Written for sidewinder for the 2009 xmas_rocks exchange
| This story is a work of fiction and therefore completely untrue. No harm or libel is meant or implied about any of the individuals named within this work and it was written without their involvement or permission. No profit is being made. |
|
Author's Note: Some of the characters from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman appear in this story. If that means nothing to you, don't worry, it's not terribly important. Here's what you need to know: The Lord of the Dreaming, Morpheous, was captured by a human magus in 1914 and did not free himself until 1988. Dreams and the act of dreaming went a tad weird at that time, according to Mr Gaiman. This story takes place in 1986.
Stewart's father leaves him the travel agency kiosk at the outskirts of Wadi El Natrun. He doesn't particularly want it, but dear old Dad is being very CIA about it. "Oh, they'd love to get their hands on it," he says, hands like vice grips on Stewart's shoulders. "But we'll show them!" He laughs. For a moment, Stewart can't be certain whether it's in character or not that dear old Dad is acting more like a cartoon CIA man than the dry, committees and recorded telephone conversations on grainy tapes, paperwork and visa clearances Stewart knows to be the real thing. "Dad, I don't even know the first thing about running a travel agency." "Not to worry! Just keep away from the big lizard." Right. Well, that's certainly not even cartoon CIA. That's just plain daffy. Stewart turns to face his father, unperturbed by the fact that his looking away from the outbound, Cairo road in front of him might just mean immediate collision with the hundreds of cars packed like crate shipments onto the road. His hands aren't even on the steering wheel anyway. (They're not?) "Look, Dad, I think you might have suffered a heat stroke or something. You're talking about lizards." "Big lizard." He nods, as if he can picture it all in his head and many, many years ago. "Nasty business all around, Stew. But just keep to the kiosk." He hands Stewart a spyglass. "And keep that with you." Stewart looks down at the spyglass. He thinks about saying, "W-what?" He settles on saying nothing. He has to keep driving and the road is- Empty. Completely empty. He can see his car-a bright blue Holden-as it hugs bright emerald mountain curves, like something straight out of an auto commercial. It turns and speeds along in smooth, practiced moves, blue sky and fluffy white cumulus clouds reflected off its impeccably polished hood. Stewart knows he's driving, or, rather, he assumes he's driving. Can't quite be driving, can he, if he's looking down at his car from, where? A lookout point? Oh, God, did he crash? He crashed and died, and he's looking down at his own body. It's sad. His body looks like a bright blue Holden in an auto commercial. A voice booms out from somewhere even further above him. It sounds both like his father and like a cartoon notion of what God's voice should sound like, all deep rumbles and holy displeasure. "THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR LEAVING BEFORE FOUR AM!" Los Angeles, CA Stewart's eyes fly open. He lies in bed, staring at a crack in his ceiling, and waits for the ridiculous dread of leaving for some place or other before four in the holy morning to leave him. God, he must've eaten something weird last night. Chinese, from that place by Sherwood Oaks. Golden Something. It was always Golden Something, or Garden Something Other. The dream follows him around for most of the morning. He cycles over to the coffee shop and browses through the Los Angeles Downtown News and keeps thinking about a blue Holden. "Dad left me a travel agency," he tells Ian over lunch. "Bizarro stuff, man. It was in some place in Egypt, out in the desert somewhere." He likes Ian. As brothers go, Ian's pretty decent. Always listens to him, knows not to interrupt, gets along with the people that probably don't like Stewart all that much, but which Stewart needs to speak to, occasionally. Ian picks apart his black forest ham sandwich, setting the bread to the left, the ham to the right, and all the vegetables in a heap at the centre of his plate. A tomato ring disappears into his mouth and he says, "It's just a dream, Stew. Don't worry about it." "I'm not worried. I'm more... kinda happy." He reaches over and takes Ian's black olive. Good old Ian. Nobody else is allowed to steal food from his plate but his beloved brother Stew. "I usually forget my dreams seconds after I wake up, but this one stuck. It's cool. That's what you get for leaving before 4.00 AM." "What?" "Dad said that to me. In the dream. Well, either Dad or God. I think I was dead at that point." Ian shakes his head. He reaches out and slaps Stewart's hand away from the pine nuts he's been carefully leaving for last. "Well, I hope you have more weird dreams. I think I prefer Dad shouting from the clouds to your usual talk of They Who Shall not be Named." Stewart grins, chin digging into his palm as his arm sprawls over the table. The salt shaker taps against Ian's plate. "Mm. You mean Law Enforcement? The Bobbies? That useless ex-lead singer of mine suggested Interpol. Ain't that just like him? Interpol. No everyday terms for him." It can be a joke. Today Stewart's thoughts on his band are light and inconsequential. He had a band, The Police. They had been pretty fucking good. And now it's 1986 and they're pretty much dead in the water. Lead warbler and lyric savant, Sting, is off somewhere, stuffing jazzy songs into packages like Dreaming of Cerulean Tortoises or something like that. On the radio, The Police are still singing baby talk at the morning commute drivers. "De doo doo do, de daa daa da, that's all I wanna say to you." It's a joke. One big, happy joke. Stewart's pretty happy to have something else to talk about for once. Not Los Angeles, CA A man comes up to the travel agency. He wears a white linen suit and a white hat and white canvas shoes and no socks and he's pressing a white handkerchief to his mouth and nose. Since there is no wind, Stewart's not quite sure why. "Hello," Stewart calls out. "You look like a man who would like to be somewhere altogether less dry than here!" The man removes the handkerchief, and Adam Ant looks at Stewart with zero recognition in his eyes. He says, "I'll go anywhere with you." Well, that was forward. "Not with me, silly," Stewart says. He slaps a brochure for Fiji on the kiosk's counter. "I gotta stay at this kiosk. But you, you, my friend, can go to Fiji. How does that sound? No? Uruguay is nice. South America. More humidity than you can shake a pan flute at." Not exactly impressed, Adam. He rests his elbows on the kiosk counter and drops his chin into his hands and winks at Stewart. "I'll go anywhere with you." "You've, ah, said that, yes." Stewart