Ash Enys, the young woman behind the counter, was the niece of a woman Jenny had met while sitting a booth at a craft show a few years before. She reminded Jenny of last night’s dream, of the middle fate with her pale skin and punky hair. They shared the same monochrome wardrobe: black jeans, jacket and combat boots, white T-shirt, smudges of dark kohl around the eyes. Ash’s lips even had the slash of blood-red lipstick, except the shade of hers ran more toward the purple spectrum. The only real difference was that the spare-change girl hadn’t had a nose ring.
“Never thought I’d see you in here,” Ash said with a smile when she recognized Jenny.
Jenny returned her smile. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”
“So what is my style?”
“Uptown,” Ash said. “No offense.”
Jenny liked to dress well, not voguing, but definitely stylish. Today she was wearing patterned stockings, heels, a form-hugging short skirt, silk blouse. She didn’t use much makeup, but the little she did was artfully applied. Her dark hair was a short pageboy with long bangs. Minimal jewelry—a stud and a dangling earring in one ear, the latter’s match in the other, a plain silver band on the ring finger of her right hand.
“No offense taken,” she said. “But everybody’s got secrets.”
They were alone in the store. Feeling bold, she tugged her blouse free from her skirt and lifted it so that Ash could see the small silver ring that pierced her navel. She got it one day when she wanted to prove to herself that she was brave. That hadn’t happened. Bravery, she realized, had nothing to do with what one chose to do to one’s self. But she did like the secret of it, the knowledge of its existence, hidden there under her clothes where no one else could see it.
“Cool,” Ash said.
Jenny tucked the tails of her blouse back into her skirt.
“So what are you looking for here?” Ash asked.
“You.” As Ash’s eyebrows rose questioningly, Jenny went on to explain. “I remember Gwen telling me you’d gotten a job here and I had a question about, you know—” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of a shelf full of books on dreaming. “Stuff like this. Dreams.”
“I’m not exactly an expert,” Ash said.
“Well, you’re the closest to an expert that I know.”
Ash smiled. “Uptown girl.”
“That’s me.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“What does it mean when you dream about Death?”
“Yours or somebody else’s?”
“I mean the personification of Death,” Jenny said. “You know, a pale-faced guy, all in black.”
“Did he ask you to play chess?”
Jenny smiled at the film reference, but shook her head. “He just stood in the street outside my apartment last night, watching me.”
“Well, some people think dreams can be like premonitions—”
Jenny shivered.
“—while other people think that’s bullshit.”
“What do you think?”
Ash shrugged. “If I had a dream like yours, I’d definitely lean toward it being bullshit.”
“No, seriously.”
Ash leaned on the counter to look more closely at her. “This has really got you spooked, hasn’t it?”
“No. Of course not. It’s just . . .” Jenny sighed. There was no point in lying. “Yeah. I found it really creepy. Especially because, normally, I don’t dream—or at least I never remember my dreams. But this one won’t go away. It keeps popping back into my mind when I’m least expecting it.”
“Well,” Ash said, “symbolically, meeting Death isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. I mean, Shiva is the god of both Dance and Death, and in the Tarot, the Death card is more often considered to be a symbol of transformation and spiritual rebirth. Even in Western culture we didn’t always depict Death as the hooded skeleton with a scythe. The Greeks envisaged Death as the daughter of night and the sister of sleep.” She cocked an eye at Jenny. “Maybe that’s why Keats described himself as ‘half in love with easeful Death.’ They used to call sleep the little death, you know, so maybe when we die we step into a dream that never ends because we never wake up again.”
Jenny stared at Ash, not really seeing her. She was remembering what the middle fate had told her about dreams and dreaming. When she finally focused her gaze she saw Ash wearing an apologetic look.
“I guess I’m not being much help, am I?” she said.
“She said the reason he’d come to see me is because I don’t dream,” Jenny told her.
“She?”
“The middle fate. That’s what she said they were—wyrds. The fates—or at least two of them. She was the one who was actually in my room—Death was sort of hanging around on the street outside.”
“This sounds like it was quite the dream.”
“It was,” Jenny said. “She looked a little bit like you.”
Ash laughed. “Generic Goth, right? I guess I deserve that for my uptown-girl comments.”
Jenny shrugged that off.
“So where does the girl come in?” Ash wanted to know.
“I don’t know exactly,” Jenny said. “The first time I saw her I was awake—she was panhandling near my office and I gave her some money. But then later I dreamed about her and that feels more true now than what I know for sure happened. She kept going on about muses and dreams and . . .” She let her voice trail off. “God, would you listen to me? I’m talking about it as though it actually happened, as though she really was in my bedroom.”
“I’ve had dreams like that,” Ash said. “Everybody does. It’s like you wake up and you can’t believe it didn’t really happen. I know this guy who had a dream about cats Morris dancing. He really, really believed it had happened. He was so excited when he woke up, he wanted to tell everybody. I just happened to be the first person he saw that morning, so I saved him the embarrassment of trying to convince anybody else that it had been real.”
