Lair of Dreams

“Not yet, cher. But I’ll walk over to the Lafayette PO in the morning and see if it’s there.”


“Louis, do you ever remember your dreams in the morning after you’ve woken up?” Henry asked, worried. If Louis didn’t remember, then how would he know to go pick up the ticket?

“I reckon I must. Who could forget this?” Louis said, nuzzling Henry’s throat.

“Just in case, I want to try something. Louis: When you wake up, you’ll remember. You’ll remember everything.”

“Everything,” Louis whispered, and he kissed Henry, taking his tongue sweetly into his mouth.

There was only one uneasy moment in the dreams for Henry, and it was the thicket of morning glories. Every time they passed the purple-blue blooms, Louis would pull Henry away. He wouldn’t go anywhere near the thicket. In fact, he seemed downright afraid of it.

“What those flowers ever do to you?” Henry joked on one such occasion.

Louis didn’t laugh. “Don’t know. Just gives me a bad feeling,” he said, rubbing his head. “Smell gives me a headache.”

But the moment they were away from the morning glories, Louis’s mood lightened once more. He broke into an easy grin, yanked his shirt off over his head, and tossed it at Henry. “Gonna get to that rope swing first!” he shouted, running toward the sparkling river.

“Wait!” Henry called. Laughing, he dropped his own clothes on the grass and ran after Louis.

Sometimes, a part of the dream world lost its color or winked out, like a lightbulb that needed changing. When this happened, Ling and Wai-Mae would concentrate, pushing their energy into the dead portion, and the dreamscape would shift under their hands, warming and blooming.

“My, but that is something,” Louis would say, and if he was envious that he and Henry couldn’t seem to perform this alchemy, too, he never said it.

Above their heads, a steady stream of ones and zeros trickled down like rain, which made Henry think about music theory and song structure and Ling of the Bagua of the I Ching. Whole dream worlds were born of this numerical rain: The ghostly jazz bands of New Orleans’ West End inked themselves into existence against the filmy sky. A swooping Coney Island roller coaster skated a constant figure eight, a memory from Ling’s childhood. A Chinese puppet show appeared, the sticks operated by unseen hands.

It was as if all time and space were unfolding at once around them, a river without end. The borders of their selves vanished; they flowed through time, and it through them, till they didn’t know if these things they saw had already been or would come to pass. Henry had never experienced such a profound sense of happiness, of being right in his self and in the world.

“To us,” he said, raising a glass.

“To us,” the others echoed, and they watched the sky give birth to new dreams.





If the nights were magical, the days were less so. For the first time in their friendship, Henry and Theta were bickering. The dream walking exhausted Henry so much that he didn’t wake before three or four in the afternoon. He’d missed three rehearsals in a row.

“I can’t keep inventing stories to save you, Hen,” Theta warned. “And Herbie’s up to something. I think he’s trying to get his song in over yours. You better show up today, if you know what’s good for you, Hen.”

“I’m not worried about Herbie,” Henry said, reaching for one of Theta’s cigarettes.

“You should be. And since when do you smoke?”

Henry smirked. “I just need a little pep.” He wiggled his fingers like a jazz baby.

Theta swiped the cigarette out of his mouth. “Then get some sleep. Real sleep.”

But Henry didn’t listen. He couldn’t listen. There were only Louis and dreams, and Henry would do whatever he could to have both. Already he and Ling were pushing the limits of what they could tolerate. Each night, they set their alarms for later and later.

But here in the dream world, Ling was on to something. She could feel the energy coiled beneath her fingers when she transformed a featureless rock into sunflowers whose petals were repeating spirals of pattern, the Qi moving strongly through them both, all those atoms shifting, changing, whole universes being born. No—made. She and Wai-Mae were making them. We did that, Ling would think. Like gods. It was magic and it was science, a blend, like her, and it was more beautiful than anything.

One night, as the girls lay back in the dewy grass watching pink clouds drifting lazily across the perpetual sunset, Wai-Mae turned on her side to face Ling.

“What happened to your legs, Little Warrior?”

Ling sat up quickly. On impulse, she tugged her skirt hem down. “Nothing,” she said.