How the mist reminded her of snow, and of her parents.
How the way she thought about the passage of her life had been reduced to those few moments she could count as purely joyous.
When she had realized that she loved him.
When she had filled a copper tub—that little boat—and taken off her clothes.
When Edward had appeared.
When the thought had run through her like Revelation: stand. Stand up. Stand up so he will see you.
She had tied the clothes that she was wearing in a bundle.
And through the mist the man she loved had called to her.
That name he had for her.
So long ago.
And once again—so proud, so free, so joyous—revelation shot through her.
And she stood up.
an american place
I wake up in my car in Vegas, in the parking lot of Sunrise Hospital, to realize I’ve been dreaming of the dead.
My unzipped sleeping bag is rutched around my knees, my neck is stiff and it takes a couple moments for me to realize the persistent beeping in my ear is the alarm clock that I set at three o’clock this morning to go off so I wouldn’t miss my rendezvous with Lester Owns His Shadow at seven. I adopt what the yoga people ominously call the “corpse” pose and close my eyes to focus where I am and I realize I’ve been dreaming about people who are dead—except by dreaming them, I’d made them come alive.
Which is normal for a novelist because we dream non-living characters and animate them with our words but I’d never dreamed Red Cloud before which is probably my mind’s way of processing yesterday’s encounter with an Indian.
In the dream Red Cloud and I were standing at a precipice that sometimes looked like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and other times looked like the edge of Acoma Mesa facing out across the plain. I knew who Red Cloud was in the dream because he looked exactly like the famous Curtis photograph of him, which means his head was down and his eyes were closed when he addressed me and I remember saying that he looked a lot like Dante in that pose, the way Signorelli painted him, which happens to be the portrait on the cover of the Penguin Classics version of The Portable Dante I found in the back of my car when I was making up this so-called bed at three a.m., left there after a Great Books discussion at a professor friend’s house a couple weeks ago in Santa Monica.
How the average person dreams is pretty much how the average novelist puts a page together. Random bits of seen material float in, dismembered parts of memories, skeins of information knit and shred in contrast to their logic.
In our dreams, as in our tales, we use the dead to tell us things we’d otherwise have to admit that we are saying to ourselves.
We dream the dead in ways that serve our needs, exploiting them for our unrecognized agendas, for our investment in the continuum of history, searching for a thread by which the meaning of our lives might hang. We dream the dead to stop the hollow longing in ourselves, and there were never two more potent dreamers of the dead than Dante in his hell and Red Cloud in his Ghost Dance on the Trail of Tears. So stick that in your subconscious high hat, Zigmund, that explains it: I’m an average dreamer. I meet an Indian, I end up dreaming one the first shut-eye I get. I see a book at bedtime and hey, presto. But that hardly explains the many times I’ve dreamed my mother and my father, the conversations that I’ve held with them in dreams for decades since their deaths. In dreams begin responsibilities. I remember standing in the Colorado Historical Museum in Denver a couple years ago, staring at a painted hide that once had been the sacred document of a Plains tribe’s winter count. The “winter count” was a tribal history, a sort of census taking, but rather than tally the living and their demographics, as our current census does, the winter count tallied how many in the tribe had died during the year and what had caused their deaths. The dead were painted as small hollow figures, their outlines waiting to be filled with detail and with tint. The empty ones had died of natural causes, but the ones filled in with red and yellow dots had died of smallpox and year after year there were more and more of them until the hide looked like a field of ocelots, overpopulated with bizarre and freckled corpses. Those were the dead that Red Cloud told his people could dance to life again through active dreaming—dance until their minds achieved a spirit level of entrancement, a wormhole through consciousness into the other world, like Dante’s purgatorio, where the dead remained, suspended in a state awaiting their rebirth. Red Cloud promised his people that the Ghost Dance would bring back the dead—not as ghosts or zombies but alive, their former selves intact, the way they had been before contact with the white