Part 33 (1/2)

Story by James Foreman Ill.u.s.tration by Ramon Perez

DROWNING.

I SAW THE FIRST ADS IN MARCH. A week or two later it was all over the news, and then for the next few months you could not get away from it. Still, none of us expected it to have the impact it did. It was a killer. By November I had only had eight or nine dreams when I used to have three or four a week. This is how I make my living. I have a dream and then I wait. Eventually they come to the office or sometimes I run into them somewhere else, we talk about it, and they give me money. At least, that is how it had been working.

Right then I was down to my last week's worth of savings. I had sold my car in August and my stereo and most of my office equipment in September and every day I was looking around thinking about what to cannibalize next. I was getting more and more pessimistic.

Then I had a dream that I thought was a paying one and I woke up that morning feeling pretty good, not a hundred percent but maybe sixty-five. In the dream I was painting a room with a small bunch of lilies. Specifically, I was back working for Denny Mankino.

I had worked for Denny for two miserable years before I started this new line of work. Denny was a nice enough guy most of the time but maybe two days a week he was a nightmare. He always apologized afterwards, and always paid on time, but I was still thinking about going to work for someone else. I had my first dream around then.

The dream was about our client. She was a nice person I did not know a thing about, other than she always said hi and once she brought me a coffee. In the dream, she was swimming in a pool filled with milk, trying to empty it by drinking as she swam. At the end of each lap the pool would be maybe half-full. The problem was that the whole time she was swimming it was raining milk. Not hard, but enough to keep filling the pool. Now the strange part, as opposed to the weird part, was that in a barn maybe thirty yards away, a farmer was spinning a millstone. It was a huge, regular millstone-type millstone, but he spun it like it weighed nothing, like it was a lazy Susan on your kitchen counter. This is what was making it rain. Like I said, strange. But it was just a dream and when I woke up I forgot about it.

That afternoon while Denny was out doing whatever he did, the client came home, walked up to me and started pouring out a dream she had had in which I was holding an invoice she had to pay. She did not even take off her coat, just walked right up to me and started talking.

I had no idea what was happening and thought maybe she was not a nice person but a maniac and I was about to find out how wrong I had been, but then I noticed that she was drinking from a big carton of milk and my dream came back to me like a bolt of s.h.i.+mmery cloth unfurling across the floor.

We went into the kitchen, sat down, and I told her all about it. When I got to the part about the guy, the farmer, she started paying close attention.

”He had a medium-sized freckle above his right eye, half in the eyebrow.”She slowly nodded her head as though she knew what I would say next, and then got up and went over to the sink. I waited. When she finally turned around she said, ”Can I give you some money?”She looked like a huge weight had been lifted off her. I was glad she was feeling better, but the notion of taking money kind of creeped me out.

”I beg your pardon?”

”You've just helped me. A lot.”

I gave her a moment to tell me how but she did not. Instead she found her checkbook and wrote out a check. She handed it to me. It was for five thousand dollars, payable to 'cash.'

As you can imagine, I was dumbfounded, and I guess since I was not saying anything, she felt the need to. ”The guy in your dream is my brother. At least, it makes perfect sense if he is. He died, nine years ago tomorrow.”

”Oh. I'm sorry.”I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

She wasn't finished. ”And now, finally, I think I understand. I'm sorry, but I'm kind of freaked out by all this and I'd rather not talk about it. We don't have to talk about this anymore, do we?”

I didn't want to jinx either of us, and now that I had a great big check from nowhere, I didn't want to jinx it either, but I had no idea what we were supposed to do.

”I don't know. Let's see. If you have to tell me, I guess you can come find me. Are you sure you want to give me this?It seems like a lot.”

She sat down and looked very calm and smiled a really nice smile. ”Yes.”

I waited, but she wasn't saying anything else. ”Okay then.”

She went back to the sink and poured out the milk, and I went back to work.

She never got back in touch with me so I never found out what it was all about, but her check was good. So there was that.

Within about six months the clients were coming pretty steadily. I quit working for Denny and got the office, and for maybe four or five years I made a nice living. It was kind of like I was just walking around, delivering things, but with no real time pressure, and at almost every stop people gave me money. Though it was kind of aimless, there was a weird logic to it all.

Then the machine came along.

I was not convinced that my new dream about Denny was a paying one. Who was supposed to be my client?Myself?That was creepy. The dream just did not make sense the way others had. So I sat in my office, waiting to see what was going to happen next. And then Mr. Watson came in, which I was absolutely not expecting at all.

Mr. Watson was the shop steward of my local, Local 111 of the S.S.C.W.I. For a long time I kind of thought the union was a scam, a way of conniving me out of 5% of my earnings, until they helped me out of a legal sc.r.a.pe that otherwise would have sunk me. That, and they offered a pretty good medical package that included dental, and of course a pension.

For a moment, just long enough to see that he was not my client, I looked at him without saying anything. He sat down on the corner of my desk and looked back at me. I had no idea what he was up to so I kept my yap shut. It must have looked pretty silly, both of us staring at each other, blank-faced, as though we were having some kind of conversation but without actually speaking.

He did not look good. He was in his late fifties and cultivated a Columbo look anyway: rumpled trench coat, cigarette, bad haircut and if you got close enough a deep, almost subliminal smell of smoke, but still. He was close enough that I smelled the smoke. That was his day job. He was an investigator for the fire department; the rumor was that he had a perfect record. I do not think this had anything to do with his side job, though; he was just a tenacious and thorough guy. He once explained that he was really only a witness anyway. ”If you pay close enough attention,” he'd said, ”ninety-nine percent of the time it's obvious how it all burned down.”

”Okay,” he finally said, then got off the corner of my desk, walked over to the window, looked down at the street and then came back and sat in my client's chair, the one people used to sit in and then give me money from.

”You do any other work in here? A side job of some kind?”he said, taking in my steadily-emptying office.

”I was a house painter before this.”

”That's right. That's not such bad work.”

”I didn't mind it, but my boss had some real problems.”

He looked around some more, nodding his head. ”You don't even have a coffee machine?”

”Sold it. I can call down to the diner, they'll send one right up.”

”The Brazilian place?”

”No, the other one.”

”Oh. Yeah, sure.”

I made the call. When I hung up he didn't say anything. He seemed distracted, maybe even morose, which was not like him at all. He was generally a pretty light-hearted guy.

For laughs I started my spiel. I thought he might get a kick out of it. I sat on the edge of my chair, leaned comfortably forward onto the desk, looked him in the eye, and said in my most neutral voice, ”So, I had this dream.”

He gave me a very stern look. ”This is no laughing matter,”he said. He was really in a sour mood.

”But I did have a dream.”

”Seriously now?”

”Well, kind of. I mean, I have one I'm working on but I don't know who the, uh, client is yet.”

”Oh.” He looked away, annoyed. ”That's what we thought. Look, it's also why I'm here. We're having some problems down at the hall. As you might have heard, we got no orders coming in. You're maybe one of ten people who've had anything in the last six months or so. Ever since that f.u.c.king machine came along. So, I just came to tell you, and luckily you don't have any medical stuff going on, but we're going to have to cut back on medical coverage, substantially, and no more dental.”

I had a dentist appointment next week. I was finally going to take advantage of the dental plan. This really was no joke.

I first met Mr. Watson maybe a month after I got my office. He walked into my waiting room one morning and said, ”What kind of a waiting room is this if you got no magazines?”

I got up to see who it was and didn't recognize him. ”I beg your pardon?”

”If this is your waiting room, where're the magazines?”