Among many other things, he dreamed that a mountain had begun to grow from the prairie not far from his car—a mountain as big as any mountain on the Earth, and as perfectly round as a pearl.
A thousand miles south, Maria Montoya, an expensive private escort, as she thought of herself—or whore, as her customers were occasionally unwise enough to whisper (or shout) in the transport of their passions—attempted to keep an appointment with a German businessman at one of the tourist hotels on Avenida Juarez in the Zocalo district of Mexico City.
Keeping the appointment proved mysteriously difficult. For one thing, there were no taxis that evening. Which was, as the Americans would say, a bitch. She depended on taxis. She had an arrangement with one company, Taxi Metro: She took a 10 percent fare cut in exchange for leaving the company’s business card on her clients’ hotel bureaus. Tonight the taxis were absent, the dispatchers failed to answer their phones, and the streets, in any case, were full of traffic that had parked along the sidewalks like clotted blood in an aging artery. The whole city was in this stalled condition. As bad as an earthquake! Of course, there hadn’t been an earthquake or any other discernible disaster; the nature of this confusion was much more mysterious… but Maria didn’t care about the details. She felt feverish, dazed, uneasy. She fixed her attention entirely on the need to meet this client. An important man, a wealthy man. She tried phoning to say she’d be late; the phones seemed to work but the hotel switchboard refused to answer. At last, Maria cursed and went out from her rented room into the unpleasantly hot night, the air glutinous and stagnant, and walked ten long blocks to the hotel district past all these stalled cars… but not stalled, exactly, because the drivers had pulled to the side of the road, sometimes onto the sidewalk, leaving a neat lane down the middle of the street, and they had turned their engines off, and all the lights. The cars had become dark caverns, and through their windows, mostly open, Maria saw the slumped shapes of sleeping passengers. Not dead—that would have worried her—just sleeping. How did she know? It was impossible to say. But the knowledge was inside her.
It was a harrowing journey. She almost fell asleep on her feet. She took a wrong turn and found herself wandering past the Palacio Nacional, its ugly tezontle masonry brooding over the motionless plaza and a hundred stalled cars. Her shoes clicked on the sidewalk, and an echo came rattling back.
She arrived at the hotel an hour late and with a broken heel. Her determination had wavered during the long walk and she was sleepy herself.
But she rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor, negotiated the pine-smelling and air-conditioned hallway to the room marked 1413, knocked and then opened the unlocked door when no one answered. Her client was inside—asleep, of course. A fat German snoring on the bedspread in his underwear, skin pale as eggshell and unpleasantly hairy. She felt a wave of contempt, an occupational hazard, and suppressed it. Obviously, she wasn’t needed here. Not a chance of waking this man, who had made such an issue of her promptness. She ought to go home… but the thought of the journey made her weary.
Conscientious to the last, Maria placed a Taxi Metro card on the nightstand and lay down beside the sleeping German, a stranger, with whom she chastely slept, and with whom she dreamed.
Dreaming marched westward. Dreaming crossed the Aleutians from Alaska into Siberia. Dreaming descended on ancient Asian cities: on Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Tokyo slept with such condensed uniformity that it seemed to Hiroshi Michio, the last traffic cop to close his eyes on the cloistered neon of the Akihabara, that so much sleep, like a fog, might rise up and obscure the stars.
Sleep followed night across the Russian steppes, across rusting collective farms and lightless arctic forests, across the Urals and the Caucasus, sleep like an army moving west until it crossed the Finnish border, marched into Ukraine and then Romania, then Poland, where it met no opposition but the cool night air.
Sleep conquered China and rolled into Tibet, Pakistan, India, swept from Calcutta across two longitudes to Hyderabad.
Sleep took Africa in a space of hours. It moved westward from the Gulf of Aden into the dry hinterlands, took the dying children in the refugee camps and suspended them in darkness; followed the equator through jungles and grasslands and consumed the stony deserts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria; took its final subject in a fish shop in Dakar.
Dreaming unwound the cities of Europe, interrupting a river of human night noise that had run without surcease since the founding of Rome. Dreaming silenced Berlin and Leipzig; captured Naples and Milan; shut down the humming grids of Paris and Amsterdam; crossed the English Channel and conquered, finally, London, where a few frightened individuals had monitored the systematic dysfunction of the world with their shortwave radios, silent now, but who slept at last with everyone else, and with everyone else dreamed.
It was the same dream for everyone. The dream was complex, but the dream in its most fundamental form was a single thought, a question posed in six billion human skulls and more than three thousand languages.
The question was: Do you want to live?
Part Two
One in Ten Thousand
Chapter 8
Buchanan Awake
Simon Ackroyd, D.D., Rector of St. James Episcopal Church since his appointment to Buchanan in 1987, woke from a long sleep thinking about the Aztecs.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the Aztec Empire had brought the practice of ritual sacrifice to such a pinnacle of efficiency that on one occasion in 1487 eighty thousand individuals—prisoners of war—were systematically killed, their beating hearts extracted with obsidian knives. The lines of victims stretched for miles. They had been caged, fattened, and sedated with a plant drug called toloatzin so they would endure the nightmare without struggling.
The Aztecs, when Simon read about them in college, had been the first real test of his faith. He had grown up with what he recognized now as a sanitized Christianity, a pastel Sunday School faith in which a gentle Jesus had redeemed humanity from the adoration of similarly pastel pagan idols—Athena and Dionysus worshiped in a glade. The problem of evil, in this diorama, was small and abstract.