Neil Gaiman - Book of Dreams

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THE SANDMAN:
BOOK OF DREAMS
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER's seven-night dreamquest in the devoted service of Desire...
BARBARA HAMBLY's nightmare of the sins of Cain spilling out of the Dreaming into the waking
world...
WILL SHETTERLY's darkest visions gathered and hungry and real...
TAD WILLIAMS's heartbreaking story of a girl, her father, and a Byronic teddy bear...
SUSANNA CLARKE's magic that would steal the sands of Morpheus...
GENE WOLFE's last gift of the first dream...
THE SANDMAN:
BOOK OF DREAMS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE Frank McConnell
MASQUERADE AND HIGH WATER Colin Greenland
CHAIN HOME, LOW John M. Ford
STRONGER THAN DESIRE Lisa Goldstein
EACH DAMP THING Barbara Hambly
THE BIRTH DAY B. W. Clough
SPLATTER Will Shetterly
SEVEN NIGHTS IN SLUMBERLAND George Alec Effinger
ESCAPE ARTIST Caitlin R. Kiernan
AN EXTRA SMIDGEN OF ETERNITY Robert Rodi
THE WRITER'S CHILD Tad Williams
ENDLESS SESTINA Lawrence Schimel
THE GATE OF GOLD Mark Kreighbaum
A BONE DRY PLACE Karen Haber
THE WITCH'S HEART Delia Sherman
THE MENDER OF BROKEN DREAMS Nancy A. Collins
AIN'T YOU 'MOST DONE? Gene Wolfe
VALOSAG AND ELET Steven Brust
STOPP'T-CLOCK YARD Susanna Clarke
AFTERWORD: DEATH Tori Amos
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Preface
Frank McConnell
How do gods die? And when they do, what becomes of them then?
You might as well ask, how do gods get born? All three questions are, really, the same question.
And they all have a common assumption: that humankind can no more live without gods than you can kill
yourself by holding your breath.
(Of course, you just may be the kind of arrant rationalist who huffs that modern man has finally
freed himself from ancient enslavement to superstition, fantasy, and awe. If so, return this book
immediately to its place of purchase for a refund; and, by the by, don't bother trying to read
Shakespeare, Homer, Faulkner, or, for that matter, Dr. Seuss.)
We need gods---Thor or Zeus or Krishna or Jesus or, well, God—not so much to worship or
sacrifice to, but because they satisfy our need—distinctive from that of all the other animals—to imagine a
meaning, a sense to our lives, to satisfy our hunger to believe that the muck and chaos of daily existence
does, after all, tend somewhere. It's the origin of religion, and also of story-telling—or aren't they both
the same thing? As Voltaire said of God: if he did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.
Listen to an expert on the matter.
"There are only two worlds—your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy.
Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important.
What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide
a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do
not exist; and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?"
The speaker is Titania, the beautiful and dangerous Queen of Faerie, in Neil Gaiman's graphic
novel The Books of Magic, and I don't know a better summary explanation—from Plato to Sir Philip
Sidney to Northrop Frye—of why we need, read, and write stories. Of why we, as a species, are
godmakers. And spoken by a goddess in a story.
Books of Magic was written while Gaiman was also writing his masterpiece—so far his
masterpiece, for God or gods know what he'll do next—The Sandman. It is a comic book that changes
your mind about what comics are and what they can do. It is a serial novel—like those of Dickens and
Thackeray—that, by any honest reckoning, is as stunning a piece of storytelling as any "mainstream"
(read: academically respectable) fiction produced in the last decade. It is a true invention of an authentic,
and richly satisfying, mythology for postmodern, postmythological man: a new way of making gods. And
it is the brilliant inspiration for the brilliant stories in this book.
Like most extraordinary things, The Sandman had unextraordinary beginnings (remember that
Shakespeare, as far as we can tell, just set out to run a theater, make some cash, and move back to his
hick hometown). In 1987, Gaiman was approached by Karen Berger of DC Comics to revive one of the
characters from DC's WWII "golden age." After some haggling, they decided on "The Sandman." Now
the original Sandman, in the late thirties and forties, was a kind of Batman Lite. Millionaire Wesley
Dodds, at night, would put on gas mask, fedora, and cape, hunt down bad guys, and zap them with his
gas gun, leaving them to sleep until the cops picked them up the next morning—hardly the stuff of legend.