brings out a Contiki Tours booklet. He points out the many, varied joys of travelling with other people's spoiled and rude teenagers through Rome and Florence, optional side tour of Venice for only $500 more. "Or maybe you're more the Scandinavia lover?" "I could love you in Scandinavia, yes." Stewart closes the Contiki booklet and levels a meaning look at Adam. "Sir," he says. Prim. Very prim. Unnecessarily prim, someone says in the back of Stewart's mind. It sounds astonishingly like him. "Sir," he says again. "I am a professional." "Oh? And discreet as well? I'd pay the extra 500 quid for that." "No, no, you misunderstand. What I meant to say was-Oh good Lord." Adam doesn't turn around. He's too busy snaking out one arm and playing the fingers of his right hand over Stewart's shirt front. So he fails to notice the creature stomping about in the distance, jerking and heaving like something out of Ray Harryhausen's imagination. "Dad said it was a lizard," Stewart says. One of Adam's fingers slips in beneath a tear in his shirt. "A big lizard." The finger draws little circles over Stewart's skin. "It's a fucking dinosaur. It's a fucking stop-motion dinosaur." And Adam is naked. "Now hold on one-" Los Angeles, CA A leg cramp wakes Stewart. He groans, turns over. His pillow has deserted the bed, and the covers are all playing Twister around his legs. No wonder he's got a cramp. He kicks off the covers and buries his head in the crook of his shoulder. It feels like 3.00 AM. It's probably earlier. He wants to go back to sleep. Something interesting was happening, it was- Not Los Angeles, CA "Th-that's the puh-puh-problem with, uh, with d-dinosaurs. They-they're, uh, suh-suh-so b-buh-big that, hah..." The little fat man pauses to dab his forehead with a spotted, red and white handkerchief. "Stuh-stomp on th-things, hmm, without lah-luh-la-looking." It's like Billy Bibbit, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Only the fat, sweaty man sitting across from Stewart wearing a red, taffeta suit isn't Brad Dourif. Or was that Jack Nicholson who played Billy Bibbit? Gosh, he should know this. He loves that picture. The little fat man offers Stewart a plate of cookies. "Oh, ah, thanks." He bites into one. Cinnamon and muesli. Crunchy. "S'good," he mumbles over crumbs. He hopes the man won't try to talk again. It drives Stewart mad, not being able to cut in and just put an end to a stutterer's misery. "Yuh-yuh-you're w-welcome." That wasn't so bad. It could be bearable if he stuck to small sentences. It could be even more bearable if Stewart did most-if not all-of the talking. "Yeah, my Mom used to bake cookies like this. She would make a whole day out of it, fill the kitchen with flour and cookie tins and alligators. That was important, see, because if the alligators didn't eat the broccoli, then it was likely that the oven would explode. Bad stuff. I had an oven explode my aunt once. The refrigerator had a field day in purple. Oh, yes, and they had to call Dad in. He works for the FBI, you know, out in Sausalito, with a chequered parasol in his hand. He arrested three Nicaraguan women and the helicopter was pink before it could, ah... before it..." Oh God. "It's one of my nightmares, you see," he says, slumped forward on the little fat man's comfortable, squishy armchair. "That all I say is really just nonsense. You know? Everybody stares." He looks up. He's fairly certain the little fat man will blubber out comforting words. He seems the sympathetic type. The little fat man is dead. One simply doesn't get neatly halved and live, you see. His lower body is still on the chair, reminding Stewart of a Christmas ham, right down to the spinal bone in the middle and the neat partitions of pinkish red meat. It occurs to Stewart that there should be organs. Ah. There they are. They followed the little fat man's upper body onto the floor. Impossible amounts of Stop sign red blood pool around them. There's a stomach and a liver and the things that look like beans and it's all rather like that kid's game, Operation. Maybe that's why Stewart's not screaming. "I must be loosing my touch," tuts a vaguely English voice behind Stewart. Not really English, but English as an American does English. Stewart knows. He does it to annoy Sting all the time. The vaguely English voice says, "I can't stand it when the little blob starts stuttering either. Makes me wanna kill him. Of course, he does it all the time, and now I've gone and halved the gooey little thing, but that's not my fault, eh?" No, Stewart supposes it isn't. "Are you going to kill me?" he says. "No," Adam Ant says. He places one hand on Stewart's crotch and presses down, hard. "We're going to do something a bit more interesting than that." Then he kisses Stewart, all urgent lips and moaning breath, and his hand- Atlanta, GA "I keep waking up," Stewart says, hands wrapped around his coffee cup and Andy Summers across from him at the diner booth. "Um, well, that's a good thing, isn't it?" "No. No, it's not. Every time the dream gets interesting, I wake up." Andy rips open a packet of sugar and stirs the contents into his coffee. He loves diner coffee. It's shit, but it's uniquely satisfying shit. It never fails to make him fall in love with touring all over again. Back when they really toured, that is. Now it's just this Amnesty International mini-tour. Charity. Big crowd, good money, diner coffee. Diner coffee even makes dragging the dying body that is The Police around bearable. "What's the dream about?" Andy says. Stewart gives him a funny look over his coffee cup. He's wearing a black trench coat, even though it's early June in Georgia and the weather forecast isn't exactly calling for rain or snow or anything but humid, crippling heat. The trench coat makes Stewart look pasty and ill, as if he were one cough away from a mass grave. "It's nothing important, really." "Then what's the big deal about waking up?" "It just..." Stewart sighs. "It just keeps happening." That night, he sits at the edge of his hotel bed and decides that he doesn't even want to dream. He rummages through his duffel bag and pulls out the book he bought at the mall in Colorado, the one with the big letters that spelled out D-E-N-V-E-R. "That's so tacky," Sting said. "That didn't stop you from shopping," Stewart mutters, flipping to page 143 of his book. A character named Michael is telling his wife about Lou. Stewart can no longer remember what was so important about Lou, so he flips back to refresh his memory. As he speed reads, it becomes plain to him that he doesn't even like this book. He drops it to the floor. TV. Always good in a pinch, TV. A handsome, middle-aged man tells Stewart about the doings at Wall Street. The Dow Jones is up, he says soothingly. All is well with the world. They run a bit on Amnesty International. Stewart sits up