happened.
Meet her in the boathouse? Who am I kidding, of course I?d meet her in the boathouse. I?d walk from
Pittsburgh to meet her in the boathouse.
Shit.
I got in bed with a copy of Donleavy?s Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule and read myself to sleep.
At two a.m. the phone woke me up. I put the book on the table and turned off the light.
The phone rang twelve times before it finally quit.
Fuck it, it had to be bad news.
16
BAD DREAMS
I had the dream again that night. The first time in four or five years. It had been so long I had
forgotten it. It had started a year after I got back from Nam. 1 understand that?s normal, It?s called
delayed nocturnal shock or something like that. At first it was just this one persistent dream. I could
never remember all of it, just bits and pieces. After a while it was such a familiar nightmare that I
knew I was dreaming and it didn?t bother me as much.
Then it changed.
The way it starts, I am in a hang glider soaring over a city. It could be Saigon, but I don?t recognize it.
Suddenly people on the ground are shooting at me. I can?t see them, but the bullets are tearing through
the wings of the glider. Next the bullets are hitting me. They bounce off as if my skin were bulletproof.
I don?t feel the bullets. I don?t feel anything. I don?t hear anything either. „This is a silent dream. The
next thing I remember, I see Teddy. He is on top of a ridge and he?s running. I don?t know what he?s
running from. Maybe he?s running toward something. He starts waving at me. I try to soar down to
pick him up, but the glider won?t move up or down. Teddy starts screaming at me, this soundless
scream. I feel desperate to get to him. Finally I get out of the seat of the glider and I hang over the side
and let go and I fall. There?s no ground, just me, falling through an empty space.
Then I wake up.
After a while it began to get more complicated, after I got used to it and it didn?t bother me anymore.
There were other hang gliders trying to collide with me. The other gliders were black and the pilots
were all masked. It was like an obstacle course in the sky. Before I got comfortable with that version,
the people in the other gliders started taking off their masks. One was my mother. Another was a fifthgrade schoolteacher whom I had not see or thought about for fifteen years. Another was my father,
only a face in a photograph to me. Then the parish priest in the New Jersey town where I was born. I
couldn?t remember his name; all I could remember about him was that he had “silent collections”—
that meant folding money, no silver. It used to make me angry. And there was also a captain named
