Notes: The Sandman belongs to Neil Gaiman and DC Comics. Reviews and suggestions are welcome.
As I Lay Dreaming
He was tangled again in half-waking, the static drone of the clock-radio providing a soundtrack to his dreams. He shifted slightly, and the images lost their center like a broken slide projector, the frayed edges of his mind flapping wild and loose.
He surfaced faintly, reluctantly, enough to be aware of the alarm and emit a noise that was half groan, half curse. The radio fell to the floor under his fumbling fingers and continued its squawking. There was an echoing thump as he rolled off of the bed (tangled in the sheets) with another incoherent complaint and finally managed to quiet the damn thing.
He shifted, still on the floor, to lie on his back. He covered his eyes with his arm, breathing slowly.
What little of the sky that could be seen through the window was the grey-yellow of a hangover. He wondered idly if that was the reason for his discomfort, although he could think of no cause. How did that joke go?
What's good for a hangover?
Drinking heavily the previous night.
Only the pain seemed more a product of huge and horrible grief than any sort of late-night revelry.
He found himself thinking about death. He examined his reaction to it dispassionately, clinically, feeling oddly empty, wrapped as he was in the winding sheet of a forgotten dream. His mouth was dry. He was circumnavigating a reality too large to be directly broached, he reflected, a task requiring patient delicacy, which reminded him faintly of Magellan gently prodding the edge of South America, probing for an opening.
He untangled himself absently, dwelling on the strange, thoughtful gloom in which he found himself, and moved out into the hall with his fingers braced against the wall.
It was over coffee, the bitter lukewarm redefining the world line by line, that he found its source.
Someone had died.
He didn't know who.
No. Not exactly that. He knew who it was like he knew his left foot – he simply couldn't recall a name, or face, or voice.
And he knew with the same inexplicable certainty that, though the death was a dream – as was the dead – it was no less real than the table he slouched over, cradling his head in his hands. Probably more real.
He felt a sense of dull, keening loss, a sadness that seemed to belong to something far larger.
Huddled over a kitchen table, clutching his coffee, staring stricken, sandy hair sticking out at odd angles, in red striped pajamas, with the rusty, hesitant noise of someone who hasn't for a long while, he began to cry.
Thank God, he thought later, that he didn't have to go to work that day. He was currently in a state of career limbo, searching for a job in which his degree in English would be useful. At the moment he worked in a video rental store, a small, shabby affair that would be replaced, no doubt, by something sleek and corporate before the end of next year. He didn't like it much – it smelled faintly of cabbages and decay, and there were always a few burnt-out men in muscle shirts that would rent the same pornographic videos, shame-faced – but the idea of it being knocked down depressed him deeply, terribly, like the death of an old dog.
Of course, today everything seemed deeply, terribly sad, as a yawning cavern of grief arched and ached in him.
He sighed wearily and pushed himself up to wander listlessly into the living room. He slumped on the couch, hugging himself tightly, then slowly picked up the television remote and pushed a button. The screen flickered to life.
It was halfway through the Disney channel's Saturday morning cartoon lineup that he realized he hadn't paid attention to any extravagant animated gesture, and he turned the television off.
There was nothing he could do today – the thought of reading was almost physically repulsive, going outside unthinkable, continuing to watch TV profoundly depressing…
This was a poor day to exist.
Sleep. That's what he'd do. But not dream. No more dreams…
He found a few sleeping pills leftover from some long ago surgery and swallowed them. He curled on the couch, almost in a fetal position, and quietly lost himself in the warm darkness.
He dreamed of her again.
The girl from dreams. Dream-girl. Girl-dream.
He had seen her nearly four years ago now, in that bizarre dream of himself waiting on scores of inhuman beings – some had reminded him of gods from old books of mythology, some made his head throb to look at them, like a migraine or a nightmare.
He had been wandering around groggily, as though he had just awakened – which was odd in hindsight, for who feels tired when dreaming? – pouring strange aromic wines and serving ice sculptures and meat heavy with blood, when he saw her.
