“I had a dream three nights in a row, a series of dreams, really. I like those, don’t you? When I was in college I had a recurring dream that I was Sylvia Plath’s pony. The dream was like a friend, or like she was my friend. After a difficult exam or a bad date or another nasty telephone call from my mother I’d have the dream the next time I fell asleep, and we would ride through the woods all night long, until just at dawn I’d leap right toward the sun and then wake up. In my first dream Boo was there again — Boo is what I call her — and she said to me, Jane, Jane, why have you come here? I looked around and saw that I was in a desert, there was nothing around except Sylvia, an oven, and a single reed growing up from the sand. I said, To watch this reed, because when the wind blows on it, it does a pretty little dance. And it did do a pretty dance. It wasn’t an ordinary reed. It was so supple, and it glowed like there was moonlight in it, and it looked like there was a lady in it, waving her arms and swinging her hair. I could have watched it all night. But Boo got very upset when I said this. Oh Jane, she said. Look what you make me do! And — it was so terrible — she rushed to the oven and stuck her head inside, and the flames came up and ate her head up, and she screamed and screamed for such a long time, longer than anyone should have been able to. I pulled on her feet but I couldn’t get her free.
“How many times had I cried out the same words. I said, Sylvia, Boo! Don’t do it! I’d shouted those same words into my pillow back in college, knowing why she did it, and wanting to do it myself, and knowing it wasn’t an on oven, but picturing her nonetheless in flames, or searing her cheek against a heating coil. I woke up in a panic, thinking I was back at our alma mater, and then, strangely, I saw the water at the window and I thought to myself, I’m in the hospital, and everything is all right. Everything is all right! Ha!
“Boo was waiting for me again, unburnt, when I came back to that desert place. Why have you come here? she asked me again. Was it to see the circus? And I said, Of course. Look at them, Boo! because there was a caravan passing behind her of clowns in big puffy silk pajamas and bearded ladies and strong ladies. I saw Abraham Lincoln on stilts, and a whole midget congress behind him on tricycles that they had to pedal very hard on the sand. There were elephants in velour sweat suits, and a Farrah Fawcett look-alike wearing parachute pants and a parachute poncho. It was a parade of wonders, as fascinating in the dream as the reed had been. Doesn’t it seem like the obvious answer, when someone standing in front of a parade asks you what you’ve come to see, to say, Well, the parade? But Boo scratched her breast and ran to the oven — it was part of the parade, walking on little iron legs, but it stopped for her — and we repeated the whole ugly scene, and it was even more vibrant and detailed this time. Now I could smell her burning hair and hear the fat under her skin crackle as it burned, and all the time she burned she called out, asking me Why, Jane?
“I woke again, and this time I actually said, Thank God, I’m in the hospital! Then right away I fell asleep again, and I was back in the desert, and Boo was there, as beautiful as ever. What have you come to see? Have you come to see this man? She stepped aside and showed me our own Mr. Grampus, standing behind her. He was standing very straight, with his eyes closed. It looked like he was in a trance. I said, Boo, he and I are pals. I can see him any old time I like. Why would I come all the way out in the desert just to see him? She pulled out her tongue and stuck her head in the oven and et cetera et cetera. I’ll spare you the details of what came next but I know you can imagine them. I woke again, and slept again, and woke again, every time I woke so damn grateful to be in my little bed, to watch the water pressing up against my window, when usually it just made me feel like I was drowning, or made me think of everybody else drowning. Have you ever had one of those dreams that seems to take a lifetime to finish? That’s what this one felt like. Boo showed me so many things — a sunflower, a marathon, my sophomore literature professor dressed all in leather — and I always gave her the wrong answer when she asked, Why have you come here? And then she showed me something different. It was nothing at all. She just indicated a space with her hands, and for some reason, instead of saying there was nothing there, or that I had come to see the nothing, I said I didn’t know why I had come, but that I would. I will know, I said. I promise you, Boo. Then it was dawn, and the oven ran screaming on its little feet off into the horizon, and Boo took me in her arms and said, Jane, Jane, Jane! and I said Boo! and the rest of it you don’t really need to hear.
“It is the lesson of the dream that you must hear. I’m sure some of you have already guessed it. I remembered my scripture in the morning. I climbed up on a chair so I could put my face right in the window and look at the miles and miles of empty ocean and I spoke it aloud, What did you go out into the wilderness to see? And I knew who had been talking to me all night. And I knew it was not to see, but to do, and I knew I must come and speak to you, not of Why me, because I cannot know. Not of How long, because it does not matter. Not even of Why at all, except as it pertains to What next.
“So now I ask you the same question. What have we come out here for? It’s so late, my friends, to ask ourselves the question, but the answer seemed obvious, before, when the circus was upon us. Now, in the quiet, we must ask ourselves again. I submit that the answer is, we don’t know. But we must know, we must decide, and I think that our errand must be as awful and wonderful as our circumstance. I don’t know what it is — can you forgive my presumption if I call on all of you to define it, and then to execute it? I call on myself to do it, too.
“So that’s what I had to say. That’s the question I wanted to ask. That’s all. Thank you for listening to me.”
36
“A little lower,” said Vivian. “I want the five-year-olds to see it, too.”
“But they’re not voting,” Jemma said. She was helping Vivian hang campaign posters, up and down the ramp, empty in the late evening, most everybody off at the movies or in one of the many Sunday-night meetings.
“So? They can talk. They can influence. Snood is ignoring everybody under sixteen.”
“Well,” said Jemma. “How about a clown nose, then?” She drew a circle with her finger around Vivian’s nose.
“Clowns suck ass,” was all Vivian said. Not all of her posters even had her picture on them, and on the two that did, her image was dwarfed by the text. She had three different posters, with three different slogans. One, blue letters on a red field, simply said: VIVIAN BENNETT: YOUR UNIVERSAL FRIEND. Between Universal and Friend her picture was set, four inches by four, a shot of her lovely face, looking friendly but not too friendly. It looked like a natural and spontaneous expression, but Jemma knew it was precisely calculated. At a poster party two nights before, Vivian had exhausted her with a catalog of expressions, trying them out on her before Rob took her picture. “How about this?” she’d say, and turn her lips up just a millimeter more. At first Jemma only pretended to notice a difference between expressions, but after a half hour of it she could actually see the difference the position of an eyebrow or the intensity of the stare could make. They’d chosen an expression they labeled a fusion of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Rogers, but it didn’t come out on film the way it looked in life. Vivian blamed Rob because he’d used a softening lens, hoping to make her look glamorous, not understanding that Vivian could look glamorous clothed only in pieces of toilet paper stuck randomly to her body, and that such devices were not necessary — indeed they were the only thing that could spoil her beauty. “Universal Friend,” she said to Rob when she fired him, “not Universal Whore.” In the final picture, which Jemma took herself, Vivian, overcorrecting for the luscious come-hitherness of the previous set, looked a bit stiff.