straighter and squints at the footage that flashes past. He catches a glimpse of their set at Denver. Sting, of course, making a guttural masterpiece out of the word Roxanne. A pert blonde woman mentions solo albums and blue turtles, and Stewart puts an end to it. Bill Cosby wants to know why rice crackers have no taste, and Stewart settles back to watch. Not Atlanta, GA First, there is nothing but white. It's not even white walls, ceiling, and floor. It's just white. White nothing. He's floating in white. Then, there's the distant sound of a Hollywood, stop-motion roar. "Ah," Stewart says. "I'm on to this now. I'm dreaming. And the dinosaur made it in again." He starts to walk. Now that he knows he's dreaming, he's pretty sure he can walk on white nothingness. It's like when he dreamed he'd been shot once. He jumped into his getaway car, leaving behind a church (the one at the Millfield campus, in Street, in Somerset, in England) (the church he only attended because they dragged all the students there on special occasions) riddled with gangster bullets. The gangsters had gotten him too. A perfect, round bullet hole dripped blood from his forehead as he drove. "I should be dead," he thought. But then he decided he wouldn't be, and he wasn't. Mug's game, dreams. Up ahead, he can make out a lumpy black shape. As he gets closer, the lumpy black shape becomes an elderly Black man hunched over a guitar. When he finally stands in front of the shape, he can see that it isn't just any elderly Black man hunched over a guitar. "You're BB King," he says. BB King looks up, confused. "No," says Cab Calloway, "I'm not." "Ah," Stewart says. "I'm dreaming, you know." "Well I can see that," says Arsenio Hall. He looks around at the white nothingness. "Couldn't dream us a couch or something, could you?" A battered yellow couch hovers behind Arsenio. Stewart wonders at his choice of couch. Back in the waking world, he wouldn't recognize this couch if it jumped up at him in the street. In dreams, he knows exactly where he's seen it last, and who had been sitting on it. The couch had been at Malcolm McLaren's SEX boutique in London, and it had been 1977, and he had been one of two people sitting on it, bored. The other person had been Sting. Sod Sting. Eddie Murphy drops down on the couch. He settles down as if ready for a Sunday nap or a session with Freud, thumbs twiddling over his navel. "You keep changing," Stewart says. He dreams up an orange armchair for himself, looks at the surreal way his feet dangle over nothing. "I fell asleep watching The Cosby Show, didn't I?" Malcolm X shrugs leather-clad shoulders. "Dunno, man." "You do appear," says Denzel Washington, digging in his pocket for a cigarette, "to want to dream about famous Black men." The cigarette flicks into a weed pipe. Jimmy Hendrix inhales, purple smoke weaving into his hair and around large, round glasses. "Which is cool by me, man. Just cool." They sit for a while, Stewart content to watch as the pipe changes from a glass of Cognac for Duke Ellington to a Snickers bar to a stick of chewing gum to a toothpick and then back to a slim cigarette for Dorothy Dandridge. "Now, honey," she says, hips cocked, Cleopatra in white furs as she reclines on the couch, "I ain't a man, am I?" Stewart smiles at a grinning Whoopi Goldberg. In the distance, the stop-motion roar goes on about its business. Stewart gets the impression that the white nothingness is a cube, with the dinosaur outside it somewhere. He sees the cube as it lies on the sands of Wadi El Natrun, and he wonders if Adam Ant is gonna show up this time as well. The dinosaur roars, all MGM back lot. "Hey, uh-" He has no idea what name to use. If he says, "Whoopi," it'll just turn out to be that Whoopi Goldberg is really Frederick Douglas or Stevie Wonder. Might as well go with, "Hey, buddy, you got any idea what the dinosaur's all about?" Sidney Poitier turns to study the horizon. Distant roars and thumps not unlike the sound effects for a Godzilla movie reach his ears. "I don't know," he says. "I don't dream about dinosaurs often," Alvin Ailey says. He stretches out one leg over the back of the couch, doing ballet warm-ups. When he straightens, Leontyne Price studies Stewart's face with a thoughtful tap to her nose. "Something old?" "I dreamt of my father." "Might be tryin' to tell you something," Danny Glover says. "He dead?" "No. He's alive." Morgan Freeman shrugs. "Then it may just be a dinosaur." Adam Ant sits on the couch next to Hattie McDaniel. Stewart looks at him with an odd sense of panic. He can already feel that, within seconds, he's going to be naked. And then he's going to wake up, and no one's going to explain the dinosaur to him. He stands up from his armchair. "Sit back down, boy," an elderly voice rasps at him. "Never did like a fidgety boy." An old woman-a very, very old woman, the kind whose skin has sagged to the point where it seems as hard as wax-peers at his eyes, then parts his lips with two bony fingertips to peer at his teeth. "But I like good teeth." "Um," Stewart says. "Please don't take this the wrong way, um, anyone in my dream, or, ah, or anyone, really, but, um, you see, I think that, um, well, you-" "Spit it out, boy!" "Um. You're not, um, black." He sinks down into his armchair, feeling wretched. "You're not black." "Oh, but she is, dear," says a plump, motherly woman on an armchair opposite his. "She's as black as coal, my poppet. Blacker than that, I think. But there now, and that's only sometimes." The white nothingness is now a warm, cosy room. Three chintz armchairs and one tartan sofa surround an old-fashioned coffee table. A smell of old woman and mother's baking and youthful floral perfume soaks everything. There are four cups of tea arranged on the table, a bowl of assorted Danish biscuits in the middle, and cloth doilies under practically everything. Dark wallpaper, with a hint of flowering vines under years of candle soot, covers the walls, and the one window, large and situated just behind the sofa, is partly obscured by a heavy, wine-coloured velvet curtain. "Isn't this nice, dear?" the plump lady says. Stewart reaches for a biscuit. He can no longer hear the dinosaur. That in itself is a sort of nice thing, even if the room itself has never been his kind of thing. It puts him in mind of a funeral parlour. A fly buzzes at Stewart's ear, and he flaps it away. "I must be in a really comfortable bed," Stewart says. "This has been the most relaxing dream I've had in a while." A fly walks across his cheekbone, the whisper of a needle thin insect tongue just below Stewart's lips. He swats it away. "I keep sitting in armchairs and-Shoo!" He backhands a fly towards a wall, frowning. "Fucking flies. I hate flies." "It's the food," says a young lady on the sofa. "I guess. But they keep buzzing around my face. I hate that. Don't you hate