So what Gaiman did was jettison virtually everything except the title. The Sandman—childhood's
fairy who comes to put you to sleep, the bringer of dreams, the Lord of Dreams, the Prince of
Stories—indisputably the stuff of legend.
Between 1988 and 1996, in seventy-five monthly issues, Gaiman crafted an intricate, funny, and
profound tale about tales, a story about why there are stories. Dream—or Morpheus, or the
Shaper—gaunt, pale, and clad in black, is the central figure. He is not a god; he is older than all gods,
and is their cause. He is the human capacity to imagine meaning, to tell stories: an anthropomorphic
projection of our thirst for mythology. And as such, he is both greater and less than the humans whose
dreams he shapes, but whose thirst, after all, shapes him. As Titania would say, he does not exist; and
thus he is all that matters. Do you understand?
Grand enough, you would think, to conceive a narrative whose central character is narrative.
Among the few other writers who have dared that much is Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake is essentially
one immense dream encompassing all the myths of the race ("wake"— "dream": get it?). And, though
Gaiman would probably be too modest to invite the comparison, I am convinced that Joyce was much on
his mind during the whole process of composition. The first words of the first issue of The Sandman are
"Wake up"; the last words of the last major story arc of The Sandman are "Wake up"—the title of the
last story arc being, naturally, "The Wake." (All of Gaiman's story titles, by the way, are versions of
classic stories, from Aeschylus to Ibsen and beyond. A Brit, raised on British crosswords, he can't resist
playing hide-and-seek with the reader—rather like Joyce.)
Grand enough, that. But having invented Dream, the personified human urge to make meaning, he
went on to invent Dream's family, and that invention is absolutely original and, to paraphrase what Prince
Hal says of Falstaff, witty in itself and the cause of wit in other men.
The family is called the Endless, seven siblings, in order of age—"birth," we'll see, is not an
appropriate term— Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (whose name
used to be Delight). They are the Endless because they are states of human consciousness itself, and
cannot cease to exist until thought itself ceases to exist; they were not "born" because, like consciousness,
nothing can be imagined before them: the Upanishads, earliest and most subtle of theologies, have a deal
to say on this matter.
To be conscious at all is to be conscious of time, and of time's arrow: of destiny. And to know
that is to know that time must have a stop: to imagine death. Faced with the certainty of death, we
dream, imagine paradises where it might not be so: "Death is the mother of beauty," wrote Wallace
Stevens. And all dreams, all myths, all the structures we throw up between ourselves and chaos, just
because they are built things, must inevitably be destroyed. And we turn, desperate in our loss, to the
perishable but delicious joy of the moment: we desire. All desire is, of course, the hope for a fulfillment
impossible in the very nature of things, a boundless delight; so to desire is always already to despair, to
realize that the wished-for delight is only, after all, the delirium of our mortal self-delusion that the world is
large enough to fit the mind. And so we return to new stories—to dreams.
Now that's an overschematic version of the lineage of the Endless, almost a Medieval-style
allegorization. For they're also real characters: as real as the humans with whom they are constantly
interacting throughout The Sandman. Destiny is a monastic, hooded figure, almost without affect.
Death—Gaiman's brilliant idea—is a heartbreakingly beautiful, witty young woman. Dream— is Dream,
somber, a tad pretentious, and a tad neurotic. Destruction is a red-haired giant who loves to laugh and
talks like a stage Irishman. Desire—another brilliant stroke—is androgynous, as sexy and as threatening
as a Nagel dominatrix; and Despair, his/her twin, is a squat, fat, preternaturally ugly naked hag. Delirium,
fittingly for her name, is almost never drawn the same way: all we can tell for sure is that she is a young
girl, with multicolored or no hair, dressed in shreds and speaking in non sequiturs that sometimes achieve
the surreal antiwisdom of, say, Rimbaud.
