The City of Dreams -- Part 16

[A slightly shorter section, and a few days late, but now that I'm writing again I need to get selling Fat Tony. It's time. He's close enough to sell-able that I should be getting query letters out there. So don't try to stop me, Smee. Smee, I said don't try to stop me. Smee!

[Sigh. Off I go to relearn how to query.]



I wasn't surly during English, but I was close.  Close enough that Mike wold have called me surly, so I just kept my mouth shut. You might be surprised at how often that works: I feel like taking a foam bat and hitting anyone on the head that tries to talk to me, but I don't show it because I keep my mouth shut. That way people don't know that I'm nuts; they just think I'm in a bad mood.
Brie ate lunch with us again. It was fine, in a fine sort of way. Not too good, not too bad, just fine. Brie and I sat sort of close to each other, and she talked with Sook and Mike, and I wondered where all my funny went. I made a mental note to go home and look around for it. My mom might have cleaned my room and put my funny away someplace that I didn't usually keep it. Yeah, that was definitely it.
Sook was happy enough about something that she didn't bother waiting for me to say anything on the way to biology, so I slipped through the rest of the day without having to say anything coherent to anyone else.  (The biology teacher did ask me a question, and I answered it, but honestly, what high school teacher really expects a coherent answer from a student after lunch? Whatever I said, it passed for then.)
Cindy and Tamara made the ride home another place where I could shut up and listen, and I found out that there is significantly more drama on a cross country team than I would have thought. It seemed slightly like a soap opera, except that I've never actually seen a soap opera, and no one on the cross country team had lost their memory in a freak accident.  Except for that, though, I was pretty sure it was exactly alike.
At home I hid in my room. I didn't eat anything, just slipped straight up the stairs. It was slightly discouraging to think that my moods were so predictable that my sisters didn't even try to invite me to do anything. I couldn't blame them, since I'd consistently turned down any invitation for anything for the last three months, but I didn't like what that said about me. Where was I going with my life?
To bed, apparently. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. Why didn't I have any posters up there? In fact, I didn't have any posters anywhere. No paintings, no crayon drawings. I used to have maps from three major fantasy novels--the made up kind of map, that may or may not realistically show the made up world, and that has more consonants and apostrophes than can fit in one mouth--but I'd taken those down during the summer and hadn't replaced them. I'd had some vague idea of getting real pictures, but I'd never figured out what, and then I'd stopped thinking about it.
My life was a mess.

