"I'm so sorry, "Sophie said, laying a hand on his arm.
Max sighed. "It doesn't hurt to talk about him, but God do I miss him."
You can say it doesn't hurt, Sophie thought, but she could see how bright his eyes had become, only just holding back a film of tears. The openness with which he'd shared his feelings with her made her want to do something special in return.
"I want you to have this painting," she said. "You can come pick it up when the show's over."
Max shook his head. "I'd love to buy it;" he said, "but I don't have that kind of money."
"Who said anything about you having to pay for it?"
"I couldn't even think of..." he began.
But Sophie refused to listen. "Look," she said. "What would be the point of being an artist if you only did it for the money? I always feel weird about selling my work anyway. It's as though I'm selling off my children. I don't even know what kind of a home they're going to— there's no evaluation process beforehand. Someone could buy this painting just for the investment and for all I know it'll end up stuck in a closet somewhere and never be seen again. I can't tell you how good it would make me feel knowing that it was hanging in your home instead, where it would mean so much to you."
"No, I just couldn't accept it," Max told her.
"Then let me give it to Peter," Sophie said, "and you can keep it for him."
Max shook his head. "This is so strange. Things like this don't happen in the real world."
"Well, pick a world where if could happen," Sophie said, "and we'll pretend that we're there."
Max gave her a carious look. "Do you do this a lot?"
"What? Give away paintings?"
"No, pick another world to be in when you don't happen to like the way things are going in this one."
Now it was Sophie's turn to be intrigued. "Why, do you?"
"No. It's just... ever since you came over and started talking to me, I've felt as though we've met before. But not here. Not in this world. It's more like we met in a dream..."
This was too strange, Sophie thought. For a moment the gallery and crowd about them seemed to flicker, to grow hazy and two-dimensional, as though only she and Max were real.
Like we met in a dream...
Slowly she shook her head. "Don't get me started on dreams," she said.
4
"There are sleeping dreams and waking dreams," Christina Rossetti says in her poem "A Ballad of Boding," as though the difference between them is absolute. My dreams aren't so clearly divided, not from one another, and not from when I'm actually awake either. My sleeping dreams bleed into the real world; actually, the place where they take place seems like a real world, too— it's just not one that's as easily accessed by most people.
The experiences I have there aren't real, of course, or at least not real in the way people normally use the word. What happens when I fall asleep and step into my dreams can't be measured or weighed— it can only be known— but that doesn't stop these experiences from influencing my life and leaving me in a state of mild confusion so much of the time.
The confusion stems from the fact that every time I turn around, the rules seem to change. Or maybe it's that every time I think I have a better understanding of what the night side of my life means, the dreams open up like a Chinese puzzle box, and I find yet another riddle lying inside the one I've just figured out. The borders blur, retreating before me, deeper and deeper into the dreamscape, walls becoming doors, and doors opening out into mysteries that often obscure the original question. I don't even know the original question anymore. I can't even remember if there ever was one.
I do remember that I went looking for my mother once. I went to a place, marshy and bogled like an old English storybook fen, where I found that she might be a drowned moon, pinned underwater by quicks and other dark creatures until I freed her from her watery tomb. But I came back from that dreamscape without a clear answer as to who she was, or what exactly it was that I had done. What I do know is that I came back with a friend: Jeck Crow, a handsome devil of a man who, I seem to remember, once bore the physical appearance of the black-winged bird that's his namesake. Is it a true memory? I don t know, he won't say, and our relationship has progressed to the point where it doesn't really matter anymore.
I only see him when I sleep. I close my eyes and step from this world to Mabon, the city that radiates from Mr. Truepenny's, the bookstore/art gallery I made up when I was a kid. Or at least I thought I'd made it up. It was the place I went when I was waiting for my dad to come home from work, a haven from my loneliness because I didn't make friends easily in those days. Not having anyone with whom I could share the fruits of my imagination, I put all that energy into making up a place where I was special, or at least had access to special things.
Faerie blood— courtesy of a mother who, Jilly is convinced, was a dream in this world, a moon in her own— is what makes it all real.
5
"Who was that guy you spent half the night talking to?" Jilly wanted to know as she and Sophie were walking home from the restaurant where they'd all gone to celebrate after the opening. Sophie had asked Max to come along, but he'd declined.
"Just this guy."
Jilly laughed. " 'Just this guy.' Oh, please. He was the best-looking man in the place and he seemed quite smitten with you."
Sophie had to smile. Only Jilly would use a word like smitten.
"His name's Max Hannon," she told Jilly, "and he's gay."
"So? This means you can't be friends?"
"Of course not. I was just pointing out that he's not potential boyfriend material."
"It's possible to be enamored with someone on an intellectual or spiritual level, you know."
"I know."
"And besides, you already have a boyfriend."
Sophie sighed. "Right. In my dreams. That doesn't exactly do much for me in the real world."
"But your dreams are like a real world for you."
"I think I need something a little more... substantial in my life. My biological clock is ticking away."
"But Jeck—"
"Isn't real," Sophie said. "No matter how much I pretend he is. And Mabon isn't a real city, no matter how much I want it to be, and even if it seems like other people can visit it. You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn't change the fact that some things are real and some things aren't. There's a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy."
"Yeah, but it's an imaginary line," Jilly said. "Who really decides where it gets drawn?"
They'd been through variations on this conversation many times before. Anyone who spent any amount time with Jilly did. Her open-mindedness was either endearing or frustrating, depending on where you stood on whatever particular subject happened to be under discussion.
"Well, I'll tell you," Jilly went on when Sophie didn't respond. "A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since."
"All of which has nothing to do with Max," Sophie said in an attempt to return to the original topic of their conversation.
"I know," Jilly said "So are you going to see him again?"
"I hope so. There's something very intriguing about him."
"Which has nothing to do with the way he looks."
"I told you," Sophie said. "He's gay."
"Like Sue always says, the best ones are either married or gay, more's the pity."
Sophie smiled. "Only for us."
"This is true."
6
The desert dream starts in the alley behind Mr. Truepenny's shop— or at least where the alley's supposed to be. I'm in the back of the store with Jeck, poking around through the shelves of books, when I hear the sound of this flute. It goes on for a while, sort of lingering there, in the back of my mind until finally I get curious. I leave Jeck digging for treasure in a cardboard box of new arrivals and step past the door that leads into the store's small art gallery. The music is sort of atonal, and the instrument appears to have a limited range of notes, but there's something appealing about it all the same. I walk down along narrow corridor, the walls encrusted with old portraits of thin, bearded men and women in dresses that appear far too stiff and ornately embroidered to be comfortable. The soles of my shoes squeak on the wooden floor in a rhythmic counterpoint to the music I'm following. I stop at the door at the far end of the hall. The music seems to be coming from the other side of it, so I open the door and step out, expecting to find myself in a familiar alleyway, but the alley's gone.