man. Reunion was the subtext of his promise—and isn’t that what dreaming is, the union of our conscious with our sub-? Once or twice a year for several years after my father died I dreamed he’d visit me, knock on my door one sunny morning and tell me he’d been living in another city all these years under an assumed name and that he’d found new meaning in his life and that he was doing swell and fine and he was happy. These dreams left me feeling a burden had been lifted from my conscience—for however briefly these dreams lasted I had a sense of great relief that I didn’t have to try to figure out how to keep him active in my mind, how to place him in a setting excised from reality: he was in a city, he was fine and swell and I’m guessing I can’t be alone in dreaming death as some nearby Philadelphia, some Tampa or utopia where the departed go to take on new, improved or different lives. The necessity for Heaven—as a place—must be essential to our chemistry and, like water, maybe we can go without it for a while but ultimately every one of us succumbs to thirst. Every one of us must find a place to put our dead. The idea of miraculous return is an ancient one and I’m certain Uncle Freud would choke on his cigar if he found out how quick I was to pack the sleeping bag and jump into my car to find out if that “city” I had dreamed my father into, after death, was Vegas. We are lost, Red Cloud was saying to me when I dreamed him last night, lost in a pathless wood. Exiled from ourselves. This, of course, is Dante’s theme in his first Canto—that he’s lost in a strange place. Homesick. Exiled from his city, Florence, forcibly removed, as Red Cloud’s people had been from the land they loved. Both men summoned the dead to ease the pain of their homesickness—Dante built his fictive hell in circles that resemble Florence and Red Cloud told his people to transport themselves from hell on earth through dance into a psychic, fictive history. Homesickness, in other words, is the distance that we put between who we are and who we used to be, between our present and our past. And we are lost only when we have lost our dead, when we exile them from our lives, because the city where they live is us. I am my father’s Philadelphia. The place he went to start his second life. But somewhere there may be someone still searching for the old man upstairs, plugged into a machine to keep his real—and false—identity alive. And maybe that’s the shape of the despair that Lester saw in this man’s eyes—his final homesickness, as a man who’s stolen someone else’s shadow and has no one in whom to live when he is gone.
I get out of the car, take a deep breath and stretch my muscles, grab my ditty bag and head through Receiving to the public bathroom. Receiving has become more crowded since the middle of the night, there are more families with more kids, most of them still in their pyjamas, and when I push through the door into the Ladies there’s a woman in there with a toddler outside a stall. I’ll be right here, Tiff, she’s telling the child. I lock myself inside the next stall and sit down on the toilet when Tiff says, Mommy, close the door, and I hear the woman pull the stall door shut. Then I think I hear Tiff ask her mother where flat daddy is and the next thing that I know a life-size cardboard head and shoulders of a grinning man in an Army uniform looms up above my stall and looks at me then bounces over like a friendly puppet to Tiff’s side. This is going to make for interesting dream time tonight, I tell myself, and flush. If not for me, at least for Tiff.
“Sorry, did we scare you?” the mother asks as I walk by her to the sink.
br /> “Not in the way you think.” I had heard about these cut-out family members on the radio, cut-outs of service men and women missing-in-family-action, that the Army and the Guard offer to their loved ones at home, but I’d never seen an actual flat daddy doing duty. The Army’s version is a full-body photograph mounted on piece of foamboard cut out along the real dimensions of the real soldier in question. But this type of artificial dad is hard to keep upright, he blows over in the wind and can’t go mobile, can’t travel in a car to soccer practice or McDonald’s and seems ominous, standing there in uniform, at bathtime and at breakfast. The Army wants us all to call these one dimensionals FLAT SOLDIERS, but FLAT DADDIES has the cultural cachet that flat soldiers can never have. “Can I see him?” I ask and the woman holds the cardboard up so it’s facing me but Tiff immediately screams, “Gimme back flat daddy!” Theirs is the National Guard version, a HALF FLAT, a daddy from the head down to the chest, a portable flat daddy who can be propped up in a chair at dinner and travel in the backseat of the family car when duty calls.
