Lair of Dreams

  Octavia turned toward the kitchen but snapped back one last time, a finger pointed at Memphis like an arrow set to fly. “You better live at the foot of the cross and do right, Memphis John.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Memphis said. He didn’t feel like “Yes, ma’am”ing his aunt, but he recognized a reprieve when he heard one and knew it was the wise choice.

  “Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” he said softly once Octavia had left the room.

  Bill’s smile was a half-formed thing. “That’s all right, son. Old Bill is always happy to do a favor for a friend. After all, a man never knows when he might need to ask for a favor in return,” Bill answered, his smile finally unleashed.

  “Memphis, where are you taking me?” Theta gasped as they traipsed through Fort Washington Park, dodging a sudden cascade of late-straggler leaves shaken down by the wind.

  “Almost there, baby. I promise!”

  They’d spent the evening dancing at the Hotsy Totsy, but Memphis had wanted to be alone, promising Theta that he’d take her straight to the top tonight. The booze had made them a little loose, and they laughed happily as they kicked at the piles of dead leaves, jogging tipsily past amused bystanders and grouchy old-timers clucking that that “wasn’t how you do.” Finally, they came to the very edge of the park, where it dead-ended at the stripe of gray that was the Hudson River and the small red lighthouse that sat perched at the tip of Manhattan.

  “That?” Theta asked, her breath coming out in a chilly puff.

  “Didn’t I say I’d take you straight to the top? Just so happens I know the password for that joint.”

  When they reached the lighthouse door, Memphis drew a wrench from his pocket and hit at the lock till it fell open. He grinned. “Told ya I knew the password.”

  He led Theta up the narrow iron steps, around and around, until they came out in the lighthouse’s lantern room. Theta gasped when she saw the water lapping at the bumpy shoreline of Manhattan, the distant, twinkling shore of New Jersey, and the dark river in between, aglow with the occasional sweep of the lighthouse’s far reach. It was just a lighthouse, but it felt like the top of the world.

  “They say they’re gonna build a big bridge right here, going from Manhattan over to New Jersey,” Memphis said. “So we oughta enjoy the view while we can.”

  Memphis stood behind Theta and wrapped his arms around her, resting his head beside hers. “Watch the light now,” he said, and they held their breath while the bright beam shone out a welcome into the world, guiding ships confidently up the river. It seemed for a moment as if the light were coming from the two of them, as if they’d already steered themselves to a safe place.

  “A mighty river ribbons through the light / Sing hey to the nightingale, sweet song of night / Sing hey to the tower that shines so bright / Sing hey to the stars and she who mourns their light.”

  “Gee, that’s pretty. Who wrote that?”

  “I guess I did. I said light too many times, though.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Theta said.

  “I sent some of my poems to the Crisis today,” Memphis said, handing Theta his flask.

  She took a sip, wincing as the alcohol burned her throat, then handed it back to Memphis. “What’s the Crisis?”

  “Just the most important journal in Harlem. It’s edited by Mr. W.E.B. Du Bois himself. Lots of people have had their work published there—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston.”

  “Memphis Campbell,” Theta said, grinning.

  “Maybe,” Memphis said wistfully. “May… be.”

  “You found anything new on that crazy eye symbol?” Theta asked.

  “Nothing yet. I swear, I’ve searched every book I can find about symbols and eyes. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s got to have an origin. Everything comes from somewhere, and somewhere is everywhere. Everything is connected, my mama used to say,” Memphis quoted, imitating the gentle rise and fall of his mother’s musical Caribbean accent. “Gonna take you back to my homeland sometime, and then you’ll know. You’ll see the thread that stretches across the ocean.”

  “Did she ever take you?” Theta asked.

  Memphis stopped smiling. “Naw. But she used to tell Isaiah and me all sorts of tales about Haiti’s history and all kinds of African folklore, about our family and where we’d come from and how we got here. Origin stories. I tell you, my mother had a story for everything.”

  Theta hugged her knees to her chest. “You miss her?”

  “Yes,” Memphis said, keeping his eyes on the shadowy hills. He drank from the flask. “Yes, I surely do.”

