Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (2 page)

The page darkened under the press of her finger. She swung the dictionary shut and returned to her lotus.

A
s
my trunk rises from the flower of my legs and the seat of my womb, so, man, arise from the book of all books.

Would it thunder? Only silence. The dictionary trembled and the Bible looked dark and somber. The yellow bulb in the shaded lamp sang like a dying moth. The air grew heavy.
Don't falter,
she told herself.
Don't lose faith, don't drop the flower of your legs and the seat of your womb. A bit of blood? Or milk from unsucked breasts? Catalysts... Or, God forbid, something living, a
fly
between the pages, the heart of a bird, or—
she shuddered, ill with excitement, with a kind of belief—
the clear seed of a dead man.

The book almost lifted its cover. It
breathed.

“That was it,” she whispered in awe. “The words know what to do.”

Frost clung to its brown binding. The dictionary sucked warmth from the air. The cover flew back. The pages riffled, flew by, flapped spasmodically, and two stuck together, struggling, bulging... and then splitting.

A figure flew up, arms spread, and twirled like an ice skater. It sucked in dust and air and heat, sucked sweat from her skin, and turned dry emptiness into damp flesh.

“Handsome!” she cried. “Make him handsome and rugged and kind, and smart as I am, if not smarter. Make him like a father but not my father and like a son and a lover especially a lover, warm, and give him breath that melts my lips and softens my hair like steam from jungles. He should like warm dry days and going to lakes and fishing, but no—he should like reading to me more than fishing, and he should like cold winter days and ice-skating with me he could if you will allow me to suggest he could be brown-haired with a shadow of red and his cheeks rough with fresh young beard I can watch grow and he should—”

His eyes! They flashed as he spun, molten beacons still undefined. She approved of the roughed-in shape of his nose. His hair danced and gleamed, dark brown with a hint of red. Arms, fingers, legs, crawled with words. An ant's nest of dry ink
foot
s crawled over his feet, tangling with
heel
s and
ankle
s and
toe
s.
Arm
s and
leg
s fought for dominance up the branches and into the trunk, where
torso
and
breast
s and other words fought them back. The battle of words went on for minutes, fierce and hot.

Then—what had been a dream, a delusion, suddenly became magic. The words spun, blurred, became real flesh and real bone.

His breasts were firm and square and dark-nippled. The hair on his chest was dark and silky. He was still spinning. She cried out, staring at his groin.

Clothes?

“Yes!” she said. “I have no clothes for men.”

A suit, a pink shirt with cuff links and pearl decorations.

His eyes blinked and his mouth opened and closed. His head drooped and a moan flew out like a whirled weight cut loose from a string.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Please stop, he's finished!”

The man stood on the dictionary, knees wobbly, threatening to topple. She jumped up from the floor to catch him, but he fell away from her and collapsed on the carpet beside the chair. The book lay kicked and sprawled by his feet, top pages wrinkled and torn.

Miss Coates stood over the man, hands fluttering at her breasts. He lay on his side, chest heaving, eyes closed. Her wide gaze darted from point to point on his body, lower lip held by tiny white teeth. After a few minutes, she was able to look away from the man. She squinted more closely at the dictionary, frowned, then bent to riffle through the pages. Every page was blank. The dictionary had given everything it had.

“I am naked,” she told herself, stretching out her hands, using the realization to shock herself to sensibility. She went into the place where she slept to put on some clothes. Away from the man, she wondered what she would call him. He probably did not have a name, not a Christian name at any rate. It seemed appropriate to call him by a name like everyone else, even if she had raised him from paper and ink, from a dictionary.

“Webster,” she said, nodding sharply at the obvious. “I'll call him Webster.”

She returned to the living room and looked at the man. He seemed to be resting peacefully. How could she move him to a more comfortable place? The couch was too small to hold his ungainly body; he was very tall. She measured him with the tape from her sewing kit. Six feet two inches. His eyes were still shut; what color were they? She squatted beside him, face flushed, thinking thoughts she warned herself she must not think, not yet.

