He had a strange dream that night. He had several dreams that night, not unusual for him, but this was the only one he woke up and remembered having that interested him enough to want to write it down. He always kept a piece of paper and a pen or two on his night table — still does — to write down things that came to him in his sleep or he thought of while lying in bed. If he used up that piece of paper or took it to his writing table to work off of, he replaced it with another one when he went to bed that night. The room was dark when he woke up from this dream. He thought about the dream awhile and then wrote the dream on the paper and probably got out of bed and had a glass of water and peed and went back to sleep. He read what was on the paper when he woke up in the morning and then a number of times the next few days — usually after he first got into bed, since the paper was still on the night table — and then thought this dream is worth saving. If he doesn’t save it he’ll lose the paper somehow — it always happens — and eventually forget what the dream was about. He kept a notebook in the top drawer of his night table — still does, in the same drawer of that night table but a different notebook from the one of that time. That one, he filled up and put someplace. It was the first notebook he ever filled up — took him around fifteen years — and he now doesn’t know where it is. Doesn’t matter. Well, he’d like to have it, but it really doesn’t matter. Whatever he could take from it, he thinks he did, and he’ll probably come across it sometime, not that it’ll be of any use to him. He has a theory — nah, forget that. But it has to do with if something’s lost, it’ll emerge someday if it’s important enough. He means in his mind, an idea or something he wants to add or take out or replace in a work he’s working on and sometimes even in one he’s finished but hasn’t published. Or hasn’t in book form. Anyway, he wrote that dream down in the notebook and got it out of the drawer a few times that week to read it. He did get rid of the piece of paper the dream was originally written on. Didn’t think he needed it anymore now that the dream had been transferred to the notebook. He also read that dream once to Gwen a short time after they got married, all of which is why — the number of times he read it — he remembers the dream so well and doesn’t need the notebook to remember it. How many times does he think he read it? A dozen or so, and he doesn’t know why it took him so long to read it to Gwen or even tell her about the dream. Maybe he thought it’d alarm her in some way, or make him out to be somewhat odd, having that dream the first night they met. Or else he didn’t think it’d be interesting to her — this could be possible — and then something came up that made the dream seem more important or applicable to their lives. The whole thing’s a blank. His sister died of a rare kidney disease. Something with “neph” or “nephr” in it. Another of those words he can never remember when he wants to use it no matter how many times he’s said it, or almost never remember. “Demagogue”—he got it now — but it almost always trips him up. “Demagogic,” “demagoguery”—anything with “demagog” in it, the same. For about a year before she died she was confined to a wheelchair. “Confined”? Doesn’t seem the right word for what she was. “Restricted to” would be even worse. At first she could get around in the chair by pushing the wheels herself. Then she didn’t have the strength for it anymore and someone had to push her in the chair. He used to push her outside to Central Park. A few times across the park to the Metropolitan Museum. Someone said to him — maybe Gwen; he seems to picture it, but long before her first stroke — that it must have been difficult pushing her so far, all these dips and hills, up and down curbs. He said it wasn’t, except for maybe crossing the bridle path in the park. The chair had wheels, for God’s sake, and he was much younger and stronger then, and his sister was a lot lighter by the time she became bound — that’s the word — to the wheelchair, down to sixty pounds from around eighty. She looked awful. Emaciated face, bony shoulders slumped forward, ankles swollen to almost twice their normal size, other things. It was before wheelchairs had seatbelts on them, so he had to tie a sheet around her waist so she wouldn’t fall out if he hit a bad bump or crack in the sidewalk or navigated a curb poorly, yet she did once and cut her hands and forehead. Just like what happened to Gwen, but in the house, seatbelt buckled by him but obviously not well, and she broke her nose and had trouble breathing in her sleep from then on. Kept him up so much at times that he left the bed to sleep in another room. She said once “I patted your side of the bed early this morning but, sadly, you weren’t there. I patted and patted in the dark in the hope I’d find you, till my arm couldn’t reach any farther. I’m sorry I make so much noise.” But the dream. He and his sister are walking down a dimly lit windowless hallway. This, just around eight hours after he first met Gwen and almost twenty years after his sister died. Low-wattage lights with dark shades on the walls. He says to his sister “My God, you’re walking, when before you were stuck in your wheelchair and someone had to push you. An overnight cure or miracle must have taken place.” She smiles at him but doesn’t say anything. Like Gwen and his parents and his brother and his best friend Mischa, and his sister in other dreams — none of them said anything to him when he dreamt of them after they died. Actually, not so. His father did once, if it was his father; it certainly was his voice. And in one of the many dreams he had of Gwen last night and this morning, she could have said something to him and he forgot. But with his father in that dream of just a couple of weeks ago, he was sleeping alone in this bed when the voice said “Martin!” just as his father used to do when he didn’t like how he was behaving or wanted him to do something for his mother or him right away or some household chore he’d been assigned to and his father thought he was avoiding or stalling. One, when he was a boy, he remembers hearing a number of times: “Martin! I’m surprised at you. Take the garbage out already. And this time line the pail with newspaper when you bring it back. For some reason only you know, you’re always forgetting.” He woke up, in the dream, though it seemed more like from it. He doesn’t believe in spirits or ghosts, but the truth is he came closest to thinking one of those could be so after he had the dream. Anyway, he was lying in bed, in or out of the dream, and saw a gray amorphous — smoky would be the best word for it — figure, no definable feature or form and taller by about six inches than his short father was and with his father’s rough voice, moving back in a slow curling motion to the corner between the picture window and closet and then come apart, the last bit of smoke disappearing where the head would have been. He stared at the spot he last saw the figure at and then sat up and turned on his night table light — he was now definitely out of the dream — and looked at the time — he’d already guessed it by a few minutes: three-fifteen — and lay back in bed with the light on, thinking about the dream and how real it was and what it might mean. His treatment of Gwen those last few weeks and especially the last night, that’s for sure. What else could it mean? Oh, he could come up with something, but that one’s probably it. His father was saying “Shame, to treat your wife, and so sick, that way. Where’d you ever learn such behavior? Certainly not from your mother or me.” He could just hear him. And what would his mother say, if she knew? “