The campus was deserted, its paths obscured by dunes of fresh snow, and even Janet’s own footprints, the ones she’d made getting herself to Happy’s, had been all but filled in, leaving only a series of shallow depressions where a former version of herself had passed. She obliterated them now with her dragging feet, cutting twin crooked channels up the hill and past Crim Hall. The door of her dormitory building carved a pie slice of cement out of a deep drift, and she left her wet and frozen boots on the rubber mat before she plodded to her room.
It was a lonely place, even when everyone else was around. Janet had never been much for decoration, choosing instead to enjoy the ready-made ambience of libraries and bars. The floor was gray linoleum up through which, in winter, heat radiated; on winter mornings, if she woke before five, she had to wear slippers or her feet would burn. The cinder-block walls were all but bare, with only a few of her own art-class scribblings taped up here and there, the cheap newsprint already discolored and curled at the edges. She lay on the bed underneath a ratty afghan her grandmom had knitted, and she stared up at one of those pictures, the only one in the room illuminated by a diagonal shaft of electric light glaring in from the building’s high eaves. It was a drawing of a rangy weed she had found outside the humanities building, a lone tendril of deadly nightshade, its fine leaves gnawed to shreds by insects, its tiny flowers rotted to wrinkled wisps. It was her favorite thing that she’d done, an ugly picture of an ugly plant, and she pulled the afghan over her spinning head and thought that she would never be happy as long as she lived, and nobody would ever appreciate what she had to offer, whatever it happened to be. Impulses raced through her mind, to tear up the drawing, to call her mother, to go back to Happy, to find some pills and kill herself. But she was too tired for any of them. She let out a single sob and fell asleep.
She dreamed that it was night, as it was, and that it was snowing, as it was, and she was trudging up the hill toward the college, as she had that night. She was following, backwards, the footprints she had made, and she placed her feet in the depressions, renewing and defining them as she went.
But when she reached the dormitory she saw that the footprints continued, around to the back and up into the woods. She followed them there, trying to remember when, or if, she had made them—and then, ahead, she saw herself, walking backwards through the trees, leaving the gentle depressions in front of her. The backwards Janet was insubstantial, translucent, her feet little more than smudges of light. This was funny in the dream—she laughed—but when she looked again her backwards self had changed. It was Happy now, and she was decrepit and sad, an old woman, and she held the nightshade plant, brown and dead from the cold, a few grains of earth still clinging to its roots.
In terror, Janet turned—and behind her in the snow was absolutely nothing. The footprints were gone. And when she turned back again toward the woods she found the same—no Happy, no nightshade, and no footprints. Just pristine, undisturbed, moonlit snow, as if no living thing had ever passed by.
* * *
At the same time, a nauseated Dave Dryer was lying in the drunk tank of the Nestor police station, gripping the metal edges of his cot and waiting for his jaw to begin aching. He had not applied his poultice or taken his medicine, and his intoxication had peaked some time ago, and he had thrown up most of his final swigs of whiskey into the snow outside the cop shop. He could feel a hardness, a terrible clarity, descending upon him; at the same time he felt himself pulled by sleep. Each possibility terrified him. Other men lay on similar cots around him—the perennially down-and-out—and groaned as they slept; bright, cold light from the parking lot glared through the tiny frosted-glass window, and the smell of urine and vomit and mildew enveloped and flowed into him. He trembled, his hands cupping his face, his eyes blinking.
In the end it was exhaustion that triumphed, and he fell unconscious. And, like Janet, he dreamed, though his dreams lacked the linearity and interpretability of hers; rather they came to him fragmented, deformed, and jumbled together, melting and refreezing in new and disturbing shapes and keeping him right on the rubbery edge of wakefulness. He trembled and writhed on his stale cot, and saw his father, a zombie, get up out of an open grave; he saw a puddle of blood spread across the floor and begin to spin, like a hurricane. He saw the steel door of the cell warp and twist and break from its hinges, and the walls swell and pulse, and he pissed his pants without waking. He saw a cockroach pace across the cracked concrete wall and disappear underneath his pillow, and when his jaw began to ache in earnest, as it was doomed to do, it was the roach that did it, and the hundreds of others that came heaving themselves out through the cracks. They swarmed over his cheeks and into his mouth and snapped with their pincers at the flesh.