that? They land on my lips and it freaks me out. Flies gather around rotting meat and stuff like that." "And what do you think you are, my dear?" The old woman tuts, pinching something out of her biscuit. "Ants. I hate ants." She pops it into her mouth and crunches it between her few, good teeth. "And I never liked boys. Think the world is modelled after them, boys." "Useless creatures," says the young woman. "We are," says Adam Ant. A breath unfurls at the nape of Stewart's neck, and slim arms wrap themselves around his chest. Under his shirt. Stewart's eyes drift closed. The palms come to rest over his nipples, and a voice, warm and low, whispers into his ear. "Why don't we show these nice ladies how bad boys can really be?" "Oh, ye-" Atlanta, GA "Oh, fuck." Early morning light lies over the hotel room, large and garish and sterile after the sitting room in his dream. "Are you sleeping well?" Sting says. He tapes out an X where he wants his microphone stand to be, looking at Stewart over his shoulder. "You look, if you don't mind me saying so, like death warmed over." Andy peers at him. "I'd say more like a movie heroin addict. You know, with all the pasty make-up?" Stewart wants to growl at them. Instead, he yawns. He curls up on a couch after the rehearsal. Just a quick nap. He's the fucking drummer, no one's gonna let him sleep right through their set. He groans as he hunts up a piece of paper and a Sharpie. "I am The Police's drummer," he writes out. "Wake me at 7.00 PM. Thanks!" He feels stupid, but he tapes it on the wall above the couch. Sleep claims him amidst mocking, "Oh hey, Police drummer, you awake?" from roadies and all and any backstage crew. But Andy'll read the notice. Andy'll be a decent guy. Do the right thing. His last conscious thought is the notion that Sting somehow drapes a jacket over him on his way down the hall. Not Atlanta, GA "Hullo," Adam Ant says. He's wearing the Millfield uniform. Only it isn't. This is the Millfield uniform as Stewart always wanted it to be, like in some grand Ivy League school: a navy blue blazer and a striped tie in blue and grey and crisp black pants and everything oh-so-English. "Would you mind if I put a scarf on you as well?" Stewart says. Adam reaches up to finger the soft wool of his blue and white scarf. "This is lovely," he says. "Did you really wear this?" "Nah. But I always wanted to." He takes Adam's hand and leads him along perfectly manicured lawns and along buildings that had once been a monastery or a grand, Gothic church. It keeps changing, from dark wood panelling to worn, dark grey stone. As they turn a corner, running, hand in hand, Adam spies a drab, plain classroom in the distance. Just stucco walls with pictures of 19th century authors, metal and plastic desks, and simple bookcases. "What's that?" he says. "That," Stewart says with a shrug, "is what my classroom actually looked like. But it's my dream, so dear old Millfield can be the grand boarding school it never was. Silly old thing." No one disturbs them as they run down the halls. They jump down windows onto soft, green lawn grass and they lounge under trees. They ride bicycles down to the quads, Stewart's feet off his pedals as they head down a steep hill. They have a picnic and feed each other cheesecake. They put on boaters and head off on a canoe, sleeves rolled back and jackets draped over their shoulders as they abandon the canoe by a bank. At long last, Adam lays Stewart down on the grass beneath a canopy of suitably leafy and lush trees, the sunlight just right to kiss Adam's eyelids and wait for him to kiss him in return. Stewart trails the back of his hand down Adam's cheek. "Are we in one of those books," Stewart says, "where young men stare into each other's eyes and proclaim they're bosom friends? Sound in mind and in body, and worthy of perfect love?" "I dunno," Adam says. He trails his thumb down Stewart's forehead. "Are you sound in mind?" He smiles. "And body?" He runs his index finger with deliberate, maddening patience down Stewart's chest, down past his ribs and his stomach and down, down to his navel and right down to his- "Wake up already, Stew!" A hard shove brings Stewart crashing into an RV bunk, a tiny, cramped, submarine affair with mildewed blankets. Stewart grumbles at the voice. "Go fuck yourself." "I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you." Stewart knows that voice. He sits up in the bunk and stares at Sting. Violent sunlight all but obliterates the right side of Sting's face and bleaches the left, so that Stewart finds himself looking at one clear blue eye and the painterly, impressionist suggestion of nostrils and a mouth. It's like looking at an overexposed photograph. He's wearing white, although Stewart forgets exactly what Sting is wearing within seconds of looking away from him. When he tries to focus on Sting's face again, the RV has become the dressing room at the Tokyo Dome. Only Stewart has no idea how he knows it's the Tokyo Dome. "What are you looking at?" Sting says, and that's when Stewart knows that he's still dreaming. It's a letdown, although he can't say why. "Hey, Stingo," he says. "Where are you right now?" Maybe this will be a prophetic dream. "I seem to be inside a tour bus," Sting says. He sounds uncertain, eyes narrowing in concentration and focus, as if he were staring intently at a flickering screen. "No, it's some dressing room in..." He frowns. "That's odd. Now it's a-" "-a Greyhound bus?" "Yes." He shoots Stewart a disbelieving look. "I'm dreaming, amn't I?" "I thought I was." Sting rubs at a patch of stubble along his chin. It strikes Stewart then that Sting has no stubble, back out in Atlanta. "No, I'm certain that I'm the one that's dreaming," Sting says. "I remember..." He shifts on his Greyhound bus window seat, checks the scenery blurring past. There are more lines on his face than Stewart knows there to be. "I remember getting into bed," Sting says at length. "Well so do I. And I dreamt about..." That's funny, there was nothing but blank emptiness where his most recent memories should be. It had been an interesting dream, that much he can recall. "Well, I dreamt," he huffs. "And I not only got into bed, I'm still there. Asleep. Dreaming this." The seat Sting had been occupying is empty. He is seated behind Stewart instead. It takes them both by surprise. A neon sign shoots by. GREEN PEAS. "That's random," Sting murmurs. Stewart agrees. "So what happens when you wake up, Stingo?" "You disappear, I suppose." "That'll be wild." "Yeah..." Stewart turns his head and the back of the bus has become a beach. It's no beach he's ever seen in his life, just an idea of a beach. There's sand and a few dunes and aqua blue sky and water. No clouds. Well, maybe one. Or a whole slew of them. Rain clouds. Nasty ones, all gun metal grey and lead heavy in their majestic