Great, I thought. Because if I sleepwalked in here, maybe I’ll sleepwalk out to the place where I first fell asleep beside Just Plain Mo. In fact, maybe I’m such a good sleepwalker, seeing how I cooked a dinner while asleep, that I’ll be able to sleepwalk not only out of this room but all the way to Palo Alto.
I went to sleep. When I woke up I was in a huge banquet hall. A long table for about fifty people was in the middle of the hall with many lit candles in a candelabra on it. A plate of food, shiny silverware, cloth napkin and bottle of champagne and champagne glass were in front of the one setting at the far end of the table. Again, I couldn’t find any windows, doors or openings of any kind. I see what it is, I thought. I’m still outside next to Just Plain Mo and dreaming. Well, I’m tired of going from room to room in my dreams. But I’ll still have some food and wine before I wake myself up. Because if this is a dream I’m in, then I must have come a long ways in it from that last room to this banquet hall to be so hungry again. Istuffed myself with steak and potatoes. With the champagne, I toasted to my good health and successful trip to Palo Alto. Then I bowed and bid adieu to all the empty places at the table and pinched my cheeks real hard. But I wasn’t able to wake myself up. Finally I yelled “Hey, anybody around?” I didn’t know why I didn’t yell this before. Maybe I thought nobody was around to hear me. “Come on, if anybody’s around. Let me know you’re here by showing yourself or just tapping on the walls or hidden ceiling or door. Even if this might only be a dream I’m in, or even a dream that I’m dreaming I’m in, I still always like to know who else is in them.” No answer, taps or anything. So far, the only way I’ve been able to get out of these rooms or the cave was to go to sleep. But this time when I sleepwalk, I won’t stop off at the kitchen to cook a meal. Because it might be that after I cook these great dinners, I always look for another room with a table and chair to eat them in. I’ll just sleepwalk straight to the outside, wake up, and find my food out there. I drank some more champagne and fell asleep. This time I woke up in a room as big and empty as a Major League indoor stadium if all the stands, stairs and fences had been removed. I was the only person or thing in this room except for a light bulb that hung on a wire halfway down from the middle of the ceiling. The floor was made of marble, the walls of white plaster, and the ceiling, from what I could make out as it was that high up, of carved wood. It took me several hours to inspect the room for doors or openings. There were none, not even a crack in the wall or floor. It was as if the marble had been put in and walls painted the day before, and had only now dried. Maybe if I fell asleep again I’d be able to sleepwalk out of this room and past the banquet hall to the room with the ordinary-sized table with no silverware on it. Then I’d stand on the table in that room and try and break through the ceiling and climb out to what might be the free sky above. So I curled up in a corner, still a bit groggy from all the champagne I drank in that last banquet hall, and fell asleep. I woke in a room that was as long as two aircraft carriers and so wide and high that it could have fitted three Major League stadiums in it and on top of the stadiums, a cathedral with tall spires. In the middle of the room was something like an enormous stage. It took me three minutes just to run to it. It was a round table, big enough to fit the three baseball teams around and all the families, relatives and friends of the players and maybe a couple thousand of their fans and all the groundskeepers and peanut and soda vendors too. The light in the room came from somewhere way above me. But it was so far up that I couldn’t tell whether it was a ceiling or windows the light was coming through or just an opened roof. There was one setting and stool at the table. And the food, on a soggy paper plate, was two cold hot dogs and splash of ketchup and pint container of milk with a chewed straw inside. Now it didn’t seem possible that I had sleepwalked into this room. Because why would I cook two hot dogs in wherever the kitchen was, leave them with the milk in the middle of this room, and then go to one end of the room about a half mile away from the table to wake up? Only to come back to the hot dogs, which by then would be cold and wrinkled, and the milk, which if I got it cold, was now warm. No, someone must have brought me and my typewriter here when I was asleep, and had the table set up for me before I woke up. But who? “Hey?” I yelled. “What’s the idea of all this? First off, if you know anything about me, then you know I don’t like hot dogs— wrinkled or smooth. And if I must eat them because there’s no other food around, at least give me mustard with them instead of ketchup. Also chocolate syrup for the milk, if you don’t mind. I’m thirsty and the milk with the syrup mixed in it is the only way I can ever get it down.” No voice answered except my echo, which said “There’s no mustard or syrup around, so take what you got or starve.” I ate the hot dogs and milk, as the next rooms I sleepwalked through might be very far away and the food in them even worse. Then I stretched out on the table to fall asleep. Even if there were doors or openings here, the room was so big that it would take days to find them. Since there wasn’t any more food around, where would I get the energy for such a long search? I’ll just wait till I awake in a much smaller room before I start looking for an opening to the outside. I woke up in the same room. The furniture and milk container were gone and I was lying on the floor. Did Isleepwalk through a hidden opening that I can only find when I’m sleepwalking, and carry the table out with me and then return to the middle of this room to wake up? Impossible. Even if there was a door large enough to get that table through, and another room large enough to store it, the table would still have been too heavy to carry alone. I would have needed the help of all those fans, players and groundskeepers. Or maybe while I was asleep I broke the table up into a million or more pieces and carried it out of the room that way, pile by pile. Anyway, either from lack of sleep or carrying all those piles out of the room, I was much too tired to look for the opening I might have carried the wood through, and fell asleep. The place I woke up in this time was absolutely black. It could have been the same room as before, or one of the other rooms I’ve been in since I fell asleep next to Just Plain Mo. What could I do but bump around or go to sleep again till either daylight came or someone uncovered the cave slit or relit the candle in the first room or one of the many candles in the banquet hall or replaced the lightbulb in that next room as big as a stadium or turned on the light switch or let up the window shade or