asoothing radiation. No, that wasn’t it at all, it was … oh, what was the use? No one ever managed to describe the oneiric ectoplasms, anyway. No two people ever saw them the same way. A round and stretchy Buddha? A hairless cat, sleeping in a ball, a—damn it! Did he have to go seeing some kind of link between its morphology and the symbolic image of bags snatched from a safe? Psychologists rejected any connection, but psychologists reasoned according to theories, clinical reports. Not one of them was capable of diving into the depths of sleep and bringing back something solid, something … alive. Not one of them had the
power
, and that very thing made them hostile, that impotent jealousy.
“C’mon, move along,” the watchman ordered. “Can’t loiter around here or you’ll get caught. You’ve seen it now, so, what? Feel better? It’s not like it’s a baby, right? Hey, you look like a first-time dad who’s just gotten a secret glimpse of his kid behind his wife’s back. Weird, isn’t it? You mediums, you’re not quite normal. But then you never claimed to be!”
David didn’t claim a thing. He thought about the little dream imprisoned in its incubator. “Don’t say
dream
,” Marianne said whenever he used the word. “It’s an incorrect and stupidly sentimental term. It’s not a dream, it’s an ectoplasmic product a sleeping medium has materialized from an oneiric image haunting his brain. The dream allowed you to create this
object
by stimulating your imagination—that’s all.” Was that really all there was to it? David didn’t believe it for a second. These
objects
were cut from the very skin of dreams; for him, they were proof that down belowa woman’s flesh was softer than anywhere else. A woman’s flesh … Nadia’s. Especially Nadia’s.
“Don’t come ’round here again for a while, OK?” the fat man whispered to David as he escorted him out. “I don’t think this is good for you. Tell yourself it’s like a deformed kid you were forced to leave at child services. Better that way in the end, right?”
[ 4 ]
Afternoon/A Walk in an Antiseptic Desert
Upon leaving the museum, David realized that it was Sunday, a day he’d long associated in his mind with activities like ritual visits to cemeteries, hospitals, or public parks full of retirees taking in the sun. When he was ten or so, he’d decreed one fine morning that in coded language the word Sunday meant “the day of the dead,” because the empty streets seemed to bear witness to a sudden embolism in the city, shops stood padlocked behind metal shutters, and the rare survivor you ran into here and there had the gait of a convalescent, quite unlike the weekday pace that sent people charging toward subway entrances as if an air-raid siren had just urged them toward shelter in rail tunnels. David hated Sunday, a day of anemic languor when the streets seemed suddenly to be short of blood, only the odd car circulating, or, worse yet, bicycles.
He wandered across the esplanade. Luckily it wasn’t very nice out, and the city was still enveloped in a vague fog that made its hard angles bearable. He decided to walk to the clinic that cared for dreamers with work-related injuries. The establishment was on the other side of the bridge, in the compound of the former marble depot where sculptors once came looking for raw material for their work: stone slabs hewn from state quarries. The main room on the ground floor had been summarily converted, divided with folding screens and curtains on great sliding tracks as in a medieval hospice. Meant as a “temporary” setup, it had dragged on for several years already. At the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, no one really cared about broken-down divers whose strange afflictions were the despair of the medical profession and profoundly annoyed doctors.
David crossed the bridge and had lunch in a bistro cramped as a concierge’s quarters, where a fat man was cooking up an enormous pot
power
, and that very thing made them hostile, that impotent jealousy.
“C’mon, move along,” the watchman ordered. “Can’t loiter around here or you’ll get caught. You’ve seen it now, so, what? Feel better? It’s not like it’s a baby, right? Hey, you look like a first-time dad who’s just gotten a secret glimpse of his kid behind his wife’s back. Weird, isn’t it? You mediums, you’re not quite normal. But then you never claimed to be!”
David didn’t claim a thing. He thought about the little dream imprisoned in its incubator. “Don’t say
dream
,” Marianne said whenever he used the word. “It’s an incorrect and stupidly sentimental term. It’s not a dream, it’s an ectoplasmic product a sleeping medium has materialized from an oneiric image haunting his brain. The dream allowed you to create this
object
by stimulating your imagination—that’s all.” Was that really all there was to it? David didn’t believe it for a second. These
objects
were cut from the very skin of dreams; for him, they were proof that down belowa woman’s flesh was softer than anywhere else. A woman’s flesh … Nadia’s. Especially Nadia’s.
“Don’t come ’round here again for a while, OK?” the fat man whispered to David as he escorted him out. “I don’t think this is good for you. Tell yourself it’s like a deformed kid you were forced to leave at child services. Better that way in the end, right?”
[ 4 ]
Afternoon/A Walk in an Antiseptic Desert
Upon leaving the museum, David realized that it was Sunday, a day he’d long associated in his mind with activities like ritual visits to cemeteries, hospitals, or public parks full of retirees taking in the sun. When he was ten or so, he’d decreed one fine morning that in coded language the word Sunday meant “the day of the dead,” because the empty streets seemed to bear witness to a sudden embolism in the city, shops stood padlocked behind metal shutters, and the rare survivor you ran into here and there had the gait of a convalescent, quite unlike the weekday pace that sent people charging toward subway entrances as if an air-raid siren had just urged them toward shelter in rail tunnels. David hated Sunday, a day of anemic languor when the streets seemed suddenly to be short of blood, only the odd car circulating, or, worse yet, bicycles.
He wandered across the esplanade. Luckily it wasn’t very nice out, and the city was still enveloped in a vague fog that made its hard angles bearable. He decided to walk to the clinic that cared for dreamers with work-related injuries. The establishment was on the other side of the bridge, in the compound of the former marble depot where sculptors once came looking for raw material for their work: stone slabs hewn from state quarries. The main room on the ground floor had been summarily converted, divided with folding screens and curtains on great sliding tracks as in a medieval hospice. Meant as a “temporary” setup, it had dragged on for several years already. At the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, no one really cared about broken-down divers whose strange afflictions were the despair of the medical profession and profoundly annoyed doctors.
David crossed the bridge and had lunch in a bistro cramped as a concierge’s quarters, where a fat man was cooking up an enormous pot
Similar Books
