Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Esc

The Road’s End





So close to the road’s end, the traveler couldn’t remember the beginning. The trail climbed the mountain, and all he could do was to lean into the slope, one hand resting on his sword’s grip, the other hooked behind the leather strap that held all his belongings on his back. His thighs burned, but he’d climbed so many mountains, walked so many miles, he knew how far he could go before rest. Every day presented more miles. Every day the horizon changed but remained as unreachable. Still, he walked.

The fingers of his sword hand stuck together. He raised them absently to his mouth and licked the wolf’s blood. Sweat flavored it, and dust. The wolf itself lay dead in the leaves at the trail’s foot. Of course, it was another legendary wolf he’d been warned about at the last inn. “Beware the Darkwood Killer,” said the innkeeper, a young man with stout arms and no hint of a beard. “A hundred men have tried their luck. Don’t go that path,” he’d said.

“Only a hundred?” said the traveler. He finished his meal, thanked the innkeeper for the courtesy, then continued on.

How many wolves had fallen in the past years? How many years had it been? The traveler didn’t know. When wolves didn’t guard the way, other barriers arose: Bridges hid trolls. Ghosts haunted castles. Beautiful princesses with hearts of black hemlock waited in court. Caves held dragons. Rivers flowed and gurgled and whispered seductively in the moonlight, waiting for him to bend for an instant to listen. Roads possessed plans of their own, changing their turns, and they led him down evil ways. Or magicians cast spells.

The traveler sighed. One more step planted in front of the other. One more climbing effort up the mountain. Would a corrupted king wait at its top? Or a giant? Or a minor god?

A biting wind dropped from the heights. He pulled his cloak closer about his shoulders, and on the distant peaks, gray snow merged with gray clouds. Already he’d passed beyond the grain fields and vegetable gardens below, all the mundane farmers and villagers who hardly waved at his passing.

If they knew his name, they would crowd the way before him because his stories traveled much faster than he did, sometimes so changed he hardly recognized himself in them. “Tell us about the witches at Coverst Crest,” one would say. “Did you really quell the beast of Fordham Falls?” another might ask. “Can I see your sword?” a child with quivering lip would say. The fathers pointed him out to their sons or hid their eager daughters behind them. Other men, valorous men, nodded or raised an open palm when he passed. Gates opened. Lanterns lit. Musicians played. They pushed close for the stories. If they knew his name.

He’d grown tired of turning around, but he stopped for a moment to look down the climbing trail. Trees bent in the wind below. Smoke hustled away from the distant chimneys. Parts of the path peeked through the forest until fog hid it all.

Where he’d been didn’t matter anymore, except that sometimes the enemies came from his back. He shivered. Every step today seemed haunted with recognition. That tree! That red thrust of rock, bare on the hill! That small pond with trees leaning in just so! Perhaps he’d traveled so far that nothing new existed. Everything had crossed his path, and the world held no more surprises. Still, he walked on, because that was what he did, the traveler, pushing onward toward the heights.

To his left, scraggly brush that rattled against the wind gave way to ragged granite teeth and a rising slope to black bluffs. To his right, the mountain dropped sharply to a tiny stream cascading from one rock to the next. He thought about mountain creatures: bad tempered long horned sheep who blocked the way, or shag-shouldered bears rearing on hind legs, their claws as sharp as nightmares, or mountain men who’d become more mountain than men with fingers that broke stone.

His hand tightened on the sword’s hilt as he glanced from side to side. The old feeling, the familiar one tingled along his arms’ coarse hair. Something waited or stalked or crouched somewhere on the path ahead. An ambush. An attack. A trap. Or was that it at all? The air had a tinge to it he recognized. The sun slanting through the clouds walked across the distant peaks in a strangely reminiscent way. But he moved forward. Whatever waited still waited, and the road’s tyranny continued. He had to press on, although he couldn’t remember exactly what it was that had started him on the quest, what long-ago undertaking took him from his home. Whatever the deed was, he’d accomplished it. That was clear. But what was it? Every act since had been to return home. Why had he left?

