“Welcome to the City,” he said.
I’d describe him to you if I could, but he was there, and he wasn’t there, and I’m pretty certain his eyes were a greenish-magenta, by which I mean green or magenta, depending on how good of a look I could get at him, which is all my way of saying that I’m not going to describe him to you.
“Thank you,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything better, and because I was pretty sure I was on drugs. That might take some explaining, because I wasn’t thanking him for the drugs, since I didn’t want to be on drugs and had never taken drugs, but one look at the guy who was-and-was-not-there, and at ‘the City,’ and you might realize why I thought I was on drugs.
First was the sun.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” he said.
“Isn’t what?” I asked.
“The skyset.”
“Huh,” I said.
The sun was inside out. And by that, I don’t mean that the super-powered nuclear furnace that’s normally on the inside of the sun was on the outside, and all the flares and expanding gas were in the middle, not that I know how that would even work. What I mean is that the entire sky was a vivid orange, like the orange of a setting sun, and all slightly hard to look at. I followed the glance of the was/wasn’t-man, and there, dipping down toward the horizon, was a sun-sized circle of dark blue sky. The wind blew past me, transparent streamers of red and gold, almost invisible, but not quite. I held up my fingers and the breeze broke into eddies around them. The bench walked three feet left, giving us a different view of the skyset. A better one, I decided.
“You’re not on drugs,” said wasn’t-man.
“Excuse me?” I said. Was he reading my mind?
“And I’m not reading your mind. That’s impossible.”
“Right,” I said.
Was-man did/didn’t lean back casually on the park bench. We were sitting on a park bench. In a park. On a hill. “It’s just,” he said, “that most people who come here are confused, and they assume they’re on drugs or some medication gone bad, and they’re not, and when I tell them that, they ask me if I’m reading their minds.”
“Which would be impossible,” I said.
“You catch on quickly,” he said.
“Do you mind if I ask a question?” I had several, but I thought I’d start with one and see how it went, then move on from there.
“Absolutely,” said would-be-man. “It’s your dream.”
“Oh,” I said. “I think that answers my question.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he didn’t say. “It’s not just your dream. It’s yours and a lot of other people’s. And that’s why the sky is inside out.”
“And you can’t read minds.”
“Of course not.”
“Is everyone here as confusing as you?”
“Is that your question?”
“Wait!” I said, suddenly panicked. “I’m not sure yet.”
Possible-man smiled just a few minutes ago. “Don’t worry,” he said, amused. “You can ask me as many questions as you want. It’s not like I’m a phone booth.”
That caught me off guard, and I managed to stutter out something about no one mistaking him for a phone booth.
“Obviously,” he said. “I’m much more friendly. And give unlimited answers.”
There was a lull in the conversation while I rubbed my face and tried to figure things out. I was sitting, as I mentioned, on a bench in a park on a hill, trees scattered around in clumps, grass in all the in-between places. It was a surprisingly high hill, good for sledding if there had been snow and I didn’t mind crashing into a parked row of cars at the bottom. Beyond the grass and past the cars was a city.
The City, I guess, since maybe-man seemed to have said it with capital letters. It looked like how I imagined New York—a mix of townhouses, streets, and skyscrapers—but not quite as crowded. It was immense. It stretched for miles, wrapped through with suspended highways and elevated train tracks, nothing quite the way I would have designed it. Billboards and water towers capped buildings, and cars lined the streets, but there were no people that I could see. And no traffic. And no noise.
“It’s quiet,” I said.
“It’s still early,” he might have said. “You taking a nap?”
“Yeah. I think so.” I tried to think back, but it was foggy. “Last thing I remember is falling on my bed, face first. I hope I took off my glasses.”
“Rough day?”
“Every day is a rough day,” I said, laughing a wry laugh. I hadn’t looked up ‘wry’ in the dictionary recently, but I was pretty sure it covered the type of laugh I was laughing. “If this is a dream, I can be frank, right? And I won’t offend you?”
“Well, you won’t offend me,” said nobody, but I wasn’t listening very well.
“My life sucks. And blows, though I don’t know how a life can do both at the same time.”