“Where’s the real one?” I ask this woman and she mouths Iraq. She leans toward me and whispers, “But we tell Tiff he’s somewhere else.”
“Philadelphia,” I conspire, and she looks at me real funny.
“Reno, actually.”
Your dad’s in Reno, Dad’s in Philadelphia, Dad’s at work, your dad’s with Teddy Roosevelt, he’ll be back someday but this week he’s with Red Cloud, he’s learning the Ghost Dance, he’s on the space shuttle and orbiting the moon. He’s taken someone else’s name and gone to Vegas.
Outside, I see Lester waiting for me on the lawn beside the parking lot—doing something with some sprigs of vegetation. As I watch him I call my sister from the car—Hey, bird, I say when she picks up.
“Where are you?”
“Vegas. I got in last night. Listen—this guy. He’s not daddy.”
“Well I coulda toldya. Next time you want to take a trip to Vegas, Cis, just go. Without the drama.”
Lester lights the sprigs of vegetation with a lighter and waves them in the air until they start to smoke a thin blue smoke.
“Who is he, then?”
“Some poor old guy who had a heart attack. No one thinks he’s going to make it, which is sad to watch. Still, he’s using daddy’s I.D. so I’m gonna stick around a while and try to find out how he got it.”
“—and check out all the restaurants on the strip in your spare time. Check into the Bellagio.”
“No, that’s your other sister. I spent last night in my car…Look, I’m sorry but I gotta go. The Indian I’m with is about to tangle with Security.”
“—another Indian?—again with the security?”
An obscure reference on my sister’s part to my previous relationships with men.
“—ha ha,” I say. “I’ll callya later.”
“—always an adventure,” she acknowledges.
I intercept the security guard before he gets to Lester. “He’s harmless, sir. I can vouch for him.” I realize I look like I slept in my clothes, I don’t have a spot of polish on and I’m definitely a ringer for that lady who comes to Vegas, craps out at the tables and camps out in her vehicle before going crazy. Lester, on the other hand, looks like the guy doing that weird Kevin Costner pas seul thing in Dances with Wolves.
“What’s he doin’—?”
“I think it would be safe to say that he’s invoking spirits, sir.”
“—oh that’s not good.—with smoke?—in front of a hospital?”
Lester raises both arms and starts to hum. Then he stands on one foot; holds the pose. Takes a big step forward, lifts the other foot. Repeats. And hums.
“—now what’s he doin’?”
“I think it would be safe to say that what he’s doin’ is a little dance, sir.”
“—with the smoke. Again.”
The smoke, and not the insurrectionary nature of the ritual, seems to be the safety issue here and the security officer isn’t happy until the burning vegetation suddenly goes out. He leaves and I sit down on the ground to wait ’til Lester finishes.
“Was that a prayer?”
“Navajos don’t pray.”
“It looked like a prayer to me.”
“People who need prayers see them.”
Who does he remind me of when he talks in only aphorisms? Tonto. Maybe even Zorba.
“How’s our guy?”
He shakes his head.
“Did he wake up?”
“No.”
“Is he alive?”
He nods.
“Shall we go and look at where he lives?”
“I’ll drive,” he says and guides me toward his truck.
“You reminded me of Zorba back there, with the dancing. You know, Zorba the Greek—that scene in the movie when he dances by the fire on the beach. You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you.”
“I know there is a nation called ‘Greece.’ Get in.”
The pickup has some age and a couple areas of body work on it, and I’m reminded of Sherman Alexie’s joke about how you can tell a ride that’s from the rez: the only gear it works in is REVERSE. The leather seat is polished to a soft patina, a single raven feather dances from the rearview, and in the ashtray there’s a half-burned cone of piñon incense, like a miniature volcano.
