Dream Thief
“How many dreams have you stolen from me?” I ask.
“Hundreds,” the voice says.
*
“Last night was the one,” says the voice on the phone, “where you’re awakened by a thunderstorm. You get up from bed to look out the window. It’s windy, dark. You see what looks to be a flock of knee-high stockings, blowing like leaves down the street. You aren’t sure what they are, how they came to be loose, but they’re black knee-highs, and they’re being driven by the storm. It’s a very upsetting sight. You worry the knee-highs might be living things, that they aren’t clothing at all, but creatures. You think they’re living things that might be in danger from the storm. So you go out into the storm. You’re very frightened and cold, but you will save as many knee-highs as you can.”
“I guess that sounds like me,” I say.
“Oh it’s you,” says the voice. “Did you think I’d lie? Listen. You’re out in the dark yard gathering knee-highs. Just then your therapist, Dr. F, pulls up in a tiny pink sports car.”
“You know Dr. F?” I ask the voice.
“May I continue telling you your dream?”
The voice doesn’t want to be interrupted.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Dr. F watches you through her windshield wipers. Her hair is black. She powers down her window and asks you what you’re doing. With your arms full of knee-highs (They are alive; they’re like friendly snakes!), you say to Dr. F, ‘I’ve never seen you in a dream before.’
Dr. F puts on her sunglasses.
“That’s one way to put it,” she says.
“I love the tone of this dream,” I say.
“It’s an excellent dream,” the voice says. “Adrenaline. Confusion. Magic. Snakes.”
“Please bring it back to me,” I say.
“It’s my dream now,” says the voice. “I’m keeping it.”
*
It’s years later and I’m a married man. One night I fall asleep on the couch watching Law and Order. I wake with a start, feeling there’s someone else in the room, but there’s no one there. I feel I’ve been dreaming but I can’t walk my way back to the dream. I can hear my wife, Gimmy, breathing deeply in the bedroom. My cell vibrates on the coffee table. I answer it.
“That was a good one,” the voice says.
“A good what?”
“A good dream.”
“It’s you,” I say. “Who are you?” I say. The voice on the phone is both a round voice and a smooth voice. I close my eyes to picture the person who belongs to the voice, but I can’t. “Do you hate me?” I ask. “Do you want to be me? Do you want me to be you? Do you want to love me or murder me? Are you a man or a woman?”
“These questions of murder and who is a woman,” the voice says, “are irrelevant. I like your dreams. I can’t keep my hands off them.”
*
The voice says: “Courtney Love pulls up in a tiny pink sports car and says to you, ‘Come on. I want to show you something.’ You climb in the car with Courtney Love and she drives you to an Italian restaurant. She drives around back and parks at the service doors, near the grease bin. Out the back door of the restaurant comes a team of men dressed all in white. The men dismantle the pink sports car while you and Courtney Love stand outside the car, hand in hand, watching it happen. You suspect Courtney Love might be Dr. F in disguise. The men in white take pieces of the pink sportscar into the restaurant and feed them, one by one, into the mouth of the dishwasher. Courtney Love leads you by the hand through the door, into the kitchen. You realize you are shorter than Courtney Love and may be a little boy. For a while you watch men in white feeding car parts to the dishwasher. Then Courtney Love leads you back outside. Now you watch the men in white reassembling the pink sports car, its parts hot from the dishwasher. Courtney Love squeezes your hand and points at the car. She says, ‘It’s as clean as it was when it was born.’”
*
Now it’s much later, years later. I’m an old man. I live out by the airport. I’m washing a sandwich plate at the sink. The cell vibrates on the counter.
“You’re not alone,” the voice on the phone says, “and you will never die.”
“I’ll probably die,” I say.
“For my part,” the voice says, “I want you to live forever. I want your dreams to go on and on. I’m selfish that way.”
“You must have dreams of your own,” I say.
“I do,” says the voice. “They’re very special and private.”
“Tell me one,” I say.
“Never,” says the voice.
We sit there a bit, listening to each other breathe.
“Have you lived forever?” I ask the voice. I ask because the voice, even though years have passed, sounds the same as when I first heard it.
“Forever?” says the voice.
“Forever,” I say.
“Not quite forever,” says the voice.