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t recall. Had there been a stronghold long ago that was his own? The memory hardly seemed there. Tall walls that stood against the morning mists? A gate? He pictured an intricately bricked arch and solid columns, a sandy path between. And there was music.

But what was that? A memory? A dream? A wish?

The trail curved around the mountain’s shoulder. His boots ground gravel into the dirt. His breath came heavily and measured. These were things he could sense much more than troubling whispers of nearly lost times. Believe in the road, he thought. Believe in the next heartbeat. The mind should be empty, like a bowl. Empty and aware, or the enemies will catch me in my distraction. All reflex.

Something flicked by the corner of his eye. With a snarl, he snapped his sword around, felt the slight contact, then stood at guard, balanced on the balls of his feet, hands away from his sides. The mountain’s pulse, it seemed, seized for a moment, but nothing else stirred within his sight. The trail curled away as before. A gust of wind hurried over scant grass, bending it down, whistling through his ears, carrying the dry scent of pine before it calmed.

Finally, he looked at his feet. A small gray bird lay in the dust, cleft into two parts, a splash of blood across one extended wing, a scattering of feathers quivering in the air, a bent claw extended and clenching up as if to grasp a branch. Just a bird. But the feeling that a trial waited ahead didn’t leave him. If anything, the feeling grew stronger like a thickening in the air. He wiped the blade clean, left it unsheathed, and then stalked forward, each cautious stride revealing a fragment more of the unknown path. The top of a tree peeked over the hill, then gradually, branch by branch, revealed itself until the whole tree stood rooted to the mountainside. As always, landscape unfolded before him, slowly, oh so slowly, his sword tip arcing before him like a steel finger with each step, until from around the hill his trek revealed a man standing astride the trail a stone’s throw away.

The traveler continued toward him. The man’s shield showed use, and his sword’s grip was worn and practical, not decorative. He wore no helmet, though—his face showed no lines, and his dark hair reminded the traveler of his own before age had grayed it. The man’s arms were crossed on his chest, well away from his weapons.

“Well met, stranger,” said the traveler, lowering his sword.

“I expected you long ago.” The man’s voice carried clearly. “We’ve waited.”

Nothing moved in the trees ahead, and they were too far away for even a skilled archer to reach him. No rock or bush close by seemed big enough to hide an accomplice, and the traveler couldn’t smell horses or men in the wind. Still, he stepped off the trail so he would be above the stranger as he approached. Even in a sword fight, height gives an advantage.

The traveler sheathed his blade. “I am expected?” He looked again at the trees and the trail’s shape. Once again, the feeling that he’d been on this road before struck him.

“Long expected. Long missed.” The younger man’s gaze was steady. His posture was poised, too, competent and prepared.

For a moment, they faced each other without speaking. The traveler puzzled the comment. At last, he said, “Missed by who?”

“My mother,” said the young man, “and me.” For an instant, an intervening cloud blocked the beams of sun that had dressed the mountains behind the man, then it shifted again, and a shaft of light lit a mountain peak as if it were on fire. “I’ve never known you, Father,” the young man said.

The traveler sighed. Of course, he could see it now in the young man’s face, the curve of his cheek, his mother’s eyes. When the traveler had left so long ago, there had been a baby. He recalled now, dimly, a last embrace, a kiss on a baby’s head, before shouldering his pack and setting out from his home. He looked past the young man, his son, and remembered that the path would curve one more time. His holdings would open out before him then. The small fields of hardy, mountain produce. The farmers’ huts, and, behind them, his stronghold, rising out of the mountain’s native stone, like a rock formation.

“I am sorry for my long travels,” he said. “Lead me home.”

After the curve, the trail spilled into a long and narrow valley, much as the traveler recalled, although it seemed there were fewer huts, and the buildings were more aged. Weather stained their wood walls. The thatching sagged on the roofs.

A farmer paused in his digging as they passed, his face a blank page. The traveler nodded in his direction, but the farmer had already returned to his work.