  “You got a lot of nice stories,” Theta said softly. “I don’t have that. I don’t have an origin story. Just fuzzy memories and this one dream that’s like a memory, but I can’t really see it, not all the way.”

  “Tell me what you do see, then.” Memphis offered Theta the flask again, but she shook her head.

  “It’s white, like… like miles of snow. And there are funny red flowers in the snow, spreading everywhere. I hear screaming and horses whinnying and there’s smoke and then there’s nothing. I wake up.” She shrugged. “That’s the only story I got.”

  “We could make our own stories,” Memphis said. “You and me.”

  For a week, Memphis had been rehearsing this speech in the bathroom mirror. But now all his words failed him. So he took Theta’s hands in his, watching the light sweep across the room. “Theta…” He cleared his throat, started over. “Theta, I love you.”

  Theta’s smile vanished. She didn’t answer.

  “That wasn’t quite the response I was hoping for,” Memphis joked, but his stomach was as tight as piano wire.

  “Gee, Poet. I just… I didn’t expect that.”

  “Theta,” Memphis said, “I feel I need to warn you: In about five seconds, I’m going to tell you that I love you. There. Now you know to expect it.”

  Theta still wasn’t smiling. “The last fella who told me that… it didn’t go so well.”

  “Well, I’m not the last fella. I’m the right fella.”

  There are things you don’t know about me, Theta wanted to say. Things that might change how you feel about me. She didn’t think she could bear that disappointment. Theta bit her lip. She ran a finger across the back of Memphis’s hand, an idea forming. “When you heal people—”

  “Used to. Haven’t tried it since Isaiah.”

  “Sure. But when you used to do it at the church, could you heal anything?”

  “Most things, I suppose. I couldn’t help my mother,” Memphis said, and Theta gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

  She looked up into Memphis’s face. “Can you take something away with your healing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Theta didn’t know how to say it without telling Memphis everything. “What if somebody had something about them that wasn’t a disease, exactly, more like a…” Theta searched for the right words. “Like a bad Diviner power. The opposite of healing. Something that could harm.”

  Memphis laughed. “I never met anybody like that at the Miracle Mission.”

  “No. No, I guess you wouldn’t.”

  “What’s all this about, Theta?”

  Theta forced a smile. Inside, she could feel herself drifting further away. Who could love somebody like her? “Just curious, Poet. That’s all.”

  She should leave him. That was the noble thing to do. Before he got hurt.

  Memphis kissed her on the temple, soft and sweet, and Theta knew she was far from noble, because she didn’t have the strength to give him up.

  “I love you,” he said again.

  “I love you, too, Memphis,” Theta whispered.

  “You just made me the happiest man in Harlem.” Memphis grinned. “Now you got more than one story, Princess. This lighthouse, this moment—I reckon it’s our origin story.”

  “Guess so,” she said. She hoped everything would be okay.

  Memphis kissed her then, and Theta kissed ba
ck. Their kiss was warm. It traveled through Theta’s body and made her want more. They sank to the floor of the lighthouse. Memphis moved on top of her just slightly. She could feel him against her stomach and it made her go liquid inside. Without warning, Theta’s thoughts flashed back to Roy. It was Roy she saw on top of her, holding her down on the bed that last terrible night in Kansas. The uninvited memory raced through her like a swift fever. Heat pooled in her palms. It shot out to her fingers like the survival mechanism of a frightened animal, as if in that moment her body couldn’t tell the difference between Memphis and Roy, love and violence.

  Terrified, Theta pushed Memphis away and sat up abruptly, breathing heavily. She tucked her hands under her thighs, feeling the warmth begin to subside.

  “I do something wrong, Princess?” Memphis asked, confused and concerned.

  Theta gulped down air. “No. No, I just… I just wanna slow down, Poet.”

  “All right. Okay. We can be slow as you like,” Memphis said.

  His gentleness made Theta want to cry. “Can we… can we just lie here?”

  “If you like.”

