Keeper of Dreams (43 page)

They laughed together, and then Enoch gave her the flagons. “Take your choice,” he said. “Gifts to us from the King of Care.”

“They’re full.”

“I filled them both with the water of wisdom,” he said.

She looked gravely at the flagon. “I don’t know. Should I drink it now?”

“No time like the present to get wise,” he said.

She pulled out the stopper and lifted the flagon’s mouth to her lips.

“Wait,” Enoch said.

“Mm?”

“I lied,” he said. “It isn’t the water of wisdom.”

“I know,” she said. She reached over and pulled out the stopper of his flagon, too. “Drink, pinhead,” she said.

“Cheers,” said Enoch, and he drank the elixir of love to the last drop.

It was Kristine’s and my first Christmas away from home together. We were in South Bend, Indiana, and we had lots of friends—but still, there was a lot of nostalgia for both of us. Ever since we started dating, we had combined the Christmas and New Year’s traditions of both our families, so we would each be missing a double portion of what we had enjoyed during our years together in Utah.

But South Bend had wonders of its own. Though in those days it was a depressed factory town—American Motors was mostly gone, except for its garden tractor division—it still had the physical signs of the glory days of American cities with once-vibrant downtowns.

There was an old department store that was only one or two years from failure, it was plain. I remember carrying one of the kids with me—probably baby Emily—as I went down into the basement toy department. It was decorated for Christmas—employees were still trying to pretend the store had a reason to exist. And as I wandered around the shelf units, I came upon a back corner that had a door leading pretty much nowhere. Its position in the building suggested that if anything, it led out under the street.

More likely it was once the loading elevator leading up to the street, but I didn’t think of that because hey, I’m a fantasy writer, and so I conjured up the image of a kid wandering away in the toy department at Christmastime and going into a passageway that led into . . .

Well, basically, into Narnia. Not Lewis’s Narnia, but the same idea, a
magical place with rules of its own that was no farther than a quick crawl through a door that should have been locked.

Because I had this idea in my head I decided that I’d write a Christmas story as our gift to friends and family. It would just be a lark, something I made up as I went along. I knew the starting place—that basement toy department in a dying store—and it would be easy enough to free-associate my way to a story.

The trouble is that free-associating leads you (a) straight into cliches, since your mind goes first to ideas you’ve seen before, and (b) into a really long story that nobody would have time to read at Christmas.

Still, I wrote it in a single sitting, we photocopied it, and then we sent it off to a list of a few select people.

My memory is that not a soul read it. Or if they did, nobody liked it enough to mention it. But that might be the slippage of memory—maybe one or two people actually mentioned it.

I knew it wasn’t my best work, because I hadn’t dropped sweat on the keyboard while typing it. But in another way it was a more personal story, less constructed than most of my work, more of a spew. So I continued to like it even as I decided not to bother offering it anywhere for publication.

I still liked it when we did a very small printing of it and offered it on our Website (
http://www.hatrack.com
) in a self-published mini-collection called
Doorways
, for whatever intrepid souls wanted to give it a try.

Again, the world didn’t stop and people didn’t beg me to print more copies so they could give them to all their friends. You’d think I could take a hint. But . . . I can’t. To me it’s still part of that first Christmas with just us.

If you don’t get into heaven, you go to hell, right? That’s what I’d always been taught. Heaven is Harvard, and hell a county technical college. If you finished high school, they’ve got to take you. Except that with hell, dying is the only diploma you’re supposed to need.

I read those near-death-experience books, where they talked about how “the light” was full of warmth and love. Well, it
was
nice, but it sort of sets you up for disappointment, because when you’re really dead and not just straying in there by accident, you get
past
that feel-good stage and suddenly you’re
at
the light, and either it sucks you in or it shunts you away, like a magnet, and it all depends on how you’re polarized.

I got pushed away.

Well, what did I expect, anyway? I used to go to church and all, but I wasn’t much of a stickler on, like, telling the truth and helping my neighbor. And office supplies from work had a way of ending up at home. Not a lot, but I wasn’t exactly perfect. Lots of looking upon women to lust after them. Just at the Victoria’s Secret level. Quarreled with my wife a lot but I never hit her, though I did compare her to her mother way too often. Kind of the normal sins. I was sort of hoping they graded on the curve—I figured I was bound to make the top half. But no, it’s straight percentage, you get one question wrong and you’re out.

So what’s the other choice? Hell, right? I start looking around, wondering if Dante was just making it all up and if not, which circle would I get into?

The answer is, Dante didn’t know squat, there are no circles. You just
find yourself on a street in hell and you go up to a door (and it’s always the same door, no matter what the street is) and you see people going in and out, dressed to the nines, and you think, Cool, there are good clothes in hell, which stands to reason, really, and you go up to the door and you knock and the guy looks at you like you’re a worm and he says, “Name?”

So I say my name and he makes this moue with his mouth like you sort of passed your expiration date about a month ago and he says, “Please, don’t waste my time,” and he starts to close the door in your face.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “this is hell, right?”

“Hades,” he says, and you can taste the contempt.

“Well I didn’t make heaven, so you’ve got to let me in.”

“No,” he says, and then with a kind of faux patience he explains, “The place where, when you go there, they have to take you in, that’s
home
. Not hell. We don’t have to take just anybody. We’re all about class here, nobody wants to look around and see
you
. There are real celebs inside. Stalin. Hitler. Caligula, for heaven’s sake—oops, did I say that?”

“I’m not asking for the best seat in the house.”