The stronghold, though, stood even stauncher than he had envisioned. From the high parapet two flags snapped briskly in a wind that didn’t touch him as he approached the stone archway. The traveler’s hand brushed against the smooth wall, so solid and cool against his knuckles, and he suddenly remembered running past this wall when he was a boy. He shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment. A boy? It had been so long since his life had been anything except the road and the weary walk.

Beyond the arch, through the thick battlements, a courtyard opened before them, and where the sky wrapped from horizon to horizon before, now the walls dominated, relegating the sky to a much smaller square overhead. Gray stone. Sturdy buildings marked with decorated wooden doors. A closed in smell that brought back a hundred new memories. Wood smoke. Stabled animals. Wet hay.

Across the courtyard, a well appointed elderly woman, flanked by two spearmen waited for them at the foot of the broad stairs that led up to the Great House. As he approached, he could see that she knew him. Her posture, already balanced, became even more regal, but she trembled slightly, and ventured a step toward him that she immediately took back.

He stopped before her. In the brief instant before she spoke, he saw within her lined features the young woman he’d left so many years ago.

“Husband,” she said.

“Wife.”

Their embrace was long. The traveler smelled the remembered perfume, the sweet underscent of her skin. Her tears dampened his face, and for a moment, all the years dropped away. They were young again and courting, when she had teased him from horseback, outracing his own horse on the windy forest trails she knew so well; when she beckoned him to sit at streamside, and they talked long and earnestly about their lives to come; and when she danced in the Great House hall, far surpassing the other women who once vied for his attentions. For the moment of the embrace, the world became her, and he realized the dampness on his face was his own tears too.

So he did not object when the servants took his sword to hang above the Great House fireplace, or gave him new, fine clothes to replace the road-worn ones. Nor did he object to the welcome home feast where his grown son toasted to his good health and then returned the ruler’s scepter, or when his wife led him up the stairs they had walked so many years before to the wedding chamber. It seemed he floated, now, so much weight had disappeared.

But much later, when the only sounds in the Great House were the skittering of mice and the familiar pulsing throb in his ears, the traveler roused himself from the bed and padded barefoot to the open window overlooking the courtyard. A full moon showed brightly on the well-swept walk from the archway entrance. Quartz or mica flecks in the stone caught the light so that the path looked more like a river than a road. It flowed from the entrance, through the courtyard, and then emptied into the darkness of the stronghold’s backdoor, a little used exit barely wide enough for a man and the belongings on his back. He stared at the shadowed door for a long time, the evening breeze washing over his nakedness until goosebumps roughened his skin. The light seemed to gravitate to that spot as if the courtyard were tilted. What was it that drew his gaze there? Behind him, the bed, so much softer than most he had slept in in his journeys, beckoned. His wife, still the young woman in her heart, still in love with the young man in his, slumbered deeply there, waiting for him even now.

But there was the mysterious door.

He leaned against the window’s sill so he could see it better. Moonlight touched his hands and face. Then, he remembered. He pictured it: his hand reaching out, unlatching the heavy bolt, all those years ago. His quest began there where the road led him from enigma to revelation, and from danger to triumph, over and over again. That’s where he had started, his wife’s last caress fresh on his lips, his sword untested and keen in its sheath.

Who was that young man then? The traveler felt that he knew of him, but he didn’t know him, just as he knew of the son who had spoke so loudly for him at the dinner that evening, but he did not know him, not like a father should know a son. Nor did he know the woman in the bed. Not really. She was like a story told to him about another woman, another man’s wife. A romance he learned about. Not his.

He shivered. Was the stronghold even a part of him?

A hazy cloud passed in front of the moon, dimming the courtyard, so it almost disappeared, but the road seemed to glisten just as brightly.