Jenny was only half listening. “She said it wasn’t a dream,” she told Ash. “She said that they came like a dream, but it wasn’t the same thing as a real dream. She was pretty emphatic about it.”
“So what did they want?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”
Ash lifted her hands, palms up. “The Goth strikes out,” she said, “because I don’t have a clue. I guess you’ll have to ask them yourself if you dream about them again.”
“I hope the opportunity never comes up,” Jenny said.
4
But of course it does. Not that night, nor the next, but Friday, I no sooner put my head on the pillow, than I find myself in this club I’ve never been in before—at least I don’t recognize the place. Dark, smoky, loud. The DJ’s spinning “Le Bien, Le Mal” by Guru and MC Solaar. I remember the first time I heard the piece, I thought it was so weird hearing somebody rapping in French, but it’s got a definite groove and the dance floor is happening, so I don’t think I’m the only person who likes it.
There’s a guy standing close beside me and I don’t know if I’m with him, or if the crowd’s just pushed together, but he lights my cigarette for me. The music’s turned up past conversation volume which makes it hard to talk. He’s nice-looking and I think maybe I’d like to dance, but then I see a familiar figure going up the stairs on the far side of the club and out the door. I think: It’s Ash, but I know it’s not. It’s not any other generic Goth either. I tell the guy I’ve got to go, using sign language because the music’s still seriously loud, and he just gives me a shrug. I guess I wasn’t with him after all.
It takes me a while to make it across the club and up the stairs myself. By the time the cool air outside hits my face, there’s no sign of the girl. I have that hum in my head—you know, the one that follows you home after a concert or a night of clubbing—and I figure I must have had enough loud music for one night, even though all I can remember is the la
st few minutes or so. I hail a cab and settle down in the back seat. We go about a half-dozen blocks before I turn to look out the window on my left and realize the girl’s sitting beside me. Was she there all along, or did she simply materialize on the seat beside me? It doesn’t really matter because that’s when I figure out that I’m dreaming again.
“See,” I say to her, “I told you I dream,” but she shakes her head.
“And I told you,” she says, “that we only seem like a dream. It’s easier for you to deal with us that way.”
“Who do you mean by ‘us’?”
She shrugs. “People like me. Or my sisters.”
One of whom’s been disbelieved into looking like a guy and just happens to be Death. It’s so strange, when you think about it. Death’s got sisters. They never told us that, but then nobody has the real scoop on death, do they? There are all the light at the end of the tunnel stories, but those people come back, so who knows if their near-death experience really connected them into the secret, or if they simply imagined the light and the tunnel?
“So . . .” I clear my throat. “Where is your sister? Out taking a few lives?”
I don’t feel nearly as cocky as I’m trying to sound.
She gives me a strange look. “More like living them,” she says.
I’ve no idea what she’s talking about, but I figure as long as I’ve got the ear of one of the fates, I might as well ask her a few questions, find out for sure what everybody else has to guess at.
“Why do we have to die?” I ask.
She shrugs. “What you really want to know is, ‘Why do I have to die?’ ”
“I guess.”
She doesn’t answer me right away. Instead she says, “It’s such a beautiful night, why don’t we walk?”
When I agree, she taps the cabbie on the shoulder and tells him we’ll get out here. He pulls over to the curb. She doesn’t offer to pay, so I dig out my wallet, but he just shakes his head. Says we didn’t go far enough to make it worthwhile. I don’t argue. I just thank him the way my companion does and join her on the pavement, but it’s the first time I ever saw a Newford cabbie turn down money.
The spare-change girl slips her arm in mine and we head off down the street. For some reason I don’t feel weird, walking arm in arm with another woman like this. Maybe it’s because it’s such a beautiful night, one of those rare times when the lights of the city just can’t drown out the starlight that’s pouring down from the sky above. Maybe it’s because I know I’m only dreaming.
“Why do you have to die?” she says, returning to our earlier conversation. “You might as well ask, why were you born? It’s all part of the same mystery.”
“But it’s not a mystery to you, is it? Or at least it’s not to your sister.”
“Which one?”
“You know. The one who was standing outside my apartment the other night. He’d know, wouldn’t he?”
“Perhaps,” she says. “He’s always had access to a lot of very potent imaginations. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s run across the answer in one lifetime or another.”
I know she doesn’t mean he’s immortal—though of course he is. She means all the lives he’s taken.
“But you don’t know,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I think it’s all part of a journey and what you’re thinking of as the start and the end are just convenient markers along the way. You don’t get the whole picture right away. Maybe you never do. Maybe it’s like tao and it’s only the journey itself that’s important, what you do on it, how you grow, not where you come from or where you finally end up.”
