Blenek paced slowly alongside the line of watchers, who were hanging onto the line’s straps like bored subway passengers. He glanced from them to his clipboard and back again, until he seemed satisfied that everyone was there. Pivoting on his heel, he waved up at the control booth. “Okay, Benny, take ’em on out.”
Nothing happened. The man in the little glass booth several meters above their heads remained absorbed in a half-eaten sandwich and a paperback book. He had his feet up on the controls that would activate the line and send the watchers out onto the dreamfield.
“Hey, Benny, come on!” shouted Blenek. “What’re you doing up there?”
“What does it look like?” said Goodell, who was standing closest to Blenek. He took Blenek’s pencil out of his hand and flung it up at the glass booth. It ticked against the glass and fell back to the floor. Benny lowered his feet and looked down at them.
“Come on!” Blenek waved his clipboard, a stiff rectangular bat flapping around his reddened face. “Throw the switch, dummy!”
Benny’s mouth moved, forming words they couldn’t hear, but his hands travelled across the control board anyway. The electronic hum whooped up in pitch and held its new note. The fluorescent lights suspended from the ceiling dimmed, reminding Ralph of the electrocution scenes from old prison movies, then the entire building, Blenek, and Benny up in the control booth, faded into grayness.
The dreamfield faded in. The familiar sidewalks and storefronts of a semi-rural small town solidified around the watchers holding onto the line’s straps. From a blue sky the fields eternal midafternoon sun shone upon them, but they cast no shadows upon the street’s surface.
The humming noise from the shack’s electronics back in the real world faded and then ceased entirely. One by one, the watchers let go of the leather straps. The line hung motionless for a moment, then snaked upwards, gathering speed until it vanished in the limitless sky above them.
One of the watchers yawned and stretched his arms. “If I stand around here,” he announced, “I’ll cork off in about ten seconds. Let’s go.” He motioned to his observation partner, and the two of them slowly started away from the group.
The rest divided into pairs and headed off in different directions along the dreamfield’s sidewalks. They all moved at the same unhurried pace.
“Which way you want to go?” asked Stimmitz. It was the first time he had spoken to Ralph since that afternoon.
“Whichever way looks good to you.” Ralph glanced at his watch; for some reason, he and Stimmitz were the only watchers he had ever seen with time-pieces. Eleven-fifteen, he noted, and sighed. Seven and three-quarters hours until the line came dangling down out of the sky again.
They walked in silence past a small drugstore. Circular racks of sunglasses and the aisles of cosmetics and other merchandise could be seen through its window. The store, like the others on the block, was lit up inside but vacant—the dream sequences tended to show up farther away from wherever the watchers had been dropped by the line.
Idly, Ralph pushed his fingers through the drugstore window. After an initial resistance, his hand went into the glass as though it were a body of water somehow made vertical. The nature of objects on the dreamfield was described alternately as “cheesy insubstantiality” and “evanescent jello.” The mental orientation that kept the watchers on top of the sidewalks instead of sinking slowly through them also gave a slight surface-tension effect to everything in the dreamfield’s illusion of a small town. The glass actually felt like water rippling around Ralph’s moving hand.
He turned his head and looked behind. The other watchers were all out of sight. Beside him, Stimmitz slowly paced, silent and apparently lost in thought.
They reached the end of the block and crossed the street. On the other side were the same stores as they had just passed, but reversed as if they had walked through a mirror. The entire field was made up of infinite repetitions and reflections of the same small area. If the two of them continued walking down the street, the neon sign that spelled out DRUGSTORE would become EROTSGURD and then DRUGSTORE again . . . again and again, for as far as they went on the field.
The sound of voices broke the silence. They had come upon the first dream sequence of the night. “In there,” said Stimmitz, pointing to the restaurant in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. The voices grew louder as he and Ralph headed towards them. One voice, a child’s, cracked with emotion.
Peering through the restaurant’s door, they watched the scene, already well under way. “The old puppy-on-a-platter pattern,” said Stimmitz.
“Are they still doing this one?” Ralph shook his head in disgust. “I thought they had already gone through all the kids in Thronsen with it.”
“Maybe the therapists have started reruns.”
The dream continued through its sequence. The platter with the boy’s dead dog upon it had already been brought to the table. The boy, a pallid-faced teenager, had risen from his chair and, with tears coursing down his face, was shouting at the waiter. As Ralph and Stimmitz watched, the waiter’s face melted into that of a middle-aged woman, probably the boy’s mother. More shouting, a long, agonized scream from the boy, and he buried his face in his arms upon the table, sobbing beside the dog’s corpse. In a few seconds, the mother/waiter dissolved into nothing along with the dog, leaving the crying boy alone in the empty restaurant.
“That’s always been one of my least favorite ones,” said Ralph as they walked away from the restaurant. “There’s something really tacky about it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I was talking about before. You know?”
Stimmitz gestured around them at the dreamfield. “Don’t you start to wonder if the therapists over at Thronsen really know what they’re doing? Or if they do know, do we?”
“Aw, come on.” Ralph kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk, the toe of his shoe going right through it. “Don’t start mystery-mongering again. Give me a little more to go on this time, all right? If you know so much, come on, show and tell time.”
Stimmitz glanced at him, then barely smiled. “Maybe what I know isn’t a mystery,” he said. “Maybe I just know the same things as you and everybody else, but I think about them differently.”
Ralph stopped in front of another of the field’s drugstores and faced Stimmitz. “You know you know more than I do. You sneaked into Thronsen with Helga Warner.”
“Think about that.” Stimmitz tilted his head to one side.
“Think about what?” He was beginning to feel a little irritated.
“Why’d I have to sneak into Thronsen.”
“Because . . .” Because there’s something they don’t want us to see. The pieces fell together in Ralph’s mind, perfectly formed, like a smooth black stone. Because they’re hiding something. He felt the weight of Stimmitz’s eyes upon himself. “I never thought about that.”
“Most people think nothing of everything.” Stimmitz turned and walked away.
Ralph stood for a moment in thought, then started after him. “Maybe they have a good reason for not wanting us in there.”
“Exactly,” said Stimmitz without bothering to even look around.
“Well, what about the dreams?” said Ralph as they crossed the street and entered another repetition of the small town. “What’s so mysterious about them?”
“Look. There aren’t any dreams here. These sequences they put these kids through every night aren’t dreams; they’re nightmares. That one we just saw—” Stimmitz jerked his thumb behind them, “—the dog-on-a-platter bit, the girlfriend-into-father-into-cop one, all of the ‘angry parent’ routines. Man, those are the worst kind of nightmares. Those are epics of humiliation and frustration and fear.”