Tapping the Dream Tree (17 page)

HOLLY RUE-USED BOOKS

When Fritzie notices her, the two of them dance and try to touch noses through the window. I can see Holly inside, laughing at the pair of them, and I wave to her.

The store is its usual jumble. I have to admit that I find something just a little disconcerting about a retail establishment that offers up its goods in such a haphazard manner. It feels like you have to be part pack rat, part spelunker, just to make your way through it all. I give Snippet and Fritzie each one of the biscuits I stuck in my pocket earlier, then make my way by a circuitous route to where Holly's sitting.

She looks the way she always does, red hair held back from her face with bobby pins, hazel eyes bright and welcoming, the same fashion sense as Jilly: all baggy clothes on a small trim figure.

“This must be a first,” Holly says. “I don't think I've ever seen you up here on your own.”

I take a few books from a chair and put them on one of what seems like twenty cardboard boxes full of books that are clustered around Holly's desk like livestock at a feeder.

“It's possible I've gone all literary on my own, isn't it?” I say as I sit down.

“Eminently so,” she assures me.

“But not true,” I tell her. “I've just come to pick your brain instead.”

Holly's eyebrows rise in a question. I have to gather my courage—this isn't Jilly or the others I'm talking to now.

“I was wondering,” I say, talking quickly to get it all out before I lose my nerve, “if you could check in the Wordwood to see if there's a way to make a dog talk.”

“You mean bark?”

I shake my head. “No. I mean to really be able to communicate with them. Share a conversation.”

Holly smiles.

“I'm serious,” I say.

“I wasn't making fun of you,” she tells me. “Or if I was, I was making fun of both of us, because I've already looked it up for myself.”

It takes a moment for that to register.

“What did you find?” I finally ask.

Holly shrugs. “Nothing terribly useful. The most effective method seems to be to get the Welsh goddess Cerridwen to let you stir her cauldron and then sneak a few drops of the magical brew when she's not looking.”

I just look at her.

“Well, apparently it worked for Taliesin,” she says. “He was able to immediately understand the language of birds and animals after one taste.”

“A Welsh goddess...”

“I know. You won't exactly find one setting up shop at the local mall... or even in the Market. One of my own favorite bits of animal lore comes from
The Book of Bright Secrets
by A. S. Ison. She says that if you look between a dog or cat's ears, you can see what they're seeing—not just what's in front of them, but those mysterious things that only they can see.”

I know what she means. Fritzie can sometimes spend a half hour or longer simply staring at a corner of the room, like there's a window to a whole other world hidden there.

“And then there's Christy,” Holly goes on. “In one of his books he talks about this idea that if you put your forehead against that of a cat or a dog and lock gazes with them, you can see what they've seen.”

“Have you ever tried any of these things?” I find myself asking.

Holly smiles. “I haven't run into Cerridwen yet, but yes on both counts to the other two. All I got for my trouble was one very happy dog and a face full of licks.”

“So they didn't work.”

“They didn't work for me,” Holly says. “Maybe I'm just not magical enough.”

If you have to have magic to make them work, then I'm really out of luck.

“There was a whole bunch of other stuff in the Wordwood,” Holly goes on, “none of which struck me as having any more practical application than the ones we've already talked about. But you could look them up. Are you on-line? I can give you the Word-wood's URL if you like.”

“I've already got it bookmarked.”

Holly waits for a long moment, then says, “But visiting the site makes you uncomfortable.”

“How did you know that?”

She shrugs. “People either fall in love with it, or get spooked— though most of the ones who do get spooked would probably never admit that, even to themselves. They'll just convince themselves it's too boring to revisit.”

“So there
is
something weird about it.”

“There's something weird about everything,” Holly says, sounding like Jilly.

“Do you believe in magic?” I have to ask.

“I think so. I believe in something. There's too much anecdotal evidence to discount the idea that there's more to the world than what we can see. I believe that there's
always
been more, but each generation categorizes it a little differently.”

“How so?”

“I correspond with this fellow in Arizona named Richard Kunz,” Holly says, “and he has a really interesting take on all of this. He thinks that the detonation of the first atom bomb forever changed the way that magic would appear in the world. That the spirits live in the wires now instead of the trees. They live and travel through phone and modem lines, take up residence in computers and appliances, and live on electricity and lord knows what else. How else do you explain the spooky ways computers act sometimes?”

“So the Wordwood... ?”

My question trails off because I'm not even sure what it is that I want to ask.

“We started the Wordwood simply as a digital storehouse of knowledge,” Holly says. “An electronic library of all the world's books. But then we started noticing texts appearing in it that none of us had entered and its URL no longer led to a hard drive with a physical address. The spirits got into it and now it's something else again, something we can no longer control and can't explain.” There's an odd look in her eyes when she adds, “And some of those spirits have even crossed back over into our world again.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Do you know Christy's girlfriend, Saskia?”

I nod.

“I think she was born in the Wordwood.”

“But that… that's impossible.”

Holly nods. “So's magic.”

We sit for a while, Holly with Snippet on her lap, me with Fritzie's head on mine. I'm anthropomorphizing him again, but I'd swear he's been following our conversation. I think about Saskia Madding. I've only met her a few times, but there is something … well, luminous about her. Like a Madonna or one of the saints in a Botticelli painting. She just glows. I would never have thought magic. Charisma, yes. But maybe that's a part of magic. A glamour …

“You know what I'd do?” Holly says.

I pull myself up out of my thoughts to look at her and shake my head.

“I'd make my own ritual,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

She straightens a couple of books on her desk, before lifting her gaze up to meet mine.