And still he couldn’t wake—or perhaps he could, and did, but it changed nothing: his delusions, if that’s what they were, persisted, and he groaned and gagged and woke up the other drunks, who spat at him and told him to go back to sleep.
At some point of night—or perhaps by now it was daytime—a figure appeared to take him away. Pale, dusty, exuding an odor of talc, the ghost stood over Dave with eyes blazing and bloodshot, and told him without opening his mouth that it was time to leave. He took Dave by the arm and lifted him to his feet. He led Dave out into the parking lot and climbed onto a white motorcycle, and instructed him to get on it too. Dave obliged, wrapping his arms around the ghost’s ribcage, which crunched and shifted as he tightened his grip. “Does that hurt?” he managed, his own pain blasting through his head with every word. “Nothing hurts,” the ghost replied, adjusting his moth-eaten tricorn hat, and they rode up the hill out of town.
And then Dave was behind the wheel of his own truck, his groceries on the floor beside him, though now he had no appetite and his face had swollen, and his mouth hurt too much to eat. Kevin Russell stood there, by the driver’s side door. He told Dave to fasten his seat belt and asked if he was really okay to drive.
“Where’d you come from, man?” Dave managed.
Kevin groaned. “Never mind,” he said, and with Dave’s meager help managed to clear the truckbed of snow and hoist his motorcycle on. Kevin drove them all the way back to Equinox, to the Goodbye Goose, as day began painfully to break.
Dave would find himself lying in the sun, halfway across the parking lot of the former bar, surrounded by fallen grocery bags and snow. It would be hard to remember what happened, but it hardly mattered. He crawled inside, to where his painkillers and liquor lived.
* * *
After the rich and boringly traditional meal, after the walk on the beach; after enduring his nephews’ hideous misbehavior, and his parents’ misplaced expressions of pride, and his sister’s resentful stares, Reeve returned to his grossly-overpriced, over-air-conditioned Gulf Coast hotel room (with highway views), brushed his teeth, watched half an hour of depressing pornography on pay-per-view, masturbated, and fell into the same idiotic recurring nightmare he had been enduring after every family dinner since he was first married to his ex-wife, which is to say for twenty-seven years. In it, he had been forced to return to elementary school and re-take second grade, because he was applying for a new job and the records had been lost. And the other students were the members of his family, and he asked to be excused to go to the bathroom, and when he went, he somehow mistook the janitor’s closet for the toilet, and pooped in the utility sink, and when he returned to the classroom all of his family somehow knew, and to make matters worse he had forgotten to put his pants back on, or even to wipe himself.
None of which Reeve could have described to you, if you asked. For he had never been able to remember this dream, or that he had dreamed it. All he knew was that, when he visited family, he went to bed feeling a mild but persistent dread and a scrap of anticipatory humiliation, and woke up in the morning feeling unusually exhausted, as if he had slept poorly, and had developed an annoying but evidently causeless rectal itch, which always disappeared by breakfast time. And when he encountered his family during the day (assuming, as was the case this time, that he was staying for several days), he experienced their personal presence as a kind of cruel taunting, in spite of whatever good or at least semi-good time they were having together.
And so that was the case on Thanksgiving night—the dream inhabited him and then left him, and he spent the following day in a state of embarrassment and suspicion. The dream, hatched by his subconscious, had come into existence as a means of expressing certain of Reeve’s personal anxieties, which, not being a terribly contemplative person, he had never had the good sense to deliberately address. A few sessions with a competent shrink might well have done the trick (and might conceivably had put him, years before, on the path to saving his marriage from destruction), but Reeve told himself he didn’t trust psychiatrists. This wasn’t untrue—he didn’t trust anyone. Except perhaps his assistant. But he certainly wasn’t going to tell Ellen about his hotel unease and rectal irritation.
And so it went.