The woman coughed in the shadows behind him as she rolled in her sleep. The traveler flinched. He didn’t recognize her breathing. The stone sill beneath his hand felt rough-edged and unfamiliar. He rose on the balls of his feet. His hands drifted away from the window and floated at his sides, relaxed, ready to defend him. Without thinking, he moved away from the silhouetting window and into the room’s darkest corner. There, he watched. Did the ornate arras that covered the far wall move, just a little? Could there be someone behind it? Quiet as the moonlight, he moved from one corner to the next, until he stood at the tapestry. It lay nearly flat against the wall, barely room for a sword to fit behind it, much less an assassin, but his heart still pumped as if he’d run a long race, and his mouth felt dry.

The woman in the bed stirred again. Her white hair wisped across the bed’s covers, all light shadows and dark shadows. He crept around the room’s door and into the hallway beyond where his foot encountered a pile of soft cloth, his old travel clothes. The shirt pulled on easily, as did the pants and much-patched boots.

No less quiet than before, the traveler stalked down the stairs. The lay of the stronghold seemed less familiar every step he took. The shape of a chandelier surprised him. An unfamiliar draft caught him unawares. With some difficulty, he found his way to the Great House fireplace and retrieved his sword. When he held it, its weight pushed him down just enough that he felt he was touching the earth again. He remembered the quick flick of his wrist earlier and the bird cleft in two, and he smiled sadly at the thought. For good or ill, the sword was a part of him. Not like this strange fortress that reeked of memories and people who did not know him.

He moved now with purpose, across the Great Hall to the throne room where he found the scepter on the high seat where he’d left it. Like a ghost, passing through one dancing-dust moonbeam at a window and into the next, he wandered until he found his son’s living quarters, marked by a sign above the door. The traveler leaned the scepter against the polished wood. It looked better there than in his hand.

Minutes later, he stood at the small door he had seen from the wedding chamber window. The latch lifted just as heavy as he remembered, and when the door swung open, the trail glowed like the brilliant face of the moon overhead. He shifted the sword into a more comfortable position and began walking.

Trees passed, and so did rock and hillock and a thrushy dell. Finally, the road returned to the climb he had started earlier that day. Before him, the not so distant peaks caught the moonlight in their teeth and did not tremble, nor did he. The path led to them and through them and passed beyond. He leaned into the ascent, his thighs burning familiarly.

So close now to the road’s beginning, so comfortable in the long strides that would eat the miles, so aware of his legs moving him forward, always forward on his comfortable journey into the unknown, he realized the road had no end, and he was content.





One in a Thousand





This is a dream!

This is a dream!

I entered the last dream shouting at my sleeping self, aware that I was dreaming. Wake up, fool! I pleaded. I’ll admit it. But I slept on anyway. Some things you just can’t help. Tonight I won’t do it, though. Plead, I mean. Tonight I’ll welcome the dream.

I knew it was a dream, all of them were, because I woke to leave them and slept to enter. But that was the only way I knew. The dreams are reality in all other ways and when I die here I die in my waking life. I saw it happen to a guy once, so I know what I’m talking about.

He stood three men down from me. No name, just another soldier. I’m a soldier, too, in the dreams. Scared looking, but holding himself stiff and straight; he was just one guy in a line of a thousand men and women. I stared straight ahead, but from the corners of my eyes I saw them wearing khaki uniforms, hiking boots, belt buckles shining.

Even in the first dream I started thinking, “How many of these people got what it takes to survive?” This is a kind of fantasy I play by myself. I remember in junior high doing the same thing, looking at a classroom full of kids and wondering who would live if suddenly they were transported to a desert island. I’d pick them out one at a time. “No, not him,” I’d think. “Too weak. Not her either. Not hard- headed enough.”

I picked myself to live.

I was close to the end of the line. The barracks, I thought they were barracks, creaked in the blowing sand fifty yards away. Sand scoured my face, but I didn’t even squint. I learned that the first time I was here. Don’t squint. Don’t relax. Don’t step forward. Don’t talk unless you’re talked to. Let your eyeballs dry out. Stand tall.

I don’t know how many times I’d dreamed about the line when this guy I’m telling you about got his. The sergeant was stalking the line towards me, and I was praying he would stop before he got to me, or walk by, not pause in front of me.

