Dancing in Dreamtime (4 page)

Back home that morning, she received the customary grilling from her parents, who wanted to know if she had met any cute doctors at the hospital, and would she please return calls from the banker and bowling alley magnate, and why doesn't she buy some pastel outfits for work instead of navy blue. “Pink would bring out your lovely coloring,” her mother said.

As soon as she could disentangle herself, Veronica filled the bathtub and soaked neck deep in the steaming water and fell asleep. She dreamed of spiders spinning webs between the stars to snare comets and spaceships. It was a familiar scenario, interesting the first time, grown tedious through repetition. The spiders seemed as bored with their work as the orderlies at the hospital. She was entering a second dream—this one about a flying man, not brawny Daedalus with his wings of wax melted by the sun, but a slender man with a blond beard and blue eyes, wheeling in thermals above a forested ridge—when a knock rattled the door and her mother barged in carrying a pizza that filled the bathroom with the smell of pepperoni.

“It's from that contractor,” her mother announced. “He delivered it himself. He said he'd bring one by every week, except he doesn't want to spoil your perfect figure. Isn't that sweet?”

Veronica groaned. “I can't eat it. I'm a vegetarian.”

“Since when?”

“Since right now. I just converted.”

Her mother frowned. “What are we going to do with you?”

“You can start by taking that pizza out of here and letting me dry off. This water's cold.”

As Veronica rose from the tub her mother surveyed her up and down and repeated a favorite remark: “You could pose for statues.”

A museum specimen was what Veronica felt like much of the time, or a zoo animal, as if she were an exhibit rather than a person. But just now, buffing herself with a towel, she recalled the secretive turns of Martin's voice and felt warmth spreading through her body.

The two of them began arriving earlier for work in the evenings and departing later in the mornings. In dry weather they sat on the bench under the sycamore; in wet, they huddled in Martin's Jeep, shivering with pleasure at the sound of rain on the roof. Thunder and lightning pleased them even more. He did not kiss her or touch her before asking, and well before he asked she was ready to say yes. Holding one another, they felt less need for keeping lists.

Martin rarely brought much to eat during his shift and often forgot to bring anything at all, so Veronica began carrying extra food in her cooler. Boiled eggs, walnuts, apples, turkey slices, blueberry muffins, yogurt, quiche—all these and more she offered him and he ate obediently. Before long the shadows vanished from his cheeks, his limbs filled out, and his skin took on an earthy glow.

“You'll ruin your figure,” her mother cautioned one afternoon, when she noticed Veronica packing so much food.

Instead of bristling, Veronica mildly explained, “I'm taking extra for a friend at work.”

“What sort of friend?”

“Human.”

Her mother snorted. “You know what I mean. Man or woman? Young or old?”

“A young man.”

“Tony!” her mother yelled into the den, where the TV was erupting with sounds of gunshots. “Come listen to this!”

Veronica's father shuffled into the kitchen, groggy from the tube. “Listen to what?”

“Our girl has a boyfriend at work.”

Her father suddenly came alert. “Is it that brain surgeon who keeps calling?”

“No, Daddy.”

“The cardiologist?” her mother asked.

“Not the cardiologist,” Veronica said patiently. “He's an X-ray technician.”

Her father whistled. “A radiologist!”

“No. He only takes the pictures. But he has a college degree and a wonderful mind and the kindest eyes.”

Her parents exchanged a look that lasted several seconds, long enough for them to arrive at some realization that made them both smile. They turned their beaming faces to her.

“If you found your guy, Ronnie,” said her father, running a hand softly over her hair as he used to do when she was little, “then bless you, sweetheart. All we ask is that you don't move in with him until you've got a ring.”

“And it wouldn't hurt to keep him interested by wearing some lipstick and eyeliner, and clothes that show off your figure,” her mother added.

Without resorting to makeup or changing her wardrobe, Veronica became, if anything, even more alluring. In the corridors of the hospital, men interrupted their errands to watch her pass. Male doctors would sometimes look up from a patient to issue a command, snag their gaze on her, and forget what they meant to say. Female doctors no longer scowled at her as if she were seeking attention, but accepted her as another example of nature's prodigal beauty, like butterflies or waterfalls or the aurora borealis.

Several times each night, Martin slipped into the emergency room to deliver X-rays from one or another victim, casting a glance at Veronica that set her nerves tingling. There was never time for more than a glance, because the number of victims kept swelling as woodlands around the city were cleared. Bored with flimsy dreams and fangless nightmares, or deprived of dreams altogether, sleepers awoke feeling muddled and furious. There were wildcat strikes at factories along the river, explosions at the refinery, bomb threats in the courthouse, lockdowns in schools. Knife fights broke out on playgrounds, fistfights in public hearings. Turf wars erupted in the suburbs. Policemen pepper-sprayed anyone who gave them lip. A homeless encampment under one of the bridges was set on fire. The reek of teargas and smoke hung over the city.

The emergency ward overflowed with bruised children and battered women, wounded teenagers, confused elders, zonked out druggies, failed suicides, mangled survivors of car crashes, sufferers of heart attacks or strokes—a procession of shattered and bleeding, shrieking and moaning souls.

