Lair of Dreams

“Ha, ha.” Evie rolled her eyes. “Haaaa. But I have seen it in my dreams. At least, I think I have. Or one like it.”


“Someday, I’m gonna buy you a castle, future Mrs. Lloyd,” Sam said. He liked the feel of Evie leaning into him, his arm around her.

“I don’t know what to think when you’re not horrible. It’s very confusing,” Evie slurred. Impulsively, she kissed Sam, then laid her head on his shoulder again.

Over the past few months, when he wasn’t picking pockets, searching the museum for clues to his mother’s whereabouts, betting on the fights, or sweet-talking chorus girls into passionate encounters in speakeasy cloakrooms, Sam had had the occasion to imagine kissing Evie. At first, these imagined scenarios had been full of hot air and Sam’s ego: Evie saying, Oh, my darling. I never knew it could be like this. Kiss me, you fool! before going limp in his arms due to Sam’s manly demonstrations of love. These fantasies were never quite satisfying, though, as if even Sam’s fevered imagination knew that was a load of bunk.

What he’d never imagined was a day like they’d had—breaking into an office in a federal building, finding secret coded cards, and narrowly escaping from cops, Evie’s hand in his and a smile on her dusty face because she enjoyed the hunt as much as he did and they were in it together.

“The room’s gone fuzzy. Does it look fuzzy to you, Sam?” Evie mumbled.

“I think one of us is drunk, Lamb Chop.”

“Must be the room,” Evie sighed.

“It’s not the room.”

“Well, it’s not me. I can hold my liquor like a sailor,” Evie slurred, her words getting very messy. A few seconds later, she was snoring.

With a sigh, Sam maneuvered the pos-i-tute-ly dead-to-the-world Evie into the rolling chair and then pushed her into the elevator and up to her room, where he dropped her onto the bed.

“I’d imagined this evening going a whole lot differently,” Sam grunted as he tucked Evie in. Her mouth was open and tiny snores escaped. “You are not a delicate sleeper, kid.”

Sam planted a kiss on the top of Evie’s messy head. “Sweet dreams, Sheba.”





The city is composed of islands crisscrossed by avenues and streets, tunnels and trolley lines—a grid of connections waiting to be made. Majestic bridges span the rivers in steel-spoked splendor, while the ferries carry their loads safely to shore.

The bridges, the tunnels, the ferries and streets. And do they dream?

The ferries dock in the terminal. They open their metal mouths to sing out the people who march forward, unseeing, heads like battering rams as they grimace at the blustery cold and sometimes forget to sing, sometimes forget that they were made for singing. The playful wind takes exception to this, and a hat skitters across a sidewalk, chased by a businessman in gray, which brings a chuckle to the audience of news agents and shoeshine boys, the telephone girls hurrying to work in shoes that pinch, the bricklayers, the street sweepers, the sidewalk vendors whose carts teem with whatever the citizens think they might need.

High above it all, the window washers hoist themselves up by the miracle of rope and hover in midair on small planks to clean away the grit of so many dreams discarded. They wipe with their cloths until the lives on the other side of the glass become clearer. Every now and then, faces appear at these windows. Eyes meet for a second, maybe two, the observed and the observer each surprised to find the other exists. Then they look quickly away, the connection unmade, islands once more.

The wind whistles down into the skyscraper-bound canyons, across the broad expanses of the avenues and the narrow confines of the streets, where lives unfold in secret, day in, day out:

Sometimes a man sighs for want of love.

Sometimes a child cries for the dropped lollipop, its sweetness barely tasted.

Sometimes the girl gasps as the train screams into the station, shaken by how close she’d allowed herself to wander to the edge.

Sometimes the drunk raises weary eyes to the rows of buildings rendered beautiful by a brief play of sunlight. “Lord?” he whispers into the held breath between taxi horns. The light catches on a city spire, fracturing for a second into glorious rays before the clouds move in again. The drunk lowers his eyes. “Lord, Lord…” he sobs, as if answering his own broken prayer.

The cars drive on. The people hurry to and fro. They sigh and want and cry and dream. Taken together, their symphonic whyohwhy might reach the heavens and make the angels weep. Alone, they are no match for the noise of industry. The jackhammers. The cranes. The streetcars, subways, and aeroplanes. The constant whirring machinery of the dream factories. And do these things dream of more?

Another day closes. The sun sinks low on the horizon. It slips below the Hudson, smearing the West Side of Manhattan in a slick of gold. Night arrives for its watchful shift. The neon city bursts its daytime seams, and the great carnival of dreams begins again.