My fever had abated, I was finally able to walk outside, and for the first time in a long while, I pushed open the door to the library. Inside, the air seemed more stagnant than before. It was a humid, cloudy evening. No sign of anyone in the inner room, and the fire in the stove had gone out. No light was on, the faint, hazy twilight filtering into the room through invisible cracks.
“Is anyone here?” I called out. I didn’t get a response, and the silence only deepened. My voice was hard and dry, with no reverberation. It didn’t sound like my own voice. I touched the kettle on top of the stove. It was completely cold. The fire in the stove seemed to have been out a long time. I looked around and called out, even louder, “Is anyone here?” But again no answer. The room seemed unchanged, everything the same as the last time I’d come. Though everything looked colder than before, tinged with a bleak, desolate color.
I sat on the bench, waiting for you to come. Or for someone else to come. I waited, but no one appeared. No one seemed about to, either. I found a match and lit the small lamp on top of the checkout counter. The room grew a little brighter. I was thinking of lighting the stove, too (which was ready to go, with firewood inside), but I wasn’t sure if that was permitted, and besides, the room wasn’t that cold. So I decided not to. I pulled the collar of my coat tighter, redid the scarf, stuck my hands in my pockets, and passed the time for quite a while.
Still not a sound in the room.
Had something unusual happened while I was laid up with a fever? Or had there been some change in the system regarding how the library was operated? Had it become clear that I was unsuited to be a Dream Reader and now I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore? Several ominous possibilities flitted through my mind. But I couldn’t settle on an answer. Every time I tried to figure something out, my mind became a heavy cloth sack, sunk in a bottomless deep.
Perhaps I still had a little residual fever. Seated on the bench, I leaned back against the wall and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. How long I slept, I don’t know. Despite the uncomfortable position, I slept deeply. Some sound woke me, and there you were, right in front of me. You had on the same sweater you’d worn when we first met, with your arms crossed in front of your chest as you worriedly looked at me. You must have lit the stove while I was asleep since I could see red flames wavering inside it. White steam puffed out of the kettle (proof that I’d slept a surprisingly long time). The lamp, too, had been changed for a larger, brighter one. With that warmth and light, and with you there, the library was back to the way I’d known it. The desolate chill from before had vanished somewhere, which was a relief.
“I had a fever for a long time and wasn’t able to come here. I couldn’t get out of bed.”
You gave a few short nods but didn’t express any opinion. Or words of consolation. Maybe you’d already heard about my high fever from someone, or perhaps you hadn’t. I couldn’t tell from your expression. It’s not so strange if that happened is what your face might have been telling me.
“But you no longer have a fever?”
“My joints are still a little stiff, but I’m okay and can get back to work.”
“Hot, thick herbal tea should get rid of any lingering fever.”
I took my time finishing the hot herbal tea, which warmed me and cleared my mind. I sat down at the old wooden table in the middle of the stacks. How long had it been used here for dream reading, I wondered? The residue of countless old dreams had seeped into it, and my fingertips felt the presence of that history in the worn-down grain of the wood.
Old dreams were lined up on the shelves of the stacks, too many to count. The stacks rose to the ceiling, and you had to use a wooden stepladder to retrieve them. Your legs showing from under your long skirt were youthful, pale, and slim. Despite myself, your beautifully formed calves held me in thrall.
It was your task that day to select the dreams to be read and line them up on the table. Ledger in one hand, you checked the numbers as you picked the dreams from the shelves, then laid them down in front of me—ever so carefully and gently. Sometimes I could read through three dreams in a night, and sometimes only two. Some dreams took a long time to read, while others just a relatively short time. Overall, the larger ones took more time. But up until then I’d never made it through more than three in a night. That was the limit of my ability. Once the dreams had been read, they weren’t returned to their original shelves, and you carried them to a room farther back. I don’t know what happened to them once they’d been read.
