Keeper of Dreams (44 page)

I looked around. “No more than anybody else.”

“Nope, nope, not so. I watched you. Crossing the street. You waited for the light.”

“I did not. The lights don’t change.”

“And you dodged the pedestrians.”

“There
are
no pedestrians.”

“Nevertheless.”

“I don’t
see
them, so how can I dodge them?”

“Oh, you philosopher, you.”

“What possible difference could it make to you?”

“I want to see how useful you are. What you can do.”

“This is a job interview?”

“I’ve got an opening for an elf.”

I looked him over, this time more carefully. No pipe clenched between his teeth, but his stomach was rather like a bowlful of jelly. “Am I supposed to laugh when I see you in spite of myself?”

“Clement Moore didn’t actually see me,” he said. “I’d long since stopped doing personal appearances by then. But you see, it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve got this image in my face every Christmas—no, every Halloween and two months after—and it’s all I can do to keep from wearing the red suit all year long. I used to be thin, when the Dutch were in charge of the image.”

“What are you doing in hell? Aren’t you supposed to be
Saint
Nicholas?”

“I’m not
in
hell. Any more than you are.”

“Here’s a clue, Nick. This ain’t heaven.”

“We’re hovering, my friend. Or maybe we’re volleying, like the shuttlecock in badminton, back and forth, almost one thing, almost another.”

“Me, I’m just walking the streets.”

“Dodging the pedestrians.”

“I’m not a toymaker.”

“Fine with me. That toymaking, that’s just part of the myth. Hasn’t anybody caught on that I’m
dead
? They don’t issue us hammers and saws and set us to work making wooden toys. There’s precious few of us can even see the living, and those that can move things in the material world, those are even more rare.”

“So how do you come up with all those toys for good girls and boys?”

“When we need toys, which isn’t as often as you think, we steal them.”

“Ah,” I said. “Now I’m beginning to get why you aren’t in heaven. You aren’t Santa Claus. You’re Robin Hood.”

“Mostly we break toys,” said Santa. “Or hide them. It’s not like we can move anything very far. And nowadays it’s a cash economy. Come to think of it, it was back when I was alive, too. They used to draw pictures of me with bags of money, because that’s what I did, my famous good deed, I paid a ransom in coin, saved some kids. Money’s what we mostly use now, too. And because it’s paper, it’s even easier. Lighter. Even my less talented elves can move it.”

I couldn’t help it. He was so serious. I laughed. “Man, you had me going there. Santa Claus, stealing toys, breaking them, hiding them, dealing in cash. You got your elves out picking pockets?”

He didn’t look amused. “Yes,” he said. “I fail to see the humor.”

“You’re not putting me on?”

“I want to see if you can move things. In the material world.”

“I told you, I can’t even see the people, let alone pick their pockets, and even if I could, I’ve never been a thief.” At once my conscience twinged. “At least, not deliberately. Not systematically.”

“You got a better job offer?”

“I want a shot at heaven,” I said. “As long as I’m not completely in hell, why not?”

“Me, too,” said Santa. “Some years I’ve been
so
close.”

“What about getting into the devil’s workshop? Been close to that, too?”

He shrugged. “As a novelty act, they’ve invited me now and then. But not to stay. Strictly in the back door, you know.”

“Why should I do this? I mean, you’ve been at this for what, fifteen hundred years? And you’re still here.”

“Got any better plans? It’s not like you’re running out of time.”

“Santa, excuse me for saying this, but as far as I can tell, you’re as looney as a one-legged duck.”

He shook his head. “My friend, nobody’s crazy here. We might be wrong about a lot of stuff, but we can’t lie and we aren’t crazy. Still, like I said, no hurry. Look me up if you decide Santa’s gang of elves sounds more interesting than . . . whatever it is you’re doing.”

“How would I find you?”

He rolled his eyes. “Just ask. In case you didn’t know it, I’m famous. People keep track of where I am.”

“I was afraid I’d have to go to the north pole or something.”

He shook his head, turned his back, and walked away.

