Do We Owe the Young

What will it be like to see movies of our dreams?

I came all the way to Grass Valley, this wilderness, because I did not like what was happening in the city, that hollow city, where people rolled over in the morning and, as casually as if they were passing a basket of hot rolls, admired each other’s dreams.

One time I went to the luncheonette, the one where the kielbasa came in from a boat, the one where they hung garlic up for protection, and I found myself surrounded, all the booths around me, young pretenders right out of college, looking at slideshows of the ordinary and the grisly, a river flowing into a cave, a barn catching fire, a boy knifing his father.

Have I not seen my dreams already? Have I not stood under the Milky Way, that night the old Greyhound lost a tire near Lake Huron, we put ochre blankets around our shoulders, a stranger touched me by the hillside, did I not then feel my forehead bathed in fog, did I not come face to face with the obscure side of my mind?

But look, here comes the mail carrier, as if I still needed mail, as if anyone had anything to tell me or sell me. But he invites himself in, he hoists his satchel onto my table, because what he dreamed last night is too rich to sequester.

I know he lost his mother. I know he lost a brother. No, I do not want to see either one. 

“Good Lord, not that!” 

He takes off his hat and pulls up the movie on his orb: the number 13, embodied, the color of twilight, walking on broad feet across a coral sea, trampling foothills far away, coming to rest on a bale of hay. A translucent stallion sleeps in the stable. 

“Why do I need your hallucination?” 

“What are days for?” 

“For something more.”

Younger than me but not quite young, he demands to show me another. 

“It’s rude to decline a neighbor’s dreams. You’ll turn hateful and unclean.” 

He points the orb at the screen and then, instead of the number 13, an osprey, or some bird of prey, it’s hard to say, but something swoops across our field of vision and crosses the valley, a swift elision, to the house where his future wife lives, not yet his, he not yet hers, but she lives in his mind already, a clinging burr. 

“Do you think I have a chance? Do I have a chance with her?”

Must I tell him? That I have once, only once in my life, been so lucky as to remember a dream? As a boy I had a glimpse the next morning: a gem tumbling from the crown adorning my head, or someone’s head. But no more than this. Yet I rode to school on a curtain of bliss that day, the one day I remembered my dream. Then decades passed, and I fled to this wilderness, where I turned old and hateful and unclean, illiberal and dull, a canvas for nicotine. 

“It’s rude to decline a neighbor’s dreams. I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

And he sails out the door like wind through a screen, while I, having nothing to do except eat kielbasa trucked up Route 22, wait for him and his dreams.