Bathing the Lion (19 page)

The first time it happened he actually awoke laughing because what he had just witnessed was funny. He knew the dream he’d experienced belonged to Vanessa Corbin. When he saw her the next afternoon at the store he wanted to ask if she ever really had had sex with an orthodox Jewish rabbi standing up in the back of a moving bakery truck. But he didn’t.

Or the time normally placid Dean came into the store one morning. Clapping Kaspar on the shoulder, the first thing he said was a gleeful, “You
dog
.” Kaspar knew the correct response was to smile quizzically and ask his partner, why am I a dog? But he already knew. The night before, Dean had dreamed his old college girlfriend Melinda Szep and Kaspar had gotten together. Dean had caught the couple in his college room bunk bed. But he didn’t feel betrayed because in the dream he was already married to Vanessa and Kaspar was twenty years old.

After Dean described his dream and both men sniggered a little awkwardly, Kaspar thought it would be good to ask what Melinda looked like. Dean put up two approving thumbs. He was right—from what Kaspar had seen in last night’s dream theater, the young woman was definitely a knockout.

Big as he was, D Train insisted on sleeping on Kaspar’s bed with him. As a puppy he was brought up there so the young dog would sleep better and feel more secure at night, especially after being shot. But this turned out to be a bad idea because as he grew older, D took it for granted he belonged on any bed with the boss—a kind of canine eminent domain. In the course of a night he might be pushed off four times but the stubborn soul wouldn’t take no for an answer. With the grace and stealth of a ninja, he’d wait a few minutes for the coast to clear and Kaspar to fall back to sleep. Then the wily pit bull crept back up over the side of the bed and settled in until the next foot shoved him off again.

When they moved to Vermont, Kaspar bought an outsized, marvelously comfortable dog bed from L.L.Bean. He placed it three feet across the floor from his own, but D wasn’t having it. He only catnapped on this bed when there was nothing else to do.

The ongoing human-dog battle for the Benn bed might have sounded humorous but wasn’t very
ha-ha
for any lover who woke up in the middle of the night with a thick gray paw on her cheek or breast, put there in friendship and camaraderie by the other (furry) man in the bed.

Particularly the poor woman—a first-time visitor, no less—who happened to be sleeping over the night Kaspar and D Train shared the same dream. At 4:13
A.M.
both fellows came yowling awake and looking wildly around for the horrible creature that seconds before was hot on their heels, its slavering cavernous mouth open to devour them, its breath near, smelling of meat and heat and you’re next.

People wonder what dogs dream about; why they twitch, shake, and yip deep down in their REM sleep. Kaspar could tell you why: because they dream they’re being pursued by things too awful for words, too big to measure, and too ferocious to grasp by a sane mind. Dogs take everything they know and experience down into their sleep where they blow it up a hundred times. When it’s something awful—times a hundred—
that
is what chases them in their dreams and why they’re running like hell horizontally to get gone. But sometimes they’re outrun. Their dream monsters catch and devour them in crunchy 3-D, feel-your-bones-snap death-o-rama.

This
is what canines dream of sometimes, and former mechanic to the stars or not, it scared the wee-wee out of Kaspar Benn. Coming awake, both dog and man sprang off opposite sides of the bed, leaving the poor naked woman cowering half-asleep in the middle, sure the world was coming to an end. The dog barked while her lover snarled at some unseen shared enemy while squatting down in a defensive jiu-jitsu stance.

Afterward Kaspar sometimes shared D Train’s dreams but mostly those of his other friends in town. Generally he enjoyed them. Dream sharing was one of the many skills a mechanic needed to learn and develop, so it surprised him when he regained the ability again as a mere mortal here on Earth.

The big difference was in this second life he was powerless to interact. If he didn’t like a dream, too bad—he was stuck in it as long as it lasted. Of course a functioning mechanic could change any dream if it was necessary. Right before he was retired, one of Kaspar’s greatest challenges and eventual triumphs was the time he wrestled a dream away from a disturbed being near the Gudrun Asteroid and in doing so, helped her perilously unstable planet survive.

