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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - When the old people dream, finally, after falling asleep toward morning, they dream, mainly in color, of old friends and relations now dead, or dead to them at least. When they wake they want to fall back asleep. They want to call old enemies and lovers and sometimes they want to ask for forgiveness and understanding, but more often they want to resume the argument left off years earlier. They dream of long-left places and drawers full of miscellaneous items, items whose use the dreamer could never determine when they were in his possession, but which now seem indispensable. Years later, when he is an old man, on the verge of being on the verge of dying, he will dream of cigars and babies. Cigars because they are forbidden him, and babies because, perhaps, they were too. In his dreams he changes diapers and does all the other tasks that he never did with his children when they were infants, and he does all these tasks remarkably well. The diapers are cloth. Sometimes the babies hand him cigars, beaming and insinuating. He takes the cigars from their outstretched fingers and lights up, turning his head when he exhales so as not to get the smoke in their eyes. The babies look at him with an expression in their eyes as might suggest love and gratitude, but he knows, even in the dream, that it's probably only the beginnings of a burp. He wants to die. It's not unusual, for a man his age, at his stage of life with too many pleasures past him, to dream both of the things he wants and the things which he fears. It's not unusual at all; though he wishes that he could be original just in this, the end or near-end of his life, when he could never be original before. The woman of his dreams died years before him. When she died he went to her funeral. He was hardly surreptitious. What was the point of surreptitiousness now, at this stage? He sat in the middle row. He had no idea who anyone else in the room was. He had only known the woman of his dreams outside of her real life — family, friends, workplace acquaintances. He had met her in a restaurant. He had met her in the library, where neither of them had gone since junior high school. Tell me, she had once said to him, What is it you like about me? They were standing three feet apart in a room. They were putting their clothes back on. He hadn't been able to answer her, of course, and she pouted for the whole rest of the visit and well into the next week, when they met again and she said, I've gotten over it, don't worry about it. She stood by the window that day looking out onto the roofs of the surrounding houses. At her funeral he wasn't able to remember any of this. He could only remember the kind words he had said to her, and how it had all begun, and how she was more suited to him than his wife had ever been even when she hadn't been sad. (His wife was still alive, still sad, and sat in their living room knitting something useful that she would never finish.) Most of all he remembered her hair. Even at her funeral he felt that her hair had been so full, in all the different lights in which he had seen it, just for him. He often imagined that inanimate objects desired him. So she never grew old enough to have odd dreams come tease her in her sleep as his dreams did him. He wondered what she would have made of him if she had lived to his age and seen him walking slowly down one of the streets through which he had once moved easily. She would have hardly recognized him, and then pretended not to know him. No: She would have pretended to know him immediately. That would have been the final blow, her final triumph as she would have phrased it to herself, kissing him on the cheek good-bye and continuing on her way. His children were all grown, nearly as old as the woman would have been had she lived. Next to him, curved into the hollow of the old mattress, his wife slept, victorious though she didn't know it. Her breath made her nightgown rise steadily every few moments. Her closed eyes betrayed no trace of disturbance. When she died she would surprise everyone by doing so loudly. She would sit up in the hospital bed looking at the assembled faces with an accusation in her eyes: You will live, they knew she was thinking, for once admitting her selfishness, and I will die. Right here on this bed. In the end she dreamt a constant nightmare of being in the hospital bed, either alone or with visitors with whom she did not know how to talk. She knew her husband's dreams were still different than his life, and when she looked over at him, he though he could detect some malevolence, some resentment, but of course he read it the wrong way. I'm sorry, he said, and tucked her hand into his. His children saw this gesture and told each other later that he was only trying to comfort himself. This was what they told each other to keep themselves from being sad.
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