She wore her best dress, wrapped in smooth dark burgundy, against which her pale skin showed to best advantage. It was one o'clock in the morning, however, and she was exhausted. “You seem comfortable where you are,” she told the man, who did not move. “I'll leave you on the floor.”

Abigail Coates went into her bedroom to sleep. Tired as she was, she could not just close her eyes and drift off. She felt like shouting for joy and tears dampened the pillow and moistened her pepper hair.

In the darkness,
he
breathed. Dreaming, did he cause the words to flow through her drowsing thoughts? Or was it simply his breath filling the house with the odor of printer's ink?

In the night,
he
moved. Shifting an arm, a leg, sending atoms of words up like dust. His eyes flickered open, then closed. He moaned and was still again.

Abigail Coates's neck hair pricked with the first rays of morning and she awoke with a tiny shriek, little more than a high-pitched gasp. She rolled from her stomach onto her back and pulled up the sheet and bedspread.

Webster stood in the doorway, smiling. She could barely see him in the dawn light. Her eyelids were gummy with sleep. “Good morning, Regina,” he said.

Regina Abigail Coates. Everyone had called her Abbie, when there had been friends to call her anything. No one had ever called her Regina.

“Regina,” Webster repeated. “It reminds one of queens and Canadian coins.”

How well he spoke. How full of class.

“Good morning,” she said feebly. “How are you?” She suppressed an urge to giggle.
Why are you?
“How... do you feel?”

A ghost of a smile. He nodded politely, unwilling to complain. “As well as could be expected.” He walked into her room and stopped at the foot of her bed, like a ghost her father had once told her about. “I'm well-dressed. Too much so, I think. It's uncomfortable.”

Her heart was a little piston in her throat, pushing up the phlegm that threatened to choke her.

He walked around to her side of the bed, just as the ghost once had.

“You brought me out. Why?”

She stared up at his bright green eyes, like drops of water raised from the depths of an ocean trench. His hand touched her shoulder, lingered on the strap of her nightgown. One finger slipped under the strap and tugged it up a quarter of an inch. “This is the distance between OP and OR,” he murmured.

She felt the pressure of the cloth beneath her breast.

“Why?” he asked again. His breath sprinkled words over her face and hair. He shook his head and frowned. “Why do I feel so obliged to...” He pulled down the blind and closed the drapes and she heard the soft fall and hiss of rayon dropped onto a chair. In the darkness, a knee pressed the edge of her bed. A finger touched her neck and lips covered hers and parted them. A tongue explored.

He tasted of ink.

In the early morning hours, Regina Abigail Coates gave a tiny, squeezed-in scream.

Webster sat in the overstuffed chair and watched her leave the apartment. She shut the door and leaned against the wall, not knowing what to think or feel. “Of course,” she whispered to herself, as if there were no wind or strength left in her. “Of course he doesn't like the sun.”

She walked down the hallway, passed the doors of neighbors with whom she had not even a nodding acquaintance, and descended the stairs to the first floor. The street was filled with cars passing endlessly back and forth. Tugging out wrinkles from her dress, she stepped into the sunlight and faced the world, the new Regina Coates,
debutante
.

“
I know
what all you other women know,” she said softly, with a shrill triumph. “All of you!” She looked up and noticed the sky, perhaps for the first time in twenty years; rich with clouds scattered across a bright blue sheet, demanding of her,
Breathe deeply.
She was part of the world, the real world.

Webster still sat in the chair when she returned with two bags of groceries. He was reading her Bible. Her face grew hot and she put down the bags and snatched it quickly from his hands. She could not face his querying stare, so she lay the book on a table, out of his reach, and said, “You don't want that.”

“Why?” he asked. She picked up the bags again by their doubled and folded paper corners, taking them one in each hand into the kitchen and opening the old refrigerator to stock the perishables.

“When you're gone,” Webster said, “I feel as if I fade. Am I real?”