Following their shift, Veronica and Martin would collapse onto the bench under the great sycamore, almost too exhausted
for talk. When they broke the silence it was often to complain of their shabby dreams, which no longer aroused them, no longer scared or inspired them. The wizards and crones lacked wisdom, the storm troopers and demons lacked menace, the saints and bodhisattvas lacked conviction. The specters that still roosted in the big trees atop the ridge were tattered, like letters that had been folded and refolded too many times. Their chatter was drowned out by the clangor of fire engines and squad cars and ambulances.

As spring gave way to summer, sweltering heat increased the turmoil. Loaded gurneys filled the hallways of the hospital, and then the lobby, and then the cafeteria. In August, the hospital board announced plans to double the capacity of the emergency facilities by adding a wing, and to do so with all possible speed. Within days, the site of the new construction was marked by red survey flags, a large rectangle that enclosed the bench, the great sycamore, and the entire grove of old trees. The trunk of each doomed tree was encircled by a strip of orange tape.

Men wearing hardhats and fluorescent green overalls arrived one morning as Veronica and Martin were leaving the hospital, wrung out from the siege of patients during graveyard shift. Two of the men picked up the bench and moved it to a patch of grass far from the sycamore, so the lovers took refuge in Martin's Jeep. They stared glumly through the windshield as a truck pulled up hauling a bulldozer, which the men in Day-Glo overalls set about unloading. Chainsaws began to snarl.

“This will finish things off,” Martin said quietly.

“There's no future here,” said Veronica.

They stayed long enough to watch several of the big trees come down, the huge trunks and branches gouging the dirt and sending out shockwaves the lovers could feel in their bones. The few
returning dream creatures swirled in the air above the spots where the crowns of the trees used to be. The specters circled higher and higher, as if bewildered, and then set off toward the horizon, dwindling away like brightly colored leaves riding the wind.

The bulldozer roared back and forth, tearing out stumps. When the teeth of a chainsaw began ripping into the trunk of the sycamore, Veronica whispered, “Take me to your place,” and Martin started the Jeep.

She took the first shower, leaving her drab clothes like a discarded chrysalis on a chair in his bedroom. Then while Martin showered, she waited in his bed. When he joined her there, smelling of mint shampoo, he spread her damp hair on the pillow, an auburn fan, and kissed her forehead, then her lips. The tremors she felt as his hands grazed her body were like those from the falling of the great trees. They lay with their limbs entwined through the daylight hours, wakeful, whispering, unvisited by dreams. Then all through the following night, and all the days and nights thereafter, the city rattled with gunfire and boomed with explosions, and sirens never stopped wailing.

For weeks before the mayor put on her startling exhibition, the townspeople had trouble sleeping. At dawn on those restless mornings, when garbage trucks began their growling rounds, damp heads were still flopping on pillows like beached fish, and hands were still plucking at sweaty sheets. Children trudged off to school with squinted eyes, relying on crossing guards to defend them from traffic. The guards leaned on their portable stop signs and listened for the squeal of brakes. With eyes as empty as the mouths of canning jars, mechanics slouched off to garages, clerks to their banks, sellers to their stores, everyone wrapped in a fog of drowsiness.

“It's the heat,” muttered some, while others insisted, “It's the humidity.”

No one could remember a hotter July. Instead of cooling off at night when breezes swept in from the ocean, the land stayed warm. Despite the incessant groan of air-conditioners, houses were slow ovens. More than heat was keeping the citizens awake, however, as demonstrated by a butcher who moved his bed into a meat locker, risking frostbite, and still could not slumber.

Old-timers blamed the plague of sleeplessness on the erratic tides. At whimsical hours, the ocean lapped high at the pilings of
docks or sank low to reveal the granite bones of the shore. “It's all topsy-turvy,” the elders complained. “Even lobsters are confused.” But youngsters, who rarely looked up from their screens to observe the ocean, blamed the sickness on poisons dumped in the bay from paper mills.

Alone among the townspeople, the mayor's wayward husband, Kenneth, dozed serenely. Early in the summer, before the heat became oppressive, he had ordered an astronaut's suit from NASA Surplus Inc., and now he spent his nights cocooned inside it, breathing bottled air. He would tumble into bed soon after supper and sleep until morning, oblivious as a baby. Initially, the mayor had rejoiced at his show of enthusiasm for space paraphernalia. True, Kenneth's previous enthusiasms had filled the basement with cameras, woodworking tools, fly-fishing gear, a potter's wheel, a make-your-own harpsichord kit, and sundry other items, all now lying untouched. Yet the mayor kept hoping that some new toy might lure him out of the gloom in which he had been mired since the early days of their marriage.

They had met on the operating table, she as patient and he as surgeon. Sally was not yet mayor back then, merely director of the waterworks. Her own waterworks had gone awry, somewhere south of her navel, and Kenneth was trying to repair them with scalpel and sutures. All she glimpsed before the anesthesia washed over her were the surgeon's blue eyes, which had about them the anxious air of a pilot recalling dangerous flights. When she came to, she realized he had bungled the operation, for the first thing she saw as her eyes fluttered open was his apologetic face, asking her to marry him.

“It's the least I can do,” he explained.

“You needn't worry,” she mumbled. “I'm not the litigious type.”

His blue gaze softened. “I'd like to marry you anyway.”

“Nonsense,” she declared.

Six months later she went through with it, having tested his resolve, his cooking, and his taste in art. By then they had shared late night talk after he slouched home from the hospital, early morning talk before she slipped away to the waterworks, talk under umbrellas and over meals and in bed—talk about their miserable first marriages, their love of wildflowers and crosswords and TV mysteries, their fears and hopes.