white tree trunk poking up like a spoon in the earth’s stewpot. How many seasons had it taken, how many rainstorms to wash off leaf, limbs, bark like a patient housewife scouring a burned pan, how many sunrise-to-sunset sunbursts to bleach it the color of an old man’s hair. Then I saw them breaking on the horizon like a wave: the mountains. Purple as deoxygenated blood, thick as clots bled by the land.
That’s
where we had to go.
Darkness. But pink darkness, and I wasn’t alone. It was there too, floating blindly, unconscious of everything from me to the innumerable horde surrounding it. At first I thought it was me and then I thought it was my traveling companion—I thought it was beside me but in fact it was
in
side me, carried along in the other’s wake, a bit of undead flotsam waiting for the kiss of contact to come to life. I saw the other too, saw that chance rules infection just as it does procreation (allow me this: it’s not the metaphor that’s mixed, just my synapses). Conception believes in the chaos of activity whereas sickness puts its faith in sloth. Both sperm and virus desire a berth but the former is the shark and the latter the remora of the microscopic world. The one seeks while the other waits. But this wasn’t even waiting. It wasn’t…even. It wasn’t me but soon would be. The most that can be said is that it was possibility manifested in its smallest corporeal unit.
It wasn’t hungry. It was hunger.
Fifty acres garlanded by a lazy loop of water, a long narrow spit on which grazed horses and dairy cows; the mountains in the background and the sky above it all; blue and gray and brown. There was the peak-roofed house with its eyebrows and eaves, the gambrel-roofed barn, red of course, or once red and now the color of bisque. The farm was an accumulation of walls: board-and-batten on the barn, clapboard on the main house, paint-flecked drop-siding feathering the ancient kitchen wing. And there if you needed it was the sign:
Rt. 27C (Old Snake)
. He’d only left out one detail. Spanning the two hills behind his little white house was the New York State Thruway, stilted above the land on pillars thin as a daddy longlegs’s legs. History’s equation reversed: here was the pastoral sprung up in urban shadow. Still, just as skinny boys dream of becoming Charles Atlas, the farm was the garden’s dream of itself. What I mean is,
this had to be the place
.
She pointed at me from the prow of her ship, her finger pulled me from the fishless sea. Red velvet, white lace, purple suede. Breast a double row of brass buttons running from an endless artificial mane of golden curls all the way down to her ankles. A silver buckle clasped one black boot but in place of the other a single column of teak. She thumped along in front of me on the hollow wooden deck, offered only glimpses of her face. My Virgil: Virago. She pointed at something and it came into being.
“But why baby? What’s he got I don’t?”
“Besides his own apartment, and a dick that don’t get hard when he comes within ten feet of me? Let me tell you, Reggie, it’s what he doesn’t have that matters. He doesn’t have any ties to me.”
“So what you’re saying is you don’t know shit about this kid.”
“What I’m saying is, he don’t know shit about me. And that’s just the way I like it.”
I hadn’t thought it would be like this: so gentle. They teach you to think of it as an attack but actually you’re the one making all the ruckus. It just wants a home. I saw it this way. It knocks at the door of a cell. No answer. It rattles the handle—locked. Damn. But maybe if it slips—ah, there we go. Inside all is Baby Bear readiness, a warm nucleic meal followed by the comfy cytoplasmic pillow. Everything’s just fine—until
you
get home to find someone sleeping in your bed and all hell breaks loose. But unlike Goldilocks the virus doesn’t wake up, doesn’t run away. It sleeps through the commotion, secure in its dreams. Like me the virus dreams only of itself, but unlike me itself is always its
self
, so fully imagined it becomes as real as the one imagining it.
And then there were two.
Split rail fences said here were forests once, stone walls testified to the rock-by-rock clearing of the land. Boulders poked from earth, too massive to be moved. The hooped wooden silo curled and sagged in on itself like a giant cruller, the house’s fieldstone foundation was so old the mortar had withered away until stone sat on naked stone and a light in the basement escaped through a dozen gaps in the masonry. Such a sober facade: the nine-over-nine windows on the first floor were sealed by white curtains blurred behind warped panes, the eyebrows above were as hooded as the brow of a Cossack. Age had shrunk the recessed Palladian door. It edged away from its sidelights and a single knock resounded like the tapped skin of a tambourine.
Johanus Peeke had the beard Nellydean needed to complete her transition to magician. That was all the hair he had.
“Well my goodness. What do we have here?”
Two journeys: one inner, one outer: the fever dreams. The virus lavished a single drop of itself on each of my cells but she remained indivisible. She extended her arm. Pale blue sapphire crowning rigid finger, nail translucent as mother-of-pearl. Oh look! she said, and I saw: a gull. Look! she said, and I saw: an eel writhing in its beak. Look! and look! and look! she said, and I saw: that the eel was a rope: that a tiny army was descending the rope: that their own ship waited to receive them. At some point I began to wonder if she willed these apparitions or if I did, but then I all wondered was when they would stop. By the time they reached the ship the soldiers were fully grown and by the time the gull had jetted away they were firing at us. Oh look! she said: cannonballs plop-plopping into the sea like marbles dropped in a puddle. Listen! she said: explosions ricocheted across the water.
She pointed: To the battle stations!
“Ain’t here. See for yourself.”
The planks in the central hall were two feet wide, domed nailheads poking up a quarter inch. The ceiling was so low you could trail your fingers along it, and a dusting of paint—no, of plaster, the paint was long gone—fell down like a tree shaken after a snow.
“Here now, here now, watch what you’re—”
Every squeaking step had its own note, do-ti-la, do-mi-so, fa-so-do, the banister was so loose on its turned spindles it wavered like a rope bridge. You had to duck at the top of the stairs or you’d hit your head on the ceiling’s slant and knock down more plaster.