Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams.
I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man’s legs swell and he didn’t want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season.
As we spoke my smartphone gathered time beside undercooked bacon. Recording a voice I’d listen to speak these words once and never again. This is the nature of the news and the people who write it. We fill our notes with memories and chronicle a world that grew so fast it forgot how to stop and remember.
I ask the man if he believes in dream analysis, and he tells me when he sleeps on his back he sees faces in the colors. People he met when he served jury duty in Greenfield three years before. I don’t know their names or anything about them, he told me.
The day aged through the pollen-painted window. Buzzards circled above the bridge across the river to the rust-lined highway to Boston. The man fingered the bacon on his plate.
Oh, he said. We sent a boy to jail for murder.
Outside the diner the man asked me if I’d put him in my story. I told him it’s up to my editor. I didn’t know if that was true but when I don’t know something I appeal to some faceless power.
We shook hands and he asked me what I dream about. I told him reporters should never become part of the story. He laughed and said, No, really. Tell me.
I told him when I dream about the places I used to live, they look nothing like those places, but in the dream it’s all real and true, that I know those places like I do the people I’ve loved. Every place in my dreams has a road leading north.
I thank him for his time. You’re from around here, he said.
Not really, I said.
The man got in his car and backed into a fire hydrant. Water gushed like blood from a torn-off thumb. Then he turned the car around and gunned it against the hydrant. His engine sobbed. I took pictures with my phone but they were all blurred, out of focus, smeared with light. Faces filled the windows around us, some I knew, faces angry and entertained, faces of why now, of not this again, of I get it, man, I really fucking do.
&
The paper assigned me to cover a recent wave of carjackings. Not the carburetor thefts. They told me that was a different beat, and that we’d talk about pay when I had something good.
As I waited at the light on Avenue E one morning a woman opened my passenger door, flashed a ten-dollar utility knife, and told me to drive.
Where? I asked.
South, she said.
I gassed it. A pollen-clouded patrol car was parked outside the gun store at the intersection. A cop, leaning against the door, didn’t look up from his phone.
We left town. Drove past restaurants, gas stations, farms. All for sale. The butterfly sanctuary was closed for repairs. Further south a line of cars waited to park at a brewery. Food trucks belched steam and a couple locked arms on the grass. I nearly collided with the car ahead of us.
Watch it, said the woman.
Sorry, I said.
The woman told me to take the highway. We inched through Sunday construction. Men clustered by potholes and idle machines. I wondered if any of them looked inside my car and confused us for husband and wife. I told her this.
Don’t say that, she said. She checked her phone and was on the verge of tears.
Her directions were more forceful now. The ramp past Deerfield, left, right, left. Take it slow down this street. Look for a truck with no bumper. Apple red.
The same, the woman said. The same.
She was out of the car before I parked. The woman sprinted, slipped and shouted up the angled drive and flung open the garage door. Two men fucked on a yoga mat, free weights and kettlebells and gym clothes abandoned around them. A radio spewed dad rock on a chair. The woman grabbed one of the men by the hair and tugged. The men broke apart, their passion fissioned to sweat and rage.
I see you, the woman screamed at one of the men. He didn’t seem angry or shocked. Calm, almost, as if this was expected, predicted, even welcome. No one said anything. Just frozen acknowledgement, where no words suffice to explain how the resolution of tension causes both pleasure and pain.
Then the woman shoved me back to the car. Pushing tears back into her eyes as she moved. Drive, she whispered.
South I drove again. Small mountains rose as if the world was teething. We approached the tallest, one I’d climbed before blind-drunk on a snowy, lonely night. I hooked an observation road and shot past hikers too weary for the steep rock path. My legs ached from the long sit.
At the peak we got out and gazed across the valley and the towns and the curves of the green-brown Connecticut River.
I dreamed about this, said the woman.
What do you mean? I asked.
I saw my husband. Driving there. I felt how happy he was. How that garage felt more like home than ours.
How did the dream end? I asked.
The woman rocked back and forth, hands in her pockets.
Like this, she said.
What do you mean? I asked.
I forced you to drive at knifepoint. When we arrived I forgot my knife in the car. My husband chose someone else. Then we drove up this mountain. Then I woke up.
We said nothing for a while. A prop plane flew above us in a circle and then turned north, against the wind.
Then the woman said, The way my husband felt. That love inside him. That deep, physical love. I’ll never forget.