* * *
Ruth and Archie had Thanksgiving together, uneasily, like a brother and sister who haven’t been alone together for twenty years. There was something about a holiday meal that could inject discomfort into even the most intimate of unions, and Ruth and Archie’s wasn’t even up to that standard: they chopped and mixed and basted and baked, fussing over candles, place settings, garnishes, saying “Excuse me” when their paths across the kitchen intersected and regarding one another with the tentative politeness usually reserved for strangers who enjoy a mild but unactionable attraction to each other. Dinner was spent in quiet conversation about the world outside Equinox. Happy Masters, of course, was the subject that could not be broached—Ruth’s opposition of her versus Archie’s apparent lack of same. Couples had endured intenser disagreements, to be sure. But Archie was mayor and Ruth was the town historian, and their coupledom had hardly been ratified by any other than casual, unspoken agreement. And so they spent Thanksgiving trying not to rock their leaking boat, and parted at ten o’clock with a gentle peck on the cheek, having largely succeeded in their aim.
Ah, but what price, success? Lying alone in her spinster’s bed on Thanksgiving night, reading and re-reading the same paragraph of Hegel, dissatisfied with everything but desiring nothing in particular—it hardly seemed to Ruth like an achievement of great worth. Maybe she ought to dump Archie. What was in it for her, after all—an occasional warm body in the bed? A companion for idle chitchat? A means of getting her rocks off now and then? She hardly needed somebody else for that.
Then again, maybe she ought to cave in to Happy Masters. Maybe she was tired of taking sides, maybe her soul longed for compromise, agreement, human contact. Had she become what she hated? Was she a bitch? She wanted people to be happy, didn’t she?
In her dream, however, she stood behind the Equinox College library, smoking, as something approached through the woods. She didn’t know what it was, but it made a sound like the world ending, a rending of earth, an uprooting of trees. It pushed the air before it, reeking air redolent of decay and of blacktop, the smell of nature corrupted by man. Was it Yeats’s rough beast? Whatever the case, she held her book of Hegel before her. She quoted: “Education is the art of making man ethical.” Her voice was hoarse and small, her words drowned out by the advancing roar. And as she spoke louder, her voice deepened, and the words began to change, even on the page before her, “Education is the art of making men do your bidding.” The woods were burning. Flaming geese made for the sky, then dropped as they died, hoarsely screaming. Smoke billowed from between the trees—soon the pages were on fire in her hands. “Education is cunning.” And then her hands, and her arms, were burning as well.
Archie, meanwhile, dreamlessly slept off his drunk. At least he didn’t remember dreaming when he woke up: instead there was a pool, a brackish thing welled in him, the remains of something spilled and left behind. He felt it shift when he rose from the bed: he sensed that he would have to carry himself carefully from now on, to keep it from splashing, from poisoning him from the inside.
* * *
A little tipsy, a little groggy from the sleeping pill, Jennifer Treisman felt her eyes grow sticky, heard a small groan escape her lips. Beside her, Bud rolled over. Her face hurt and her body ached, and she felt the buzzing discomfort of boredom, that perennial affliction the arrival of Happy Masters had seemed, at long last, to quell. Until, that is, their fight, their reconciliation, and their real estate deal. Now, with nothing to oppose, Jennifer was again bored, again in need of drugs to help her sleep. And, as before, it wasn’t very good sleep, either. It was fucked up. Her vision blurred, yet intensified in color—the blues and blacks of night—as if she were a camel or a lizard, one of those creatures with see-through eyelids. And she heard a low rumble of indeterminate origin, the sort of sound that could be a moth at your ear or thunder ten miles away, and she got up to look out the window.
The sound increased in volume and clarity, and resolved into a crumbling, a quaking, the slurping pull of water. She could see the lake, forty yards off, and strange ripples appeared at the edge, sharp and solid, pushing twigs and leaves before them, breaking up the ice that had begun to form along the shore. The ripples grew, yet the water pulled back, and revealed on the lakebed were rotten boats, and bones, and rusted lengths of metal pipe. And in a flash of insight she understood—the earth was falling away, and the lake being swallowed. Along the shoreline that curved away from her, trees tumbled into the abyss, and in the houses behind them lights snuffed out, and the houses vanished. All of it—the land and the water—was draining away from the world. There was barely time to worry before it was upon her—and she went flying through the window and into nothingness, with the remnants of her life breaking to pieces around her.
