The first dream went like this:
I was on a suburban street, watching a motorcycle drive by,
when I looked down and was confronted by a scene of pure menace. A pack of huge
dogs, grim and silent, had killed a smaller dog. They surrounded the small, red
carcass and tore at it with a silent and unnerving brutality. I took a step
towards them, trying to frighten the big dogs away, but they turned to me and
fixed me with dead-eyed stares. I shrank away.
A few months later, it seemed that everyone had had a
similar dream. Details differed, but in all of them: a pack of huge dogs
hunting small dogs; ripping them apart; always silent, always suffused with a
carnivorous dread.
Mal’s version of the dream, as he told it to me, was by his
parents’ house—their neighbor was walking his poodle and had been knocked down.
The terrified poodle tried to run away, but was trapped by the leash, still
held in the neighbor’s hand. It strained against the leash, yelping in terror
as the larger dogs bore down on it. Mal had watched as one dog wrenched the
poodle’s leg off, stunned at how vividly red it was.
“I don’t even know if I’ve ever dreamed in color before”.
We were sitting at a bar and catching up, as we tried to do
once every two weeks or so. Talking about mutual friends from high school,
about our jobs; whatever.
Mal’d had the dream only two nights before, and he still
looked haunted and tired.
“I barely slept last night”, he told me, reaching for his
pint. “Honestly, I was scared I’d dream it again”.
I told him that I’d had the dream only once, months ago, and
it hadn’t come back.
“I suppose. Still, I’ve talked to some people at work. A bunch
of them have had pretty much the same dream. And some of them have had it
twice. One guy said his sister in law had it every night, three or four nights
in a row”.
“Jesus”.
“Yeah, exactly”.
I picked up my glass, to interrupt the conversation. Trying to
steer it in a new direction. Trying to keep my voice neutral, I asked, “Have
you heard from Eleanor at all lately?”
“No, still not. It’s been almost a year since I’ve heard
from her. I think she’s still down south, but I wouldn’t know. She hasn’t been
all that open when we’ve spoken anyway”.
I at least felt a little bit ashamed by my relief that I
wasn’t the only one Eleanor was stonewalling. I felt truly pathetic.
“The same with me”, I said. “She doesn’t really say much
even when she does talk”.
“Well”, said Mal, “I guess we weren’t that close, even back
in school, so mostly I just try and keep a little bit in touch”.
Again trying to force any hint of over-concern from my
voice, I said, “Well, we were pretty close, I think. Anyway, we hung out a lot.
I guess it just happens though. Life forces you apart”.
Months passed. After a while, the dog dreams faded. Mal and
I kept meeting: going for drinks after work, walking through the park near his
house; every so often one of us going to the other’s apartment. Even though he
was by all reasonable measures my best friend, neither of us were the type to
really meet on personal ground. We preferred neutral space; and neutral topics
of conversation.
After a while, rumors started: more dreams. Again, the
shared dream was violent. Mal told me his as we walked through the park. It was
early summer, just before it really starts to swelter. We met after work, but
even with the sun low in the sky, it was uncomfortably hot.
“I was out walking”, Mal told me as we wound along a narrow
gravel path threaded between the trees, “when I saw a guy lying out in front of
his house. I got closer, and saw his head was covered in blood. I don’t know
how it happened.”
We walked past a baseball diamond, and I heard the ‘clink’
of a metal bat driving a softball.
“Anyway”, Mal continued, “anyway, I didn’t notice what
happened next, but suddenly I was helping this guy into his house, and his wife
is just frantic. The phone is ringing, it’s chaotic in there, I can barely tell
what’s happening. Finally, I manage to get him down to his basement and sit him
down, when I hear this—this just tremendous banging from upstairs. Things
crashing, glass breaking, maybe some screaming, I don’t even know. And the next
thing, there’s a group of five or six guys down in the basement with us. I
don’t know if they wanted something, or what.
You know how, in a dream, you sometimes get these feelings
but you can’t really explain where they come from? Like you’re reading the
stage directions, that tell you things not in the actual script? I sort of had
that feeling: that these guys were here to steal something, but also, more
importantly, to just break things. Fuck shit up. Fuck people up, really.
And here I am, with this bloodied-up guy behind me,
completely out of it, facing down a gang of, I don’t know, thugs?”
He looked at me as if confused. “Thugs isn’t a good word.
It’s like ‘no-goodnik’; it’s a word that sounds tough only to old people. No
one uses it; at least, no one uses it to talk about someone actually
threatening.