He did once.

“What are you thinking about?” he had asked. His face pushed up under my chin, his breath puffed on my neck.

“Lots of things sir.” My voice didn’t crack. There was no way to know what would be a good answer. He never behaved the same way twice. He was a maniac sometimes, or as reasonable as a judge others, or indifferent, or caring. He changed constantly. Sometimes his voice varied. He spoke in an accent, or hoarse, or falsetto. But his face never changed. It was creased and leathery, an odd shade of brown, not really Chicano or Negro. Something else. And his uniform was always the same, sky blue with a wide black stripe down the sleeves and legs. He might as well have been wearing a black hooded robe though, and carried a scythe, since that is who he was. He didn’t though. The uniform was blue and the boots were brown, and he took long heavy strides in them, for a small man.

He almost always carried something. Once it was a machine gun, the kind I used to see in World War II movies. A Sgt. Rock machine gun. Another time it was a spear, and another time an Eskimo skinning knife. Today it was a little stick, like a straw you’d stick in a malted milk. He pressed it against my chest above my heart.

“Name two,” he said.

“I was thinking how I wished you wouldn’t stop in front of me sir, and I was thinking it is too hot here.” I tried not to lean backwards from the pressure of the stick on my chest, and to do that I had to lean into it, which struck me as exactly like moving into a punch.

He laughed. He did laugh a lot, but it hardly ever meant anything. He laughed the way some people say “um.” It just filled time while he thought of something to say.

“Good answers.” He pulled the stick away and I had to catch myself from falling forward. He turned and walked. That’s the first time I saw the patch on his shoulder. Since then I tried to study it whenever he went by. The patch is gray with a black border, and on the field of gray is the fraction 1/1,000 in black. That’s the other reason I know this is not just a dream. The patch I mean.

That’s what happened when he stopped in front of me, but the time I was telling you about, the time he stopped in front of the guy three men down, he wasn’t carrying anything. Around his lower legs, though, he wore what looked like skinny shin guards, and coming out of the top of each of the guards was an eighteen inch long sabre, curved slightly away from him so when he walked the points wouldn’t stab him. They looked sort of weird sticking up like that, like something you might see on an insect’s leg.

The sergeant started screaming at him. He spit when he screamed, so that at the end his chin shone with the glisten of his saliva. He yelled like a television preacher preaches, putting emphasis in odd places and dragging out some syllables. It all seemed like gibberish these things he yelled, and part of the time I couldn’t tell if he was yelling at the guy, or yelling at himself, or just yelling for the hell of it. I thought for a second maybe that he was even crying.

Then, abruptly, he threw his knee into the abdomen of the man, and the sabre slid in as easily as a boat into harbor. It made a ripping noise, a small one, when it tore his shirt, and then a kind of sloppy wet sound. The guy doubled over the sergeant’s knee and spazzed out for a few seconds, like an epileptic having a seizure, and then he was still. The sergeant had been supporting him by the armpits and he let him down on his back and pulled the blade out. His pant leg was black with blood, and when he walked by me his shoe squished just like he’d accidently stepped in a puddle.

It’s kind of funny. When something happens in a movie, like a guy gets kicked in the nuts, lots of people double over, like they got kicked themselves. Not me. I feel the kick in my foot. People all around me are moaning like they got booted, and I’m thinking how it feels to do the kicking. So this guy down the line gets gored with a mutant shin guard and instead of thinking how bad that’d feel to have happen to me, I’m thinking what it would feel like to do it. Funny, huh?

I saw the guy’s face staring up into the blind sky. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye for a long time, and that’s why I know I can die here, because I saw the same face on the street outside of my apartment the next morning. He’d been hit by a car and his back was twisted around funny, like a busted toy, so that his knees were against the asphalt as if he were kneeling, but his upper torso was on its back on the sidewalk. I had walked out of the door, on my way to the plant, still distracted from the dream, just in time to hear the car hit him. He didn’t make a sound, but the car tires shrieked like a banshee and the driver was out in a second saying it wasn’t his fault; the man was a jaywalker.

