Memphis was no doctor and he was no saint. He couldn’t make either of them free. But he might be able to do something about Noble’s festering cut if he was brave enough to try. Or would he fail at that, too?
“Mr. Bishop, I better take a look at that cut on your arm,” Memphis said, drawing closer. His heart thumped in his chest. The whole night was a disaster, and here he was flirting with the possibility of even more trouble.
The drunk kicked at him halfheartedly. “Don’t need no help from you! Git!”
“You need help from somebody. Just let me have a look. That’s all.”
Reluctantly, Noble offered his arm, an expression of barely checked violence in his eyes. He smelled not just of booze but of piss, too. Fighting back his revulsion, Memphis gripped the man’s arm at the wrist and just below the elbow and closed his eyes, trying to draw on that healing place deep within. But nothing caught. No spark. And suddenly, the night veered from awful to hopeless.
“It’s gone,” Memphis said to himself. He felt frantic. “I lost it again.”
“Let me go!” The man smacked Memphis on the shoulder and cuffed him once on the ear.
“Ow! Quit it, you old drunk!” Memphis said, dodging Noble’s blows.
“Let go! Let go!” Swearing to beat the band, Noble landed a punch that caught Memphis in the thigh, and the whole lousy night swelled up inside Memphis like a wave. He didn’t want to heal Noble Bishop; he wanted to hit him and keep hitting him. He wanted to strike back at the world. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the man’s arm and held on tight.
“You want this arm to rot off, you damn fool? Stop it, ’fore I hit you back! Stop—”
The connection surged through Memphis quick and hard, like an electrical current. His body jerked twice. The back of his tongue tasted of iron. The street beyond blurred, grayed, then filled with light. The last thing Memphis saw was the drunk’s eyes going round as coins as he tried, but failed, to speak.
Memphis felt as if he were falling, and all around him was a sound like rushing water. His body settled, and he stood once more in that other, healing place that lay between this world and the next. He felt the press of spirits beside him. Their hands welcomed him back first, and then he saw them standing all around: vague shapes of ancestors draped in layers upon layers of cloth, reaching across oceans and generations, unknown yet so familiar. There was the soft, distant rhythm of drums and subdued singing. A warm breeze brought the smell of salt and heat-baked sand.
When their hands fell away, the shapes parted, and Memphis saw his mother in a coat of shiny blue-black feathers, waving at him through amber fields of sun-ripened wheat.
“Memphis. Son…” Her voice was raspy, her words slow, as if it took great effort to speak. “We h-haven’t much t-time.” She clutched her stomach as she gagged, vomiting up a small, feathery tuft. A thin stream of oily drool dripped from her lips. Her voice thinned to a croak. “Follow. The. Eye. Heal. The. Breach.”
Dark, roiling clouds massed on the horizon, blocking out the sun. Angry light crackled against the churning sky and pitchforked down into the earth. Ghosts appeared in those brief flashes; they swayed in the wheat like shimmering scarecrows. These dead bore no resemblance to the shadowy spirits who’d welcomed Memphis into the healing space. There was nothing benevolent or ancestral about these wraiths. Instead, there was something terrible and hungry about them, as if they could eat and eat and never be filled.
Another storm of lightning lit up the sky, and Memphis could see that it swirled around the man in the stovepipe hat. It balled in his palm. He seemed delighted by this. His laugh was everywhere at once. He extended a hand toward Memphis, and though he was far away, his face loomed large and close. “Mine,” the gray man said in a voice as old as time. He strode through the field toward Memphis, and the dead moved with him.
Memphis’s mother coughed and spasmed with some violent change. Her eyes widened as she fought to whisper one last word: “Run.”
Before Memphis’s eyes, his mother was swallowed up in a whirl of blue-black feathers and desperate cawing as she transformed into a crow and flitted up, crying into the angry sky. She dove down and tugged at Memphis’s collar with her beak, as if trying to pull him away from that place, but the man in the stovepipe hat and his retinue of dead were like a magnet, drawing him in. Memphis could hear his heartbeat pulsing in his ears. His eyes fluttered. He felt as if he could fall and never stop falling.