By my rough calculations, even if I got through three dreams a day, it would take at least ten years to get through the old dreams lined up on the shelves of the stacks. And there was no guarantee that the ones here were all the old dreams that were “in stock.” No guarantee that other old dreams weren’t added to the inventory each day. (By the amount of dust on the ones you chose, I knew they must have been quite old.) But thinking about this wasn’t going to get me anywhere. All I could do was read, one by one, the dreams laid out before me every day—all the while not understanding the reasons and goals involved.
Had my predecessors—the other Dream Readers who’d come before me—done the same thing, intently making their way through old dreams, without any explanation being given to them as to why, not grasping the meaning behind these activities? Had they done a reasonable job of it? And what became of them?
Whenever I finished reading a dream, I needed to take a break. I would put my elbows on the table, cover my face with my hands, rest my eyes in that darkness, and recover from my fatigue. As always, I couldn’t catch the words spoken by the dreams all that well but could surmise that it was some sort of message. They were trying to convey something—to me, or to someone else. But what was said there was speech I couldn’t follow, spoken in a language I wasn’t familiar with. Yet even so, each individual dream had its own joy, sadness, or anger inside, sucked in from somewhere—all of which passed through my body.
Reading dreams, I could feel, quite intensely, the sensation of them passing through me. And I also came to think that what they desired was not understanding in the usual sense of the word. Sometimes as they passed through me they stimulated me internally, from an unexpected direction, summoning up long-forgotten feelings of excitement. Like ancient dust at the bottom of a bottle swirling up when someone breathes on it.
You brought over a hot drink for me when I took breaks. You made more than just herbal tea, sometimes a coffee substitute, or a cocoa-like drink (but not cocoa). Most of the food and drink in the town was plain, most of it substitutes, not the real thing. The taste, though, wasn’t bad. They had a—how to put it?—kind of friendly, nostalgic taste to them. The people’s lives were simple, full of all kinds of workarounds.
“You seem to be used to dream reading now,” you said, encouragingly, from across the table.
“Slowly but surely,” I said. “But reading a dream leaves me exhausted. Like all my strength is gone.”
“You still have a bit of fever left, I would think. But you’ll get over the tiredness. The fever is something that always appears. After you have it, things settle down.”
Having a temporary fever like that must be a rite of passage for a new Dream Reader, something they had to go through. That’s how I would be accepted, little by little, as a part of this town, and assimilate into the system. I guess I should have been happy about that. Because you were happy.
The long, damp fall was finally over, and the harsh winter had arrived. Several of the beasts had already passed away. The morning of the first heavy snowfall, a few of them lay on the ground in their area, in the two inches or so of snow that had accumulated, their golden fur taking on a more whitish hue for the winter. The first to expire were older beasts, the ones who were physically weak, and the young beasts who had been abandoned for some reason by their parents. The season mercilessly weeded them out. I climbed up the lookout tower and gazed down on the corpses of the beasts. A melancholy, yet captivating scene. The morning sun shone dully behind the snow, while below hung a layer of the beasts’ white breath in the air, like morning mist.
Soon after dawn the horn sounded, and the Gatekeeper swung open the gate as always, leading the beasts inside. After the living beasts passed through, the corpses of the deceased lay there outside the wall, like lumps that had swelled from the earth. I kept watching, entranced by the scene, until my eyes could no longer take the morning light.
Despite the cloudy skies, the light made my eyes sting more than I’d expected. Back home, the tears spilled out when I closed my eyelids, and trickled down my cheeks. I lowered the slatted shutters and protected my eyes in the darkened room, gazing at all the shapes that rose up and dissipated in the darkness.
The old man came, as always. He placed a cold towel on my eyes and gave me hot soup to eat. There were vegetables and a kind of pseudo bacon in the soup, and it warmed me.
“On snowy mornings,” the old man said, “even if it’s cloudy, the light is far more intense than you think. Your eyes have yet to fully heal. Why’d you go out, anyway?”
“I went to see the beasts. Several had died.”