But these guys, I could tell, were mean. So I look around
and all I can find to defend myself with is a baseball bat. I mean, I’ve never
hit someone in my life. What do I know what to do with a baseball bat? I’ve
never played baseball either. And I know they can tell that about me: that I’m
soft. An easy target. And they start closing in on me.”
Mal had a haunted look, and he didn’t resume. I decided not
to press him, and after walking for a while in silence, we eventually managed
to turn to other topics.
I knew though, as everyone by now probably did, that Mal
wasn’t the only one with such dreams. Nor the only one so affected by them. The
newspaper spared a few column inches for the story of a little girl who had
developed bruises after suffering a dream much like Mal’s: an armed gang had
assaulted her piano teacher, and she had intervened.
As the days and nights grew hotter, it seemed the city
became more tense. It had an antic, nervous energy to it; a rawness. Cruelty
blossomed spontaneously in the streets. There was a shooting near the bar where
Mal and I sometimes drank—one dead, blasted apart by three shots. The killer
wasn’t found.
According to the mayor and the police chief, certain
seditious elements had been distributing propaganda of a violent and disturbing
nature; the usual Christian groups felt that violence in the media was to
blame. Two of my co-workers got into a fight over whether it was communists or
terrorists who had worked our normally placid city into such a frothing rage.
Conciliatory, I tried to suggest that maybe it was communist terrorists? The
looks they gave me convinced me to mind my own business.
By the end of summer, everyone was on edge—we breathed in
naked aggression like humidity in the air. My back teeth ached from constant
grinding; from setting them always on edge. We lived in a dry powder keg, and
it felt like only the punishing humidity kept it from sparking.
When next I saw Mal, he looked terrible. He was thin—not that
he had been fat before, but he looked shrink-wrapped now. He was pale, and his
eyes were red-rimmed. Later, I found out he was barely sleeping. Every night,
without fail, he was visited—plagued—by the same dream. A condition he shared
with some two thousand or so other citizens: the dream was identical, those who
shared it were sure, even though it was maddeningly difficult to describe it:
A sense of striving—like
an insect boring through the soil—a drumbeat, insistent, driving conviction
that movement was what mattered—upward—forward—a thousand, million legs scuttling in unison like the oars
on a Viking longboat thrusting through dark, mutinous waves in search of
plunder—and beneath it all, a challenge—a
glove across a complacent face, daring you to fall in line, to march to the
drumbeat. If. If you would give in to
the overwhelming impulse to exertion, to effort—what might be done?
Waking up disoriented and sweaty, in a dark room, heart
still pounding—the details already fading but not the sense of urgency behind
it; the sense of a psychic call-to-arms, aimed at the darkest parts of the
soul.
But I didn’t know anything about that at the time. Mal spoke
vaguely, and our conversation rattled about to no great effect, like a single
gumball inside a too-large jar. We parted listlessly, but I remember being
chilled by how Mal delivered his farewell: “Stay safe.”
Not long after that, the fuse on our powder keg lit.
According to an emergency press conference given by the
mayor, “certain agitators” were at work—members of a nihilistic cult, devoted
to death, reveling in bloodshed. “They seek to tear apart the bonds that keep
us together. We will show them that we are better than that.” The police chief
spoke beside a picture of a young man, the alleged leader of the alleged cult,
both nameless. The picture was at odds with the crimes the young man was
supposed to have committed, or inspired: his face was young, and soft. He
looked like a teenager trying to look tough. The face was too chubby to be
grim, but not fat enough to be grotesque. His up-coiffed hair looked like a pop
star’s. As summer rolled into autumn, and each fresh atrocity rolled in, I
would try and imagine this face to reconcile it to the latest outrage, always
unsuccessfully.
Time passed, and no end to the crimes. Knife attacks on the
subway—a 9-11 call; in reality an ambush—two girls tied their friend’s dog in a
sack with rocks, and dropped it in the river. An endless parade of horrors. I
work up each morning with a pit of dread in my stomach, a slow nausea tugging
at my insides. Through all this time, I had no word from Mal.
So I was surprised to receive a phone call from him in late
September: “Jason, hey. I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for a while, but I’d
like to see you.”
“Sure, I could use a night out. How’ve you been? When’s a
good time for you? And where do you want to meet?”
“To be honest, it’s not been a great few months for me. But
I’ll tell you about that when we meet. Are you free tomorrow?”
I was; unwilling to go out alone, I spent most nights at
home alone, reading. “Yes, tomorrow is fine. Where do you want to go? Doyle’s?
Do you want to grab some drinks?”