The shock of feathers across his cheek like a slap startled him. The crow cawed in his face, and Memphis jolted out of his healing trance, sweating and confused. His hands still gripped Noble Bishop’s arm, but Noble himself lay on the ground, still as death.
“Mr. Bishop, you gotta get up now,” Memphis pleaded, panicking as he shook the motionless old drunk. “Mister, please, please wake up. Please!”
Terror curled inside Memphis. He was close to crying. High above, the sky pulsed with lightning. Wind kicked up, sending dead leaves skittering down the street. A pounding rain started. Lightning struck a tree across the street and a branch fell off, burned and smoking. Memphis dragged the old man into the alley, where he could be protected.
“Sweet Jesus,” Memphis said, looking down at Noble’s still body. “I’ve killed him.”
A couple of policemen walking their beat came down the street. Memphis knew these particular cops were dirty for Dutch Schultz, and they’d love nothing better than to take one of Papa Charles’s runners in for any offense they could think up. Murder would be a hell of a charge.
“Mr. Bishop please, please wake up,” Memphis pleaded.
Noble Bishop coughed and breathed. And then he settled into a light snore that was the best sound Memphis had ever heard.
“I did it,” he said, grinning in astonishment at his hands. “I did it,” he said again, almost reverently. The cops were nearly there.
“Hey! There’s a sick man here!” Memphis shouted from behind the protection of the wall. Once he saw the cops heading toward the alley, he turned and ran away, climbing up and over the fence toward home.
PART TWO
The gloom of January weighed on New Yorkers. The days were short and the nights were very long for people who’d grown to fear sleep. Mothers kept close watch by their children’s beds. The rich asked their servants to sit nearby and wake them every few hours. The bootleggers’ business was booming. The city was wary and afraid and close to violence.
But for Ling and Henry, it was the nights they lived for. Dreams provided an escape from the worries of the real world, a refuge of hope and possibility. While they waited in the beautiful old train station, Henry would play the piano, trying out new songs, looking to Ling for approval or boredom. If she wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad, he abandoned it. But if she cocked her head to the side and nodded slowly, he knew he was on the right path.
“Anytime you want to come to the Follies, just say the word, and I’ll get you the best seat in the house,” Henry promised.
“Why would I do that? I can listen to you here.”
“It’s not just me, you know. There are grand dance numbers and singers, big stars. It’s very glamorous, don’tcha know?”
“It sounds long and tedious.”
“Most people love the Follies.”
“I’m not most people.”
“Darlin’, truer words were ne’er spoken,” Henry said and laughed.
Wai-Mae was always there to greet their train when it arrived in the forest. She’d beam at Ling and take her hands like a sister, then glance shyly at Henry.
“Miss Wai-Mae, you look radiant this evening,” Henry would say with exaggerated courtesy, and Wai-Mae would giggle behind the cover of her hand. Sometimes, Ling and Wai-Mae would join Louis and Henry for a picnic on the grass bordering the river behind Louis’s cabin, where music echoed across the forest—the bright syncopation of Dixieland threaded with the high notes of the erhu.
“Here, I’ll show you how to dance the Charleston,” Ling said, hopping
up and taking Wai-Mae’s hand in hers.
But when she showed her, Wai-Mae begged off. “What a terrible dance! So ungraceful! Not like the opera.”
“Show us how it’s done,” Henry teased, and Wai-Mae moved with serpentine grace through the grass, rippling the sleeves of her gown as if she were spring coming to life.
“That’s beautiful,” Louis said. “I never seen anything like it. Not even at the balls in the Quarter.”
“If only women could perform,” Wai-Mae said, coming to sit beside Ling again.
“Women can’t perform in Chinese opera?” Henry asked.
“Oh, no! It’s only for men.”
“Even the female roles?”
“Yes.”
Louis grinned. “Hmm. Sounds like you got yourselves a drag ball.”
Henry laughed and looked away.
“What is a drag ball?” Wai-Mae asked.