  They lay side by side on the floor of the lighthouse, and Theta rested her head on Memphis’s chest, where she could hear his heart thumping. More than anything, she wanted to keep kissing him. But in her mind, she heard Roy’s screams, saw the curls of black smoke rising from under his fingers as he clutched at his face and the room caught fire.

  “Everything copacetic, Princess?” Memphis asked.

  Just tell him. He’s not gonna run. Tell him. Tell him.…

  “Sure. Everything’s jake,” she managed to say, and they watched the bright light sweeping back and forth, promising safety.

  The moon poured through the flimsy curtains in Isaiah’s bedroom as he half woke and rose slowly from his bed, crossing to Memphis’s desk. His eyes tipped back in their sockets and his mouth mumbled old words. He grabbed the pencil and began to draw.

  In a back room of a smoky gambling hall, Blind Bill bargained with two men who didn’t take well to bargains. “Tell Mr. Schultz I’ll get him his money. I promise,” Bill said.

  “Mr. Schultz expects interest. Or he takes his own kind of interest, if you get my meaning,” one of the men said, and he kicked at Bill’s cane just to make the point clear.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Bill said. He grumbled a curse at them on his way out. They were bad men. But Bill had met much worse. The sort of men who might pay handsomely for information about truly gifted people, if it came to that.

  Jericho yawned as he read over an account from Will’s early days investigating Diviners who sensed danger coming and issued warnings that mostly went unheeded. He looked out his window at the neon night and wondered where Evie was now, and if she ever thought of him, and he hated himself for caring.

  Elsewhere in the city, the bright young things danced to feverish jazz in the speakeasies while others stumbled home to sleep off the gin. They went to bed humming songs they were sure had been written just for them, songs they believed they would sing that happily for the rest of their lives. They slept and they dreamed: Sweethearts who’d fallen asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. Bricklayers and bridge builders whose lives were lived in the shadows of the monuments they built to the greatness of others. Newcomers to America whose tongues still struggled with the texture of English words. Midwestern boys who’d set off for the big city to make their fortunes. Teenage girls in cramped apartments who longed to feel beautiful and adored and seen. They traveled deep into the corridors of sleep, following the music-box song, desperate to join the dream that called to them, a great migration to its promising shores.

  They heard a voice whispering, “Dream with me.…”

  Some said no. They drifted into other, less satisfying dreams from which they woke in the morning with a feeling of great loss, as if they’d been offered a fortune of happiness and had squandered it.

  Some answered yes. They chased after their elusive desires, ignoring the terrible sounds in the dark, until they realized their mistake. And by then it was too late. There was no leaving now. They would dream until all that remained was the phantom presence of their insatiable desires. Hungry ghosts, still dreaming.

  In a basement speakeasy on West Twenty-fourth Street, two flappers slept with their Marcel Wave heads pressed together, lost to dreaming.

  At Vesuvio’s Bakery on Prince Street, the CLOSED sign hung on the door and the lingering scent of yeast and flour wasn’t enough to wake the three young men in baker’s aprons who lay sprawled in their wooden chairs, mouths agape, one worker still clutching the broom from last night’s sweeping in his hand.

  Near the Brooklyn Bridge, in the rumble seat of a car whose windows were fogged with frost, a young couple had stopped their heavy petting. Now it was only their eyes that moved feverishly behind their lids as they dreamed and dreamed and could not stop.

  On the top floor of a five-story walk-up, across the street from a rival gambling den, one of Lucky Luciano’s hired goons slept beside his Tommy gun while his intended target walked free. Lucky would be furious about the botched job, but it didn’t matter to the assassin, because he would never wake again.

  Deep below the city, the long metal snakes of the IRT rattled through the dark tunnels, while on the mud-rutted back roads of Connecticut, Sister Walker’s car rumbled toward the dark horizon. They’d been driving for miles, following up on leads. Gray strands of stars stretched out above the sleeping towns and quiet farms they passed.

  “Here we are. Just like old times,” Sister Walker murmured.

  The car’s headlights bounced off the eyes of a rabbit that sprinted through the winter-dead grass. Will kept a hand on the folder of newspaper clippings in his lap.

