Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

You said, “hummm,” and raised your index finger from the paper to your pursed lips.

“I don’t remember many words passing between us. I remember you there and me here, and right now even I’m feeling…”

“Déjà vu?” you asked.

I nodded. “Still feeling it. See, I knew you were going to ask that.”

The room. It was very still. Time slushed through my ears. Ticks of it rode molecules of my heart-beaten blood.

In the hall, lockers clacked shut, voices burst out into laughter. You looked startled by the world outside that door. You cleared your throat again. “That’s really something, Kevin. I’m having the same feeling. And I had a dream, too, with you in it. Sitting there with your backpack in your lap.” You nodded to me. “Just like that.”

“Did you have a dream about the end of the world like in my story?”

You shook your head. “No. But this, yes.” A beat of pause. “And now it’s gone, that feeling.”

“Yes,” I’d said, relieved. The room opened and cleared. Like an eclipsing shadow lifting away with a flick.

You chuckled and shook your head clear. You sat in your chair and said, “Okay. Enough of that. Tell me about your dream and how it fueled this story of yours.”

“It’s a long time ago now, so the details aren’t there, at least not many. But with dreams it’s the ones that remain that are important, I guess, huh?”

“Could be. Again, I’m just an interested English teacher. If this is in any way uncomfortable…”

“No, no it’s fine.” I moved my eyes around in my head to remember and put the backpack on the floor. “I don’t know what happened to the world. Just these few people like in the story. We’re standing at some sort of overlook. Me, this dark-haired girl, and this other guy.”

“Do you know them? Then, or still?”

“In real life? Yes, actually. This girl I work with at Dollar Tree and another student here.”

You nod, your chin muscle flexing and tightening with thought.

“Below us is a mass of people. All these young kids. Thousands of them in a tight grouping. They’re facing and cheering at something in front of them and we didn’t know what it was. We knew we had to get closer to see but we didn’t want the kids to see us. We were really frightened. I don’t know why that is, but we were.”

“So what happened? This isn’t in your story. Do the things in the story occur in your dream?”

“Not really. The dream’s residue gave me the feeling which led to the idea.”

“In the dream did you go down to see what they were cheering about?”

“No, we didn’t. We were too scared to move. Didn’t want them to see us.”

You formed a steeple with your fingers in front of your face. “How did you know it was the end of the world?”

“I just felt it was. We all did. It was just that scene. There wasn’t any more to it.”

“In the dream it happened in an arid place? You set the story in Phoenix.”

I shook my head. “No, in the dream it was here in Austin, though I don’t know where exactly. The location was ambiguous. Just this field. The story grew out of this feeling in the dream, a feeling of—” I struggled for the right word.

“I understand. You feel something powerful but nebulous and you write to bring it into some focus.”

I shook my head. “—doom. That’s what I felt. A horrible doom that made my heart race and my stomach sour.”

“An apocalyptic vision will do that, I suppose. I’m sure it didn’t feel good and I’m sorry you had such a, well, a nightmare. But it fed a story. Something good came out of it.”

“But is it good?”

“Yeah, I think you’ve written a fine story here,” you said, brushing it again. Very tactile with my story, Mr. E.

“No, I mean is that a good thing in general terms? To have a horrible dream and not being able to sleep and feeling forced to get something down on paper?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. It’s the essential art question, isn’t it? Is the suffering one does, the privation experienced, worth the art it produces?”

I glanced at the wink of shine off Inga/Inger’s aviator sunglasses and her geometric mandible making her look like an insect. “Must art be the result of suffering?”

“Not necessarily. But show me any work of art that isn’t in some way tinged with bittersweetness, pain, the unknowable, existential ennui, our lives’ ephemeral nature. I don’t think you’ll find one. Even humorous work is rooted in darkness, sometimes the most dark and fearful. My God, I mean listen to Richard Pryor or David Sedaris, Mel Brooks. Carlin, Bill Hicks. Robin Williams? I mean, gah —dark, despairing stuff under the ha-has.” You traced the outside of the pages of my story with your index finger. I thought you might slice your finger pad open and bleed on it. It was profane, transgressive, what you were doing. Like, who cares if I cut the shit out of my finger on this right now. The way you stared at your sliding finger, meat along a blade…

I audibly gulped. “So, you’re saying it is. Necessary. Suffering for art.”

“What?” Startled. You put the pages on the desk. You winced and looked at your fingertip. “Oh, yeah. I think so.” You swept your other hand through your hair. “Yeah, time and pressure makes diamonds from coal. Similarly, art is a by-product of life. We’re a carbon life-form. Squeeze some of us just right and you get art.” You chuckled through your nostrils.

As I say this to you, I think of Mom humming a Crosby, Stills, and Nash tune and singing the refrain while folding laundry dumped on the living room floor— we are stardust, we are golden, we are sixty-billion-year-old carbon…

Goddammit, dear reader, I miss her. I miss you, Mom.

“And then there you are at the end of the dream, sitting here talking about it, as we are now,” I said.

You nod curtly once, re-erect your steeple of fingers, that one finger shying from the pressure. Then I saw a droplet of blood roll down your finger. You collapse the steeple and put the finger in your mouth. You wait. There’s more, you know.

I said, “Then you saying to me what… you said.”

The steeple was quickly back; collapsed, erected, collapsed like the eensy weensy spider dancing on a mirror. I wanted you to fill it in for me. “You know what you said in my dream, don’t you, Mr. English?”

You didn’t answer right away, and that’s when my pulse kerthumped in a chaotic time signature.

You shook your head, cleared your throat with an air of annoyance, bored yourself up and donned a professional demeanor. “All I can say is what I said to you in my dreams. What I said was, sitting there at the end of my desk—you with the backpack—‘they leap from high places with smiles on their faces.’”

To hear this dream-phrase uttered in the conscious world… I’m sure I looked at you hanging fire and pin-eyed.

“That line was in your story. Not in dialogue, as I recall. In a passage of narration.” You perfunctorily shuffle my story pages as if seeking the phrase. “This is why I’m fascinated, Kevin.” The look on your face didn’t say fascination. It projected bald fear.

I hung my head and found myself muttering almost with shame, “You said it to me in my dream too.”

I mean, Mr. E? The blood fell from your face. You struggled to keep your lips clamped together. You started to say something but your voice was a crack of air. You stood and smoothed out your shirt absentmindedly. “Stranger than fiction, huh Kevin?” Your look just totally haunted, eyes howling and dark against a blanched canvas.

You were out for the next week, nobody knew why, and then I didn’t see you again until Coach Numbnuts brought me in. You sat behind your desk. The framed photo was gone. You pretended for Coach Numbnuts. I was any other punk on the wrong path.