weightlessness. Maybe some seagulls too. And that dinosaur he kept seeing everywhere. "Stop that," Sting says. "It's your dream," Stewart says with a sly smile. "You're the one doing that." "I know I'm dreaming you," Sting says. "I wanted to-" Then Sting disappears. Atlanta, GA Stewart's eyes snap open. "Damn it," he mutters, before the reason for his distress becomes wispy and intangible. "I know that was important." According to his watch, it's 6.45 PM. It's already dark. Andy comes jogging up the hall, water bottle in hand, all set to splash Stewart awake, just like his sign says. He looks miserably disappointed to find Stewart scraping sleep out of the corners of his mouth with the flat of his hand. "Thanks anyway," Stewart says. Andy empties the contents of his water bottle onto Stewart's head regardless. "As I said, Andy, thanks." He keeps a close watch on Sting throughout most of the set. His face comes into profile, backlight by banks of bright yellow and red lights. No stubble. He wanders up to Stewart's drum kit during one of Andy's solos, and Stewart squints, looking for wrinkles and fine lines. Sting raises his eyebrows. "What?" he mouths. "Nothing!" Stewart hollers over the sound system and his own cymbals. "You just look so young! And beardless!" Sting stares at him. Stewart's pretty sure he's shaking his head in disbelief as he jogs back to the microphone. "Get some sleep, all right?" he says afterwards, as he climbs out of the limousine that ferries them from The Omni Arena to their hotel. "Some real asleep." "Do you have fake sleep, Sting?" Stewart calls out, all but dangling out of the limousine window. "Do ya? Huh? Do you fake that too?" He leaves Sting at the entrance to his hotel, all polite disbelief and upturned coat lapels. When he gets back to his own hotel (his own hotel, not their hotel) (Christ that's annoying), he glares at the bed. "Something decent tonight, okay?" He switches off the bedside lamp with an odd feeling at the pit of his stomach. Not Atlanta, GA A cadet in light grey bows before he throws open the doors to the dining hall. Mother has outdone herself. Only a member of the family would recognize it as a dining hall. The dinner table is gone, as are the china cabinets. Everywhere Stewart looks the room is plush chairs and little refreshment tables and servants darting in and out of the crowd with nibbles and wine glasses that seem to come from nowhere. There are so many ball gowns that it's a swelling sea of bright pink and egg blue and hunter green and ruffles, ruffles, trains, bows, and more ruffles as far as a man cares to look. In between all the colour is a great deal of sober, manly black. Only a few men wear blue Royal Navy uniforms. Stewart is one of them. Not knowing how he got it, Stewart sips 7up from a wine glass. He talks to year six school teachers and random roadies from the Reggatta de Blanc tour and even his brother Miles. They all look pretty decent in 19th century garb. He spots a girl he hasn't seen since 1965 and waves. She comes over in a Millfield uniform, before the dream catches onto Stewart's flub and attires her in a white, poufy ball gown. It's more 80s fantasy movie than 19th century, but she looks so stunning, he decides he doesn't care. "Having a good time?" "You know," she says, "the Germans will invade again. They're bringing the elephants." His old maths teacher, Mr Bloom, takes a bit of caviar and tells him that if the giraffes are not removed from parliament soon, then it's likely that ice-cream trucks will run on diesel. By the time his Mom is congratulating him for building the Eiffel Tower in Rome, Stewart has given up on making conversation. The dining hall is this close to collapsing into a different dream (and the back of the room has already morphed into the school gym from Carrie), when he spots Adam. He makes his way to him in weak-kneed relief. They embrace in a way Stewart would never embrace another man-or any other person-out in the waking world. It's more a desperate cling than an embrace, all arms up under Adam's and palms flat against his back, head buried into his left shoulder, bodies pressed close-and desperate clinging of this sort is not something Stewart wants others to think of when they bring him to mind. But he clings to Adam now. "Oh, for fuck's sake, please tell me you can have a real conversation." "I believe I can." "Oh, thank fuck." They dance for a while. They waltz, and they do other, old-fashioned dances Stewart doesn't know the names of. Like something out of Cinderella, the dance floor clears for them. Lights dim, fountains that had not been there before burst into life, candlelight strikes Adam just right. Small, iridescent reflections of light, like soap bubbles, drift about the corners of everything. "Do you have a sister?" Adam asks, as they dip and turn and rise and fall on the floor. "I do," Stewart says. "Lorraine. Why do you ask?" "I was just wondering where you got all this from. My God, it's like we're on some little girl's cartoon or some illustrated fairy tale book." "It is, isn't it?" He ponders having the dinosaur bring down the ceiling when something else catches his eye. He turns a corner in his waltz and sees a blond, bearded man among the crowd by a marble pillar that had not been there before. A few more turns around the floor brings him back to the pillar, only now it's sunbaked mud, and Stewart seems to recall having won some battle out at the Rio Grande. The bearded man is filthy with caked mud and blood, his own and others. His eyes-Technicolor blue against all the grime on his face-follow Stewart. "What's wrong?" Adam says. "Bastard," Stewart mutters under his breath. "Bastard has no business coming into my dreams all the goddamn time." He kisses Adam, hard and dispassionately. He feels Adam respond to the violence, press closer to him. The dream does not end. Damn it. Stewart stops dancing and starts to undo Adam's grey cadet coat. He works at a feverish pace, hair coming loose from his regimental ponytail. Think passionate thoughts, he tells himself. Think sex. Animal sex. Um, get naked. Now. He does. Adam obviously likes what he sees. "Fuck me," Stewart says. "Here?" "Why the fuck not?" Adam smiles. He obliges, and Stewart is flabbergasted to realize that he is being fucked in his mother's dining hall, naked as a newborn, with guests watching-with his mother watching-and all he can do is scan the crowd for the bearded man. Adam sinks his cock into him, and Stewart cries out and pulls off all the right moans and jerks himself off as Adam slams into him and he thinks, "I really should have woken up by now." He's drenched in sweat, for pride's sake, hair plastered to his cheeks. Adam is pumping into him like some Olympian god, wearing a Navy uniform. He really should be waking up now. Sting smiles at him from behind a pillar. "Do I have your