“Is school hard?” he asked-ish.
“Hard? Seriously? No, school isn’t hard. I’m probably one of the five smartest people in my high school, and that’s including the teachers. School is not hard.”
“Rough home life?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “My parents come to every choir concert and my sisters are nice. I mean, mostly nice.”
“Girl troubles, then?”
I snorted. “Yeah. I wish. No, girl troubles are not the issue.”
“Then what is?”
I shook my head again, aware that I was, but not having a real reason for it. “I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. It’s like my entire life is messed up and nobody else can see it. I’m the Emperor, and everyone is pretending I have clothes on, but I know I don’t. I know I’m naked.”
“That’s from a Hans Christian Anderson story, right?” he did…n’t ask.
“Yeah.”
“And these thieves convince the Emperor he’s wearing clothes that only wise people can see, but he’s not wearing anything?”
“Again, yeah.”
“Okay,” nodded isn’t-there, not nodding. “I’m up to speed now.”
“And,” I said, pushing ahead as the sky sunk further, starting to dip below the horizon, “I can’t seem to talk about it with anyone. They don’t get it. They see my grades and my family and my PSAT scores and think nothing could possibly be wrong. And the thing is, they’re right. What is wrong with my life? Nothing. I’ve never been hungry for more than a few hours, never had to survive an earthquake, never lived through a war. My dog died when I was a kid, but they took him to the vet and put him down quietly, and if that’s caused me some sort of life-long trauma, then I’m even more of a loser than I think I am.”
“I think-don’t-think you’re a loser,” said man-question.
“Th…anks?” I said.
“Any time.”
“So with my perfect life, how do I tell anybody that I’m going crazy? That it’s like I’m always wearing this wool coat, and it’s always wet, and it’s so stinkin’ heavy I might as well be in training for some sporting event that…requires sitting around in a classroom wearing a heavy, wet wool coat. That metaphor didn’t work.”
“Also,” added uncertainly-man, “I thought you were naked.”
“Not the point,” I said. “The point is that I—”
“Are you wearing it now?” he interrupted.
“Wearing what?”
“The wet coat.”
I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised. “I…feel good.”
And I did. The coat was gone. I took a deep breath as I looked up at the purple sun covering the sky. I said it again. I said it loud.
“I FEEL GOOD!”
“Welcome to the City,” said was-wasn’t-man.
I stood up and stretched, looking around in my new freedom. Freedom to move. I felt like running someplace, and I don’t like running. I noticed a river behind me, down past the sweep of the hill away from the skyset. At first glance it was water, at second glance it was faces and horses and shouting and tumbling bodies and ring-around-the-rosie, and on third glance it was water again. I think my eyes got large. The river swept around the edge of the City as far as I could see, and on the other side of the river were fields of nothing. Really nothing, not nothing like the guy sitting next to me. Seriously nothing-nothing. I sat down again.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Is that your question?” said will-be-man, and he laughed. “Sorry. That joke never gets old for me. I told you, it’s the City.”
“What city?”
“The City of Dreams, of course.”
“Should I have known that?” I asked.
“Well…you are dreaming.”
“And what’s that river?”
“Dreams. And a river. Rivers are tricky that way, but don’t worry. Everything in the City is stable, relatively speaking. You won’t dissolve. Just don’t go swimming.”
“Will swimming hurt me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why warn me?”
“Better safe than sorry.”
I tried—again—to get a good look at him, and I thought I caught a bit of dark hair, but it wasn’t much, and then it wasn’t at all.
“Do you have a name?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have introduced myself. Sometimes I forget introductions. It’s a flaw of mine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Thanks for being understanding,” he said.
We sat in silence and the sky set even further, disappearing behind the buildings of the City. I took a deep breath. It felt good. And I waited. Finally I stopped waiting.
“So?” I said.
“So what?”
“What’s your name?”
“Didn’t I say it? I’m sorry, I sometimes forget introductions.”
“Right. Are you going to tell me now?”
“I’m not,” he said and didn’t say.
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure, but I do know that I’m not.”
“I thought you said you’d answer my questions.”
