NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
By Thanksgiving, Christmas lights illuminate Fauxmont’s trees, shrubs, and rooflines, and many shine all night, along with streetlights, making it even more difficult to see the natural light of stars.
Someone in red boots and a high-collar black overcoat is standing in the front yard looking up into the dead magnolia outside the living room window. They hold bird glasses up to their face hidden behind the collar.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“No.”
I walk around to see the hidden face.
“Hi Diddlie. Looking for me?”
“Do you hang out in dead trees?”
“You might have let me know you were here!”
She goes on looking up into the dead branches. We hear a cry, as a young eagle flies out toward the street.
“Did you see that?”
“Yup.”
“At one point it was strutting around on the ground!”
“What? out here, you mean?”
She lets her glasses hang free on their strap.
“It has the Red Queen freaked out.”
“I doubt if she can see anything down here.”
“No, that bird was in my yard, right outside the kitchen window.”
“Oh, so you flew down after it!”
“No Fred, I have been tracking it on foot for the last hour, or more.”
“In this weather!”
“I have a high-tech coat.”
She looks at her watch.
“I still have another thirty-eight minutes of power.”
“How can you tell?”
“My watch tells me, see?”
I see a red horizontal bar on the face.
“That’s interesting. Most watches tell time.”
“Fred, you are being really obtuse today. Is the cold weather getting to you?”
“I am not being obtuse, just inquiring.”
Some ice falls out of the tree, in a gust of wind, and shatters on the ground, narrowly missing her.
“First you accuse me of flying into your yard without telling you and now you pretend that watches only tell the time.”
She puts her glasses up to her eyes again.
“Sorry, the humor intended by my remarks seems to have frozen in the air before you could get it.”
Keeping hold of her glasses she takes them down from her eyes, and looks at me, holding them ready in front of her.
“Yeah, maybe it will melt out of that ice that nearly hit me in the head!”
“It won’t melt today.”
Diddlie lets go of her glasses and pulls her colorful fairisle knitted hat down above her eyebrows.
“Listen, I just walked over tracking this bird, okay?”
“Okay, your watch has an app that regulates your heated coat.”
She holds her glasses up to her eyes and scans the trees across the street.
“Do you see it?”
“No.”
She strides toward the gate to the street with her glasses in one hand at her side.
“Come on, Fred.”
“Just a minute.”
“Fred! Come on. Aren’t you going to help?”
“Help with what?”
“Tracking down this trespassing raptor.”
“It isn’t trespassing. Eagles own the whole area between the clouds and the ground.”
“Well, okay, but the Red Queen needs reassurance.”
“Let me get my unheated puffy jacket and hat.”
“Hurry up!”
She goes on scanning the trees with her glasses. When I get back, she is standing by the gate in our post and rail fence.
We walk up the hill towards her place when we hear the cries again.
“Can you see it?
“No,”
“I haven’t seen anything flying about.”
Diddlie lets her glasses hang by the strap.
“I think it is a dream sign.”
“It is an eagle, Did. I hear them all the time. There was a breeding pair in the willow oaks on Wicket Street back in the spring.”
“It could still be a dream sign.”
I follow her up the hill to her carport.
“You are not going to find the raptor in here, Did.”
“Oh, really, Fred?”
Diddlie unlocks an old art deco burr walnut armoire, standing against the house wall. Some of the highly polished veneer has chipped off around the doors and on the corners. The back turns out to be a heavy steel door, faced with wood, and I don’t see any handles.
“How did you open that?”
“Mr. Liddell and I, know how.”
“You mean he comes through here too?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“But he is locked in his hutch.”
She pulls me in, with her arm in mine.
“Come on honey, just move, will you!”
We stand in the armoire. The door we came in by closes. It is dark. The big steel door opens, letting in some light, and the armoire seems bigger inside than out. There is a scent of camphor in the musty smell, and I can see where the shelves and coat rail have been removed from the sides.
“Is this your husband’s old bomb shelter?”