“Ah, because winter’s come. A lot more will die from now on.”
“Why do the beasts die so quickly like that?”
“They’re weak, from the cold and hunger. It’s always been that way. It hasn’t changed.”
“Will they all die?”
The old man shook his head. “They’ve managed to hang on like that since long ago. And I imagine they’ll continue. Many lose their lives in the winter, but then spring and the mating season comes, and babies are born in the summer. New lives push out the old.”
“What happens to the beasts’ bodies?”
“They’re burned. By the Gatekeeper.” The old man warmed his hands in front of the stove. “They’re tossed in a hole, oil is poured over them and lit, and by afternoon you can see the smoke from anywhere in town. They’re burned most every day.”
As the old man had announced, smoke rose in the sky every day. About the same time every afternoon, perhaps around three thirty, from the angle of the sun. Winter grew deeper by the day, the harsh north wind and occasional snow assaulting the elegant, single-horned beasts like a persistent hunter.
On the afternoon of a day when the snow had stopped and it was overcast, I visited the Gatekeeper’s cabin for the first time in a long while. The Gatekeeper had taken off his long boots and was warming his massive legs in front of the fire. Steam from the kettle on top of the stove mixed with the purplish smoke from his cheap pipe, turning the air in the room heavy and stagnant. On top of his broad worktable lay a line of hatchets and adzes, of all types and sizes.
“Hey there. How’re the eyes? Still bothering you?” the Gatekeeper asked.
“They’re a lot better, but still hurt sometimes.”
“Just hang in there. As you get used to living here, the pain will fade.”
I nodded.
“So, are you worried about having given up your shadow?”
Now that he said it, I realized I’d hardly thought about my shadow for some time. I only went out at twilight or on cloudy days and had little chance to consider my shadow, or to think about being bereft of one. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about it. We’d been a single being for such a long time, how could I forget him so easily?
“Your shadow’s doing okay,” the Gatekeeper said, rubbing his rugged hands in front of the stove. “I let him go out an hour a day and get exercise, and he has a good appetite. Would you like to see him?”
I would, I replied.
The place where the shadow lived was between the town and the world outside. I couldn’t go to the world outside, and the shadow couldn’t enter the town. This shadow enclosure was the only spot where people who had lost their shadows and shadows who had lost their people could see each other. To get there, you passed through a wooden door in the backyard of the Gatekeeper’s cabin. The enclosure was a rectangle roughly the size of a basketball court. At the end of it stood the brick walls of a building, while on the right was the wall that surrounded the town. The other two sides were tall board fences. In one corner was a single elm tree, and my shadow was seated on a bench beneath it. He was dressed in an oversized crewneck sweater and a worn leather coat, and was gazing up at the cloudy sky through the branches, his eyes listless.
“There’s a room he stays in over there,” the Gatekeeper said, pointing to the building at the end of the enclosure. “Not as nice as a hotel, but a decent, clean room. We change the sheets once a week. Would you like to check it out?”
“No, we can just talk here, that’d be fine,” I said.
“No problem. You can talk about all the things you’ve been saving up. But I will tell you this—don’t try to get attached again. Ripping him away again wouldn’t be a picnic.”
The Gatekeeper sat down on a round wooden seat next to the back gate, lit a match, and got his pipe going. He’d no doubt keep an eye on us from there. I slowly made my way over to the shadow.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hello,” the shadow answered weakly, looking at me. My shadow looked one size smaller than the last time I’d seen him.
“Are you doing okay?” I asked.
“Yes, thanks for asking.” I detected a slight tone of sarcasm.
I thought of sitting down next to him but was afraid that something might lead us to be reattached, so I stood. As the Gatekeeper said, ripping away a shadow was no easy task.
“Are you in this enclosure all day?”
“No, sometimes I go outside the wall.”
“To get exercise?”
“Exercise, right…” My shadow frowned. He motioned toward the Gatekeeper with his chin. “The only exercise is helping that guy burn the beasts. I dig holes in the ground with a shovel. I guess that’s a form of exercise.”