“There
is
no table insignificant enough for you.”

I did a quick calculation—how many people ever lived on earth, how many would likely fail the entrance exam for heaven, and how many first-rank sinners would be ahead of me in line. “But . . . what do I do?”

“You bogey off and stop blocking the door.”

“What do you think this is? Studio 54?”

He laughs. “Oh, no, it’s much worse. It’s like junior high. And you . . . ain’t . . . cool.”

And you get a big hand planted in your chest and when he pushes you don’t fall, you
fly
across the street and smash into a building only it doesn’t hurt—you’re dead, remember?—and you’re not injured and it begins to dawn on you, you’re stuck in hell but you can’t get in. You try a few other doors and the same guy is waiting behind every one of them to bounce you. And it’s starting to rain. A thin cold drizzle, and even though you can’t actually get injured, you
can
get cold and damp, or at least you
feel
like you’ve been left out in the cold, which in fact you have. You’re not going to get sick, you’re not going to starve, but you’re also not going to get
in
.

Not that I was alone out there. There are a lot of streets in hell, and lots of homeless people wandering around. And they seem just about as
crazy as the normal mix of homeless people. A few who look like they’re waiting for a drug deal to go down, only I knew it was a fake, because what is there to buy or sell, and even if they’re carrying—because you pretty much look the way you see yourself, so some people
are
armed—they aren’t dangerous. If they had ever been truly dangerous, they’d be inside watching the strippers, or whatever they did inside Club Styx. These guys think if they look bad enough, if they say enough rude things to passersby, maybe someday they’ll get by the bouncer. Ditto with the ones who look like hookers. They’ve got nothing to sell. But let’s face it. Not everybody in hell is bright.

Then there are the crazies, shouting and preaching about Jesus and the end of the world, only it dawned on me pretty quickly that they aren’t crazy—I mean, after you die there’s no schizophrenia because there’s no brain to malfunction. They’re preaching because they’re trying to tip the balance the other way, to show how righteous they are, denouncing sin, calling out the name of Jesus—or whoever, depending, but most of the shouters were, like, born again, only it apparently didn’t take the way they thought.

I stood there watching them, and walked around watching them, and sat down and watched them, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to care. It began to dawn on me just how
long
eternity was going to be, stuck on the streets of hell. I tried street after street, only nothing changed except the faces. The language didn’t even change, because after you’re dead all the languages become the same. They speak, and they think they’re speaking Arabic or Tagalog, only what you hear is English, or at least you think it is. If you speak English. Anyway, you can understand everybody, and that’s the worst, because you can’t even go to a place where you don’t understand the words people are saying so you can tune them out. You’re always tuned in and it’s so
boring
.

Daytime comes and goes, just like on earth, and gradually it began to dawn on me that this
was
earth. In fact, it was Washington DC, which is where I happened to buy the farm, hit by a car trying to cross Wisconsin in Georgetown on New Year’s Eve 1999, which meant that whether the world ended that night the way everybody said it might, it definitely ended for me. I knew the streets. I could walk down the mall. Only everybody I saw was dead.

I thought for a while that the whole world must have died or something, but then you’d think there’d be more newly dead people like me, you know, the whole government thing, if the world ended surely some significant percentage of them would go to hell, and surely they couldn’t
all
qualify to get into Studio 666, so where were they? No, the world hadn’t ended, just my little oxygen-consuming, carbon-dioxide-expelling bag of blood and bone.

And now that I was looking for it, I began to see the signs that life was going on. Things changed position. Garbage cans were in one place and then they were in another. Cars were parked somewhere and then they weren’t. But you never actually saw them move. Nothing moved. It was like when they were in motion, they disappeared. And it occurred to me that it was like long-exposure photography. You set the exposure time really long, the aperture very small, and the only things you get are the things that don’t move. Pedestrians, cars, anything that moves is gone.

It’s like in hell time passes so slowly that living people are invisible to us. I had it figured out!

“You think you’ve got it figured out,” said a fat man.

I looked at him, a little puzzled by why he was fat. I mean, surely when you die, you don’t have to be fat anymore.

“It’s how you see yourself,” said the fat man. “You know how people said, ‘Inside every fat person there’s a thin person struggling to get out’? Not true. It’s just another fat guy in there. In fact, usually a fatter guy.”

“Can you lose weight?” I asked, because at least it was a conversation with somebody who wasn’t trying to get wafted up into heaven or deeper into hell. And also it was kind of funny.

“You can look thinner,” said the fat guy, “if you start to think of yourself as thin.”

“So why can’t you think of yourself as good, and get on up into heaven?”

He shook his head. “Those street preachers, they aren’t thinking of themselves as good. They’re thinking of themselves as righteous. Saved. Chosen.”

“Better than everybody else.”

“Bingo. Ditto with the bad dudes and the tough girls. They’re needy,
all of them, and needy doesn’t get you off the street. Needy is what gets you
on
the street.”

“If you’ve got it all figured out,” says I, “what are you still doing here?”

“I’m conflicted,” he said. “A common problem. Whenever I start going one direction, I do something to send me back the other.” He grinned. “While
you
, you’re talented.”

Talented? “I’m not the one reading minds here. I mean, you’ve been answering stuff I didn’t say.”

“Yeah, I’ve got good hearing. I don’t have to wait for you to speak. Because, you know, it’s not like we actually have voices. We just sort of wish our thoughts to be heard, and then people close by can hear them. But your thoughts are actually just as loud, so to speak. So yeah, I can hear stuff. But you, you can see things.”