*
“This was the dream where,” says the voice, “whenever you masturbate, a baby is born. No need for the sperm to meet an egg. Hundreds of babies, some already with teeth, crawling all around you. Whenever you come, even in your sleep, you give birth to an entire baby. You don’t have enough names for these babies. Whether you’re in the shower or at the movies or driving around in a tiny pink sports car, you know it’s a problem, but you can’t stop yourself. Babies, babies, babies.”
“Stop saying ‘babies,’” I say.
“I won’t,” says the voice.
“This is a terrible dream,” I say.
“Just wait,” the voice says, “until you find out how it ends.”
Vampire Mermaids of the Deep
is a pretty good movie. The vampire mermaids aren’t the villains, like I thought they’d be at first. The movie explains their teeth are hollow, like syringes or drinking straws. Your blood goes up their teeth and right to their brain, their brain which is—I’m not clear on the biology—also a stomach. They have powerful tails and sometimes legs when they need legs, but they can’t keep their legs for very long, maybe, tails bursting out and going horizontal, business-like, not like a mammal but a shark. They have gills, so they lack that sidelong but very real human connection the blowhole can give you. As magical denizens of the sea, they have foreknowledge of the world’s end by flood. So their plan is to abduct some number of humans to save them from this flood, though also (it’s a horror movie, after all) to use these humans as a future food source, you know, once the planet turns completely blue. They will keep these humans alive and reproducing in dry sea caves. The mermaids are very graceful and powerful in the water, but being fish, essentially, they can’t move around on land, long, before drying out, even when they grow their legs. But they get around this: all a vampire mermaid needs is saltwater nearby, and they can teleport their bodies to that salt-water. This is an original touch. There is a good scene, midway, where the lead mermaid, a female called Belladonna, teleports into the lobster tank of a seafood restaurant, crashes out from the lobster tank in slo-mo, and abducts a pretty male diner named Cherry. Belladonna loves Cherry because he is handsome and because he is the one diner in the restaurant who didn’t order seafood. Belladonna murders manager and bartender and wait-staff, then teleports herself and the diner, Cherry, to a dry sea cave she’s prepared for him in special. Cherry falls in love with Belladonna because she is beautiful and because she did not murder him. And the best scene of all, toward the ending, is when the young man Cherry helps Belladonna kill the movie’s true villain, a human man named, I think, Rough Bobby. Rough Bobby is anti-mermaid and a denier of the coming flood, and he has the long flowing scalps of many a mermaid vampire fixed to the wall of his bedroom. He is the kind of villain who wears handsome leather pants and sleeps on a waterbed and listens to punk rock. And he is hated by Belladonna, as some of the scalps on his wall are the scalps of her former sisters, plus Belladonna prefers dance music. Therefore the vampire mermaid Belladonna sends the young man Cherry to break into the villain Rough Bobby’s apartment—this being an evening which happens to be the evening of the Fourth of July—while Rough Bobby is out patriotically hunting some lesser vampire mermaid or other. The young man Cherry, who is sympathetic to Belladona’s cause, slips into the apartment through a window, bringing with him a pour-tub of salt and a funnel with which to funnel the salt into the villain’s waterbed. And though I thought Rough Bobby was too smart to sleep on a waterbed (Wouldn’t you think about a thing like that? If all you did, all day, was obsess over vampire mermaids and how to kill them? How not to fall in love with them?) the villain’s death is nevertheless visually satisfying. That night, nearing sleep, Rough Bobby hears a scratching sound in his bedroom. He sits up from the slosh of his bed and looks around for the source of the sound. But the sound isn’t coming from the room. It’s coming from beneath him. He pulls back the flat sheet and there we see Belladonna through the plastic skin of the waterbed, her mackerel eyes wide open. She vents the plastic with her finger spines and removes the villain’s throat with her hollow teeth, and she doesn’t even want to drink his blood, just wastes it all, lets it all spill out, seemingly enough of it to refill the emptying waterbed, fireworks going off outside the window of Rough Bobby’s apartment, fireworks in Belladonna’s teeth. As Rough Bobby slowly turns from a villain into a body, Belladonna lets her tail become her legs. She rises and walks dripping to the window and stands there, watching the fireworks. She seems not quite triumphant, like you’d expect she might feel after such a revenge, but instead sad, meditative, tired. She is a creature with her stomach in her brain and she’s comfortable with certain brutalities, but by this point you feel for her. She stands at the window a long time before the credits roll, as if hypnotized by the strange bursting colors in the sky. You want her to survive. You want her to turn around and look at you. She’s beautiful in the way of her species and you realize this is the first time she’s ever seen fireworks.
