“No.”
“Well, thanks for coming so quickly.”
“I had nothing pressing. What’s on your mind?”
“Settling down.”
“Not a bad idea. I’ve done it myself, once or twice.”
“Do you believe in omens?”
“Does the Pope believe in bears?”
“What about dreams?”
“Dreams. I’m not certain about dreams. Why?”
“I’ve been having some odd ones.”
“What about?”
“Children. That is, my own.”
“Have you any?”
“Not in the conventional sense.”
“And that’s the sort you’ve been dreaming of?”
“Yes.”
“And it seems significant?”
“Very.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not going to live forever, you know.”
“An axiom, Kellem, without substance.”
“Maybe, but that’s not how it’s been feeling.”
“Is that why you’ve brought me out here? Because you’ve been having dreams?”
“I brought you out here because I knew how to reach you, and I needed to reach someone.”
“To talk about your dreams?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well?”
There were a pair of kids, a boy and a girl, both about seventeen, across the street talking about what they were going to do when the year ended. She’d go to school in town, probably at Twain, and he was going to apply to MIT in Boston. The calendar year would be ending in another few weeks, but I decided they probably meant the school year. That was all right, one is as arbitrary as the other, and the year as measured by the progression of seasons doesn’t really mean anything in a city. Their conversation faded into the background din of man and nature, who keep changing each other and making noise while doing so.
“The dreams have been affecting me,” she said. “I’ve done some strange things.”
“Taken chances?”
“All of that.”
“What sort of chances?”
“The sort you take when you’re desperate, and not really in control of your actions.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’m not sure.”
“If you want help, you must tell Doctor Agyar-”
“Cut it out.”
I spread my hands, palms up, and waited. When she didn’t continue I said, “Do you think someone might have noticed?”
“Yes,” she said in a neutral tone, so I couldn’t tell if she was worried, angry, or only vaguely interested.
“Can you cut and run?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“I like it here.”
I looked around elaborately. The streets were lined with trees, mostly oak and sycamore. The houses were working-class one-family dwellings, this one blue, that one yellow, that one green, with nothing to choose among them except lawn ornaments.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“No.”
“I go into coffee shops and talk with artists who are actually creating something. I go to plays, or movie theaters, and meet people with children who talk about how little Johnny speaks in full sentences and he’s only two years old. I-”
“And you like it?”
“Yes.”
“And now and then you do a convenience store or a bank.”
“When I’m desperate for cash; not often.”
“And lately you’ve been committing indiscretions.”
“That’s right. I think I have it under control now, though.”
“That’s good. Then what do you want me for?”
She looked me in the eyes for the first time. Hers were blue, large, and very, very cold. “As I said, the indiscretions have been noticed.”
“So what do you want me for?”
“Someone has to take the fall,” she said. “It’s going to be you.”
The night whispered around us, alive but indifferent.
Steven Brust
Agyar
TWO
or?gan?ic adj… 2. Of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms… 4. Having properties associated with living organisms… 6. a. Of or constituting an integral part of something; fundamental; constitutional; structural.
I keep discovering ways in which age affects me. For example, when I was younger and, as I said before, considering a career in journalism, I tried to keep a diary, because this had been recommended to me by a professor at University as a way of training myself, but I could never do it. Yet now I find that, as I go through my day, my thoughts keep coming back to this old typewriting machine and I eagerly await the chance to return to it. I don’t understand the reason for this change, and I haven’t the patience for soul-searching.
I don’t think, though, that it is really the need to set down what happens, as much as it is the act of writing, or typing, itself. There is something soothing in hearing the type bars smack the paper with that hollow, crunching sound, and seeing the black marks appear. They are nice and black, because I found a new ribbon in one of the desk drawers that sits next to this hard wooden chair, and after considerable trouble I managed to get it threaded the right way. Then I had to go wash the ink off my hands, because it seems wrong to soil the keys of this venerable machine.
Yesterday I rushed home after meeting with Kellem and, before anything else, I set it all down as well as I could. The act of doing so was very soothing, more so, it turned out, than telling it all to Jim the ghost, which I did as soon as I was done typing. Yet there were things, important things, that I didn’t remember as I typed them. Some of these came back, however, as I told Jim about the conversation. Why is it that some memories cast themselves naturally into written words, while others must be spoken?
