In the metropolis in my dreams, the dead outnumber the living. They sit in coffee shops and lie on blankets on the shores of bodies of water I often don’t recognize. They patronize theaters I’ve never been in and play basketball on courts built in unlikely places, such as cliff edges. They grow flowers and vegetables. They sing. They dance. They speak a language I strain to understand.
As the majority population of Dream Town, the dead hold all elective offices. They determine the hours of the municipal pool. (Midnight swimming!) They program traffic lights to operate on peculiar patterns: Some never turn red. Others never turn green.
My mother is the mayor: her intelligence, diligence, and creativity extolled, in contrast to how she was treated by her final employer in life. Depending on the night, she’ll greet me in the house—or the apartment, or the cottage—where she lives and offer me something she’s made: a slice of carrot cake, a cup of coffee, a candle. Once, she presented me with a drink composed of strawberries. “It’ll help you stop missing me,” she said. Although I love strawberries, I didn’t take even a sip, fearing that to stop missing her would be to forget her. I’d rather live with the ache of her absence.
Sometimes I see her in the hospital bed where, at the age of seventy-nine, she died of complications from a stroke. One night she opens her eyes and says, “Let’s go on an adventure.” Outside the hospital, the man she dated at the end of her life pulls up in his Cadillac and opens the door for her. They drive off without me. “You can join us another time!” she calls out the window.
I see my father, his cancer gone, his hair restored, in the middle of a woods, golf club in hand. He’s hit an errant shot. He’s free of the journalism job he excelled at but found burdensome. I’m delighted: We will at last have time to say to each other what we never said, to right the wrongs of our relationship, which became wobbly after he divorced my mother and married her best friend. But here in the forest, we don’t speak. We concentrate on looking for a ball we’ll never find.
My friend and colleague Dennis, who died of a heart attack a few months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, greets me on the front porch of his house with a winsome grin that never saw the inside of an orthodontist’s office. We pick up our conversation where it ended, with Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Florence + the Machine, the top-ten best zombie movies, and a man he calls the “Tiny Cowboy,” whom he met online and who offers him virtual sex and advice about a leak in his roof. Dennis is even more sanguine about politics than he used to be, protected by death from our democracy’s devastation. As usual, I’m cheered by his optimism. He pulls a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and lights one up. Smoking was one of the “great loves” of his life, he once told me, and although his doctors urged him to quit, he could no more say goodbye to cigarettes than Romeo could say goodbye to Juliet. When he became too ill to drive to Smoker Friendly—where, befitting its name, the employees all knew him—I made the trip in his place. I’d never bought cigarettes in my life. With its rich tobacco smells emanating from cartons of American Spirits, Camels, Newports, and Pall Malls, the store was an olfactory arcade, and my nose was delighted with all I might become addicted to. Dennis insisted on paying me back. He died a day after he wrote me the check. I never cashed it.
In Dream Town there are no banks. I carry his check in my pocket like a charm.
As they do in my waking world, my grandparents show up in Dream Town only in photographs on walls and mantels. Does this mean they’re dead even here? So often I want to read my grandmother a poem I’ve written, or ask my grandfather about the solo drive he made across the country and back after he retired the first time. His family didn’t know what to make of this journey, which was out of character for a man who would have had Responsibility inked on his forearm if he hadn’t found tattoos reckless. Whatever he’d discovered in his month on the road—about life, about America, about himself—he never said, and we never asked.
My friend Steven wakes from his heroin overdose—he’s twenty-one years old again; I must be too—and shows me what’s in his palm. They’re marijuana seeds left over from a bunch we planted in flowerpots under his ping-pong table when we were in ninth grade. The fluorescent lights on the underside of the table were supposed to be as bright as sunlight, but the seeds failed to sprout. This time, he promises, they will. “Everything,” he says, “will be different than it was the first time.”
“You’ll live?” I ask.
“I’ll thrive,” he says, enunciating the final phrase as if it were a lyric from one of the heavy metal songs he loves. I ask if he’s had any more trouble with his stepfather, who died a decade after he did. “I haven’t seen him,” Steven says, “which means I’m not in hell.”