“I can’t buy that,” I tell her. I have an old pain aching in my chest, but I don’t speak about it. It’s not something I can speak about—that I even know how to speak about. But while I can’t deal in specifics, the general injustice that crowds my head whenever I think about death and how people die is easy to verbalize.
“What about little kids?” I ask. “What about infants who die at birth? What do they get a chance to learn? Or what about all the terrible suffering that some people have to undergo while others just drift peacefully away in their sleep? If this isn’t random, then, I’m sorry, but Death’s one spiteful bastard.”
She gets this sad look. “Death can’t pick when you die, or how you die, just as no one can decide what you dream.”
“You make it sound like the people who suffer choose to suffer. That a baby chooses to die when it does.”
“You have so much anger in you.”
“Well, excuse me,” I tell her, “but I’m not like you and your sisters. I have to die.”
And probably sooner than I want to, considering how my companion’s older sister has taken this sudden interest in me. But that’s not why I’m really angry. I think maybe she knows, only she doesn’t call me on it.
“But is dying so bad?” she asks. “How else can you move on to what comes next, if you don’t leave the baggage of this life behind? What comes next might well be more wonderful than anything you can even begin to imagine in this world.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” she admits. “I don’t. Just as I don’t know why some die in pain and others in their sleep. Why some die young and others in their old age. Why good people can suffer and evil ones prosper.”
“Well, what about your sister?”
“What about him?”
“Doesn’t he know? I mean, if anyone should know, it’d be him.”
“My sister has many good qualities,” she says, “but omniscience isn’t among them.”
“I just think if he’s going to show up standing outside my apartment that he should at least have the decency to tell me where I’m headed next.”
She shakes her head. “All he’s concerned with is why you don’t dream.”
“Why should that bother him?”
“I told you. People not dreaming changes us. Every one who doesn’t dream is like a little black hole. If it isn’t tended to, it’ll draw other dreamers into its net and soon there’ll be vast numbers of you, abed and dreamless.”
“Well, what does that matter? I mean, who really cares if we dream or not?”
“We do. He does.”
I try to digest this. “So dreaming is important to him.”
“Very much so.”
“I was talking to someone recently,” I tell her, “and they mentioned something about how people once called sleep the little death.”
She nods her head. “I remember.”
Like she was there, but I let it pass because she probably was.
“So maybe,” I say, “dying is like going into a dream that never ends because you never wake up again.”
This seems to interest her. “I like the idea of that,” she says.
I feel like I’m on a roll now. “And maybe that’s another reason why it’s so important that I dream. Because if I don’t dream, then I won’t die.”
She doesn’t reply. Instead she says, more to herself than to me, “I wonder if that’s the real reason John’s been around for all these years.”
“Excuse me?”
“John Buttadus. It’s like he just doesn’t quite scan.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
She blinks out of her reverie and gives me this irresistible smile that I can’t help but return.
“What were you saying?” she asks.
I start to repeat what I’ve just said, until I realize she’s gone back to what we were talking about before she spaced out on me.
“Does this mean that so long as I don’t dream, I don’t die?” I ask.
“I don’t think there’s been an appointment made for you yet,” she tells me. “At least, not that anyone’s told me.”
“And we’re not dreaming right now?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, I can sure live with that,” I say and then I have to laugh at the double meaning of what I’ve just said.
br /> I pause to light a cigarette. Our reflection in a store window catches my eye. She looks Gothic, I’m uptown, but the poor light and dark glass blend the differences. We could almost be sisters.
“Those are going to kill you,” she says as I put away my lighter.
I blow a wreath of blue-grey smoke into the air between us.
“Is that inside information?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Because I quit years ago,” I tell her. “And besides, I don’t dream, remember? I’m going to live forever. I could probably take them up again if I wanted to.”
I have this giddy feeling that I can’t shake. I feel immortal, the way I did when I was a kid, when my life was still normal. That makes me almost fall into the trap of reliving the past, but I manage to sidestep the memories. I’ve had to live with them for almost as long as I can remember. Right now, I just want to hold onto this good feeling and never let it go.
I’m still smiling when I wake up the next morning, never mind that what I experienced last night had to be a dream. Except it wasn’t—at least not according to Death’s sister, the middle fate, and if anybody should know, it’d be her, right? So I’m safe from him—safe from what I know will be waiting for me when I die. Until I have a real dream. So I guess the big question is, how do I stop myself from inadvertently doing just that?
5
Saturday found Jenny back at The Occult Shop, but Ash didn’t appear to be working this morning. In her place behind the counter was a tall, green-eyed woman who presented a look that was the direct opposite of Ash’s Goth image. She wore a high-necked black dress over tights the same color and a pair of combat boots. The dress was unadorned except for a bone ankh broach pinned above her right breast. Her long blonde hair was gathered into a loose ponytail that hung down to the small of her back in a golden waterfall. She looked like she should be in a fashion magazine instead of working the counter here.