Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

"Who're you going to see?" he wants to know.

"Kokopelli."

"You know where he is?"

I shake my head. "I thought I'd let him find me."

I hold the music of the medicine flute in my mind and let it draw me through the cacti and scrub. We top one hill, scramble down the dusty slope of an arroyo, make our way up the next steep incline. We finally pull ourselves up to the top of a butte, and there he is, sitting crosslegged on the red stone, a slim, handsome man dark hair cut in a shaggy pageboy, wearing white trousers and a white tunic, a plain wooden medicine flute lying across his knees. A worn cloth backpack lies on the stone beside him.

For the first time since I stepped into this desert dream all those weeks ago, I don't hear the flute anymore. There's just the memory of it lying there in my mind— fueled by the cassette that's playing back in that world where another part of me is sleeping.

Kokopelli looks from Coyote to me.

"Hey, Ihu," he says. "Hey, Sophie."

I shoot Coyote a dirty look, but he doesn't even have the decency to look embarrassed at how easy it was for me to track Kokopelli down.

"How do you know my name?" I ask the flute-player.

He gives me a little shrug. "The whole desert's been talking about you, walking here, walking there, looking every-where for what's sitting right there inside you all the time."

I'm really tired of opaque conversations, and I tell him as much.

"Your problem," he says, "is that you can't seem to take anything at face value. Everything you're told doesn't necessarily have to have a hidden meaning."

"Okay," I say. "If everything's going to be so straightforward now, tell me: Which one are you? Peter or Max?"

Kokopelli smiles. "That would make everything so easy, wouldn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"For me to be one or the other."

"You said this was going to be a straight forward conversation," I say.

I turn to Coyote, though why I expect him to back me up on this, I've no idea. Doesn't matter anyway. Coyote's not there anymore. It's just me and the flute-player, sitting up on the red stone of this butte.

"I didn't say it would be straight forward," Kokopelli tells me. "I said that sometimes you should try to take what you're told at face value."

I sigh and look away. It's some view we have. From this height, the whole desert is lain out before us.

"This isn't about Peter or Max, is it?" I say.

Kokopelli shakes his head "It's about you. It's about what you want out of your life."

"So Coyote was telling me the truth all along."

"Ihu was telling you a piece of the truth."

"But I followed your flute to get here."

Kokopelli shakes his head again. "You were following a need that you dressed up as my music."

"So all of this—" I wave my hand to encompass everything, the butte, the desert, Kokopelli, my being here. "— Where does it fit in?"

"It's different for everyone who comes. When you travel in a dream, you can bring nothing across with you; you can bring nothing back. Only what is in your head."

And that's my real problem. I know my dream worlds are real, but it's a different kind of real from what I can find in the waking world. I work out all of my problems in my dreams— from my mother abandoning me to my never seeming to be able to maintain a good relationship, But the solutions don't have any real holding power. They don't ever seem to resonate with the same truth in the waking world as they do in my dreams. And that's because I can't bring anything tangible back with me. I have to take it all on faith and for some things, faith isn't enough.

"Perhaps you expect too much," Kokopelli says when I try to explain this to him. "We are shaped by our experiences, and no matter where those experiences occur, they are still valid. The things you have seen and done don't lose their resonance because you can only hold them in your memory. In that sense there is little difference between what you experience when you are awake or when you dream. Keepsakes, mementos, tokens... their real potency lies in the memories they call up, rather than what they are in and of themselves."

"But I don't always understand the things I experience?"

Kokopelli smiles. "Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"

He picks up his flute and begins to play. His music carries us through the afternoon until the shadows deepen and twilight mutes the details of the desert around us. Although I don't hear a pause in the music, at some point he's put on his pack and I look up to see him silhouetted against the sunset. For a moment I don't see a man, but a hunchbacked flute-playing Kachina.

"Tell Max," he says, "to remember me as loving him."

And then he steps away, into the night, into the desert, into the sky— I don't know where. I just know he's gone, the sound of his flute is a dying echo, and I'm left with another mystery that has no answer:

If he was Peter, how did he know so much about me?

And if he wasn't, then who was he?

17

"I've been thinking a lot about the desert lately," Max said.

He and Sophie were having a late dinner in The Rusty Lion after taking in a show. They had a table by the window and could watch the bustling crowds go by on Lee Street from where they sat.

"Are you thinking of moving back to Arizona?" Sophie asked.

Max shook his head. "I probably will one day, but not yet. No, I was thinking more of the desert as a metaphor for how my life has turned out."

Sophie had often tried to imagine what it would be like to live with a terminal disease, and she thought Max was probably right. It would be very much like the desert: the barrenness, the vast empty reaches. Eyerything honed to its purest essence, just struggling to survive. There wouldn't be time for anything more. She wondered if she'd resent the rich forests of other people's lives, if she knew her own future could be cut short at any time.

"I think I know what you mean," she said.

Max laughed. "I can tell by the way you look that you've completely misunderstood me. You're thinking of the desert as a hopeless place, right?"

"Well, not exactly hopeless, but..."

"It's just the opposite," Max said. "The desert brings home how precious life is and how much we should appreciate it while we have it. That life can still flourish under such severe conditions is a miracle. It's an inspiration to me."

"You're amazing, you know that?"

"Not really. We all know we're going to die someday, but we like to pretend we won't. Given the hand I've been dealt, I don't have the luxury of that pretense. I have to live with the reality of my mortality every day of my life. Now I could just give up— and I won't pretend to you that I don't have my bad days. But when I tested positive, I made myself a promise that I was going to dedicate whatever time I have left to two things: to fight the stigmas attached to this disease, and to squeeze everything I can out of life."

The waitress came by with their orders then and for a while they were kept busy with their meals.

"You look a little gloomy," Max said later, when they were waiting for their coffees. "I hope I didn't bring you down."

"No, it's not that."

"So tell Uncle Max what's bothering you."

"My problems seem so petty compared to what you have to put up with."

"Doesn't make them any less real for you, though. So 'fess up. Are you having man trouble again? We can be such bitches, can't we?"

"I suppose," Sophie said with a smile, then her features grew serious. "I just get tired of arguing. Everything starts out fine, but it always ends up with me having to adjust my life to theirs and I'm just not ready to do that anymore. I mean, I know there's going to be compromise in a relationship, but why does it always have to be on my side?"