I stood there. It was the same guy as from the dream laying in the street. He blinked slowly once, and his lips parted, not to speak but to let a last breath out. The driver was still yelling, and a handful of people stopped to look at him, but no one bent to touch the dead man. For a moment I panicked when I thought the driver might be the sergeant, but he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged fellow, really beefy. His shirt was untucked in the back so it flopped off his big butt as he twirled around assuring everyone in earshot he was innocent. I backed up though when I saw his tatoo, a little one, on his forearm, a black circle around a gray field with a black 1/1,000 in the middle.

I saw that tatoo and my breath kind of froze in my throat, and I ran away just like I’d killed the guy.

Couldn’t work worth a damn. Made lots of mistakes. Couple of the fellows covered for me when I did, because I had for them before. I thought about the dream all the time. I wondered if the dead man had had the same dream the night before, and he knew he died in it. I wondered if he woke up that morning and washed his face, and put on his tie, and kissed his wife goodbye, and patted his kids on the head knowing that it was over.

It’s kind of odd, you know, being afraid of a dream since you can’t do anything about it, though Lord knows I tried. I mean this is going to sound like I just did nothing, like I was a wimp letting this dream push me around, but it wasn’t like that at all. I tried all the time, every night, to not dream. I stayed away from rich food, thinking that might do the trick, but it didn’t. And then I tried dreaming other dreams, dreams I used to have, but they wouldn’t come. So I ended up just letting them do what they wanted because I had no choice.

All the first dreams I stood in the line and he inspected, and paused, walked on, and paused, and killed. Sometimes with just his bare hands. I tried to guess who would go next. Once, way down the line, he reached up to a man’s throat and stood there for ten minutes choking him to death. I could see the hair on the sergeant’s arms, and the muscles underneath straining. And I remember other faces turned to look, like I was, but no one stepped out; they took peeks, so I’d see the face, a flash of eyes, and then I wouldn’t.

It happened slowly. The wind moaned past us, notes rising and falling. Individual grains of sand bounced off my shirt. The sergeant was far away, but I could see those muscles tight under his skin as if I stood beside him. My forearm muscles clenched until they ached from it.

The guy next to me hated the sergeant; I could tell. Hated and feared him. Scared? Oh yeah, I was scared. Who wants to die? But I couldn’t work up any hate for him as much as I tried. So I started to hate myself, for not hating him, I mean. “What kind of man am I?” I thought.

In the beginning when I believed it was just a dream, a bad recurring dream, I guessed it came out of dodging Vietnam. It’s not like I really dodged. I had a high number, but other guys didn’t and they had to go. I stayed home. I would have gone, but my luck was good. So I thought at first that these dreams were like a civilian version of delayed shock syndrome. I was feeling bad from not going over and it showed up in this military nightmare.

Fat chance. As I said, they are real.

Then, we broke formation. He made us march across the desert, and for days (every night) I drug my feet across the sand, and that’s all the dream was, us walking, and him trailing along killing people, maybe a half dozen a night. No reason as far as I could tell unless someone cut from the column. Completely random. Sometimes he’d yell something. Sometimes he was quiet. You’d never know.

I watched the back of the man in front of me. He had a funny rhythm in his walk. He’d take three good strides, and then a short one, always with the left leg. It got hypnotic. I breathed to his walk, three longs and a short, three longs and a short. Sweat lines slid down my back, soaking my belt. My feet burned because the sand held the foot for a second each stride. I counted steps, but only the short ones, and I was almost to 2,500, about six miles I figure if each step was three feet long.

“What you thinking about?” The Sergeant marched beside me, hands hidden behind his back, like this was a stroll in the park. This was the first time he’s spoken to me since I saw the guy in the street, but I didn’t think about that then. My face went dry. It was funny, kind of, how my body showed me I was afraid. All my pores closed up, and my skin got cold, like my body fluids had abandoned me, gone to hide inside. I didn’t blame them.