I was a week from finishing my Peace Corps tour in a small town in the mountains of Guatemala when Layne arrived to start her service. I gave her everything I couldn’t fit in my suitcase, including a three-foot wooden cross—a gift from the volunteer who’d preceded me, who’d received it from a priest who’d had to leave the country quickly because of politics or a woman. Three months later a small plane Layne was a passenger on crashed outside the capital, killing everyone on board. The pilot supposedly had a heart attack. One of our Peace Corps friends called him an asshole, as if he’d ordered his heart to quit. I understood: It’s easier to be furious than full of grief. I heard someone carried the cross I’d given Layne to the local cemetery, although it also appears from time to time in Dream Town—amid tomato plants in a cooperative garden, on the front seat of a school bus, at the entrance to what looks like a church but proves to be a theater where I’m playing Hamlet, as I did in high school. I’ve forgotten my lines, and the audience’s reaction to my improvisation is hard to gauge.
I’ve never seen an airplane in Dream Town. Sometimes the dead fly on their own: their arms wings, their legs tails.
Every so often, from the mist-covered mountains around Dream Town, I hear the voices of the disappeared and dead I never knew in Guatemala. During the three years I was in that country, a civil war raged in places Peace Corps volunteers were forbidden to go. Every so often soldiers stopped a chicken bus I was on to search its male riders. Dutifully I placed my hands on the side of the vehicle alongside the other men, although I might as well have been a child playing war. The soldiers weren’t going to pull me into their canvas-covered trucks and drive me to where no one would ever see me again. In Guatemala I lived sometimes as if in a dream. Even as soldiers came one moonless night to seize three of my neighbors, I knew sooner or later I’d wake up in the United States.
My wife, from whom I am separated, appears often in Dream Town. I might joke that she’s permitted there thanks to a “you’re-dead-to-me” visa, but the truth is she’ll never be dead to me. Twenty-five years and two children are an eternal stamp in her passport to my life. In Dream Town she looks as she did before time carved lines into our youthful faces and hopes. She’s polite and friendly, as always—her social graces the yin to my recluse’s yang—laughing at my mother’s jokes and complimenting Dennis on his new shirt. No one here, least of all her, warns me I won’t wake up next to her. Morning offers its lonely surprise.
I don’t know I own a house in Dream Town until one night I answer a knock on my front door to find my mother outside. “Come in,” I say, thrilled to see her. She smiles, but I can tell a visit with her son isn’t her objective. She admits her real purpose: She’s here to collect Dusty, her calico cat.
My heart clenches. After my mother’s death, Dusty moved in with me. At eighteen she’s older in cat years than my mother would have been had she survived her stroke. On mild mornings Dusty walks with me around the outside of my house. Sometimes, like a veteran climber, she scales the twelve steps of my back porch, hoists herself onto the outdoor couch, and soaks up the sunlight. I’ve come to think of Dusty as my mother’s surrogate, someone I can soothe through the trials of her declining years. She’s granted me an opportunity for a closeness I was denied with my mother because of her sudden death.
I’m about to refuse my mother’s request when I consider how much she must miss her cat. Dusty was by her side as her career ended, as her second marriage dissolved, as her robust sixties surrendered to the infirmities—congestive heart failure, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, pneumonia—of her seventies. Dusty was her company and comfort the day she waited on the side of a Pennsylvania highway for three hours for a Godot-like tow truck from AAA. My mother always liked the saying “When you’re in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell with you, saying, ‘Damn, that was fun.’” Dusty was my mother’s cellmate.
My sadness at what I’ll lose turns to happiness at what my mother will regain. “Of course you can have her back,” I say. Dusty appears as if summoned, swirling around my mother’s legs, and the two of them walk into a sunrise so bright, I wake up.
Terrified that my dream is prophecy, I spring from my bed and race downstairs to my basement, where Dusty, owing to her territorial fierceness, lives apart from my two other cats. I expect to find her dead, called into the afterlife by my mother. But there she is, curled up in her favorite place on the couch. She opens her eyes and greets me with her usual meow—half welcome, half demand.
I collapse beside her and pet her with the arhythmic intensity of an amateur performing CPR. Despite this frantic attention, she purrs and eventually falls asleep, her head on my thigh, her body twitching as she dreams.