attention now?" he says. He scratches his beard, and dry blood flakes off. "Good, because I wanted to tell you that-" Atlanta, GA and Rosemont, IL A dog barks in the street below, and Stewart wakes with an irrational desire to beat up his pillow. It flies across the room and strikes the hotel room dresser. He thinks about going back to sleep right then and there, hoping he'll somehow pick up that ridiculous ballroom dream again, find Sting, drive a fist so far up his nose it'll pop out from his big, stupid toes. "Don't look so pissed," Sting snaps at him as they board a plane for Rosemont, Illinois. "It's just two more shows, and we can all go home." "You have been rather jumpy, lately," Andy says, teeth clamped over his bag of extremely salted peanuts. "Do you want maybe I should lend you my meditation tapes? They knock me off to sleep in seconds, they're so boring. It's all this even, perfectly articulate BBC accent and rain effects and shite. Bloody awful. But you look like you might need it." A roadie lends him a tape deck, and Stewart climbs into bed at his Rosemont hotel with Andy's BBC gentleman mildly informing him that he should start breathing now. "Start breathing?" Stewart grumbles at the ceiling, hands clasped over his stomach in what he assumes is a meditative pose. "I'm already breathing, you moron." It's amazing. The tape knocks Stewart under in less than two minutes, the sides and back of his head tingling in an uncomfortably pleasurable way. His last conscious thought is that getting turned on by English meditation tape voices is not the type of fetish he wants to be known for. Not Rosemont, IL He's climbing a mountain. Flurries of snow and frozen rain strike his face, but he doesn't seem to need gloves or even climbing gear. He climbs the mountain as if he were merely scrambling up a steep hill. After a while of this, the mountain tilts, himself clinging to it, and he finds himself-upside down but free of any blood rushing to his temples and nose-looking at Adam. "Why?" Adam slices Stewart's mountain top in two with a leaf blower, watches as Stewart drops with a, "Whoa!" into a pile of snow at his feet. "Why what?" "Why do I keep dreaming about you?" "Ah." Adam turns to look at the dinosaur making its way through waist-high snow banks several feet below them. "I'm actually wondering about that myself. I keep dreaming about you. We filmed a video two weeks ago." He points down. "That bloody dinosaur's in it too." Two weeks ago? Stewart has been dragging his drum kit along behind the corpse of The Police for Amnesty International concerts since 4 June. He has no recollection of shooting any videos, let alone with Adam Ant. He met with Adam's people to talk a soundtrack collaboration that-at last check-in-was looking pretty darn tooting solid. But no videos. Not yet. "Um, was it a nice video?" Stewart says, rustling snow out of his hair. "It was okay. It was funny." Adam shrugs. "I keep dreaming about bits and pieces of it and-" "Oh, fuck." Adam follows Stewart's glare. A blond, bearded man in a parka is making his way up the snow towards them. He seems to care not one iota for the dinosaur stomping and jerking along behind him, roaring now like something scratching out of an old Victrola. "Stewart!" the man calls out. "Bugger and blast him," Stewart mutters. He shoots Adam an apologetic look that's more justification than admission of guilt. "Sorry. Hope you're not the kind of Brit to take offense at Americans abusing your peculiar turns of phrase and all that, because-" Adam kisses him into silence. "I think it's a better idea to run, don't you? That is what you want to do, isn't it?" They run. Snow slushes into parquet floors and then into a dirt road fringed by dry, dead grass. Stewart looks around him as he allows Adam to pull him along, smiling-he's fully aware of this-like a dolt. "Kansas," he says. "I'm dreaming of Kansas. I always wanted to dream about The Wizard of Oz." "Really?" Adam says over his shoulder, jumping a fence into an Irish bar. "Because I thought that was the Great Depression. I keep dreaming of the Great Depression." "Stewart!" comes Sting's voice. He's pedalling like a madman on an old-fashioned bicycle, dressed like some priest out of a B&W French picture. "Please!" "Screw yourself, I'm with Adam now! He says we made a funny video together! When was the last time you made a funny anything, huh?" He flashes Sting the bird and pulls Adam into a confessional. They make out in a moaning flurry of elbows bumping into cramped, wooden space and Stewart's head swimming in frankincense fumes. To his frustration, he never comes, but the tight and burning sensation in his balls is so goddamn good that what really boils him is Adam breaking off mid-cock suck to pant out, "Oh, shite, he's the sodding priest." They scramble out of the confessional, pulling their pants back on and skidding on the marble church floor, as Sting fights his way out from behind the confessional as well. "Please," he says. Pleads. Stewart nearly looks back at him, but gives it up in favour of jumping into a dream of his mother's kitchen. Only half of his bedroom is at the corner of it. "Did you really have purple bed covers?" Adam says. "No," Stewart lies. They run, Sting always one door or pantry shelf or Vespa or row boat behind, for what seems like an interminable flash of pointless dream segments. Being as it's a dream, Stewart never gets tired. Adam is laughing. Sting walks up to them across water, black clouds above him. "Stewart," he says. He still has a beard, still has more wrinkles than Stewart knows him to have. He thinks of Adam's video shot two weeks ago that Stewart knows he hasn't lived yet, and something odd happens to his heart. It's not painful, really. It's as if something were twisting it round, like the lock on a safe or the knob on a television set. The motion is constant and merciless. "What do you want?" he shouts at Sting. "Look, you're the one who left. Right? Only you didn't even have the decency to tell me. You just drifted off somewhere and now I'm wondering where in fuck you're drifting to and why and you're a bastard, you know, and you can just fuck off because I don't care to hear whatever the fuck you have to say, right?" Sting glances at Adam. He seems to debate whether to speak in front of him or not. He has no real choice, so he turns his eyes to Stewart. "I'm in London. I'm taking a nap before the first show of my tour. I keep dreaming about you. The first time I thought it was a coincidence, but then I realized that you looked the same in every dream. Is it 1985 when you're at?" "1986," Stewart says, his voice small and hollow in his head. "Near enough. I've just taken off on my own, haven't I?" He waves away Stewart's oncoming tirade. "Yes, you've already said. I'm in 2003. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and..." He hesitates. Stewart can almost guess why. Sting has been trying to get to this moment for at least two dreams now (and Stewart realizes-with a start-that a blond, bearded professor had been wandering around the halls of his Millfield school dream), and it always signals their abrupt end. Adam reaches out to take Stewart's hand. "I don't want to hear this, Sting," Stewart says. "I really don't." "Please. Please, Stewart. I just wanted to tell you that-" Los Angeles, CA Stewart drinks coffee. He drinks lots and lots of coffee. When he's not drinking coffee, he's jogging. He rides his bike at 9.00 PM every day, so that he gets home pumped full of adrenaline. He thinks about swallowing sleeping pills and dropping off into drugged blackness, but that might make him dream. Andy calls him and tells him that things are okay with him. He mentions Sting, something about filming a video, something about a fortress built around his heart. The song comes on the radio a few days later. "I had to stop in my tracks," Sting says to him over the frequency, "for fear of walking on the mines I'd laid." "I bet you do, Stingo. I just bet you do." He thinks about calling Adam Ant. The real one. The one he wrote a song with, the one he finally made that video with. A video with a desert travel kiosk and a blue Royal Navy uniform and a stop-motion dinosaur. "That was fun," Adam said. They did have real sex, at that. And it had been surprisingly good. Adam had been attentive and passionate and all around decent. Stewart lay awake afterwards, afraid to close his eyes and dream. "Get some sleep, man," Andy tells him for the hundredth time when they run into each other. "You look like a bloody drug addict." Sleep. Dream. Not good. Every time he slips, he dreams something disjointed, with a dinosaur in the back somewhere, and Adam turns up, all sweet and protective, to have sex with him, and Sting shows up and it's always, "I wanted to tell you-" Stewart is a superstitious man. He's dreamt of Sting trying to tell him something eleven times now. They're at a beach, or at a party, or on a train. One time Sting sprouted wings, and Stewart shoved him off a balcony. What the hell, it was a dream, right? Worse that would happen to Sting is he'd wake up with a jolting crash in his own bed. Wherever or whenever that bed really was. He never stopped looking older in the dreams. Sometimes he had stubble, sometimes a beard, sometimes a clean shaven chin. But there were always the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the weight of a few more years in his gaze and the way he held his shoulders. Stewart heard words in his head that he could no longer pin-point to any specific dream, "I'm in 2003." Nonsense. "I wanted to tell you that-" The TV talks to itself in the voices of The Golden Girls, and Stewart jogs in place to stay awake. He jogs into the kitchen, slaps on bright, overhead lights that bleach everything neon white, and makes himself more coffee. His hands are shaking. He's wired. Wired wired wired shaking wired. He drops the cup, and he watches, as if drugged, as the shards fly out and strike the chair legs and the counter drawers and his feet. He drops down seconds later, eyes rolling into the back of his head. Not a Place He's in a basement, that much he knows. It's dark and spooky in a primordial, childhood way, and something feels very wrong about the place. It's nothing he can isolate and point to, but something about the place makes him feel tired and uneasy. It occurs to him that maybe that's a natural reaction to dreaming after passing out from exhaustion on his kitchen floor. God, he hopes he hasn't given himself a heart attack. Would he be dreaming, then? He walks along the basement, but there's not far to walk. It's a pretty small room. Most of it is taken up by a glass dome at the centre. Stewart runs his palms over it, then knocks on the glass. Something with a tangle of black hair, devastatingly bony and very, very pale is curled up at the centre of it. Great. He's gonna dream about dead people now. Stewart rests his back against the dome. He slides down into a sitting position. Without knowing why, he begins to talk to the thing within the dome. He says, "Hi, I don't know you, but I'm Stewart. I'm a drummer. I dreamed of being in a very successful rock band, and I was. And now I'm dreaming that my fucked up lead singer wants to tell me something, only I don't want him to tell me, because I know-I fear-what he is going to say." I see, says a whisper at the back of Stewart's head. It sounds like a psychologist, one of the competent ones, the ones that make you believe that they're not only listening, but reading your mind as well. "Look, it's all fucked up anyway. I know the band is over, right? I'm working with new people, got myself some soundtrack jobs. It's good money. It's good work. And I have nothing to fear from that bastard Sting." He pauses, shrugs. "That's his name. Sting. Only not really. His name's Gordon. His real name." The voice in his head sighs like a rustle of voices rising from Stewart's own chest. It's a tired sound. Soul tired. Do you wish to dream of something other than Gordon, little drummer? I am afraid that I cannot help you, in my present state. I am afraid dreams are... beyond my control. "Nah, it's okay, man." Strange thing to say. What the voice said makes no real sense to Stewart. "Just..." He shrugs. It occurs to him that he's not sure why he feels like he knows the voice in the back of his head, regardless. He's never heard it before in his life, but he finds himself perfectly at ease. He doesn't even feel as if he has to crack a trillion high-speed jokes a second. His head drops back against the glass dome. "Hey, you know those dreams where you know exactly what you're doing and it's all so logical and it all makes sense, but then you wake up and you realize that broccoli has nothing to do with exploding ovens? You know those kinds of dreams?" Yes. "Have you ever had a dream like that?" I do not dream. "Ah." Stewart looks down at his feet. He's barefoot, wearing striped, blue and white pyjamas. "They don't mean anything, do they? Dreams?" Sometimes. "Yeah? Well which is it? Do they or don't they? 