“Nothing,” Henry said quickly, nudging Louis gently with his elbow. “Show us some more, Miss Wai-Mae, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Wai-Mae danced and Ling curled her toes in the dewy grass, enjoying the slick cool of it. She and Henry had come to accept this as ordinary. The old dream walking, which had once seemed strange and thrilling, bored them now. Here, they could write their own dreams, and every night, the dreams became that much more real.
Louis proved to be kind and funny, and Ling could see why Henry liked him so much. When she looked up at him, the golden sky at his back, Louis shimmered as if he were carved of sunshine. Ling liked the way he talked, as if his words had been dunked in warmed honey.
“Perhaps you should marry Louis,” Wai-Mae said as she and Ling walked back to their spot in the forest on the edge of the village. “He’d make a fine husband. He is very handsome. Almost as handsome as my husband-to-be. But not quite.”
Ling resisted the urge to roll her eyes. There was nothing Wai-Mae couldn’t turn into a penny-novel romance. “I’m not ready for a husband.”
“You’re seventeen!” Wai-Mae tutted.
“Exactly,” Ling said.
Wai-Mae’s sigh was weary. She patted Ling’s hand like a worried auntie. “Don’t fret, Ling. I’m certain your parents will find someone for you,” she said so earnestly that Ling could only take it in stride and not be insulted.
Wai-Mae’s patience did not extend to Ling’s scientific experimentation. “When will you be finished?” she complained as Ling stared at a house in the village that they had altered earlier, waiting to see if it changed in any way while she observed it. “Science is so dull!”
“Science is anything but dull,” Ling said. “And I need to test things.”
“These atoms you talk about. What are they?”
“They’re building blocks of energy. Everything in the world, all matter, is made of atoms,” Ling explained. “Even us.”
“What about dreams? What are they made of?” Wai-Mae asked.
“They’re born of people’s thoughts, I suppose. Their emotions. Endlessly renewing, endlessly creating,” Ling said. But she wondered: Could an energy field be generated from all the thoughts, desires, and memories inside dreams? Was that how the dead were conjured? And what happened when you put a few dream walkers inside that landscape? Could their interactions transform dream into reality?
Each night, toward the end of her dream walks, Ling conducted her experiments. First she marked her hands with ash from a fire. When she woke, she examined her hands for the marks, but there were none. The next night, she slipped a few pebbles into her pocket to see if she could bring them out of the dream, but it didn’t work. She’d even tried to bring a pheasant feather into the dream world for Wai-Mae, but when she stuck her hand into her pocket, there was nothing there at all.
“Perhaps some things are beyond testing,” Wai-Mae mused as she watched a sparrow hopping from branch to branch before it flew off toward the shimmering rooftops of the village and disappeared altogether. “Perhaps there are things that exist only because we make them so, because we must.”
Henry and Louis spent hours fishing the river or playing music on the cabin’s front porch, Louis on fiddle and Henry on harmonica. Other times, they’d go for long walks with Gaspard, and Henry would tell Louis all about New York and his friends there. “I’ll take you to Evie’s radio show and we’ll cut a rug at the Hotsy Totsy with Memphis and Theta—you’ll love it there. You get that train ticket yet?” Henry asked.
“Not yet, cher. But I’ll walk over to the Lafayette PO in the morning and see if it’s there.”
“Louis, do you ever remember your dreams in the morning after you’ve woken up?” Henry asked, worried. If Louis didn’t remember, then how would he know to go pick up the ticket?
“I reckon I must. Who could forget this?” Louis said, nuzzling Henry’s throat.
“Just in case, I want to try something. Louis: When you wake up, you’ll remember. You’ll remember everything.”
“Everything,” Louis whispered, and he kissed Henry, taking his tongue sweetly into his mouth.
There was only one uneasy moment in the dreams for Henry, and it was the thicket of morning glories. Every time they passed the purple-blue blooms, Louis would pull Henry away. He wouldn’t go anywhere near the thicket. In fact, he seemed downright afraid of it.
“What those flowers ever do to you?” Henry joked on one such occasion.
Louis didn’t laugh. “Don’t know. Just gives me a bad feeling,” he said, rubbing his head. “Smell gives me a headache.”
