ALEX

TRETBAR

Lying sideways on the little couch, not looking at the ceiling (as is customary), I was only half listening to her when she asked if we could talk about the elephant in the room. My eyes were focused on one of those anonymous, mass-produced paintings you see in offices and hotel rooms everywhere, a painting of a phalanx of geese disappearing into a wall of cloud. I still believed in art at that time.

“Did you hear what I said?” my therapist asked.

“Yes, but I’d rather not talk about all that.” The geese were trembling. “It’s my birthday. I want to take it easy.”

“So what would you like to talk about?” she asked with tender curiosity. “Are you still having the dreams?”

“I actually had a different dream last night, but it was familiar.” I had my fingers laced together behind my head. I was looking up at the taupe ceiling now.

I heard my therapist typing.

“It was a recurring dream I had as a child, but I haven’t had it in years. In the dream it’s always my birthday, and I’m sitting in my bedroom, on a different version of my bed, a huge white bed, and a friendly woman, maybe my mother, hands me a red balloon. Both my birthday and the big white bed go on forever, and even though the red balloon is my only gift, I’m happy.”

“That sounds like such a nice dream!” I couldn’t see her, but somehow it sounded like she was standing up now. We had a half hour left in the session.

“It was a nice dream,” I said, “and I’d forgotten all about it till last night.”

My therapist was rustling around in her desk.

“Could you take me back there?”

“Sorry,” she said distractedly from her desk, “take you back where?”

“That bedroom I used to dream about. Could you hypnotize me?”

My therapist was suddenly quiet, and when she began to speak again I could tell she was back in her chair, sitting. I was looking at the painting again now. The geese had begun to tremble more violently as the cones and rods of my eyes grew lazy from staring so intently at a single place for so long.

“Yes, I could try to take you there, but next week I think we should really talk about the elephant. Can we try to do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay. As for your dream, it’s entirely possible that it will have changed, that you won’t recognize it anymore.”

“I’ll recognize it. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Okay, Red. Close your eyes.” I did so. Night descended on the geese. “I’m going to count backwards from ten, and you’re going to feel

“How can I help you?”

I opened my eyes. I was standing at the edge of a dark forest, looking out from the trees into a sunny meadow with a castle in the distance.

“Ahem. How can I help you?”

Turning to my right, I saw a miniature tollbooth that was too small for its occupant, an even smaller tollbooth who was wearing the larger tollbooth like an ill-fitting dress.

“Oh yes, I’m looking for my dream? My bedroom?”

“Right,” the tollbooth said. “That will be ten tears.”

“Ten tears?”

The figure held out a caution-striped hand, and I thought about something sad until I cried. The figure’s palm absorbed ten of the tears, but there were two left over. From a pocket in their tollbooth dress the figure produced a glass vial as long as a strand of spaghetti, but so needle-thin and narrow that my two tears filled the entirety of its length. They handed it to me and said, “Here’s your change.”

“What do I need these for?”

I realized then that I was wearing a little backpack with a sleeve designed specifically for the vial, so I stowed away my tears and stepped into the meadow, absently marveling at the windmill flowers and haystack footstools.

At the castle I came upon a drawbridge which rose up slowly out of the water, from the unexpected direction, and as it emerged I noticed fish flapping and gasping on it, defying gravity as the bridge’s angle grew ever more acute or obtuse, depending on whether you identified heaven or hell as hypotenuse. The drawbridge finally clicked into place, parallel to earth, and I began to cross it, stepping gingerly between all the bright-colored fishes. I felt sorry for them, so I leaned down to pick one up and return it to the water, but it wouldn’t budge—it seemed to weigh many hundreds of pounds. At last I pried it away but with a terrible ripping sound, and I saw a fish-shaped patch of Velcro vibrating where its shadow had been. I turned to toss the fish into the water but found that the bridge now spanned a dry, uninhabitable canyon. I returned the fish to its Velcro, and the entire school of fish sighed in the grip of its collective shadow, a bridge of sighs, and I walked on into the castle proper.

Past the portcullis a stock market bustled with trenchcoated, robed, and loinclothed men of power. They were selling futures, literal futures, halved precious stones inside of which glimmered all that might happen. I took a step into the market and felt the sawdust and straw crunch underfoot. I bent down and saw that the paving stones were actually littered with millions of nanoprocessors and impossibly tiny glass contact lenses befitting myopic mice. I asked one of the stockbrokers, “Where am I?” He pointed into the sky directly behind me, and I turned and saw a gaggle of geese flying in a perfect endless circle. A little puff of cloud pulsed at the central axis of the circle. “No, right there!” I turned to see where the stockbroker was indicating, but when I did so my forehead came to meet the tip of his index finger, which he tapped three times against my skull. “Home,” he said, with his eyes closed as though suddenly blind, and as if he were speaking of his very own place of dwelling.

Behind him a shabby little three-story boarding house came into focus, mounted by a colossal neon marquee, a bit overkill, a fragment of Vegas in Iowa. The sign read: ɪɴsᴇʀᴛ ʙᴇᴅʀᴏᴏᴍ ʜᴇʀᴇ. I left the market, and as I approached the boarding house the porter in the dooryard tipped his hat, and the copper cockatiel on his shoulder likewise greeted me: “Bawwk! The therapist was right! The therapist was right!”

Inside were the usual Russian screams, dead samovars sensed through walls, vanished fortunes and lustful civil servants. I found the door to my bedroom in the middle of a dim basement hallway that was zoned and coded for mop closets only. The doorknob was melting, but when I grabbed it my hand took on ice like a glove and froze to it. I pulled away but my hand broke off at the wrist, and on its way to the floor, where it shattered, the fist-shaped crystal doorknob wheeled and cast back reflections of an eight-year-old me. I stuck the nub where my hand used to be into the slot where the doorknob used to be, and turned it.

Inside the room was a bed of black iron nails, and a medium-sized elephant with skin like distressed gray silk. There wasn’t a red balloon, but there was a torn and crimson thing tangled among the nails. The elephant was using its trunk to inscribe an equation into the air.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing at the symbols.

“Aeroglyphs. I am the alphabet of things.”

The room was cramped and cold. “I think I’d like to wake up now,” I said.

The elephant responded without looking at me or pausing in its calculations: “When you wake up, it’s entirely possible that your life will have changed, that you won’t recognize it anymore.”

“I’ll recognize it,” I said.

An unseen intercom crackled on. It played a .wav of a goose honking.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

The goose kept honking exactly the same way, over and over. The .wav was skipping.

And with a ponderous flourish the elephant dashed an equal sign into the air, then pointed with its trunk to the bed of nails. “Go ahead, Blue. Lie down. I think it’s time we talk about the elephant in the room.”