“No, no,” he said, not shaking his head. “I’m Not. That’s my name: Not.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course it is. And what are you?”
“I’m a leftover dream. I must have been a big one, but I’m not entirely sure what. Someone wanted to be me, I think. I’m pretty sure I’m not a nightmare, though that’s not exactly how things work here.”
“What isn’t?”
The bench moved us fifteen feet to the right, giving us a last glimpse of the sky disappearing between two skyscrapers.
“It’s not like someone has a nightmare about an ugly gorilla in a banana suit, and suddenly everyone here in the City has to deal with a banana suit and it’s accompanying gorilla. The interaction is much more complex. Lots of dreams coming in here. It’s more like the City is influenced by the tides of the collective human subconscious.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty Jungian.”
“You’ve read Jung?” he asked.
“About Jung.”
“That’s a good start.”
“Why do you know about Jung?” I asked.
“Maybe someone wanted to be a psychiatrist. What’s yours?”
“My what?”
“Your name.”
“Oh, right. I’m Perry. Perry Crows.”
“Crows? That’s quite the last name.”
“We think it might have been Polish and then they changed it at immigration.”
The sky had fully set and the sun had faded to black. In its place, across one edge of the dome of the sky, a massive sliver of the moon dominated the night. Stars clustered and chased beneath the light of a waxing crescent—at least I assumed it was waxing, though I suppose East and West probably weren’t fixed concepts in here. Lights across the City flickered to life. The bench underneath us stretched and shook itself slightly, a curious feeling under my bottom. Down the hill a patch of glowing flowers, blue and silver, crept out of the shelter of a grove of trees, moving in a herd. A five-story brownstone rubbed one shoulder against a neighbor and aimed a satellite dish on its roof. Sounds of a television floated up to me along with something like a sigh as the building settled down again.
“This is very odd,” I said.
“This is a place of wonder,” said Not. “I’m glad you came.”
“Are there any other people here?” I asked. Part of me was curious why he would be glad I was there, but I put the question aside for the moment. I was feeling slightly creeped out by the lack of real people around.
“Here? Oh, goodness, no. They’re far too smart for that. The Hill is wild territory. Too many undomesticated constructs around. And the flowers are pushy.”
“The flowers?” I looked down the hill towards the delicate looking crowd of blue and silver. Those flowers were soon joined by a scattering of yellow and white blossoms, along with a large swath of orange. It had become quite the…bouquet? That, and they were all moving up the hill towards me. For some reason I was reminded of a herd of high school football players, and not the nice ones who actually talked to me and took advanced mathematics. “What do the flowers want?” I asked.
“Food,” said Not. “But don’t worry. I’m pretty sure you’re about to wake up.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m Not,” he said. “Sure.”
“You’re very confusing,” I said.
“Better hurry, Percy. Dinner’s already over…”
“…but we saved you some,” said my oldest sister, Diana.
“You’re sitting on me,” I said, rolling my face away from the wet spot on my pillow. I had, it seemed, remembered at some point to take off my glasses, though I couldn’t remember where I put them.
“I’m only sitting on your legs, I couldn’t get you to wake up any other way, and I am extremely light.”
“Then why can’t I feel anything in my le—oof!”
“I said, I am extremely light.”
“Feathers envy you,” I said.
“Thank you,” said Diana, standing up and off of me. “It’s just spaghetti, but Dad put Italian sausage in the sauce, so it’s good, and no, we didn’t pick out all the sausage. Hurry, though, because cross country is doing funny things to Cindy’s appetite and she threatened a return to the kitchen. The fifteen-year-old strikes back!”
“I’ll go now,’ I said, sitting up. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” Diana left my room, taking her piles of blond hair with her. She was twenty and cute and happy.
She left me alone. I was sixteen and pleasant looking and not quite happy. I let my hands sit in my lap. The freedom I had felt in the City was gone. I suppose I should have expected it. It was a dream, after all. A very, very real dream, but still a dream, and a person always wakes up from dreams.
I was awake. And I was wearing the coat again. It was heavy.
I pushed myself up out of bed with my hands and went downstairs to find some spaghetti.