But not here. When he shared others’ dreams on Earth he was only along for the ride. It didn’t matter because most of the time these dreams were enjoyable and frequently informative. He learned things about his friends he was certain they’d never divulge on their own. He learned important lessons about being human. He also learned D Train was for some mysterious reason afraid of carrots.

TWO

After the airplane took off the night before, Kaspar had originally planned to make a detailed list of all the things he needed to do in Vienna. He also wanted to play a new video game he’d downloaded onto his iPad a few days before. But to his mild surprise he felt completely exhausted after eating dinner and decided to nap for an hour or two before doing anything else.

By the time he awoke, the plane was already crossing the Irish coastline. It made no difference because he was too disturbed by what he’d just experienced to do anything he’d originally planned for the flight. Wide eyed and sitting stiffly upright in his seat, he stared unseeing at the blank television screen on the seat back in front of him, all the while trying to grasp what had just happened and, more important, what it meant.

Kaspar Benn, Jane Claudius, Bill Edmonds, and the two Corbins had somehow combined their separate dreams into one and then all five of them experienced the mix at exactly the same time.

Eventually Kaspar got out a large notepad he usually only used for business matters. For the rest of the flight, he wrote on it until the plane landed in Vienna. When a flight attendant walked down the aisle checking to see if everyone’s seat belt was fastened, she glanced down to see what the man was writing and paused.

“Wow! What’s all that?” She smiled, raising her eyebrows to show how impressed she was while pointing at the notebook.

Kaspar looked up but said nothing, which was very unlike him. His expression would trouble the woman for some time. The flight attendant was usually very good at reading people. It was part of her job and she prided herself on the skill. But what she saw on this guy’s face was not only impossible to read, but a contradiction. That was the only word for it. On the one hand the man’s face said I’m busy, can’t talk now, but thanks for your interest. At the same time his large brown eyes were ice cold, steely and appraising. In an instant she felt like he was looking straight
into
her and seeing things she didn’t allow anyone to see.

“It’s a map.”

“Excuse me?” His glance had unsettled her so she didn’t register he was answering her question.

“I said it’s a map.”

The flight attendant immediately wanted to say, it is
not
a map. The page was filled from corner to corner with detailed, precise drawings of mysterious figures and what looked like hieroglyphics, intricate illustrations, strange alphabets, and abstruse-looking math problems. Also, single words and sentences were written in fine calligraphy. The paper looked like some kind of recondite illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages.

On the taxi ride into Vienna, Kaspar continued writing on his notepad. But it was a new drawing this time. If the flight attendant were to see
this
page it would have made her even more confused. The entire sheet of paper was covered with seventy-two identically drawn glass ink bottles. They were done in pencil in photo-realistic detail. It was uncanny how much they looked like the real thing. All that distinguished one from the other were the skillfully lettered labels on each bottle describing the color of ink inside each one—cerulean, feldgrau, obsidian, burnt sienna, caput mortuum, gamboge, cerise.…

Most impressive about what Kaspar was doing was the speed with which he drew the bottles. There was so much complex detail involved in rendering each one—shadowing, lettering on the labels, and perfectly aligning one right next to the other like toy soldiers. Yet all of the execution took him no more than a minute and a half per bottle from start to finish.

The taxi driver looked at his passenger in the mirror twice during the ride into town: the first time Kaspar’s head was down so it looked like he was seriously concentrating on whatever he was working on in his lap. The second time the driver glanced at him Kaspar was staring out the window as they passed the Schwechat oil refinery. What the driver couldn’t see both times was how quickly the passenger’s hand sped over the page, drawing. Even when Kaspar stared out the car window his hand kept moving. What it drew was as detailed, perfect, and accurate as everything else already on the page.