But the moment they were away from the morning glories, Louis’s mood lightened once more. He broke into an easy grin, yanked his shirt off over his head, and tossed it at Henry. “Gonna get to that rope swing first!” he shouted, running toward the sparkling river.
“Wait!” Henry called. Laughing, he dropped his own clothes on the grass and ran after Louis.
Sometimes, a part of the dream world lost its color or winked out, like a lightbulb that needed changing. When this happened, Ling and Wai-Mae would concentrate, pushing their energy into the dead portion, and the dreamscape would shift under their hands, warming and blooming.
“My, but that is something,” Louis would say, and if he was envious that he and Henry couldn’t seem to perform this alchemy, too, he never said it.
Above their heads, a steady stream of ones and zeros trickled down like rain, which made Henry think about music theory and song structure and Ling of the Bagua of the I Ching. Whole dream worlds were born of this numerical rain: The ghostly jazz bands of New Orleans’ West End inked themselves into existence against the filmy sky. A swooping Coney Island roller coaster skated a constant figure eight, a memory from Ling’s childhood. A Chinese puppet show appeared, the sticks operated by unseen hands.
It was as if all time and space were unfolding at once around them, a river without end. The borders of their selves vanished; they flowed through time, and it through them, till they didn’t know if these things they saw had already been or would come to pass. Henry had never experienced such a profound sense of happiness, of being right in his self and in the world.
“To us,” he said, raising a glass.
“To us,” the others echoed, and they watched the sky give birth to new dreams.
If the nights were magical, the days were less so. For the first time in their friendship, Henry and Theta were bickering. The dream walking exhausted Henry so much that he didn’t wake before three or four in the afternoon. He’d missed three rehearsals in a row.
“I can’t keep inventing stories to save you, Hen,” Theta warned. “And Herbie’s up to something. I think he’s trying to get his song in over yours. You better show up today, if you know what’s good for you, Hen.”
“I’m not worried about Herbie,” Henry said, reaching for one of Theta’s cigarettes.
“You should be. And since when do you smoke?”
Henry smirked. “I just need a little pep.” He wiggled his fingers like a jazz baby.
Theta swiped th
e cigarette out of his mouth. “Then get some sleep. Real sleep.”
But Henry didn’t listen. He couldn’t listen. There were only Louis and dreams, and Henry would do whatever he could to have both. Already he and Ling were pushing the limits of what they could tolerate. Each night, they set their alarms for later and later.
But here in the dream world, Ling was on to something. She could feel the energy coiled beneath her fingers when she transformed a featureless rock into sunflowers whose petals were repeating spirals of pattern, the Qi moving strongly through them both, all those atoms shifting, changing, whole universes being born. No—made. She and Wai-Mae were making them. We did that, Ling would think. Like gods. It was magic and it was science, a blend, like her, and it was more beautiful than anything.
One night, as the girls lay back in the dewy grass watching pink clouds drifting lazily across the perpetual sunset, Wai-Mae turned on her side to face Ling.
“What happened to your legs, Little Warrior?”
Ling sat up quickly. On impulse, she tugged her skirt hem down. “Nothing,” she said.
“No. I see the way you are with them, always hiding. You’re holding something back. Some secret.” Wai-Mae’s expression was resolute. “If we are to be friends, you must tell me everything.”
Ling hugged her knees to her chest—a simple action in the dream world, impossible when she was awake. “A few months ago, I got very sick. When it was over, the muscles in my legs and feet had stopped working. I need leg braces and crutches to walk now. But sometimes, just before I’m fully awake, there’s a moment when I’m still holding on to the dream. And I forget. I forget what happened to me. I forget about the sickness and my legs. For those few seconds, I think that the infection was a bad dream, and I’ll get up and walk out of my room and run down the stairs as if nothing ever happened. But then the truth creeps in. The only place I’m free is in dreams.”
“Dreams are the only place any of us is free,” Wai-Mae said, turning Ling’s face toward hers with just a finger. Wai-Mae’s hands smelled earthy, like moss on the hillside. “There was a boy in my village like you. Every day, they massaged his legs to help with the pain. You have to work fire back into the muscles, Little Warrior.”