I woke up in the city, the sun bright and immense overhead making it hard to squint at the circle of sky that was settling its way towards the west. I was sitting on a bench again and the street was quiet around me, though I couldn't get a good view of it. The world under the heavy sun was too much, overexposed like an artsy film, everything too white and too bright.
I had to do something about it, but I wasn't sure how someone found a hat in the City. Maybe if Big Ben's market were close, but with EVERYTHING backlit by the sun, it was impossible to tell if one of the buildings rising into the sky around me were actually a clock tower.
"You're asleep early," said Not. "Are you sick?"
"Probably," I said, "though I don't have a cold or anything. My waking life is a disaster."
"That's too bad," said the abandoned dream. "I'm glad you're here, though. I wanted to talk."
"Can't you talk with other people?"
"Other people don't always see me."
"Father Thomas saw you."
"I think he's used to looking for abandoned dreams."
I thought about that. It seemed reasonable, so I just shrugged. "I'm fine with talking, but I need to find some shade, or a hat, or an umbrella, or something. That sun is killing me."
"What about those sunglasses?"
"Which?" I asked.
"The ones hanging on your shirt."
I lifted my hand to my chest and my fingers bumped into glasses. I looked down.
"What do you know," I said.
"Was that a question?" asked Not.
"I don't think so," I said. "The City is a very strange place."  My hand jumped up to my face. "I'm not wearing glasses!"
"Do you usually wear glasses?"
"All the time. Otherwise I can't tell the time from across the room, and taking notes in class would be impossible."
"Is taking notes important?" asked Not.
I thought about that one. "Not really," I said.
"Then why do you need glasses?"
"There are other things worth seeing in the world."
"Like what?"
"Lots of things. But I'm putting on these glasses and then we're talking about whatever it is you want to talk about." I put on the sunglasses and hoped Not wouldn't press me too hard on what was worth seeing when I was awake. All I could think of was things I wanted to see when I was asleep--the strange dome of the sky, the plants and light posts that acted more like animals, the people all a little bit odd. I realized that I liked this place. The City was becoming comfortable, and if Not really wanted to know what was worth putting on my glasses for in the waking world, I wasn't sure I had a good answer.
The sunglasses were a welcome relief, cutting the light of the too-close sun down to manageable levels, leaving an amber-colored world in place of the silvered world of nighttime in the City.
"Should we talk here?" I asked, "Or do you mind walking?"
"I don't mind," said Not.
"Let's go then. I want to see more of the City during the day."
I stood up, looked around, and didn't see anything I recognized, even with the shade for my eyes that the sunglasses provided.
"Which way?" asked Not.
I closed my eyes, turned myself around a couple times, and pointed straight ahead.
"That way," I said.
"That's going to be a short walk," said my companion.
I opened my eyes, looked at the blank wall that was fit in between the doors and windows of sleeping buildings. I closed my eyes and spun again. "I meant that way." I opened my eyes and saw open road ahead of me. "Yep. That way."
We started walking. At least I started walking. I couldn't tell if Not walked, or hovered, or coalesced, and after a few seconds trying to get a good look at him I gave up. Again.
"I can never look at you straight," I said.
"That's funny," said Not. "I can't look at me either. I wonder if it's some kind of medical condition."
"You don't know about glasses, but you know about medical conditions?"
"Maybe whoever dreamed me wanted to be a doctor."
"Not an eye doctor, I'm guessing."
"Probably not," agreed Not.
We strolled down the street, empty of people but with the occasional parked and snoring car, sedate street light, and imobile cluster of flowers-in-a-planter. The City was quiet, but surprisingly cool, even with the sun so massive overhead. Warm, but not burning away like an apocalyptic movie.
"What did you want to talk about?" I asked.
"I've been trying to figure out what I am," said the dream.
"Besides the obvious?"
"Besides that. I know I'm an abandoned dream, but I don't know whose, or what I'm supposed to be."
"Any guesses?" I asked.
"I wondered if I might be your dream," said Not.
"What?"
"Consider," he said, seriously. "Finding you is easy, where I can only guess where other people are when they come to the City. You can see me, while it's hit or miss whether other dreamers even notice I exist. And it seems like you've lost a dream."
"I have not," I said. Had I? Not didn't say anything, so I was left to think. Certainly not as painful an experience as when I was awake, but not something I necessarily had in my top five list of things to do in the City.
Could Not be my abandoned dream? We certainly were together a lot, but I didn't know if that meant anything--who knew what anything 'meant' in this crazy place? Add to that, I'd only come here a few times, but it seemed like Not had been coming for a while before I ever arrived. Did that make it less likely he was my abandoned dream, or more likely?
"If you were my dream," I asked, "how would we tell? I mean, really, how would we figure it out?"
"I have no idea," said Not. "Maybe you could tell me what kind of person you want to be, or what things you want to do, and I could tell you if I'm that kind of dream. If I fill in the blank parts of your life, then I'm your dream."
"But I don't know what the blank parts are! I don't know what I want to be. I don't know what I want to do. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be coming to the City."
"That's a tuffy," said Not.
I turned a corner at random and walked down another sleeping street. "What's a tuffy?" I asked.
"How do you look for something when you don't know what's missing?"
"Exactly," I said. "And when I'm here in the City, it doesn't feel like anything's missing."
"That's because I'm here," said Not. "You've found your dream!"
"But what are you?" I asked.
"I don't know," he answered.
"So why does it help that I've found you?"
"Still don't know," he said.
I started laughing and shook my head. "Maybe you really are my dream. I'm just as bad at figuring things out with you as I am without you."
"Maybe we should ask someone," said Not.
"Who? No one is asleep at this time of day."
"Mr. Punctilious is."
"Really? How do you know?"
"Mr. Punctilious is always asleep."
I blinked.  I didn't know what to make of that.
"Let's go," said Not. "I think he's this way."