“Is it your — your thoughts that are in Latin? Or the dialogue? Do other people speak Latin in them? Like, am I in your dreams?”
“Oh, yes, baby.” It amused Ronan to say this, a lot. He laughed enough that Chainsaw abandoned her paper shredding to verify that he wasn’t dying. Ronan sometimes dreamt of Adam, too, the latter boy sullen and elegant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan’s clumsy attempts to communicate.
Gansey pressed on. “And I speak Latin?”
“Dude, you speak Latin in real life. That’s not a good comparison. Yeah, fine, if you’re there. But usually, it’s strangers. Or the signs — the signs are in Latin. And the trees speak it.”
“Like in Cabeswater.”
Yes, like in Cabeswater. In familiar, familiar Cabeswater, although Ronan surely hadn’t been there before this spring. Still, arriving there for the first time had felt like a dream he’d forgotten.
“Coincidence,” Gansey said, because it wasn’t, and because it had to be said. “And when you want something?”
“If I want something, I have to be, like, aware enough to know that I want it. Almost awake. And I have to really want it. And then I have to hold it.” Ronan was about to use the example of the Camaro keys, but thought better of it. “I have to hold it not as a dream, but like it’s real.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t pretend to hold it. I have to really hold it.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Neither did Ronan, but he didn’t know how to say it any better. For a moment he was quiet, thinking, no sound but Chainsaw returning to the floor to pick at the corpse of the envelope.
“Look, it’s like a handshake,” he said finally. “You know when some guy goes in for the shake, and you’ve never met him before, and he puts it out there, and you just know in that moment right before the shake if it’s going to be sweaty or not? It’s like that.”
“So what you’re saying is you can’t explain it.”
“I did explain it.”
“No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.”
“I did explain it,” Ronan insisted, so ferociously that Chainsaw flapped, certain she was in trouble. “It’s a nightmare, man — it’s when you dream of getting bit and when you wake up your arm hurts. It’s that.”
“Oh,” said Gansey. “Does it hurt?”
Sometimes, when he took something out of a dream, it was such a senseless rush that it left the real world pale and unsaturated for hours after. Sometimes he couldn’t move his hands. Sometimes Gansey found him and thought he was drunk. Sometimes, he really was drunk.
“Does that mean yes? What is this thing, anyway?” Gansey had picked up the wooden box. When he turned one of the wheels, one of the buttons on the other side depressed.
“A puzzle box.”
“What does that mean?”
“Fuck if I know. That’s just what it was called in the dream.”
Gansey eyed Ronan over the top of his wireframes. “Don’t use that voice on me. You have no idea whatsoever?”
“I think it’s supposed to translate things. That’s what it did in the dream.”
Up close, the carvings were letters and words. The buttons were so small and the letters so precise that it was impossible to see how it could’ve been made. Also impossible was how the wheels of characters could have been fixed into the box without there being any seams in the rainbow-striped grain of the wood.
“Latin on that side,” Gansey observed. He turned it. “Greek here. What’s that — Sanskrit, I think. Is this Coptic?”
Ronan said, “Who the hell knows what Coptic looks like?”
“You, apparently. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is. And this side with the wheels is us. Well, our alphabet, anyway, and it’s set to English words. But what is this side? The rest of these are dead languages, but I don’t recognize this one.”
“Look,” Ronan said, pushing to his feet. “You’re overcomplicating this.” Stalking to Gansey, he took the box. He spun a few of the wheels on the English side, and at once buttons on the other sides began to move and shift. Something about their progress was illogical.
“That hurts my head,” Gansey said.
Ronan showed the English side to him. The letters read tree. He flipped it to the Latin side. The letters had shifted to read bratus. Then round to the Greek side. .
“So, it’s translated the English into all those other languages. That’s ‘tree’ in all those. I still don’t know what language this is. T’ire? That doesn’t sound like …” Gansey broke off, his knowledge of perished linguistic oddities exhausted. “God, I’m tired.”
“So sleep.”
Gansey gave him a look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid to think that sleep was just a thing that could be so easily acquired.
Ronan said, “So let’s drive to the Barns.”
Gansey gave him another look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid as to think that Gansey would agree to something so illegal on so little sleep.
Ronan said, “So let’s go get some orange juice.”
Gansey considered. He looked to where his keys sat on the desk beside his mint plant. The clock beside it, a repellently ugly vintage number Gansey had found lying by a bin at the dump, said 3:32.
Gansey said, “Okay.”
They went and got some orange juice.