Nevertheless: the Endless are an allegory, and a splendid one, of the nature of consciousness, of
being-in-the-world. And it can't be emphasized too much that these more-than, less-than gods matter
only because of the everyday people with whose lives and passions they interact. The Sandman
mythology, in other words, brings us full circle from all classical religions. "In the beginning God made
man?" Quite—and quite precisely—the reverse.
And Dream, the Lord of Storytelling, is at the center of it all.
We begin and end with stories because we are the storytelling animal. The Sandman is at one
with Finnegans Wake, and also with Nietzsche, C. G. Jung, and Joseph Campbell in insisting that all
gods, all heroes and mythologies are the shadow-play of the human drama. The concept of the
Endless—and particularly of Dream— is a splendid "'machine for storytelling" (a phrase Gaiman is fond
of). Characters from the limitless ocean of myth, and characters from the so-called "real" world—that's
you and I when we're not dreaming—can mingle and interact in its universe: quite as they mingle and
interact in you and me when we are dreaming. It's often been said by literary critics that our age is
impoverished by its inability to believe in anything save the cold equations of science. (Hence Destruction,
fourth of the siblings, left the Endless in the seventeenth century—the onset of the Age of Reason.) But
our strongest writers, Gaiman included, have always found ways of reviving the vitality of the myths, even
on the basis of their unreality. Credo, quia impossibile est, wrote Tertullian in the third century A.D.,
about the Christian mystery: "I believe it because it is impossible." Good theology, maybe; excellent
theory of fiction, absolutely.
Now that The Sandman is over, and its creator has moved on, it continues to serve as a machine
for storytelling. DC Comics provides The Dreaming, a series by various hands using the assumptions
and the characters invented in The Sandman. And the volume you hold now, by gifted "mainstream" (i.e.
non-comic book) writers, all of them expanding and elaborating the Sandman mythos, is perhaps only
the first, rich fruit of Gaiman's new technique for godmaking.
De te fabula, runs the Latin tag: the story, whatever story, is always about you. That's the
ancient wisdom The Sandman makes new: it's why, finally, we read at all. It is—and I know no higher
praise—another realization of Wallace Stevens's sublime vision of fiction in his great poem, "Esthetique
du Mal":
"And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.
MASQUERADE AND HIGH WATER
Colin Greenland
I have known Colin Greenland (um, Ph.D.)
at least three weeks longer than I have
known anyone else in this book. That's
about thirteen years. In that time he has
written elegant fantasies, romping space operas,
and wise works of nonfiction. He has
also won many awards, including the Arthur
C. Clarke Award for his novel Take Back
Plenty. Oddly, he has not aged in any
noticeable way, still looking a little like Gandalf's
rock-and-rolling youngest brother would, if
he were secretly a pirate.
It's a love story; which seemed like a good
place to start.
Sherri stood in the doorway with a mug of ice tea, shading her eyes from the sun. "You missed the
wedding!" she called.
Oliver shut the car door and went up the steps to the porch. "You had a wedding?" he said.
In fact Oliver had been aware of them all morning, the battered cars and bikes trailing up the
road past his house. He had heard the laughter coming from up here, the distorted wail of old Jefferson
Airplane albums. It was either a wedding or a wake. He kept away until the celebration all died down
and everything went quiet. He didn't know why he had come up here now. Just being neighborly, he
supposed.
Sherri was pottering inside and out, picking up. There was enough mess: paper plates smeared
with guacamole, empty bottles, half-empty cans. There was always mess at Sherri's house, wedding or
no wedding. Oliver kind of liked it. It helped confirm his resolve to keep his place down the road
vacuumed and tidy, free of bachelor squalor.
"It was a great wedding," Sherri said. "I married Johnny and Turquoise."
She knew everybody in the hills for miles around, and always assumed he did, too. In fact in two
years here she was the only one he had got to know at all. It was the solitude he liked—that, and the low
property prices that meant he could own now instead of paying top dollar rent on some cracker box
downtown. He liked living among the trees, in clean air, with the mountains in the distance. He sat on
Sherri's broken-down porch and looked out into the soft dark green of spruce, the shivering yellow
aspen. Above his head hung the sign, black letters charred into a slice of birchwood: CHURCH OF THE
WILD ELK.
"Want some of this?" She put a big cold bowl in his lap.
"What is it?"
"Melon ginger ice cream."
Probably half an ounce of hash in there too, knowing Sherri. "No thanks."
Sherri half sat on the porch rail in her worn long tie-dye skirt, cradling the bowl. Her arms were
sun brown and strong. "You know, I had this amazing dream," she said, dipping her finger in the ice
cream and licking it. "I dreamed I was sitting there where you're sitting, only there was this big white cat
in my lap. And I stroked it, and it got up and went away, and I looked down in my lap and there were all
these tiny little kittens! It was ama-azing," she said, drawing the word out into a whole drowsy musical
phrase. "It was really amazing. Don't you think that was a good omen for Johnny and Turquoise?"
"I never have dreams," said Oliver.
In his black onyx boat in the form of a sphinx, Morpheus the Shaper and his sibling Desire float across
the waters of the buried lake. The air is hot and gloomy. The sailors in their nightwear haul at the ropes,
putting on more sail. Eyes closed, they trawl the darkness for the sluggish wind.
The two travelers lie upon cushions. They speak of responsibility. Desire says it is a tiresome
illusion. Morpheus does not deny it, but claims it is inescapable in the human realm, inseparable from it as
shadows from sunlight.
"People pursue things," says Morpheus. "As soon as they have them they run away from them.
But what they run away from stays with them, dragging along behind them like an ever-lengthening
cloak." "Cloaks are nice." Bright-eyed Desire bites its finger. "You can wear a cloak and have nothing on
under it at all. And you can go anywhere you want like that!"
The water is dark and murky, like an old painting. Desire makes water lilies in it, green and white
and golden as egg yolk. Morpheus broods, as he does so often, his long chin resting in his wax-white
hand. Far away across the water, at the Pavilion of Recurrence, the summoning bell is ringing.
"Everybody dreams, Ollie," said Sherri, fetching him a beer. "They say you are what you dream. Did you
ever hear that?"
"No," said Oliver. "I never did."
"You are what you dream," said Sherri again, nodding, and smiled her blissed-out smile. Her
eyes were pretty. She picked up some butts, an empty corn chip box. She came across a shawl and
draped it round her shoulders, despite the warmth of the afternoon.
Oliver glanced at her. She couldn't be much older than he, though she had a grown-up daughter
somewhere running around. They always had dressed like grannies, the Earth Mother types, in long
dresses and scarves and twenty pounds of beads. He did wish she wouldn't call him Ollie.
Sherri was a nice Jewish girl from New York, originally. She had come out here to clean out her
headspace.
Her house was a legally consecrated church, tax exempt. She had told Oliver she was figuring out a way
to write off the hot tub as a baptismal font.
Oliver smiled and drank his beer. Sherri and her congregation. People who had crawled up in
here when the sixties turned to shit and never crawled out again. But Sherri was okay. She had helped
him the first winter, when he got sick, and when his Subaru went into that snowdrift she got somebody
for him, somebody she knew who came with a tow truck and pulled it out and never even sent him a bill.
Sherri was okay, when you had time for her. Sherri wouldn't do you harm.
Sometimes the Pavilion of Recurrence looks like an Arabian tent, a finespun marvel of white-and-scarlet
cloth billowing in a place of sand and mirage. Sometimes it stands to one side of a grassy river meadow
where swans glide beneath willows and great helms and targets with obscure devices hang amid the
branches of bowed and ancient trees. Sometimes it is made of pellucid white marble, the Pavilion of
Recurrence, with gilded balconies, and the sound of a piano tinkling lazily from an open window.
Sometimes, like today, the Pavilion of Recurrence has the aspect of an island monastery, with a
bell tower and a thick coat of evergreen creeper. The bell tolls slowly, insistently, across the buried lake.
Inside the Pavilion of Recurrence, as anywhere else in the Dreaming to one extent or another,
whatever is needed is provided. A morgue, where night after night forensic pathologists find members of
their families stretched out on the slab, opened up for dissection, though still pleading to be released. A
school where adults of all ages return again and again to face unprepared for and incomprehensible
exams. A tram that takes commuters on an eternal journey to an ominous destination through unknown
yet strangely haunting streets. A sepulchral secondhand shop, on whose shelves authors find dusty books
with titles that are completely unreadable, but whose covers bear their own names.
Inside the Pavilion of Recurrence today they are assembling for a dream of masquerade and high
water. The bell calls them in, the figments, the chimeras, the larval entities that make up the crowd. A
raven perches on a sill above the jetty, inspecting them as they disembark. Beneath their long hair they
are faceless. Smoke drifts from their unfinished fingers. One carries a tambourine. Others seem to be
swirls of paisley and embroidered clothes with no bodies inside them at all.
A foreground character with the likeness of a placid child speaks to the librarian, who is
consulting the index of a large book. "How many more times must we do this?"
The librarian answers, "Until he ceases to mourn."
Her voice was harsh, roughened by smoke and bad habits. "What are you doing the rest of the
weekend?"
"I've got some stuff to sort out. Some projections."
"Astral projections?" she asked, teasing.
"Just the regular kind. Sales and budgets."
"Shit, Ollie, they really got your feet nailed to the floor, don't they."
Oliver drank beer, licked his lips. "The work don't do itself, Sherri," he said. "It don't go away."
He found himself saying things like that, don't instead of doesn't, when he talked to Sherri. It was more
appropriate, somehow, out here where people wore beer brand T-shirts and drove around with their
dogs beside them in the front seat.
"Sure it does," she said. "When it goes away, that's when you start to worry."
He asked her: "What are you doing these days, Sherri?"
"I'm going into solar," she said. "You know that little place down on the mall? They got a sales
training program and incentive scheme and everything. You sell enough systems, they fit you one for
free." She braced her arms on the rail and beamed up at the sky as though she could already see the big
glass panels erected on her roof, gathering heat from the benevolent sun.
"That would be good," said Oliver.
Sherri never told you what she was doing, always what she was going to do. She never seemed
to do anything, unless it was some crazy scheme, charting horoscopes, designing children's clothes, selling
tofu sandwiches out of the back of a truck. House painting, she did sometimes. There was a house
across the valley she told him she had painted. It had a huge yellow sunflower on the side.
Sherri always made Oliver think of California, twenty years before. Nearer thirty now. She
reminded him of when he had lived that way himself for a time, on the coast, in the days of Donna. It had
been possible then. In the summer it was a gas—had they really said that? Something was a gas? The
phrase seemed strange to him, as if it could not possibly have ever fit inside his mouth. In the
summertime, anyhow, yes, the living was easy: plenty of work, warm nights, they slept on the beach.
In the winter it was different. Then there was no work, it was freezing cold and it rained all the
time. You had to hole up in the empty tourist cabins, try to live on what you'd saved from the summer.
The two of them had joined a commune, a bunch of psychedelic musicians and their "old ladies"—Jesus
Christ, had he said that too, and called them chicks and talked about freaking out and scoring dope?
Living on rice and beans, sleeping in bags on drafty floors, keeping watch for the Russian River to flood.
Jesus Christ, he must have been crazy.
Oliver thought about Donna then, almost without knowing he did so; and as he always did,
blanked out her features before consigning her to oblivion.
He drank his beer.
The figments troop into a small room. The room has walls and a floor of green jade. No matter how
many of the figments come in, the room is always big enough to hold them.
In the green jade room the Continuity Girl checks their manifestations for them. The Continuity
Girl wears gold bangles shaped like stirrups and a reassuring jacket of russet tweed. She tries to call the
roll. "Parqua... Quarpa... Apquar..." The letters on her clipboard wriggle about.
"Minimum May ... Dr. Scorpio Bongo ..." The figments are ignoring her. Background characters
settle into clusters, comfortably. Absentmindedly they start to merge.
The raven perches on the librarian's shoulder. It speaks. "What's the story here?" it asks.
Patiently the librarian adjusts his glasses, dislodged by the raven's landing, and turns over a page.
He follows the line of an entry with his finger. "It looks like a dream about lost love ..." he says.
"Yeah, well, typical," says the raven.
"... and about a river rising."
The raven nuzzles its purple plumage. "I think maybe I've seen it."
The clustered figures are growing consolidated, like statuary groups. Their fringes are entwining,
the patches on their denims running together. The Continuity Girl has not yet noticed. She is dealing with
the thing that is Donna, helping it into a dress made of dried leaves and peacocks' eyes.
Over the years the foreground characters have become quite stable. Some of them are acquiring
memories— personalities, almost. A little brown thing like an elongated cherub with bat wings and a
screwed-up, miserable face speaks about the wonderful dress.
"His mother had a dress like that. He remembers her in it, dancing with his father in a state of high
excitement. It was at his cousin Mona's wedding, but he has forgotten that. He was three. When they sat
down after dancing he got under the table and put his head up his mother's dress."
A man with the beard of a lumberjack and the face of a turtle denies it. "She never had such a
dress. No one ever had, not in the human realm. It is a piece of something else that has blown in from
who knows where, and been caught between the teeth of the dream."
A grainy boy in a headband laughs. "Like getting your shorts stuck in your zipper."
"You ever seen Texas, Ollie? El Paso? I'm going down to El Paso, going to see Pepper."
Pepper was Sherri's daughter. Short for Chili Pepper, Sherri had told him. "Because she was so
red and wrinkly!" Oliver had never met her, only seen photographs. The girl looked half-Indian;
half-something, anyway. Sherri was always taking off somewhere or other to go see her.
"You ought to come along," said Sherri.
"How's Pepper?" he said.
"She's going to Mexico. She's driving a truck for this wildlife survey."
Sherri always made her daughter out to be a conscientious person—"really focused"—but Oliver
had noticed that whenever she went to see her, each time Pepper was in some new place, doing some
different thing. Once Sherri had come back from Wyoming in a beat-up Oldsmobile with a story about
her and Pepper meeting two rodeo riders in Cheyenne and everybody swapping cars with each other.
Pepper, Oliver suspected, might be a lot like her mom.
Oliver glanced down at his car. The transmission needed looking at. And there was that little bit
of rust that needed fixing before it got any bigger. The little bit of rust had been there since last winter. He
didn't want to think about it.
Sherri had left the porch and was doing something indoors behind him. Oliver pitched his voice to
her. "When are you going?"
There was a pause. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked; then another, and another. All
along the valley, at all the houses hidden in the trees, dogs roused themselves on porches and in dustholes
and under sheds. One after another they lifted their heads up and added their contribution to the
neighborhood chorus. Whatever had woken them remained mysterious as always, remarkable only to
canines.Sherri reappeared. She was eating ice cream again. "Oh, I'm going real soon," she said.
The janitor sits down on the set and lights a cigarette. His team is setting up the redwood forest, giant
trees that shoot up hundreds of feet to spread their branches. There are bits of twig all over the janitor's
blue bib overalls. He says: "What I can't figure is, we're here luggin' these goddamn trees around, yeah?
But the guy's got trees in the daytime, ya know? So what's he need the goddamn trees in his dreams for?"
The librarian turns a page. "I think it's other way round, Mervyn."
A black dog that has been hanging around has turned into a squat bird with a long beak. When it
lifts its wings you can see it has legs underneath like a crab. There are several of the things. They run
quickly among the shapeless furniture.
The Girl flicks back her hair. "What are those?" she calls. "I've never seen those before." Intently
she searches her list. The list is getting longer. It slips between her fingers and drops to the floor, unrolling
as it bounces away.
"No story is exactly the same twice," observes a figment with paper lips. "Even written down and
printed in a book."
"Everything is the same as itself," says another in a dry, whiskery voice. "That's the way it is,
man." "It's not the same story because you're not the same person," says the first figment.
"I'm the same person, man," the second asserts. "I used to be in another dream," it recalls. "It
was better than this one. It was all about flying and chocolate."
"You're not the same person because it's not the same dream."
Circling, the raven glides back to the librarian. "The Quapras are arguing, Lucien."
"Sort them out, Matthew, for goodness sake, before they start attracting Delirium," says the
librarian. "Get everyone to their entrances." It is like looking after a tour party of forgetful old people,
always squabbling and repeating themselves, telling each other the same things over and over.
Sitting on Sheri's porch, Oliver fell asleep.