'Cause I'd like to have proper dreams again, without feeling as if I need to pay close attention to them." Sometimes you dream lies, but you always dream half-truths, Stewart Copeland. It strikes him then that he never mentioned his surname, at the same time that he realizes that this doesn't feel like a dream at all. There's something very tangible about it, without the odd, curved mistiness at the corners of real dreams. He turns around to ask the creature-the man-in the glass dome about it, but he's already back in his kitchen, holding a coffee cup in his shaking hands. He drops it and watches it shatter, and he drops down onto the floor a second later. Not Los Angeles, CA Adam stands by the travel agency kiosk. Sting stands beside him. They're both dressed in white linen suits, although Sting is barefoot. Stewart walks toward them with a slow, resigned gait. He opens up the kiosk, stands behind the counter, and looks at them both in turn. "Right," he says. "What do you want?" "I already got what I wanted," Adam says with a shrug. "I wouldn't mind a bit more every now and then." "That one's easy. Yes." He turns to Sting, raises his eyebrows. "I wanted to tell you that-" Stewart braces for his eyes to open, for something, anything, to snap him awake. A dog barking, a car backfiring, a bird, the telephone, Andy clapping for no good reason, anything. "-you were right." Adam walks away. Stewart watches him waving to a portly old gentleman dressed in green, a wide brimmed hat on his head and a cane in his right hand. They head off into the desert together, Adam turning to smile at Stewart in an oddly knowing way before he disappears with the gentleman in green behind a dune. "I'm still here," Stewarts says at length. "So am I," Sting says, his voice dipped in quiet surprise. "My God, I'm still here. I didn't wake up. Stewart." He looks at Stewart with an urgent frown. "Stewart, you were right." "I'm often right." He gives Sting a close lipped grin. "Well, I am. But I'm not sure what I was right about this time." Sting sighs, rubs the back of his neck. He's got that blessed beard again. "Were you... I mean, back then, when I was in the band, were you-" He pushes breath out between clenched teeth. "I may have been in love with you." A pause. A long pause. "Were you in love with me...?" Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Lie or truth. Truth or lie. Half-truth. Wasn't that what the pale man in the glass dome said? Dreams are always half-truths. "Maybe," he says. "Maybe." A heatless sun hangs over the desert. Yellowed posters for Calais and Verona Beach crackle and murmur against rusted nails behind Stewart. Sting stands with his hands in his pockets, and Stewart knows he's struggling with being completely honest again. It's odd, but Stewart pities him. He hates him, he hopes-if he's completely honest with himself-that his solo career will bite so much dust, Sting will choke and cough right back into Stewart's arms. But he still pities the bastard. Never did know when to rip his heart out and plunk it down on his sleeve. "You may have been in love with me, huh?" Stewart says. "Is that how you're phrasing it, out in, what was it you said, 2003? We got those flying cars out of The Jetsons yet, by the way?" "No. All the doomsday Sci-Fi movies got closer to the truth." "Jesus." "But nothing that dire." Sting half-smiles with the arrogance laced ease of those who have seen the heart of a raging catastrophe and have lived to tell the tale. "Your hair looks nice that colour," he says after a while. "You've gone completely grey at my end." "Aw, shit." Stewart rests his chin on his palms. Grey. Dollars to however that saying goes that he looks like his father. "Do I look cool?" "You've taken to wearing black rimmed glasses too." He gives Stewart a quick look, then turns back to his pretence of studying the quite unremarkable desert landscape. "I'm, ah, kinda used to them now. You look a bit weird without them. You look so..." "Young? Why thank you." Stewart reaches down and undoes the last button on his white, cotton shirt. "You look a tad bit older than when I saw you last. That was in New Jersey on, oh, 15 June." "You'll see me again soon, I'm afraid. It... won't be very satisfactory." Stewart pauses half-way up his shirt. He doesn't know whether to frown or smile. Likely doing both. His voice is flippant and casual. "Oh, well, you know, it's been... not very satisfactory... for months over at my end. You're doing stuff with azure, hard-shelled, slow-moving reptiles, and you're being kinda rude and condescending to me and Andy, although you're being very, very polite about it, which makes it worse." He undoes the final button and wriggles out of his shirt, all bony shoulders and weird angles. He drops it somewhere behind him. "But that's okay, 'cause you may have been in love with me. Right?" "Stewart..." He looks hurt. He really does look hurt. "To be honest," Stewart says, "I couldn't make up my mind either. One minute I thought I might just, you know, just might be in love with you. At other times I dearly wished a bus would run you over, leave your head like a watermelon versus shopping cart disaster on aisle seven." Stewart starts to pull his belt out of its loops. It's made of intertwined leather chords, one dyed bark brown, the other a kind of burnt sienna. Amazing the detail some dreams can have. Sting's beard, for example, it's as if he can see each damn strand individually. There are so many specks and reflections and shades of blue azure cerulean lapis lazuli in his eyes that it's bordering on illegal in all fifty states, Mexico and Canada. Whoa. Whoa there, Stewart. Slow down. Take off the belt. One loop at a time. Good. Wind it up-slow, slow, slow-one turn around your hand at a time, and now place it on top of the counter, just so. Maybe give him a look, chin tilted. As if you don't really care. Nice and coy. Is he looking? Hundred shades of blue within his eyes. Yeah, he's looking. Let's start working on that first pant button. He- "For fuck's sake, Stew, it's a dream. Get naked already if that's what you're aiming for." The first pant button pops open. "Was it really may have been? This is a dream. No one can hear us. At least one of us is gonna forget once we wake up. Was it really may have been?" Sting doesn't smile. "No." "Yeah?" Stewart pushes hair out of his eyes, the fingers of his right hand hovering over the zipper of his pants. "I kinda lied too." "Which part?" Stewart steps out from behind the counter. He tilts his head to the side and smiles. Well and truly smiles. Even his skin is smiling. "Does it matter?" It's a nice dream, all things considered. Sting is buried deep within Stewart and pumping madly and Stewart is deliriously happy. It doesn't even matter that he knows he's merely jerking away at his own cock in some floor he can't even picture anymore. Sting is wrapping one arm around his naked chest, palms scooping up sweat and sand, and pushing into him as if his very life depends on it. It is fuckingly fucking fuck me fantastic. It is at that precise moment that a stop-motion dinosaur grinds its colossal foot into the travel kiosk in the desert of Wadi El Natrun, reducing it to a pile of white toothpicks and a few arabesque pages of brochures. "Did that make any sense?" Sting pants. He stares at the wreckage as he continues to fuck Stewart, mesmerized. Stewart smiles. "Hey," he says, "that's what you get for leaving before four am." Indeed. © 18-20 December 2008
|
[ 7 comments ]