“From my window I can clearly see the smoke from burning the beasts.”
“The poor things. They keep on dying every day. Dropping like flies,” he said. “We drag the corpses and toss them into a hole, then pour in canola oil to burn them.”
“Sounds awful.”
“I wouldn’t call it enjoyable. The only saving grace is there’s hardly any smell when we burn them.”
“Are there other shadows here? Other than yourself ?”
“No, no other shadows. It’s only been me, since I got here.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know how long I can stay like this,” my shadow said in a low voice. “Shadows forcibly ripped apart from the body don’t live very long. All the shadows who preceded me in the enclosure passed away, one after the other. Just like the beasts in the winter.”
With my hands stuck in my coat pockets, I gazed down at my shadow. Occasionally a burst of north wind would blow through the elm branches, making a sharp sound above us.
My shadow said, “It’s up to you to decide what you’re looking for in your life. It’s your life, after all. I’m a mere appendage. I don’t have any great wisdom, nor any real role to play. Yet if I totally vanish, it will cause some inconvenience. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I haven’t been with you all this time for no reason.”
“But I couldn’t help doing this,” I said. “I gave it a lot of thought.”
Did I really? I suddenly wondered. Had I really given it a lot of thought? Or wasn’t I like some powerless piece of driftwood, washed up here on the tide?
My shadow gave a small shrug. “I can’t say anything—that’s something for you to decide. But if you do want to return to the world you came from, if you do still feel that way, you’d better make up your mind soon. There’s still time, but after I die, it’ll be too late. Just remember that.”
“I will.”
“How about you? Are you getting along okay?”
I tilted my head. “Still hard to say for sure. There are a lot of things I need to learn. It’s a completely different place from the world outside.”
My shadow was silent for a time. Finally he raised his head and looked at me. “Were you…able to meet the person you were hoping to see?”
I nodded silently.
“I’m glad to hear it,” my shadow said.
The wind noisily blew through the elm branches.
“At any rate, thank you for coming to see me. I’m really glad we could see each other.” He raised a hand, in a thick glove, ever so slightly, in farewell.
The Gatekeeper and I went through the back gate toward his cabin.
“We should have some more snow tonight,” the Gatekeeper said as we walked along. “My palm never fails to itch before it snows. The way it itches now I’d guess we’ll have about this much snow.” He opened his fingers about four inches apart. “And lots of beasts will die.”
Back in the cabin, the Gatekeeper picked up one of the hatchets and, eyes narrowed, examined the sharpness of the blade. He took a whetstone, and with practiced hands began honing the blade. A sharp scraping sound rang out, menacingly, in the room.
“Some say the body is the temple of the soul,” the Gatekeeper said. “And it could well be. But for someone like me who deals with the corpses of those poor beasts day after day, the body is no temple, but a mere dirty hovel. And I’m finding I believe less and less in the soul, crammed into that pathetic vessel. Sometimes I think it’d be best to douse it with oil, too, like the body and burn it all up. I mean, it’s just a worthless thing whose only role is to live and suffer. So tell me, is my way of thinking wrong?”
How should I respond to that? Asking about the body and the soul only left me confused. Especially in this town.
“Anyhow, you’d best not take seriously anything your shadow tells you,” the Gatekeeper said, picking up another hatchet. “I don’t know what he told you, but those guys are pretty glib. They only want to save themselves, so they’ll give you every reason they can think of. Best to keep your guard up.”
I left the Gatekeeper’s cabin, climbed up the western hill, and returned to my house. I turned around and saw that the sky in the north was covered with thick dark clouds filled with snow. As the Gatekeeper predicted, it looked like it would start snowing in the dead of night. And even more beasts would take their last breaths, in the midst of the snow. They would lose their souls, become nothing but pathetic empty shells, be tossed into a hole dug by my shadow, have oil poured on them, and be burned to ashes.