Miriam Toews - Irma Voth

Marijke slept with her rubber boots up on the dash and Wilson wrote in his notebook.

Hey Wilson, said Sebastian. What are you writing about?

Nothing, said Wilson. He closed his notebook and put it on the seat beside him.

C’mon, you’re writing something, said Sebastian. What is it? A love letter? Is it about us?

No, said Wilson. Fuck off.

C’mon, said Sebastian. What are you writing? Tell us.

I’m writing about how dreams are like art and how both are sort of a conjuring up of the things that we need to survive.

That’s why I always dream about sex, said Elias.

Even if it’s an unconscious or subconscious act, said Wilson. Art, of course, is a more wilful act than a dream, but it comes from the same desire to live.

I once had a dream that I was fucking the world, said Elias. Like, I don’t know how old I was but I was in Montevideo in a house somewhere and I was bored so I wandered around and then I got this idea so I went to the back door and I opened it and stepped outside and took my dick out and started banging the night. Like, I was just banging away at the night. But the night was dark, obviously, so there was no stopping it. I mean I couldn’t see where the night ended, because of the horizons or whatever, so it was like the night was the whole world and I was fucking it.

You weren’t fucking the world, said Sebastian. You were jerking off in the dark like every other night.

No, man, said Elias. It seemed like that but it was different in my dream.

I’m talking about dreams of guilt and dreams of redemption, said Wilson.

We don’t know it but we direct our own dreams, said Sebastian. A restructuring or an un-structuring of ideas and experiences that allow for our own salvation.

Give that to me, said Wilson. You’re an asshole.

Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson’s notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction.

Sebastian, said Wilson. Can I have that, please?

I like it! said Sebastian. No, seriously, that’s heavy shit that clarifies a thing or two for me.

Sebastian, said Wilson. Please?

Sebastian handed over Wilson’s notebook and apologized for reading from it. Wilson waved it all off and smiled at me as if to say, would you help me blow up the universe?

Well, said Elias, my dream is me telling me to fuck the world. That’s my art. What can I say.

Wilson stared out the window and Elias and Sebastian went back to listening to their music. I looked at Marijke. She was still sleeping. Then she opened one eye halfway and looked at me as though she was incorporating me into her dream and closed it again. I drove slowly, trying to relate everything to a dream, hoping to see my Tarahumara family again before the dream ended.

IT WAS LATE WHEN WE GOT BACK to the filmmakers’ house. Wilson invited me in for coffee and I said no, I couldn’t. Then I changed my mind and said yeah, okay. He told me he wanted to show me something. Marijke had gone to her room and closed the door — we could hear her laughing or crying — and Diego was busy talking on the radio. Wilson asked me if I would come into his bedroom. I stood still and quietly panicked and then he said that it was okay, he didn’t mean it in that kind of way, he just wanted a little privacy from the others. So I followed him into his room and he closed the door and I went and stood by the window and he sat on his bed.

I’d like to read you something if you don’t mind, Irma, he said. He opened his notebook and read a story, half in Spanish, half in English, about an angry circus clown who was going through a divorce.

All the people in my stories are awful, he said. I agreed with him.

Why don’t you write about people who aren’t such assholes? I asked him.

Because, he said, that would be too painful.

I looked around the room. I remembered playing with my cousins. I remembered trying to climb out the window of this room and breaking the window frame. I got up and went over to the window and it was still cracked and crooked.

I used to play here all the time, I said.

Really? said Wilson.

Yeah, my cousins lived here.

One family? said Wilson. There are so many bedrooms in this house.

Lots of kids, I said. A soccer team.

Or a film crew, said Wilson.

They didn’t make movies, I said.

I know, said Wilson, I was just kidding. They probably didn’t play soccer either.

Of course they played soccer, I said. That’s mostly what we did all the time.

Oh, said Wilson. Are you any good?

Not really, I said.

Do you want to kick a ball around sometime? said Wilson.

Well … I don’t know, I said. I’m a married woman now.

So? said Wilson.

I could see Elias and Sebastian standing on the road talking to each other and passing a cigarette back and forth. Elias was waving his arms around and Sebastian was perfectly still. Corn was behind them. Endless corn. Then Elias crouched down to the ground and picked up some stones and threw them at the corn and there was a dark explosion of crows.

Why is it so painful to write about people who aren’t assholes? I asked Wilson.

Because I would start to love them, he said.

I was still looking through the broken window. I didn’t know what to say. I heard Wilson sigh. Can I show you something now? he asked. I went over to the bed and stood beside him and he lifted up his shirt. There were scars all over his chest and stomach, some of them looping around to his back.

What happened? I asked him.

I’m dying, he said. I sat down beside him on the bed.

From what? I said.

My veins won’t stay open, he said. They sometimes just collapse. The doctors have cut me open so many times to work on a vein but after a few months another vein quits and they have to go back in. Then they gave me this super-industrial-strength medicine that I had to squirt into my body through a tap in my stomach. They drilled a hole right here above my belly button and stuck a little faucet in there that was attached to a long cord and a pump which I could hold in my hand and every hour or so I’d have to squirt another drop into my body and it would go through the long cord and then through that little tap into my gut. It was basically like TNT blasting through my veins trying to wake them up so the blood could move.

You don’t have the tap anymore? I said.

No, said Wilson, because I kept getting infections from the incision and they had to replace it every three weeks and that was excruciating. So now it’s just a matter of waiting. But I try not to think about it.

Are you afraid? I asked him.

He told me he was scared shitless, actually, who wouldn’t be? And then I told him about all the stupid things I’d done in that room when I was a kid and a little bit about my old life in Canada, how we couldn’t recognize even our own mothers in the winter because we were so bundled up trying to stay warm, which he thought was funny. And I told him about the hockey rink that my father built for us little kids in our backyard by first of all clearing away tons and tons of snow and then using that snow to build towering walls around the rink and then by packing down the surface until it was as smooth as glass even though it was only rock-hard snow and how once I woke up in the middle of the night and the yard light was still on which made me wonder what was going on so I looked out the window at the glistening hockey rink in our backyard and I saw my father on his hands and knees in the middle of it next to a perfect red circle and he was all hunched over and concentrating, painting lines, red ones and blue ones, on the hard snow to make the hockey rink official and the lines were so even and perfect and bright against the white snow. I watched him paint for a long time and finally he stood up and put his hands on his hips like this and stared at his circle and his lines and he had this huge grin on his face.