She glanced up at the small mirror over the sink. Her shoulders twitched and a shudder ran up her back.
I am very far gone now.

Regina brought in the afternoon newspaper and he held his hand out with a pleading expression; she handed it across, letting it waver for a moment above a patch of worn carpet, teasing him with a frightened, uncertain smile. He took it, spread it eagerly, and rubbed his fingers over the pages. He turned the big sheets slowly, seeming to absorb more than read. She fixed them both a snack but Webster refused to eat. He sat across from her at the small table, face placid, and for the moment, that was more than enough. She sat at her table, ate her small trimmed sandwich and drank her glass of grapefruit juice. Glancing at him from all sides—he did not seem to mind, and it made his outline sharper—she straightened up the tiny kitchen.

What was there to say to a man between morning and night? She had expected that a man made of words would be full of conversation, but Webster had very little experience. While all the right words existed in him, they had yet to be connected. Or so she surmised. Still, his very presence gratified her. He made her as real as she had made him.

He refused dinner, even declining to share a glass of wine with her after (she had only one glass).

“I expect there should be some awkwardness in the early days,” she said. “Don't you? Quiet times when we can just sit and be with each other. Like today.”

Webster stood by the window, touched a finger to his lips, leaving a smudge, and nodded. He agreed with most things she said.

“Let's go to bed,” she suggested primly.

In the dark, when her solitude had again been sundered and her brow was sprinkled with salty drops of exertion, he lay next to her, and—

He
moved.

He
breathed.

But he did not sleep.

Regina lay with her back to him, eyes wide, staring at the flowers on the ancient wallpaper and a wide trapezoid of streetlight glare transfixing a small table and its vase. She felt ten years—no, twenty!—sliding away from her, and yet she couldn't tell him how she felt, didn't dare turn and talk. The air was full of him. Full of words not her own, unorganized, potential. She breathed in a million random thoughts, deep or slight, complex or simple, eloquent or crude. Webster was becoming a generator. Kept in the apartment, his substance was reacting with itself; shut away from experience, he was making up his own patterns and organizations, subtle as smoke.

Even lying still, waiting for the slight movement of air through the window to cool him, he worked inside, and his breath filled the air with potential.

Regina was tired and deliciously filled, and that satisfaction at least was hers. She luxuriated in it and slept.

In the morning, she lay alone in the bed. She flung off the covers and padded into the living room, pulling down her rucked-up nightgown, shivering against the morning chill. He stood by the window again, naked, not caring if people on the streets looked up and saw. She stood beside him and gently enclosed his upper arm with her fingers, leaned her cheek against his shoulder, a motion that came so naturally she surprised herself with her own grace. “What do you want?” she asked.

“No,” he said tightly. “The question is, what do
you
want?”

“I'll get us some breakfast. You
must
be hungry by now.”

“No. I'm not. I don't know what I am or how to feel.”

“I'll get some food,” she continued obstinately, letting go of his arm. “Do you like milk?”

“No. I don't know.”

“I don't want you to become ill.”

“I don't get ill. I don't get hungry. You haven't answered my question.”

“I love you,” she said, with much less grace.

“You don't love me. You need me.”

“Isn't that the same thing?”

“Not at all.”

“Shall we get out today?” she asked airily, backing away, realizing she was doing a poor imitation of some actress in the movies. Bette Davis, her voice light, tripping.

“I can't. I don't get sick, I don't get hungry. I don't go places.”

“You're being obtuse,” she said petulantly, hating that tone, tears of frustration rising in her eyes.
How must I behave? Is he mine, or am I his?

“
Obtuse, acute, equilateral, isosceles, vector, derivative, sequesential, psych
-
integrative, mersauvin powers
...” He shook his head, grinning sadly. “That's the future of mathematics for the next century. It becomes part of psychology. Did you know that? All numbers.”

“Did you think that last night?” she asked. She cared nothing for mathematics; what could a man made of words know about numbers?