“It's just what Christy and Jilly say,” she tells me. “The magic's already there. Here. All around us. To tap into it you have to really be able to focus on it—it's like what mystics do when they meditate. It's all intent and concentration. That's the whole idea behind spells and rituals. They force you to focus completely on what you're doing.”

“So they don't really work,” I say.

Holly shakes her head. “No, they do. But not for the reason we think they do. They work because they make us concentrate so completely that the magic has to pay attention to us. It's like communion and singing hymns in church. People really do get closer to God because they're focusing on these rituals and no longer listening to that constant dialogue that goes on inside their heads.”

“I wouldn't know how to make up a ritual,” I tell her.

She smiles. “Me, neither. But it sounds good in theory, doesn't it?”

That night I give it a try, making it up as I go. Fritzie follows me from room to room as I gather up candles and herbs and whatever else I can think of and bring them all into the dining room. I turn off all the lights and sit in the dark for a few moments before I light the candles. I burn some piñon incense. I paint symbols on a clay platter from a mixture I've made up of red wine, spit and flower pollen. I have an old Tangerine Dream album playing at low volume on the stereo. I write the words, “I want to hear Fritzie talk,” on a slip of rose-colored paper, then cut it up into tiny pieces and burn it on the platter with pinches of herbs. Anise. Thyme. Cilantro. Mint.

The odd thing is, the more I get into it, the more I feel it's actually going to work. I can feel something, like the charge in the air before a big storm.

Be patient, I tell myself. Focus. Believe.

I sit there for a long time, taking in the acrid smell of burning paper and dried herbs as it mixes with the piñon.

Then I have to laugh at myself.

“So what do you think, boy?” I ask Fritzie. “Is any of this making you feel talkative?”

He comes over and licks my hand.

“Yeah, I thought about as much.”

I turn on the overhead and put everything away. I don't know why I thought it would work in the first place. It's weird the things we'll do for hope.

Before I go to bed, I check my e-mail. I delete the messages as I read them, reply to a couple. Then I find this one:

Date: Wed, 08 Jun 1999 17:55:42-0700

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Your question

Why do you want to speak to your dog?

The Wordwood

http://www.thewordwood.com/

I stare at it, my cursor arrow hovering on the link to the site, but I don't click my mouse to take me there. After a long moment I remember to breathe. I close my e-mail reader and turn off the computer.

It's late and I should get to bed. Instead I go out and sit on the balcony, Fritzie lying at my feet. I stare out at the darkened city and have no idea what I'm thinking about. I just sit there, waiting for morning.

Remember when I said that Sophie is a fairy tale? It's this theory that Jilly has. She says Sophie has fairy blood, but Sophie only smiles when the topic comes up, so who knows what she really thinks. But Sophie does have these fascinating serial dreams that, if you were given to believing in parallel worlds and the like, would certainly lend credence to the theory. She has this whole other life, apparently, over there in her dream world, but the strange thing is that she says she's met people here, in what Christy calls the World As It Is, that know her from her dreams.

It's not a traditional fairy tale, but then, Jilly says, it's not supposed to be. And we're still in the middle of it, so it's hard to say how it will all turn out.

Do I believe it's true? Of course not. But when I've had a glass or two of wine, and Jilly's there pumping Sophie for the latest installment of her dream serial, and Sophie's describing these wonderful things, all so matter-of-factly, like how her boyfriend there is this guy named Jeck who can turn into a crow, or this wonderful shop where you can buy all the books and paintings that never got made in our world, somehow it all does make a certain kind of lopsided sense. And I realize that whether or not it's true isn't what's important; what's important it's that we have the story.

Because, getting back to Robert Nathan's books for a moment, there's this bit in
The Elixir
where he says that the difference between man and animals isn't that we have thumbs, but that we have fairy tales. Everything has a history, even the rocks and trees. But we have legends and dreams that weave into one another. We're part of them, and they're part of us. The trees have history, but they have no legends.

I think of it all as a metaphor for imagination, but I want it to be real. I want what we call Jinx, the reason that mechanical objects don't work properly around Sophie—her wristwatch running backwards, Christy's computer crashing when she tries to use it, her radio bringing in signals from Australia when it's tuned to a local frequency—to have a magical rather than a biochemical explanation.

So the next morning, as soon as the hour's decent, I take Fritzie out for his morning constitutional and follow a meandering path that leads us to the door of Sophie's building. Because what I need now is for one of my muses to lend me some of her imagination.

Sophie sits us out on the old sofa on her balcony for tea and biscuits. She seems a little amused when I tell her why we've come— not amused at me; more amused at the idea of her fairy blood, the way she always is, but not denying it either.

“I can't do anything here,” she says after a long pause. “But maybe in Mabon you can find someone who can help you.” She smiles. “Since it exists because of magic, somebody there should know how to make an enchantment work.”

Mabon is the name of her dream city. Fritzie seems to pick up his ears when she mentions it.

“Can you take us there?” I ask, but then I think of how often Jilly's asked the same question.

Sophie shakes her head. “People seem to have to find their own way,” she says. “I don't think it's a rule so much as just the way it works.”

“Find my own way,” I repeat.

“Have you ever tried lucid dreaming?” she asks.

“I wouldn't know where to start.”

“You have to picture the place you want to be when you start to dream,” she says.

I sigh. More of this focus/centering oneself business.

“But I've never been there before,” I tell her.

How could I? The place doesn't exist except in Sophie's dreams.

But she smiles and gets up. When she returns from inside, she's carrying a small ink drawing of an old-fashioned storefront. The leaded windows are crammed full of books and above the door a sign reads: