The Dream Thieves
Kavinsky made a whoo shape with his mouth. “Gladly, Lynch. Here’s the deal. You get your stuff from the same place every time, right?”
The forest. “Mostly.”
“Go back there. Don’t go anywhere else. Why would you want to go anywhere else? You wanna go where your shit’s at. That’s where you go. You’re thinking of what you want before you go to sleep, right? You know it’s gonna be there, in that place. Don’t let it know you’re there. It’ll change on you if you do. You’ve gotta be in and out, Lynch.”
“In and out,” Ronan repeated. It didn’t sound like a dream he’d ever had.
“Like a motherfucking thief.”
Kavinsky revealed another two green pills in his hand. One he kept for himself. The other he offered to Ronan.
“See you on the other side?”
Fall asleep. Yes, you fall asleep. You are awake and then you close your eyes and thoughts press in and lucidity invades but then, eventually, you teeter on the edge of slumber and fall.
Ronan did not fall asleep. He swallowed the green pill and he was thrown into sleep. Hurled into it. Dashed, wrecked, destroyed into sleep. He rolled onto that shore a crushed version of himself, his legs gone beneath him. The trees leaned over him. The air grinned. Thief? He had been robbed.
In
Out
There was the object he had planned to take. Was it? He couldn’t tell what it was. The trees wrapped their branches around it. Orphan Girl tugged and tugged.
In
Out
Kavinsky’s voice, very clear: “Dying’s a boring side effect.”
Ronan snatched the metal of the thing. Inside him, a ventricle jerked restlessly. Blood poured into his empty atria of his heart.
“GET OUT!” screamed Orphan Girl.
His eyelids flashed open.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, sailor.” Kavinsky leaned over him. “Remember: You take the pill, or it’ll take you.”
Ronan couldn’t move. Kavinsky gave his chest a supportive thump of the fist.
“You’re all right,” he said amiably. He poured some beer into Ronan’s unprotesting lips and finished it himself. The sun looked strange outside the windshield, like time had passed, or the car had moved. “What the hell do you even have there?”
Ronan’s arms regained sensation. He held a metal cage with a tiny glass Camaro in it. It bore no resemblance to the boom box he’d planned to take out. It bore only a slightly better resemblance to the actual Camaro. Inside the glass car was an anonymous driver, his facial expression vaguely shocked.
“Dear Dick,” Kavinsky said. “Drive this!”
This time, Ronan laughed. Kavinsky showed him his own prize: a silver gun with the words DREAM KILLER engraved on the muzzle.
“You didn’t sneak in, did you?” he said accusingly. “Sneak in, sneak out. Get your stuff, get out. Before the place notices.”
“Fucking pill,” Ronan said.
“It’s a wonder drug. My mom loves the hell out of these, man. When she starts breaking shit in the house, I grind one of these for her. Put it in her smoothie. You can make a joke there, man. It’s easy. Go on. I left it wide open for you.”
“What is your place?”
Kavinsky set two more green pills on the dash; they danced and jittered along to the beat of the speakers. The song slyly told Ronan: Аре махай се, аре махай се, аре махай се. Kavinsky handed him a beer.
“My secret place? You want into my secret place?” Kavinsky howled a laugh. “I knew it.”
“Fine. Don’t tell me. You put pills in your mom’s drink?”
“Only when she steals my stuff. She wasn’t such a bitch back in Jersey.”
Ronan didn’t know much about Kavinsky’s home life, other than the legend everyone knew: His father, rich and powerful and Bulgarian, lived in Jersey where he was possibly a mobster. His mother, tanned and fit and made of non-factory-standard parts, lived in the suburban mansion with Kavinsky. This was the story Kavinsky told. That was the legend. The rumor was his mother’s nasal septum had been eaten away by coc**ne and his father’s patriarchal instinct had died when Kavinsky tried to kill him.
With Kavinsky, it had always been hard to say what was real. Now, looking at him holding a fraudulently perfect chrome firearm, it was even harder.
“Is it true you tried to kill your father?” Ronan asked. He looked right at Kavinsky when he said it. His unflinching gaze was his second finest weapon, after his silence.
Kavinsky didn’t look away. “I never try to do anything, man. I do what I mean to.”
“Rumor has it that’s why you’re here and not Jersey.”
“He tried to kill me,” Kavinsky replied. His eyes glittered. He had no irises. Just black and white. The line of his smile was ugly and lascivious. “And he doesn’t always do what he means to. And anyway, I’m harder to kill than that. You kill your old man?”
“No,” Ronan said. “This killed him.”
“Like father, like son,” Kavinsky noted. “You ready to go again?”
Ronan was.
Pills on tongue. Chase it with beer.
This time, he saw the ground coming. Like being spat from the air. He had time to hold his thought, hold his breath, curl his body. He rolled into the dream. Fast. Tossed from a moving vehicle.
Soundlessly, he rolled into the trees.
They watched each other. A strange bird screamed. Orphan Girl was nowhere to be seen.
Ronan ducked low. He was quiet as rain under a root. He thought:
bomb
And there it was, a Molotov cocktail, not very different from the one he’d thrown into the Mitsubishi. Three rocks jutted from the damp forest floor, only the tips visible, eroded teeth, mossy gums. The bottle was tipped between them.
Ronan crept forward. Closed his fingers around the dewcovered neck of the bottle.
Te vidimus, Greywaren, whispered one of the trees.
(We see you, Greywaren.)
He clenched his hand around the bomb. He felt the dream shifting, shifting —
He exploded awake.
Kavinsky was already back, doing a line of coke off the dash. The light outside was dull and dead, past twilight. His neck and chin were lit like a garden feature by the dash lights below. He wiped his nose. His already keen expression sharpened when he saw Ronan’s dream object.
Ronan was paralyzed as usual, but he could see perfectly well what he’d just produced: a Molotov cocktail identical to those at the substance party — a T-shirt twisted and stuffed into a beer bottle full of gasoline. It looked just as it had in the dream.