“Do we know how to get there?” he asks.
I take my notebook from my shoulder bag. “I Mapquested the place before I went to sleep last night. Take Maryland and then stay straight across Flamingo. It’s a little street behind the University.”
“Far?”
“Not far.”
“I only have a quarter of a tank. Gas is so expensive off the rez! How do you people manage?”
“That’s what I like about the tribal nations. No state and federal tax.”
“And all the bars are right across the border.”
“And the Navajo have universal health care.”
“Part of our last treaty. Our own hospitals. Yes.” He nods solemnly at something I can only guess at. After a brief silence I ask, “Is there a Mrs. Lester, Lester?”
“Rose. Dead seven years next Sunday. Cancer took her.”
“—oh I’m sorry.”
“—thank you.”
I roll the window down.
“You’re not married,” he observes.
“No, sir.”
“I don’t think our mystery man is, either. I don’t think we’ll find a wife where we are going.”
“Well I hope we find someone. Someone to remember him.”
“We’ll remember him.”
“—not the same. Without his history he’s another unknown person.”
“—not true. I looked into his eyes. And saw his face.” He shrugs, as if it will make the memory fit better. “Faces, eyes—take for example your Mr. Curtis and his photographs. When we look at them, we know those people. They are not forgotten.”
“—not the same,” I say again and I can hear the sadness in my voice. “Those photographs. Maybe without them there would be no record of those people’s lives. Or there would be a different record, a more private and, therefore, diminished one. They’re beautiful, his photographs. But to me they’re still flat daddies.”
On Lester’s look I tell him to take Harmon then make another right and soon we’re in a warren of untraveled narrow streets named after shore birds—Blue Heron, Egret, Swan—where the houses are called “courts” and are situated in circular formations perpendicular to the sidewalk as if they were built to accommodate guests in the style of motor courts along old Route 66. There are neighborhoods in Hollywood that look like this, blocks of row residences built by the studios to house their contract workers around a central court or meeting space like little Melrose Places. But who built these mini-houses on these mini-streets in Vegas—or why—escapes me. All the houses look alike, despite their individual decorations—a set of shutters here, a little weather vane atop an arti
ficial vestibule.
Tipis, Lester registers as we get out.
“It should be that one over there,” I say, pointing to the small house at eleven o’clock on the circle. The house beside it is the dominant house on the court, larger than the others, and as we approach we can see a ramp built to its door and connecting, by a separate boardwalk, to the door of the house we’re heading for.
“Is our guy—?” I start to ask.
“—seemed fine to me, when he walked in. Before he fell. Walked fine.”
I look back at the connecting house. Like all the other houses on the court its blinds are closed, no sign of life inside discernible. The place in its abandonment feels like an empty backlot movie set. Lester rings the doorbell and we hear it chime. He rings again, then opens the screen door and knocks. We wait, and nothing stirs. He tries a key from the old man’s set of keys—the tumbler turns, the handle turns, and we walk in.
It’s dark—not dark, but dim, the blinds are closed, and Lester leaves the door ajar for light and we each, tentatively, call out Hello—? The house is the size of a log cabin—square, divided down the middle by a central partition walling off the kitchen and the eating area to the right, from the “living” and “sleeping” ones on the left. I go toward the little dining room while Lester walks without a sound through the living room into the bedroom at the back and returns to say, “There’s no one here. The bed is made.”
We start to case the place, Lester shadowing me through the dining room where there’s a table and four chairs and a glass-fronted hutch. Much as I claim you can’t know a person’s history from a photograph, I still believe the photographs a person chooses to display speak volumes, and the old man who’s stolen my father’s name has a gallery of Polaroids taped onto the glass panes of the hutch and onto the surrounding walls—all of them of him in a spiffy hat, white gloves and a well-pressed uniform, smiling for the camera with his arm around another person.
“He was a doorman,” I realize. “Look at all these people—”