  “Not quite,” he said at last and kept his eyes on the road ahead.

  Just before bed, Ling set her alarm, said her prayers, lit some incense, and slid George’s track medal under her pillow, resting her fingers on top in the hope that she’d be able to make contact with him in the dream world. She kept her eyes on the ticking second hand of the clock, letting it lull her into a hypnotic trance. A moment later she woke, gasping, inside the dream world. Henry was there, doubled over, breathing heavily. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Are you all right?” Ling asked.

  “Sure… just need a minute to catch my breath. I’m… not used to doing so much dream walking. Need to get my sea legs under me.”

  “Don’t you carry any jade for protection?” Ling asked.

  “I’m plenty jaded all on my own.”

  Ling rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot. Find some jade. It helps me.” While Henry caught his breath, Ling searched for any hint of George, but she didn’t see him anywhere.

  “George?” she whispered. “George Huang. George, are you here?”

  “What are you doing?” Henry asked, coming to her side.

  Ling whirled around. “Nothing. I thought I saw a friend, but I was mistaken.”

  The fog lifted on the streets of the old-fashioned dream-jumble city, and the familiar scene started up like a clockwork show: The fighting men falling out of the saloon doors. The children chasing the rolling hoop, shouting, “Anthony Orange Cross!” The ghostly wagon and driver clopping by—“Beware, beware, Paradise Square!”

  “Huh. It’s exactly the same scene,” Henry said.

  “So?”

  “Well, it’s curious, isn’t it? I’ve had a recurring dream before, but there’s always something a bit different each time—the scarecrow in the cornfield has a different hat, or the house that’s supposed to be your house has unfamiliar rooms. But this has been the same sequence of events in precisely the same order each time we’ve come here. If I’m correct, any second now, there should be fireworks right over… there.”

  Henry pointed, and the night sky exploded with pops of light.

  “You see? And now…” Henry gestured like a circus barker. “The man in the vest, please.”

&n
bsp; Like an old vaudevillian respectful of timing, the man appeared, a glimmering in the haze.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Come one, come all, for a ride on Alfred Beach’s pneumatic train. See this marvel for yourselves and be amazed, ladies and gentlemen—the future of travel, beneath these very streets!”

  “It’s like a loop of dream time that’s stuck for some reason,” Henry said.

  A shriek reverberated throughout the foggy city, and then: “Murder! Murder! Oh, murder!”

  Henry and Ling crowded together.

  “Here… she… comes,” Henry said.

  Right on schedule, the ghostly veiled woman in the blood-smeared dress emerged from the fog and ran past them and through the wall of Devlin’s Clothing Store. The shimmering portal opened once more.

  “C’mon!” Henry said, and he and Ling darted down the steps into the dark underworld of the dream.

  As they waited in the train station, Henry told Ling about what happened after they’d been separated, how he’d followed the path to the cabin and Louis. “But what happened to you afterward?” Henry asked as he sat at the old Chickering, marveling once more that there was a piano he could play inside a dream.

  “I met another dream walker last night. Her name is Wai-Mae,” Ling said. “She talks too much. Even more than you do.”

  Henry smiled at the jibe. “So there are three of us? It’s getting mighty crowded in this dream world. Tell me,” he said, picking out a melody, “what do you do when you’re not talking to the dead or leading wayward musicians into magical train stations, Miss Chan?”

  “I help my parents in the restaurant,” she said, sitting on the edge of the fountain to watch the goldfish darting about. “But I want to go to college and study science.”

  “Ah. That stack of books you had with you.”

  “I remember the first time I read about Jake Marlowe’s experiments with the atom. It made me think of dreams.”

  “Naturally,” Henry deadpanned.

  Ling trailed her fingers in the cool water of the fountain. “What are these quantized bits of energy we see inside dreams? When I talk to the dead, where do they come from? Where do they go? Can we change the shape of our dreams? I can feel the Qi all around me. If I could understand this energy, this power, perhaps I could turn it into a scientific discovery in the physical world.”