Then she said, I don’t have any money.
We drove back to town under a rose-gold sky. There are no sunsets anywhere like those in western Massachusetts. I wondered if I had the right to tell this story, or if everything was off the record, or whether these things even matter when you’re a witness against your will.
As we turned onto Avenue E the woman pressed her knife against my neck.
Wallet, she said. Then, more softly, she said, Please.
She took thirty bucks and a gas station gift card and the picture of my nephew, then tossed the wallet in my lap and stepped out into the street.
&
The paper laid me off on the fifth of July.
In June we covered bridge repair delays, unaffordable homes, church fires, community musicals, childhood illiteracy. Covered births, deaths and arrests. Covered sickness, hope and happiness. We covered the war, and then they shut us down.
Some private equity barons out in Boston coveted the land beneath our office. I had an hour to clear the city desk I shared with three other journalists. One week’s severance. Benefits ’til the end of the month.
I asked my editor what to do with my half-finished story about a man who’d drowned in the river. He was a local, an institution, a bellwether figure. Sought your change outside the sandwich shop. Bought milk and bread from the communist theater group on the corner of Avenue G. Once, he told me a story about being a judo champion in California and as he spoke he hand-chopped the air and winced and bore his teeth, but he seemed proud to remember those moves. Ben. Ben Armstrong. I’d written his name on a notepad and circled it in red ink.
Forget it, my editor told me. We were close in the way you become when you deal with the constant mess of private lives, because that’s what local news is, a constant mess bursting into public, ordered and shaped by writers and publishers. But I knew next to nothing about him, his family, what he wanted, how he saw himself, here, at the end. But it was too late to ask. I watched him slide a half-dozen reams of untouched paper into his backpack and step nervously out into the light on the sidewalk outside our office.
On the bathroom wall I wrote in permanent marker The News Was Here. Then I pissed, didn’t flush, and left with some notebooks and pens.
At home, I caught up on my drinking. Shouted at hummingbirds. Built a castle of beer cans on the back porch and staggered through its walls before a midweek thunderstorm could blow it down.
Mostly I slept. My blanket gathered cat hair as I moved from bed to floor to couch like some forgotten, guilt-soaked king. I wondered whether the stories I told really mattered. If they changed the world or changed someone’s mind. If any sort of story matters when a story must make noise, provoke, and never repeat.
My mother, a man’s voice said from beside the couch one day.
It was the man from the diner. He gripped his legs with thick, red hands. Like many men who lived in town, he seemed on the verge of explosion. His eyes darted between the brown houseplants on the windowsills.
Then he said, That’s who I see in the summer when I sleep.
That’s not a color, I said.
She is, he said. Like this.
The man pinched his arm and then held it close to me. His arm shook and a small spot bloomed red then purple-brown. The ease of his bruise scared me and I wanted to tell someone about it.
I loved her but she, well, you know, said the man.
The man’s arm kept shaking.
Then the man said, Someone can love you and still do terrible things. Like nobody taught them how to do it right.
Yeah, I said.
I rolled over and listened as the man watched me and breathed.
Am I asleep? the man asked.
I think I am, I said.
No, said the man. I’m asleep. And I really don’t want to be. I want to wake up.
I turned back toward him and then said, Sometimes when I want to wake up I open my eyes as wide as they’ll go. Sometimes if I do it enough I can break through the sleep and escape.
The man tried it. The valleys beneath his eyes turned the color of plums. He used his fingers to stretch the skin like he was trying to release air from inside his head.
It’s not working, he said.
I’m sorry.
Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep?
I don’t know.
Please wake me up. Please. Please!
Alright, I said.
I threw off the covers and gripped the man by the shoulders. We made eye contact. Blue ones. The sky in spring.
Ready? I asked.
Yeah.
I shoved him. As he fell backwards the man grabbed my face. I lost my balance and we tumbled together in darkness.
I don’t know if I hit the ground. Don’t remember. All of a sudden I was awake, alone, in my blanket, and that was all.
I sat up. I had nowhere to be. No stories to sell. I closed my eyes.
What remained was a burst of relief. Like a bath of liquid gold. But it wasn’t my relief. In half-awake clarity I knew that the man had escaped from the dream. His dream or mine, I wasn’t sure. But he was free, somewhere out there, even if it meant returning to whichever hell had inspired the dream to begin with. I wanted, desperately, for the man’s happiness to be my own.