We descend the concrete steps to another door, which seems to open automatically.
“There; remember?
She lets go of my arm.
“This is where I store all the different kinds of truth.”
“Yes, with your goldenrod in all those cubbies.”
“You see those jars over there?”
“Right, about twenty of them in funny shapes.”
“Each one holds dead dreams.”
“I didn’t know they died!”
“Oh yes, once it has passed through the minds of millions of people it dies.”
“Why?”
“Times change, Fred, and people’s dreams change with them.”
“How come you have them?”
“Because this house is in the collection field.”
“Good grief!”
“If you are sensitive to them the dreams will come to die there.”
“Oh, you mean this is a cemetery?”
“No Fred, my husband was a Dodgson.”
Mr. Liddell watches us patiently from under a small table.
“I remember.”
“The family has had the gift for generations, all the way back to the Druids.”
“Do you think Stuart was a Druid?”
“No, silly!”
The red Queen is perched on top of the case of truth cubbies, flapping her wings in agitation. Mr. Liddell emerges hesitantly and hops across the room.
“You remember when all those rabbits who crowded into the carport?”
“Yeah, it was raining hard.”
“They were all dream signs.”
“I thought they came in out of the rain.”
“The rabbits did but as dream signs were attracted by the collection field.”
“Is that why Mr. Liddell was so scared?”
“Yeah, that crowd was too much for him.”
“Okay, you mean they are all in one of those jars?”
“The dreams are, not the animals.”
“Aha, so how do they detach from their mammalian hosts?”
“Well, how do your dreams detach from you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember most of them.”
“No, they soon escape, you know.”
“They re all lost to me.”
“They escape too. Some leave you with a memory, but it is like a still from a movie. You can never remember the whole thing.”
“So, what is the whole thing?”
“Well, it isn’t anything you could put into words. It, like, vibrates through all kinds of existences.”
“It does?”
“Every dreamer of that dream adds a vibe.”
The Red Queen glides down onto Diddlie’s shoulder.
“Okay Queenie, okay.”
“Dream scream, dream stream, cream dream dreeeeee!”
The Red Queen goes on repeating herself.
“Queenie! We get the message, okay!”
She starts grooming her wing feathers and then as if distracted, she flies back up to her perch above the cubbies.
“That bird is having a bad one!”
“She can feel the energy.”
“What energy?”
“All the energy that Mr. Liddell is tuned in to.”
“OH! He is in dream reception mode!”
“His ears can channel it.”
Mr. Liddell has stopped at the foot of the dream cabinet and watches us with ears up.
“You mean he hears our dreams?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Oh stop asking such obtuse questions!’
“I am not obtuse. I am curious!”
“Just chill, okay.”
We stand in silence while Mr. Liddell channels energy and the Red Queen gets even more agitated and starts pulling out her feathers, which float in the air like dust.
“Did. Queenie is losing it.”
“No, look! She has calmed down.
The Red Queen glides to the floor through the cloud of her feathers, and Mr. Liddell hops back under the table.
“What’s going on?”
“The dream has settled.”
“What are we doing down here anyway?”
“I wanted to show you the dream sign. You didn’t seem to understand.”
“Well, those jars look empty. I mean all I can see is the dust collecting on them.”
“Well, you can’t see a dream, can you?”
“I have seen plenty in my dreams.”
“The dream inhabited you then left without you seeing it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You experience the content, not the dream’s invisible gravity.”
“Dreams are not planets. They don’t have mass.”
“Not physical mass, metaphysical mass, all the unresolved stuff in life.”
“Well Did. I feel plenty unresolved. I feel as if I might dissolve!”
“Come on honey. This is a pretty strong field.”
She folds her arm into mine again and tugs. We go back upstairs to the carport. The wind is still gusting, and the white oaks have released the last of their remaining dead leaves. Some blueish Christmas lights hang with their cold light in the dark of a fir tree across the road. The leaf blowers are silent after gathering late falls and drowning out everything but the sound of trucks and crows.
