Lair of Dreams
“Your mother loved you so much, Sam,” Evie said, and she felt Sam’s arm tighten around her. “Objects don’t lie. I could tell.”
“Thanks,” Sam muttered. “Anything else?”
“I-I couldn’t see everything,” Evie lied. “But someone was asking your mother to help the government with Project Buffalo in some way. But she thought what they wanted was too dangerous, that it would draw bad spirits, whatever that means. And I heard something about ‘Come to the Harbor.’ Do you know what that means?”
Sam shook his head. “Plenty of harbors around, though.”
“Do you know anything about where this picture was taken?” Evie asked.
Sam stared at the photograph. He shook his head. “I don’t recognize it. Why?”
“I couldn’t tell precisely, but it looked a bit like a castle.”
“No, Sam. A sand castle,” Evie retorted. “Yes, of course, a castle castle. But here’s the strange part: I’ve seen this particular castle before, in my dreams.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “And were you married to a handsome prince in that dream? Was there a scepter and a throne?”
“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.
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.
“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.
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.