He was right. I
could
see living people. And it wasn’t a matter of slowing down or speeding up, either. It was more like you had to pay attention to something else, sort of look away and then be aware of what’s going on at the edges of things. Only that’s the strange thing—when you’re dead, there are no edges. You have the habit, from all those years of binocular vision, of seeing only this window in front of you, with out-of-focus glimpses to the sides, and most dead people never get past that. But the fact is, when you’re dead you don’t have those limitations. You can see . . . well, you remember how people used to say that teachers seemed to have eyes in the back of their heads? Or it’s like, you could feel someone’s gaze on you, even though they were behind you? Well, that’s how it is when you’re dead, once you get the hang of it. You’re aware in every direction. It’s not really vision. It’s just knowledge, but your mind kind of makes sense of it like vision. I wasn’t consciously seeing those moving
cars or pedestrians, so I didn’t “know” they were there. But I was aware of them, aware of the people in the cars, aware of the people on the street, and some old reflex made me dodge them, weave among them without knowing it.

Thanks to the tip from Nick—I hate calling him Santa Claus because that name’s too loaded down with cultural freight; I just have to laugh whenever I think of saying, “Hi, Santa!”—I got pretty good at seeing mortals. Got to be a habit, really, knowing where they were, knowing what they were doing. I found my range was pretty good, too, because this awareness thing, it isn’t blocked by mere walls, I know who’s coming around the corner before they actually come into my field of view. And I’m not a genius, either, I can imagine there’s those that can see for miles, right through hills and cities and whatever else is in the way. Maybe see forever, if they’ve got the mind to sort through all the stuff you’d see in between.

And it wasn’t just awareness. I could move stuff.

The thing is, touching the material world, changing it, that doesn’t come the way awareness did—it isn’t just automatically happening, so you only have to notice it. Ordinarily, when you’re dead you simply don’t affect the material world in any way. You don’t sink through the earth or walk through walls, but only because you still have the respect for those surfaces you learned when you were alive. You
can
go through them, just as you can sink down into the earth, though that’s extraordinarily boring, since nothing much is going on once you get past the earthworm and gopher level.

But you
can
affect things, not by touching or pushing or pulling, but by—oh, how else to say this?—by really, really wanting things to move. Yeah, OK, by
wishing
. But we’re not talking about some wistful little desire. “Oh, I
wish
I could eat a candy bar again.” No, it takes a desire so intense it consumes you, at least for the moment, the way a campfire consumes an empty marshmallow bag. You feel shrunken, thin, weak. But it’s funny, because you also feel amazingly powerful. Like a superhero. Just because you got a chair to move.

Only how much can you really care about moving a chair? That’s why poltergeists are so rare, and why they’re usually so mean. They’re angry all the time, and they move things around in order to cause fear in the
living. That’s the consuming desire—to make the living afraid of them. To have power. It’s a pathetic thing, and it’s definitely on the evil side of the ledger. Evil, but the bouncer doesn’t let poltergeists into the nether-club, because they don’t need somebody inside moving the furniture or spilling the drinks, I guess.

I’m no poltergeist. I’m not mad at anybody. OK, well, so, that’s a lie. I’m pretty steamed about being stuck between heaven and hell, and I’m ticked off about getting killed before the prime of my life (at least I assume the prime was still ahead of me, seeing how nonprime the years I actually lived through seemed to be). So how was I going to move anything?

It was Nick who showed me how. Once I realized he’d been right about my seeing the living, I looked him up and he kind of took me under his wing, he and a few of his elves—who are
not
little and
not
cute, they’re just dead people like me—and showed me the work they do.

It isn’t just at Christmas, though Christmas is for them like tax time is for accountants. All through the year, Nick and his gang are watching out for children. They’ll pick a kid—almost at random, or so it seems to me, though maybe there’s some system in it, some signs they look for—and they just follow, watching. Most kids, their life is OK. Sure, they get yelled at, spanked, ignored, ridiculed, the normal stuff that makes life interesting, but most of them, somebody loves them, somebody’s looking out for them, somebody thinks they’re pretty good to have around. You can live through a lot of hard times, if you’ve got that.