“Actually”—he spoke slowly, as if hesitant to broach the
suggestion—“I was wondering if you’d mind coming to a”—a pause—“friend’s house.”
He continued after a moment, “I think you’d be interested in
him.”
This was so unlike Mal that I didn’t believe I had
understood. Other than our shared group of friends in high school, I had not
known Mal to have any friends. And most of those had drifted away by now; other
than occasional e-mails from Eleanor, his interactions with colleagues at work,
and whatever contact he had with his family, I did not believe that Mal spoke
to other human beings at all. I was too shocked to do anything other than
agree: “Yes, that sounds fine.” Curiosity alone made this impossible to turn
down.
“Great, I can pick you up and drive there. You don’t need to
bring anything, and I don’t imagine we’ll stay late. I can get you from your
place around 6.”
The next day, Mal picked me up as agreed in his ten-year-old
Honda. I got in beside him, but after saying our ‘hello’s, we drove in silence.
I was nervous, and I imagine Mal was self-conscious; small-talk with him always
felt forced.
Twenty minutes later we pulled up at a small house in a
suburb west of downtown. It was getting dark by then, and the overgrown garden
gave the low, white structure a fairy-tale aspect. It was a little sinister as
well, set far back from the road as it was. Most of the windows were dark, but
on the lower floor it was clear that lights were on in a room deeper in the
house. The door and the windows were dark blue, and an ivy reached around from
the left side of the house to wrap around an upper-story window.
I stepped out of the car into the fresh autumn air; heard
the ‘click’ of the car door shutting. We approached the house, crunching the
gravel of the drive under our feet. Mal knocked loudly; the door opened and we
were ushered inside by a man who greeted Mal with a nod. I was completely
ignored. We walked down a passageway past a few closed doors and into a kitchen
that I would describe as gracefully shabby: it was untidy, all the furniture
was clearly past its prime. Even with all the lights on, the room was dim; the
corners seemed to drink up the light. Pots and pans cluttered the counter that
ran along a far wall; two benches set on either side of a long table that took
up the centre of the room. Upon the benches were perched five people, two men
and three women; it seemed they had been interrupted by our arrival. I could
feel them waiting for us, so they could continue with some conversation. The
man who had ushered us in gestured to the benches before sitting down himself.
At the head of the table stood a man with short blond hair,
of medium height and a slight build. Mal went over to the man and they
exchanged some words I didn’t hear, before Mal waved me around the table to
come join them. This then, must be Mal’s friend.
“Jason”, Mal said giving me a significant look, as if
willing me to receive some telepathic communication from him, “this is Gideon.”
I reached out to take his hand; I looked into Gideon’s eyes, and prepared to
mouth a “pleased to meet you” when I felt an electric shock run through me. My
guts clenched and ice ran through my veins. I had been blind not to recognize ‘Gideon’
from across the room. The hair was shorter, and the mens’ clothing had perhaps
misdirected me, but the blue eyes and the oval face were unmistakable. Eleanor.
Mal steered me away before I could say anything, and so I
stewed in my confusion as we took our seats on the bench. I supposed this was
what Mal had wanted me to infer from his look: don’t say a fucking word.
My head felt like it had been invaded by a swarm of locusts.
I had not seen Eleanor in years, nor had any word from her recently. I had no
idea what she had been doing in the south. I had imagined (fantasized is
probably the truer word) what it would be like to see her again. But to see her
here, like this; no longer Eleanor but ‘Gideon’—the shock was too much. I had
been trying to regain control over my twisting stomach and buzzing head for
half a minute before I noticed a low voice talking, and realized it was ‘Gideon’.
The voice was lower than the voice I remembered, but not quite masculine. I
tried to push down the emotional surge threatening to overwhelm me and listen:
“—have all felt it; the rallying call”, Gideon said. “You
are here because you were sensitive enough to hear it, and curious, or perhaps
brave enough to heed it. You are here because we face a deadly enemy—an enemy,
inspired, like you, by forces they do not understand and cannot face directly.
An enemy that has perched on our city like an unfelt, unseen spider: injecting
its venom, liquefying its prey quietly.”
Gideon looked around the room, meeting each of our gazes. I
almost looked away, but steeled myself to look into those eyes, less familiar
than they should have been. I saw no recognition in them.
We sat in silence for a moment, and then: “I will not lie to
you. It may already be too late. There may be nothing we can do. The poison may
already have reached the heart. But we are nothing if we do not try to stop it.
Less than nothing.” I squirmed in my seat a little.
