“I had a ten-dollar dream,” she told Oreilly, and Oreilly, rubbing his hands together, said, “Fine! Fine! But that’s just my luck, baby—you should’ve got here sooner ’cause I went and did a terrible thing. I walked into a liquor store up the street, snatched a quart and ran.” Sylvia didn’t believe him until he produced from his pinned-together overcoat a bottle of bourbon, already half gone.
“You’re going to get in trouble some day,” she said, “and then what would happen to me? I don’t know what I would do without you.” Oreilly laughed and poured a shot of the whiskey into a water glass. They were sitting in an all-night cafeteria, a great glaring food depot alive with blue mirrors and raw murals. Although to Sylvia it seemed a sordid place, they met there frequently for dinner; but even if she could have afforded it she did not know where else they could go, for together they presented a curious aspect: a young girl and a doddering, drunken man. Even here people often stared at them; if they stared long enough, Oreilly would stiffen with dignity and say: “Hello, hot lips, I remember you from way back. Still working in the men’s room?” But usually they were left to themselves, and sometimes they would sit talking until two and three in the morning.
“It’s a good thing the rest of Master Misery’s crowd don’t know he gave you that ten bucks. One of them would say you stole the dream. I had that happen once. Eaten up, all of ’em, never saw such a bunch of sharks, worse than actors or clowns or businessmen. Crazy, if you think about it: you worry whether you’re going to go to sleep, if you’re going to have a dream, if you’re going to remember the dream. Round and round. So you get a couple of bucks, so you rush to the nearest liquor store—or the nearest sleeping-pill machine. And first thing you know, you’re roaming your way up outhouse alley. Why, baby, you know what it’s like? It’s just like life.”
“No, Oreilly, that’s what it isn’t like. It hasn’t anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone. Oreilly, I tell you I haven’t an ambition, and there used to be so much. I don’t understand it and I don’t know what to do.”
He grinned. “And you say it isn’t like life? Who understands life and who knows what to do?”
“Be serious,” she said. “Be serious and put away that whiskey and eat your soup before it gets stone cold.” She lighted a cigarette, and the smoke, smarting her eyes, intensified her frown. “If only I knew what he wanted with those dreams, all typed and filed. What does he do with them? You’re right when you say he is Master Misery.… He can’t be simply some silly quack; it can’t be so meaningless as that. But why does he want dreams? Help me, Oreilly, think, think: what does it mean?”
Squinting one eye, Oreilly poured himself another drink; the clownlike twist of his mouth hardened into a line of scholarly straightness. “That is a million-dollar question, kid. Why don’t you ask something easy, like how to cure the common cold? Yes, kid, what does it mean? I have thought about it a good deal. I have thought about it in the process of making love to a woman, and I have thought about it in the middle of a poker game.”
He tossed the drink down his throat and shuddered. “Now a sound can start a dream; the noise of one car passing in the night can drop a hundred sleepers into the deep parts of themselves. It’s funny to think of that one car racing through the dark, trailing so many dreams. Sex, a sudden change of light, a pickle, these are little keys that can open up our insides, too. But most dreams begin because there are furies inside of us that blow open all the doors. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, but I do believe in people’s souls; and I figure it this way, baby: dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us. Now Master Misery, maybe he hasn’t got a soul, so bit by bit he borrows yours, steals it like he would steal your dolls or the chicken wing off your plate. Hundreds of souls have passed through him and gone into a filing case.”
“Oreilly, be serious,” she said again, annoyed because she thought he was making more jokes. “And look, your soup is …” She stopped abruptly, startled by Oreilly’s peculiar expression. He was looking toward the entrance. Three men were there, two policemen and a civilian wearing a clerk’s cloth jacket. The clerk was pointing toward their table. Oreilly’s eyes circled the room with trapped despair; he sighed then, and leaned back in his seat, ostentatiously pouring himself another drink. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, when the official party confronted him, “will you join us for a drink?”
“You can’t arrest him,” cried Sylvia, “you can’t arrest a clown!” She threw her ten-dollar bill at them, but the policemen did not pay any attention, and she began to pound the table. All the customers in the place were staring, and the manager came running up, wringing his hands. The police said for Oreilly to get to his feet. “Certainly,” Oreilly said, “though I do think it shocking you have to trouble yourselves with such petty crimes as mine when everywhere there are master thieves afoot. For instance, this pretty child,” he stepped between the officers and pointed to Sylvia, “she is the recent victim of a major theft: poor baby, she has had her soul stolen.”
FOR TWO DAYS FOLLOWING OREILLY’S arrest Sylvia did not leave her room: sun on the window, then dark. By the third day she had run out of cigarettes, so she ventured as far as the corner delicatessen. She bought a package of cupcakes, a can of sardines, a newspaper and cigarettes. In all this time she’d not eaten and it was a light, delicious, sharpening sensation; but the climb back up the stairs, the relief of closing the door, these so exhausted her she could not quite make the daybed. She slid down to the floor and did not move until it was day again. She thought afterwards that she’d been there about twenty minutes.
Turning on the radio as loud as it would go, she dragged a chair up to the window and opened the newspaper on her lap: Lana Denies, Russia Rejects, Miners Conciliate: of all things this was saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one’s lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too; and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn’t. But if Mr. Revercomb succeeded finally in collecting all the dreams out of every head, perhaps—the idea slipped, became entangled with radio and newspaper. Falling Temperatures.
A snowstorm moving across Colorado, across the West, falling upon all the small towns, yellowing every light, filling every footfall, falling now and here; but how quickly it had come, the snowstorm: the roofs, the vacant lot, the distance deep in white and deepening, like sheep. She looked at the paper and she looked at the snow. But it must have been snowing all day. It could not have just started. There was no sound of traffic; in the swirling wastes of the vacant lot children circled a bonfire; a car, buried at the curb, winked its headlights: help, help! silent, like the heart’s distress. She crumbled a cupcake and sprinkled it on the windowsill: northbirds would come to keep her company.
And she left the window open for them; snow-wind scattered flakes that dissolved on the floor like April-fool jewels. Presents Life Can Be Beautiful: turn down that radio! The witch of the woods was tapping at her door: Yes, Mrs. Halloran, she said, and turned off the radio altogether. Snow-quiet, sleep-silent, only the fun-fire faraway songsinging of children; and the room was blue with cold, colder than the cold of fairytales: lie down my heart among the igloo flowers of snow. Mr. Revercomb, why do you wait upon the threshold? Ah, do come inside, it is so cold out there.
But her moment of waking was warm and held. The window was closed, and a man’s arms were around her. He was singing to her, his voice gentle but jaunty: cherryberry, money-berry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie is a loveberry pie …
“Oreilly, is it—is it really you?”
He squeezed her. “Baby’s awake now. And how does she