How can we describe what draws us to someone? How can we name the feeling of our heart stopping when you see the way someone's hands move or hear how a voice resonates?
Then the dream became slippery and truculent, as dreams always do once you discovered your purpose: every strange being began crying for wine, more wine and he was running to fill the orders while trying to find her, talk to her, savor her. The floor buckled beneath his feet; sudden crowds would appear simply to pass between the two of them, slowing him down.
Who are you? he asked her when he finally stood near her, smelling her odor (which was strange too; he never smelled in dreams). I've seen you before. What's your name?
Please, she answered, distracted, wistful, I have to serve this food…
And then the tangling again, the madness of the crowds and he was swamped in urgency because she would go soon, she would go and he did not know if he would see her again and this thought burned him. He found her, reached his hand out to her, desperate to touch her before she fading, but it had already started.
Don't go! he said. Not before I learn your name.
I can't help it, she said, and smiled at him sadly, her skin translucent, I'm sorry. It's the doorbell…
Her eyes lasted in his memory as he struggled to stay asleep so he could at least feel the air where once she stood, but the world dragged at him.
He didn't know whether to smile or weep when he awoke.
That had been several years ago, and she still appeared in his dreams sometimes, always with the nagging feeling that he knew her in the waking world but could not see her. He never remembered what she looked like. It wasn't important.
And now he lay curled on the couch, empty and tired, and he slipped without meaning to into The Dream.
There were a thousand thousand people standing with him in this place that did not quite exist, and he felt small. Some figures were familiar, from dreams or life or neither, but he did not speak with them. The air was very still, and the feeling very solemn.
And then she was there, next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth of her body. He did not look at her because he feared that she would disappear.
Do you have a handkerchief? she asked timidly, her voice thin.
No, he would have said, but he felt something in his hand before he could say the word, and instead he said I don't know. He held the scrap of fabric – had it always been there? – delicately as a baby bird. I have a piece of cloth from the curtains that hung over my bed as a child, he began, wonderingly. He felt her turn towards him slightly, saw her face out of the corner of his eye as she watched and listened.
I remember the way the sunlight would creep over and touch it, in the morning, he continued. This was the friendly curtain, the one on the right. The one on the left I knew somehow was unfriendly. He raised his eyes from the worn fabric, made nearly colorless by age, and stared into a middle space. By the time I was three or four I no longer gave the objects around me personalities, he whispered, and he realized now the enormity of that betrayal. Soon, I forgot I had ever done so.
They stood there, he bent over with shame, she watching him silently.
Can I use it? she ventured.
Are you crying? he asked, because he didn't know what else to say.
No, she said. I'm bleeding.
And now he looked at her and saw blood running softly from her eyes down her smooth face and neck, seeping gently into the same thin nightgown he remembered from years before.
She took the memory from him, and both were careful that their hands did not touch.
I'm sorry, he whispered, and somehow that managed to say everything.
And she smiled at him.
He didn't try remembering the rest of the dream, although bits and pieces recurred throughout the years, called to mind by someone's voice or a particular archway. All that mattered was the growing certainty that this time he would remember her face and find her again, that out of the loss of something greater than worlds would come something small and new and profound.
You cannot stand next to the river of eternity with someone, watching a ship that was a swan that was a dream float off the map of the world and turn into a star without remembering them. You cannot see such a sight and lose contact with another witness.
What's your name? he finally asked her, when all was said and done and the uncounted, uncountable beings began to disperse.
And she told him.
And he knew that she would come into the video store in which he worked at 12:57 p.m. the next day, looking for his favorite movie which had been mis-shelved, and that they would end up talking about movies and swapping phone numbers (shyly, awkwardly, because neither of them had done this sort of thing before); and although they would measure their anniversary from that day for the many years afterwards, they would both forever know that it happened earlier, while they lay dreaming.
And then he woke up.