Once again he is standing in the cabin in front of the enormous closet, watching the clown take out
clothes and throw them to the people all around the room. The clothes fly over Oliver's head, very
slowly. He is still in the cabin, but he can see gray sky beyond the floating Hawaiian shirts and party
gowns, where the ceiling used to be. The people always catch the clothes with happy cries and put them
on. They are dressing up as the summer visitors.
Some of the people are familiar. That boy with the snub nose and long curly hair, he is usually
there. He called himself Dr. Scorpio. He used to take acid and play the bongos all night. Oliver had
learned to sleep through the drumming. Dr. Scorpio puts on a pair of pajamas. For an instant the pajamas
are a pair Oliver had when he was a little boy, with blue tugboats on, but he could not be expected to
remember that. The clown has huge buckteeth. He is still throwing clothes. Oliver tries to catch some, but
they seem to pass right through his hands.
He notices a man with a black beard who used to work at the funfair, and someone cooking
food, and someone whose skin keeps changing color behind a pair of circular purple spectacles. "Fixing
plumbing is Nixon cling," a face swims up and tells Oliver, who folds his hands in his sleeves and laughs
desperately. Donna is there—Donna is always there—in red-and-green-striped trousers, playing the
piano. In the cavernous closet a placid child sits, contemplatively stroking the jackets and dresses of the
absent guests. "These clothes are not our clothes," it says. "That is why they suit us so well."
Oliver laughs and laughs and laughs.
On Sherri's porch, the sun sifted through the trees on Oliver's still face. Sherri was talking to him about
Turquoise and Johnny, but he was very far away.
It is winter in the Pavilion of Recurrence. Oliver and a black woman he saw once on a street corner in
Philadelphia are trying to warn everyone the river is going to flood. They are clambering up and down
tiers of seats, like in a stadium, in and out of trapdoors, up and down ladders with just little stumps
instead of rungs. Far below, the rest of the commune come running across the grass, fleeing from a huge
wave of water. Oliver and the woman always slide down a chute in an upturned table with a placid child
and a man with a fishing pole. Everyone passes around heavy packages wrapped in disintegrating paper.
No matter how Oliver tries to hold on to the packages, the paper keeps tearing and the weight slides out
of his fingers. The flood bears him away under the enormous trees. Oliver tries to hang on to the leg of
the table, but there is no table anymore. Donna runs away between the trees, laughing. Oliver is not
laughing now. He is always upset, or cross. Sometimes he tries to catch her, wading frantically through
earth that has turned to water, or sometimes through the air. Sometimes she tries to catch him. They
never catch each other, no matter what.
Sherri crumpled the last paper cup into the garbage sack. She looked at Oliver, wondering how long he
could hold on to his beer without spilling it. He had the can propped on his belly. He was getting a little
pot there, the years starting to pile up around his waist. Why were all the guys she knew getting fat?
Sherri had the strongest urge suddenly to put her hands on Oliver's belly and feel the warm firm mass of
it, to squeeze him awake and kiss him in his surprise. She snorted at herself and reeled back a ways on
her heels. She was still a little stoned. Deliberately she went and got the cloth and wiped the tabletop,
softly humming a tune that was going round her head, thinking about the wedding and the celebrations
and all. Ollie was nice, Sherri thought, though he always seemed kind of sad, as if he was more alone,
maybe, than he really wanted to be.
"Weddings always make me horny," she told the sleeping man.
In the buried lake at the bottom of the Dreaming the black onyx boat in the shape of a sphinx bumps
against a shadowy jetty. Its somnambulant crew begin to reef the sails.
Desire inserts a ripe cherry into its own mouth, and one into its brother's. It draws its feet up and
looks about. "I know this place," it says.
"The Pavilion of Recurrence," says Morpheus. This spot can be reached from any of their realms.
All the Endless have sometimes been concerned in the ceremonies staged inside this gray secretive
building, nightbound ceremonies of loss or discovery or consecration established and sanctified by
repetition.
By the light of pale green torches Morpheus and his sibling climb the steps and walk directly
through the wall into the flooded Pavilion. The wall grows vague and confused, admitting them.
