“Here is a game,” I said. It had to be done stealthily and rapidly, because of the Romans, and it had to be done in such a manner that if they happened to see they would understand nothing and think only that I was giving my son bread and water. Bending down, I gave him the piece of bread, and then, before he took the water, I inclined the glass playfully, as if by accident, and managed to splash it on his hair and forehead. Then, wiping it off with the sleeve of my pajama, I traced with my finger a cross of water on his forehead and said very quietly, under my breath so that only he and I could hear, words in Greek that I did not know the meaning of. Then, at once, I gave him the glass of water to drink from, and as he handed it back I kissed him and hugged him, as if spontaneously. It was done in an instant, this ritual of ceremony, this series of actions, whatever it was, something ancient which I knew to do by instinct. As I let go of my son I said into his ear, for only him to hear: “Your secret name is Paul. Remember that.”
Johnny gazed at me quizzically and then smiled. It was over. His real name had been given him, and under the correct circumstances.
“Good night,” I said aloud, and left his bedroom; behind me he rubbed at his moist hair and, sleepily, lay back in his bed.
What was that all about? I asked myself. In the dream transmission something had been freighted across to me on an unconscious level, instructions rather than information, concerning the welfare of my son.
When I returned to bed I had another dream concerning Sadassa Silvia. I heard music as I lay in sleep, astonishingly lovely music, a woman singing, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Gradually the guitar gave way to a small studio combo, and I heard, then, subtracks with backup vocals and the faint hint of an echo chamber. It was a professional production.
I thought, We should sign her up. She’s good.
Presently I found myself in my office at Progressive Records. I could still hear the girl singing, again with the solo guitar. She sang:
You have to put your slippers on
To walk toward the dawn.
As I listened, I picked up a new album which we had mastered. A mock-up of the artwork and layout had already been prepared: inspecting it critically, I saw that the singer was Sadassa Silvia; there, in addition to her name on the album cover, was her picture, the same Afro-natural hairstyle, the small worried face, the glasses. There was blurb material on the back, but I could not read it; the small letters blurred away.
That dream remained clear in my mind when I woke up the next morning. What a voice, I said to myself as I showered and shaved. In all my life I had never heard such a pure voice, so compelling; absolutely accurate in pitch, I realized critically. A soprano, something like Joan Baez; what we could do in the way of marketing a voice like that!
Thinking about Sadassa Silvia reawakened my concern about my job at Progressive. I had missed a lot of time; maybe I was ready now to go back. The dream was telling me that.
“Think you can make out okay alone?” I asked Rachel.
“Is your eyesight—”
“I can see well enough,” I said. “I think it was all the vitamin C I was taking; it’s finally flushed out of my system, taking everything else with it.”
I spent one whole day walking around Placentia, enjoying myself immensely. There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision now seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language. It resembled the trail signs which I understood American Indians used, and as I walked along I felt the invisible presence of a great spirit which had gone before me—walked here and moved the unwanted debris in these subtle, meaningful ways so as to spell out a greeting of comradeship to me, the smaller one who would follow.
You can almost read this stuff, I thought to myself. But I couldn’t. All I could gather from the arrangements of trash was a participation in the passage of the great figure who had preceded me. He had left these discarded objects placed so that I would know he had been there, and in addition a golden illumination lay over them, a glow that told me something about his nature. He had brought the dust out of its obscurity into a kind of light; this was a good spirit indeed.
I had an acute feeling that the animals always saw this way, always were aware of who and what had passed along the alleys ahead of them. I was seeing with the hypervision associated with them. What a better world than our own, I reflected; it is so much more alive.
It was not so much that I had been exalted upward from my animal nature to the realm of the transcendent; actually I seemed closer to the animal world, more tuned to actual matter. Perhaps this was the first time I had really been at home in the world. I accepted all I saw and enjoyed it. I did not judge. And since I did not judge, there was nothing to reject.
I was ready to return to work. I felt cured. Having handled the shoe ad certainly helped. The crisis had come and gone. It did not disturb my tranquillity to know that in point of fact I had not dealt with the shoe
