“I’m awake.” I can just barely make out his face in the dawn light. We’re in trees somewhere outside. There’s a motorcycle here. I think we’re in Oregon somewhere.
“I’m all right, it was just a nightmare.”
He continues to cry and I sit quietly with him for a while. “It’s all right”, I say, but he doesn’t stop. He’s badly frightened.
So am I.
What were you dreaming about?”
“I was trying to see someone’s face.”
“You shouted you were going to kill me.”
“No, not you.”
“Who?”
“The person in the dream.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Chris’s crying stops, but he continues to shake from the cold. “Did you see the face?”
“Yes.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was my own face, Chris, that’s when I shouted. — It was just a bad dream.” I tell him he’s shivering and should get back into the sleeping bag.
He does this. “It’s so cold”, he says.
“Yes.” By the dawn light I can see the vapor from our breaths. Then he crawls under the cover of the sleeping bag and I can see only my own.
I don’t sleep.
The dreamer isn’t me at all.
It’s Ph?drus.
He’s waking up.
A mind divided against itself — me — I’m the evil figure in the shadows. I’m the loathsome one. —
I always knew he would come back. —
It’s a matter now of preparing for it. —
The sky under the trees looks so grey and hopeless.
Poor Chris.
28
The despair grows now.
Like one of those movie dissolves in which you know you’re not in the real world but it seems that way anyway.
It’s a cold, snowless November day. The wind blows dirt through the cracks of the windows of an old car with soot on the windows, and Chris, six, sits beside him, with sweaters on because the heater doesn’t work, and through the dirty windows of the windblown car they see that they move forward toward a grey snowless sky between walls of grey and greyish-brown buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and debris in the streets.
“Where are we?” Chris says, and Ph?drus says, “I don’t know”, and he really doesn’t, his mind is all but gone. He is lost, drifting through the grey streets.
“Where are we going?” says Ph?drus.
“To the bunk-bedders”, says Chris.
“Where are they?” asks Ph?drus.
“I don’t know”, says Chris. “Maybe if we just keep going we’ll see them.”
And so the two drive and drive through the endless streets looking for the bunk-bedders. Ph?drus wants to stop and put his head on the steering wheel and just rest. The soot and the grey have penetrated his eyes and all but blotted cognizance from his brain. One street sign is like another. One grey-brown building is like the next. On and on they drive, looking for the bunk-bedders. But the bunk-bedders, Ph?drus knows, he will never find.
Chris begins to realize slowly and by degrees that something is strange, that the person guiding the car is no longer really guiding it, that the captain is dead and the car is pilotless and he doesn’t know this but only feels it and says stop and Ph?drus stops.
A car behind honks, but Ph?drus does not move. Other cars honk, and then others, and Chris in panic says, “GO!” and Ph?drus slowly with agony pushes his foot on the clutch and puts the car in gear. Slowly, in dream- motion, the car moves in low through the streets.
“Where do we live?” Ph?drus asks a frightened Chris.
Chris remembers an address, but doesn’t know how to get there, but reasons that if he asks enough people he will find the way and so says, “Stop the car”, and gets out and asks directions and leads a demented Ph?drus through the endless walls of brick and broken glass.
Hours later they arrive and the mother is furious that they are so late. She cannot understand why they have not found the bunk-bedders. Chris says, “We looked everywhere”, but looks at Ph?drus with a quick glance of fright, of terror at something unknown. That, for Chris, is where it started.
It won’t happen again. —
I think what I’ll do is head down for San Francisco, and put Chris on a bus for home, and then sell the cycle and check in at a hospital — or that last seems so pointless — I don’t know what I’ll do.
The trip won’t have been entirely wasted. At least he’ll have some good memories of me as he grows up. That takes away some of the anxiety a little. That’s a good thought to hold on to. I’ll hold on to that.
Meanwhile, just continue on a normal trip and hope something improves. Don’t throw anything away. Never, never throw anything away.
Cold out! Feels like winter! Where are we, that it should get this cold? We must be at a high altitude. I look out of the sleeping bag and this time see frost on the motorcycle. On the chrome of the gas tank it’s sparkling in the early sunlight. On the black frame where the sunlight hits it it’s partly turned to beads of water that will soon run down to the wheel. It’s too cold to lie around.
I remember the dust under the pine needles and put my boots on carefully to avoid stirring it up. At the motorcycle I unpack everything, get out the long underwear and put it on, then clothes, then sweater, then jacket. I’m still cold.
I step through the spongy dust onto the dirt road that has brought us here and sprint down it through the pines for a hundred feet or so, then settle down to an even run and then finally stop. That feels better. Not a sound. The frost is in little patches on the road too, but melting and dark wet tan between the patches where the early sun’s rays strike it. It’s so white and lacy and untouched. It’s on the trees too. I walk back softly down the road as if not to disturb the sunrise. Early autumn feeling.
Chris is still asleep and we won’t be able to go anywhere until the air warms up. Good time to get the cycle tuned. I work loose the knob on the side cover over the air filter, and underneath the filter withdraw a worn and dirty roll of field tools. My hands are stiff with the cold and the backs of them are wrinkled. Those wrinkles aren’t from the cold though. At forty that’s old age coming on. I lay the roll on the seat and spread it open… there they are — like seeing old friends again.
I hear Chris, glance over the seat and see that he’s stirring but doesn’t get up. He’s evidently just rolling in his sleep. After a while the sun gets warmer and my hands aren’t as stiff as they were.
I was going to talk about some of the lore of cycle repair, the hundreds of things you learn as you go along, which enrich what you’re doing not only practically but esthetically. But that seems too trivial now, though I shouldn’t say that.
But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story. I never really completed it because I didn’t think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.