Inside, enigmatic monumental furniture floats about, and vast trees seem to tower out of the thick
brown water. A human man is being hounded this way and that by chuckling sprites. The Lord of
Shapings points at him. "This is one encumbered by the cloak of his past," he tells his sibling. As he
speaks you can almost see it, a dim integument of ragged moonlight that clings to the toiler's shoulders,
holding him back like a spider's web. He tries to lunge forward through the liquid wood, but the
phantasms baffle him easily, driving him astray this way and that.
Desire gathers up a handful of air. It seems to have caught the hem of the human's cloak, to be
rubbing the unstable fabric between its fingers. With its free hand it points to a laughing woman hiding
behind a tree.
"Who is that?"
"His first true love."
"How sweet."
Desire reaches into the dream, which seems to have become very small suddenly, like a toy
theater, an enclosure of splashing, scampering little mammals. It does something to the face of the
woman, turning her into someone else, someone older, with long dark red hair. "There," it says,
straightening up again. "That's better, isn't it?"
At first, the flux of wood and water is so complete it is impossible to notice any change. Then it
becomes apparent the endless recircling rhythm of the piece has been disrupted. Individual phantoms are
shrinking, dwindling, turning into sparks that go whizzing away into nothingness. Agitated memories are
being smoothed and quelled and laid to rest like ironed clothes folded in sheets of tissue paper. The
Continuity Girl waves her arms like a scarecrow in a gale. Already she is coming apart, in a flurry of dark
green underwear. An infinite number of golden bangles go shooting away in a cylindrical stream.
Meanwhile Lucien is crossing something out in a big book, writing hurriedly in the margin with a long
stout jet black feather.
Morpheus fingers his jaw. "I wish you would not interfere," he says mildly to his sibling, though
anyone who knows his voice well might detect a touch of sardonic amusement.
Desire touches itself then in a way that makes even the Dream King inhale reflexively, narrowing
his nostrils and hooding his fathomless eyes.
"Darling brother," Desire sighs yearningly. "I never do anything else."
Oliver started awake to a blare of sound, guitar and electric violin. Sherri had put "It's a Beautiful Day"
on. He sat blinking on the porch, entirely disoriented. The sun had gone down while he slept, and the
sky was a rich thick wash of indigo. Soon it would be black, pricked and blazing, dripping cold silver fire
from an inconceivable number of stars.
"Sherri?" he called. He could not hear or see her, and suddenly that seemed to matter.
He heard her footsteps inside the house and turned toward them from his chair, almost spilling the
remains of his beer. "When you going to Texas?" he asked clumsily, before he could see whereabouts
she was. It was hard to speak, sleep seemed to have gummed up his tongue.
"I don't know," her voice said, calm and easy as ever over the surging music. "Next week,
maybe. You want to come?"
He saw her then, looking through the kitchen window at him. The smile on her face seemed to
welcome him as though he had returned from a long absence, and not just woken from an unintended
nap. Oliver had seen her naked one time, dropped in and found the door open and nobody home, he
thought, until he came upon her sleeping out back in the yard in the sun. He had stood and looked at her
curved and comfortable body, her lolling breasts with their broad dirt-brown nipples, her plump thighs
drawn protectively up. He had stood looking at her a moment or two, and then he had returned to his
car, got in, and parped the horn. He had sat and waited until Sherri had appeared with a dozy grin on the
porch in her long gown of Laundromat gray, messing up her thick red hair with her hand.
"What about the solar job?" he asked, in a mischief-making drawl.
She caught his tone. Lifting a plate from a bowl full of suds she squinted at the sky. "I guess I
missed the sun," she said. Sherri, Oliver thought, was not afraid of time; and that seemed suddenly very
important.
"You want to come?" she was asking him again. "To El Paso?"
With Sherri driving, he thought cynically, probably they wouldn't ever get to El Paso. Like as not
they wouldn't get to Texas at all. They would take her car and it would break down in New Mexico.
摘要：

THESANDMAN:BOOKOFDREAMSTHESTUFFOFDREAMSGEORGEALECEFFINGER'sseven-nightdreamquestinthedevotedserviceofDesire...BARBARAHAMBLY'snightmareofthesinsofCainspillingoutoftheDreamingintothewakingworld...WILLSHETTERLY'sdarkestvisionsgatheredandhungryandreal...TADWILLIAMS'sheartbreakingstoryofagirl,herfather,a...

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