“Just counting steps.” I had nothing I could say. What did it matter, after all? My dream had a maniac in it who was going to kill me.

“What else?” He sounded like a librarian asking me what books I wanted. Very proper. Very polite.

“I was thinking I don’t want to die yet.”

“No one does, son.” Then he pulled a gun from behind his back, not an ordinary gun, but a massive black hunk of metal with a pistol grip and no barrel at all, pointed it at the man in front of me, and blew a hole in him the size of a pie plate. Almost cut him in half. I skipped sharply to avoid stepping on him. The sand was sprayed red for twenty feet from the body, and the guy I was behind now was soaked in gore, little bits dropping off him as he walked. Blood ran off the palms of his hands. I wondered what it felt like to hold a gun like that, to feel the heavy kick of it.

“He didn’t want to die either,” the sergeant said in his librarian voice as he aimed the gun at me.





Then I woke up, gasping, soaked with sweat, and I realized I’d wet the bed.

I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I scored some whitecross from an old drug buddy of mine and tried to outlast the sergeant.

It was stupid.

Sitting in a back booth of the Dark Horse Bar and Grill seventy-six hours later, with a hundred gallons of coffee and God knows how many amphetamines in my system, I closed my eyes.





“Nobody wants to die,” he said. The sand scrunched loudly under his feet. I stared ahead, but the gun filled my peripheral vision.

“I hate this dream,” I said. He laughed, and it almost was a real laugh, an honest one.

“You shouldn’t.” Then he said a weird thing. I wondered about it. “It’s better than being awake. You should want to stay here all the time.” Then he dropped the gun to his side and disappeared behind me, but I could still hear his chuckle as I walked farther away from him. When his gun’s awful slam echoed flatly across the desert later, and someone else died, I didn’t even flinch.

How could this possibly be better than being awake, this nightmare where people died for no reason, this nightmare that was real? But I didn’t try the uppers trick again. I just went to bed when I was tired and let the dream happen.

We came, I don’t know how many nights later, to the edge of a swamp, all oozy mud and pale sick looking trees falling over on themselves, and he set us to building a road into it. I was in the rock and fill crew. We moved dirt and boulders in wheelbarrows from a quarry a quarter of a mile up a hill to the edge of the marsh, where a second crew dumped it into the muck. Mindless sort of work: lift and carry, lift and carry.

The road stretched into the swamp slowly, night after night. We started moving our loads down to the end of the road we’d made and leaving them there rather than at the edge of the swamp. He kept killing though. Like a jumping spider, he’d be one place, and we’d be working, and all of the sudden he’d be next to somebody and they’d die. We buried the bodies in the road.

I don’t know what I was doing during my waking times. These dreams went on for months. It seems that I did what I always did: went to work, ate meals, talked to my friends, but it was like that was the dream, and dreaming was the reality. I tried to tell a buddy about it, but he got that glassy look in his eyes, like anyone would, when I started going into the details. After all, it was only a dream to him. Everyone has them, he said.

I even went to a psychiatrist, and he at least listened, but when we were all done, he said I needed more sessions, and scheduled me in for twice a week. I told him that at the rate the dream was going I wouldn’t make the second appointment, and he frowned, scribbled a prescription for something and told me to try that. The pharmacist told me that it was a sleeping pill. Great help.

Meanwhile, numbers were getting pretty thin in the dream.

The road reached a couple of hundred yards into the swamp, but there were only eight of us left when I woke up in the dream, exactly where I had been when the dream left off last. He carried a six foot long double bladed ax now, with a little whistle device in the head so that when he swung it, it sang. Gruesome thing, and heavy too. It hardly slowed down passing through a body. I thought of that old horror story with a pendulum in it. This ax could have doubled for the pendulum.