There are other kids, though. Two kinds. Bullies and victims. And Nick’s on the lookout for both. The victims, they break your heart. The ones that are getting tortured or beaten, there’s not much we can do for them. The rage in the person hurting them, that’s a powerful force, it matches any wish we can come up with, and then on top of that they’ve got bodies, which pretty much makes us helpless. What Nick’s gang does in those cases is, they try their best to make it obvious to other living people what’s going on. You know, cause a shirt to ride up so a bruise is visible, or get a neighbor to look in a window or hear a sound, something to make them suspicious. A lot of them call the cops or child welfare, if it’s a country where the cops care, or where there
is
an agency whose job is to look out for kids. But a lot of them don’t, and in the end, our hearts
just break for those kids and we sort of just wait for them to join us. Because a lot of Nick’s best recruits come from among those children. His scouts, so to speak. They’ve got a nose for it.

The neglected kids, though, Nick’s gang can help a lot, there. We get food to them, sometimes. We open a door now and then—that’s a lot harder and more complicated than you might think. And when they’re alone, some of Nick’s gang, they can’t move things, but they can make sounds that the living can hear, so they sing to them or talk to them. Tell them stories. We get tagged as imaginary friends sometimes, but it’s not like we’re looking for credit. We just try to help the kids know they’re not alone, that somebody cares what they’re going through. And those singers, they do a sweet lullaby, I tell you. Songs that even the deaf can hear, cause they sing right into the mind. Sometimes I go with them, just to hear them sing. We can’t save all their lives, but we can make what life they have a little better, and that’s good. It’s not like we think of death as all that big a deal, anyway. I mean, we
are
dead, and so death doesn’t hold any fear for us. That’s why we’re generally not in the lifesaving business. When we can get a few crackers to a kid, sure, we’ll do it, but . . . they’ll just need more tomorrow, right? While a good song can live in their memory through a lot of dark nights of fear and loneliness.

But that’s not the kind of work I do. I’m not a singer, and when I move things, I’ve got to be mad. It’s my sense of injustice that has to get riled up. And so I’m on the bully patrol.

You know the kids I’m talking about. Some of them are physically violent, but most bullies do their damage with their mouths. They’ve got this instinct for the thing that makes a weaker kid hurt the most. Sometimes it’s obvious—a kid with a big nose, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out what to make fun of. But some of these bullies, it’s like they can read minds. Their victim has a drunk mother, the bully goes straight to the mother jokes—how does he know? The girl who’s lonely and scared she’s not good enough for anybody, the bully girls taunt her clothes or play really mean jokes where they pretend to be her friend until she commits herself, says something that shows she really believes in their faux kindness, and then they can mock her. Some of the things they do are so elaborate, it takes so much thought and effort to do them, you
can hardly believe someone would go to all that trouble just to make another person unhappy.

Well, that ticks me off. That gets me all intense, and I feel it building up, and I can move things.

The trouble is, what do I move? It’s not like the bully deserves to die or anything, so I can’t make the roof cave in on them. Death may not be a big deal to us, but murder still is, and one of the rules that seem to govern the universe is that while we can do a little messing around with the material world, we’re not allowed to kill. Just can’t do it. Wish all we want, but if the thing we try to move might kill somebody, it just won’t budge.

So we’ve got to be resourceful. I mostly try for justice. A girl makes fun of another kid’s big nose, I make sure the bully girl bumps into a door that wasn’t quite where she thought it was. Big swollen nose, a shiner. Let her see how it feels to have other people stare at your face for a while. Or a bully boy who shoves little kids around—I can arrange for him to twist his ankle or trip and fall headlong right as he’s going after a kid, make him look bad in front of everybody or distract him with a little pain. My favorite, though, is to make it so when the bully just touches his victim, I make the victim’s nose bleed like a river, make him bruise up around his eye or jaw. Doesn’t really hurt the victim when I do it, but it makes it look like the bully did a full-out assault, gets him in
so
much trouble. A few times the bully’s been so frightened by the injury he “caused” that he gets control of his hostility and stops picking on kids.