“It sounds like they’re talking to each other.”
Patty glances back over her shoulder.
“Good ears. They’re alive. When we’re asleep, our nervous systems merge with the Big Collective and these nerves broadcast our dreams.”
The second floor is a neural obstacle course. Most of the nerves are bundled along the walls like computer cords but the densest bunch run out from a twelve-sided wood-and-brass enclosure in the middle of the room.
A room off this one is a small but comfortable-looking rest area with a fridge, a massage table, and big overstuffed chairs.
The floor around the wooden enclosure is inlaid with the images of silver arches. The twelve vaults of Heaven. Patty touches each door as she walks around the big toy box. And stops by one. She pulls it open.
“Someone isn’t here today. Johnny Zed is supposed to be in here. I hope he’s all right.”
Inside the chamber is a fleshy pitcher-shaped pod of clear fluid. Nerve filaments drift inside like pale seaweed.
“This is it,” says Patty. “Dreamer central.”
“You get in there?”
“Strip down for a two-day skinny-dip. It’s not bad. It’s warm and you don’t feel a thing. You just float there. A womb with a view.”
“What do you dream about?”
“It’s hard to describe. It’s not things so much as the places between them. I wouldn’t dream of a table or you. I dream about big empty spaces. The hollow parts inside things. The atoms and molecules. I don’t dream about how fucked up things are out here but how perfect things are when you go deep down inside them.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Want to strip down and try it? You’re a little tightly wound, you know. It would probably do you some good.”
“What’s the dreamer safeword?”
She does a mock sigh.
“You’ve been to Hell but won’t even give Heaven a try. Silly boy.”
She closes the door and crosses her arms, looking serious for the first time since I got her away from the ghost.
“What happens now?”
“What happens is you stay here. Go inside the Silly Putty and try to calm down the sky a little or just hang around the lounge. I’ll see what I can do about the little girl. Don’t leave until you hear from me.”
I start back down the stairs, stepping carefully around the dreamers’ nerves.
“Hey, Sandman,” says Patty from the top of the stairs. “Thanks for today. You didn’t have to do all that.”
“No problem. I’d have done it for a dog.”
She smiles and goes into the lounge.
I take a cab to Max Overdrive. Thank God for cabbies. People joke that when the world ends, all that’ll be left are the roaches. They forget about the cabbies. As long as the roaches have money to pay or something to trade, the cabbies will be there to drive them from their roach motels to their roach offices and out to the roach suburbs, slamming on the brakes, cursing out the