He walked behind me, and my back felt naked. I shoveled more dirt into the wheelbarrow, waiting for the whistle, but it didn’t come for me. All night I loaded dirt and rocks, rolled it to the edge of the road, and dumped it. I imagined what it would be like to be him, to heft that heavy axe, to look at sweaty backs and choose and choose.

When I woke up in the real world (I don’t know. I can’t tell them apart any more. Not that it makes a difference), there were only two of us left and I knew that I would die the next night.

But it was unavoidable. Sleep, I mean. It was like a gigantic cold front moving across the horizon, first showing up as just a hint of darkness, and then towering higher and higher. I remember a picture of a farmer in a field watching a storm come. He is very small in the picture; the wall of blackness bearing down on his field, huge.

I pulled my blankets back, stepped out of my shoes, lay down and closed my eyes. You can’t stop the rain. I started to sleep.

That’s when I yelled “This is a dream! This is a dream!” But it didn’t do any good.

He threw a body into my wheelbarrow, a short woman with black hair. Not a mark on her. Perhaps he just looked at her and wished her dead. I don’t know.

She thumped hard, her head snapping sharply against the edge of the wheelbarrow.

“Put her in the road,” he said. Her hands had draped on the rim like she was going to come to life and pull herself out, like she was resting there and wasn’t really dead. I wondered how she would die in her other life. Maybe a car accident, or on an operating table, or she might just go to sleep and not wake up.

“You killed us all off. The road won’t get finished,” I said.

“The work doesn’t matter,” he said, but his tone was odd, like he was smiling when he said it.

“Was this better than being awake for her?” I was angry. You can’t stay scared forever. For a while I was petrified. He killed up and down the line. I saw death administered hundreds of ways, then, after the uppers incident, I got numb, like death was anything else that happened. It was no different than going to the bowling alley. But now I was mad.

“Of course.”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“So how’s that better?” I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Her arms flopped across her chest. He pushed his burnt leather face up to mine, but I didn’t back up. We locked eyes, his watery blue ones with my muddy browns.

“Before, she was always going to die. Here, she had a chance.” His breath washed on my chest. I thought about jumping him—he didn’t carry a weapon today—but I had seen him attacked before, two times. They both died horribly, slowly, in a great deal of pain.

“What chance!” I yelled. It was so stupid. He would kill me, and that would be that.

“The same chance you had, which was better than what you use to have over there in your waking life.”

“What?”

He sat down on a boulder the size of an office desk and crossed his legs under him.

“What do you think life’s about?” he said to me, suddenly angry. “Have you thought for a second what you do anything for?”

I tried to think, but I was too mad. I couldn’t figure what he was getting at, and I wanted to kill him. I’d never have another chance. What did I have to lose? I bunched my fist and slammed it into his throat.

It was like hitting polished marble, like punching a statue. He waited until I quit grimacing. My knuckles should have all been broken, but they weren’t. The skin wasn’t even bruised.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I can’t die, and that’s why she’s lucky and so are you.”

I must have looked stupid. “Huh?” I said.

“Nobody used to live,” he said. “You know, it was inevitable. Everybody died. One-hundred percent. But it’s different now. Things have changed here.”

I looked around. Behind him the gray desert hills mounded one on another. Behind me, the incomplete road reached into the swamp like a dock. “Where’s here?” I said.

He shrugged. “All places are the same place. Heaven, I guess, if you want a word. But you’re in it all the time, sleeping or awake.” He put his hand on his leg, fingers wrapped around something. “Only now, not everyone will die. We get to choose a survivor.”

Maybe it was his calmness about our conversation. Maybe I just didn’t have any anger left, but all of the sudden I just felt empty. Everybody in the dream but me was dead. I said, “Before, no matter what I did, I was going to die anyway.” It was more a statement than a question.

“In the end.”

“And now I’m not going to, ever?”

He opened his hand and held it out to me. It was, naturally, the black bordered patch with the gray background. In the middle, in black, 1/1,000.

“No, never.”

He walked away, into the desert, and from the other direction I heard feet marching, a thousand sets of feet. I pinned the patch to my shoulder and waited for the troops.