Lair of Dreams

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

He stepped into the tunnel and found himself outside Le Bon Reve in rural France. He and his mates had gone drinking there one September evening before they’d been lost to the trenches along the Western Front. The saloon’s windows were alight. Chauncey put his face to the glass, but he couldn’t see anything. Hearty laughter erupted on the other side of the saloon door. And then a chorus of drunken voices took up a song that had been popular during the war. Chauncey could still remember the words.

“Over there! Over there!” came a strong tenor. That was Clem Kutz singing! He’d know that voice anywhere. Somehow, his old pal Clem was here.

Chauncey pushed through the door and went inside.

Seated around a long, rustic farmhouse table were all the friends Chauncey had lost during the war. Why, there was Teddy Roberts! Poor Teddy, whose mask had sprung a leak and he’d choked on mustard gas, dying with eyes bulged out, a hideous, unnatural grin stretching across his thin face. There was Bertie Skovron from Buffalo, who’d taken a bellyful of shrapnel and bled out, one hand still gripping the field telephone. Medic Roland Carey—funny old Rolly, who’d tell you a right filthy joke as he checked your gums for scurvy or poured stinging alcohol over a nasty cut. The same Rolly, cut down by influenza, was sitting right in front of him. And Joe Weinberger was there, too. Joe, who’d made it back home to Poughkeepsie after the war with a bad case of shell shock. He’d lasted eight months before he went into the barn on a fresh spring morning, threw a rope over a rafter, and hung himself. All of Chauncey’s friends were here, alive and young and whole. Brothers. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and the dreams they’d nurtured before the war—to be husbands, fathers, businessmen, heroes worshipped by a grateful nation—were still untouched and waiting to be used.

Clem sang out, “Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun / Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.…”

The other fellas joined in. “Hear them calling you and me, every son of Liberty.…”

“Over there, over there… Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle, do or die,” Chauncey said, though he’d gotten the verse and chorus mixed up. He sniffed back happy tears. “You’re here. How are you here?”

His mates welcomed him with smiles. “Dream with us.”

Chauncey laughed. “All right, then. All right.”

He took a seat at the table, which had been laid out with an enormous feast: boiled eggs and slabs of bread and butter on silver platters, a roast pig surrounded by shiny apples, beer, and cake. Those cold nights when they’d burrowed into trenches in France, their bellies rumbling with hunger and their heads itchy with lice, they’d talked incessantly of the food they’d eat when they returned.

“Who are we fighting this war for?” Teddy had asked once under a cold, starless sky as they passed a lone cigarette among the unit. “What are we doing here?”

“Defending democracy,” Chauncey had answered.

Teddy had let the next question out with his smoke. “Whose democracy?”

That had been long ago. They’d died, horribly, all of them. All his friends. But somehow, they were here now, healthy and smiling, as if the war had been a dream and this was truth. Chauncey felt drunk on gratitude and profound relief. Even though just last week the doctors had told him there was something wrong with his liver, and he might want to get his affairs in order—as if he had any affairs to put in order! Well, they were wrong. His liver wasn’t failing. He was being granted a second chance at life. Chauncey imagined getting married in the church where his parents had been married, raising a passel of rambunctious kids who liked to fish in the creek. And if anyone asked his future sons to fight a war, he’d tell them to go to hell.

Clem patted his arm and made a funny face. “Sick,” he said. “Not much life. Bad dreams.”

Chauncey smiled. “Clem, old boy, this is the best dream yet.”

The food looked delicious, and even though the past few weeks his appetite had been flagging, Chauncey found that he was eager to eat.

“Bad dreams,” Rolly said, and for just a moment, the dream wavered.

“Cheers, boys!” Chauncey said, willing the dream to continue. He spooned potatoes into his mouth and spat them out again just as quickly. The potatoes tasted bitter and dry, like eating a mouthful of sawdust. He looked more closely at the lump. It was moving. Maggots. They were maggots.

“My god,” Chauncey said, gagging into his napkin. He wiped furiously at his mouth. “Say, wh-what sort of joke is this, fellas?”