She woke with a start, desperate to pee. She allowed herself a single sob, to which sleeping Bud responded with an intake of breath and a grunt. Then she shook herself and trudged to the bathroom.
* * *
And Happy? Happy didn’t dream, not since she was a girl. She had other things to do while sleeping, having perfected it as a means of fully replenishing the body and mind, under the instruction of a certain Yogi whom she had flown halfway around the world to meet. Sleep, for Happy, was not something that was entered into casually, in response to the simple and instinctual needs of the organism; rather it was anticipated, planned, and executed with all the bureaucratic vigor of a general. She got things done while sleeping. It was part of her job, and she felt sorry for those whose hours in its grip were wasted by the mind’s tyrannical disorganization. Dreaming was for the weak and the unambitious. It was silliness. It was wrong.
That’s what she would tell you, anyway, if you asked. In truth, Happy’s control over her sleeping mind was less absolute than she might have liked, and there were nights when she was incapable of restraining it. To be sure, she fought it, and sometimes she was able to tamp her dreams down into a perpetually incipient, constipatory state. But if they wanted, needed to come, they came.
And on Thanksgiving night, her pillow still wet with tears, her face aching, her husband snoring on the sofa downstairs, her assistant sprawled alone on her dormitory bed, her architect and designer awake and whispering in the guest room, Happy had a dream. It opened in a bright and spiffy future Equinox, where every pink house brimmed with red-cheeked admirers, and every black streetlamp burned with a little blue flame, and every trellis bloomed with hundreds of fragrant yellow roses. And Happyland was complete, a village unto itself where the college once stood, castles and cottages in gleaming white stone nestled in a field of undulating green. And beaming tourists of all nations, hand-in-hand with their beribboned girl children, paced among the gravel paths and in and out of galleries and shops and the Museum of Dolls: and Happy herself stood watching it all from the bell tower, divine master of her domain.
Enter Aunt Missy, staggering in on broken legs, labored breaths hissing out of a ravaged face, the eyes a child’s, bright and full of pain. Her arms, scabbed and spotted and hung with heavy flesh, held a doll, a Happy Girl. And Happy saw that this room was in fact a nursery, tastelessly baubled and frilled and wallpapered, an empty crib at its center, and Happy’s aunt wanted her to take the doll.
“Sign it!” the old woman sobbed. “Sign it!”
The doll’s belly was exposed and bloated, poking out from under its dress like a slick stone from the lake. In her hand Happy held a pen.
“Why yes, certainly!” she said cheerfully, and she took the doll and tried to get the pen to write on the slimy body. “Dammit!” she growled, and jabbed the doll with her pen, but of course it was not a doll at all, but a living child, and its glass eyes were wet with tears, and it was naked now, the tiny ribs visible beneath the skin.
“You have to nurse her,” Aunt Missy cried, her black mourning dress wet with milk.
And now Happy realized: all of the dolls were real, all of them were babies, and she had never fed them, never held them to her breast. She had forgotten. She dropped the wailing doll and pushed her aunt aside. Down the spiral stairs she ran, and along the graveled path to the doll shop and museum, its turrets flying blood-red flags—but it was too late. They were all dying. Her employees, sick and miserable, ministered to the dying dolls, artificial smiles smeared across their filthy faces. But it was hopeless; the dolls were doomed. Happy tore open her blouse and her breasts tumbled out, sore and leaden, and she tried, horribly, to feed her children, but their tiny smiling mouths would not open, and no milk would come. Even as they perished, they smiled; their living eyes turned to glass and their china skin went gray and flaccid, sinking into their boneless faces, rotting away; and still they smiled. Happy collapsed, naked, to the floor of the doll museum, sobbing—and was sobbing still, with no idea why, when she woke.