He had finished by the time the taxi pulled up in front of his hotel in the Sixth District. Tearing the paper off the pad, he folded it carefully in four quarters and slipped it into a pocket.

In his room he took it out along with the one he’d done on the plane. Opening both, he wedged them into opposite corners of a large mirror that faced the bed. After unpacking his bag he sat on an uncomfortable chair and stared at the two drawings a long time. Sometimes he would close one eye and after a while the other. He’d put up a hand to block part of a drawing. In time he dropped his head to his chest and sighed. This was not going to be easy.

Kaspar thought about calling Vermont but wasn’t ready to talk with them yet about the dream. He looked at his watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, 9:30 in the morning in Vermont. He needed more time to think. If he spoke to Dean or any of the others right now he might say something he’d later regret, and that was dangerous. He knew as little as they did about why they’d shared the dream and more important, why they all knew it.

The three blond women who’d visited Kaspar Benn in Vermont months before were back in town. They sat together now in the same restaurant where he had breakfast every morning. They were all eating the corn chowder recommended by the waitress.

“So anyway, thanks to Kaspar, at least the five of them
finally
shared a dream.”

“Here’s to Kaspar, poor guy,” said the blonde in the Russian fur hat. All three women raised water glasses in a toast to their former colleague. “But will someone please tell me why they sent
Crebold
to Vienna instead of us? Those two guys have hated each other since forever. Crebold made an ass of himself in what, forty-five minutes?”

Her colleagues exchanged glances but said nothing. Fur Hat looked from one woman to the other and scowled. “What? Do
you
know why Crebold was sent?”

Another knowing look passed back and forth between the two others.

“Stop it and just answer my question: why did they send Crebold?”

One woman took a deep breath and said, “Nobody told us specifically, but it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?”

Indignant, Fur Hat raised her chin slowly. “No, not to me. You’re both making me feel stupid, which is not very nice, so would you please explain?”

The third blonde said, “It was a test: they wanted to know how Kaspar would react to seeing Crebold after all this time. And then if he’d recognize Grassmugg. He recognized both of them right away, just like he recognized us. Humans usually have terrible memories. They didn’t know what would happen with Kaspar.”

“He remembered everything,” the blonde sitting next to Fur Hat added.

“No, not everything; he doesn’t know why the five of them shared the dream, so he’s still human in one respect.”

“True, and that’s great; he’s reached the perfect mix of the two. It’s just what they wanted.”

“This soup is good.”

“It’s
very
good—for human food.”

Secretly all three women had specific things they liked a lot about life on Earth, even though they’d only been there a short time. They didn’t tell each other though because none of them wanted to appear unprofessional. Whenever they came it was to do a job, not indulge (as individually they had been) in competitive ballroom dancing, the Silbo Gomero click language, or herpetology.

Fur Hat stood up and said she had to urinate—another thing she enjoyed very much about being human. The waitress directed her to the toilet. It was a while before she returned because she spent an excessive amount of time peeing and then reapplying her makeup in the restroom mirror. She loved watching makeup commercials on television. She was by far the vainest of the three blondes. She craved attention and wasn’t particular about who gave it to her. Her name was Jezik.

When she returned to the restaurant, her table was empty. She went stock-still seeing this, not believing it was true. These three women never separated without telling each other where they were going. They had worked together for centuries and inseparable was just the way they did things. They were rarely apart at all because they’d found over the years constant close proximity helped them function better and solve problems more quickly.

The waitress passed. Jezik asked her where the other two women had gone. The room was crowded and the waitress was busy trying to juggle many orders at once. She looked at the empty table and thought a moment. “Were you with other people? I don’t remember. I didn’t see them go, to tell you the truth. Sorry. Should I give you the check?”

Troubled, Jezik nodded and waited while the woman wrote it out. What was happening? Where were the others?

The blondes had been ordered back to Earth as soon as the five human beings shared the dream. Now that it had happened, they were supposed to help Josephine with the gathering when the right moment came.