Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

I looked at him carefully. “In what way exactly do you think you hurt me?”

He shrugged. “Well, maybe I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t care. But still, I could have been a lot nicer. We went out those couple of times, and then so long sucker, that’s it. Loyd’s a good-time boy, he don’t call the same girl twice.”

I breathed out. Nobody knew, so Loyd couldn’t, but for one minute I’d been afraid. I didn’t want him to know how much of a mark his careless love had made on my life. It would oblige him to one of two mean possibilities: compulsory kindness or a vanishing act. I leaned over and kissed him. “You’re forgiven,” I said. “Plain Jane forgives Mr. High School Honcho for being a red-blooded boy.”

“Plain Jane my ass,” he said, rolling me over on top of him and grabbing mine. “I like you a lot. A real, whole lot. You buy that?”

“I’ll buy it. Just don’t try to sell me no knife birds.”

He looked straight into my eyes. “I’m serious, Codi.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sold.” I laid my head on his chest and nearly went to sleep while he gently stroked my spine. I felt like a baby being coaxed, reluctantly, into dreamland. A few yards away, Jack was already there. His legs jerked helplessly, making him look vulnerable.

“I’ve lost an earring. You see it?”

“No. I’ll help you look in a minute.”

“What’s Jack dreaming about?”

“Chasing rabbits,” Loyd said.

“That’s what everybody says, but I don’t think all dogs dream about that. You watch a city dog that’s never even heard of a rabbit-it’ll do that same thing.”

“How do you know they really dream?”

“They do. All mammals that have been tested have REM sleep, except spiny anteaters.” I cringed after I said this. I sounded like Codi Noline, brain of the seventh grade, despised by her peers.

“Spiny anteaters?”

“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I read it in the encyclopedia one time.”

“You are an amazing person.”

He meant it, he wasn’t making fun of me. His hand stopped moving and came to rest on the small of my back. He was actually thinking about all this. Carlo wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to a conversation like this; he’d be thinking about whatever men think about, how much gas is left in the tank. Loyd asked, “What do you think animals dream about?”

“I don’t know. Animal heaven.” I laughed.

“I think they dream about whatever they do when they’re awake. Jack chases rabbits, and city dogs chase, I don’t know what. Meter readers.”

“But that’s kind of sad. Couldn’t a dog have an imagination, like a person?”

“It’s the same with people. There’s nothing sad about it. People dream about what they do when they’re awake. God, when I used to work for Tía sorting the pecans I’d go to bed and dream about pecans, pecans, pecans.”

I studied his face. “Didn’t you ever dream you could fly?”

“Not when I was sorting pecans all day.”

“Really, though. Didn’t you ever fly in your dreams?” Even I had done that, though not often.

“Only when I was real close to flying in real life,” he said. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”

“So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream about except our ordinary lives.”

He gently moved a lock of hair out of my eyes. “Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling happy. I was sure no other man I’d ever known would have concerned himself with what animals dream about. “I’m going to sleep now, and I’ll give you a report.” I settled my head back down on his chest. His heartbeat moved faintly against my ear as I looked out across the ground. I saw my silver earring gleaming in the grass.

His name is gone. He understands that this is his own fault. He took a pen to paper and changed it, canceled his ancestors, and now his grandchild-Codi’s child-has been erased like something in writing too, rather than flesh and blood. He knows she’s no longer carrying it. He’s aware of the signs.

The red darkroom light burns like a dying sun, very old: red dwarfs, they call them when they reach that stage. He sometimes reads astronomy now, when he can’t sleep. But at this moment, outside this sealed room, it’s daytime. He considers carefully the time of day and of year, and his daughters’ ages, a ritual he performs a dozen times daily to keep himself rooted in time. That was nearly twenty years ago, when Codi lost the baby. He has photographed the eyes of so many babies. He gets lost among years now, the way he used to lose track when he sat in the dark movie theater for too many hours. He has always loved the dark.

The liquid feels cool on his hands, though it’s a chemical bath, not particularly good for the elasticity of human skin. He should use the Piper forceps from the kitchen, but he has misplaced them. He moves the photograph into the fixative and stares at the lines. And frowns. They are a precise copy of what the real world offered his camera, and nothing more: the branched shadow of a cane cholla falling across a square of pale, cracked ground. He found the image while walking in the arroyo, and immediately saw the illusion he could draw out of it: a river in the desert. He’d seen exactly this sight, in aerial view. It was years ago, in wartime-they had taken him in a small plane over the bombing range near Yuma; a soldier lay wounded out there and couldn’t be moved. They flew the quickest route, over the Algodones dunes, a dead ocean of undulating sand. The pilot said it was harder to fly over dunes on a hot day than through a tornado; the plane shuddered until its rivets creaked. Then suddenly they were over the Colorado River agricultural plain. He marveled, feeling lucky as a spaceman. Surely no one had ever seen this amazing sight, a complex river fretted with canals cutting an unearthly path through the bone-dry land.

He can’t remember the wounded soldier. He closes his eyes and tries, but he can’t. Possibly some chest wound, a punctured lung? No, he can’t bring the soldier back. But he remembers the vision of that water. He gently agitates the photograph in its stop bath, lost in technical possibilities. He knows there must be a way to transfigure this cactus shadow into that other vision, which no longer exists outside his mind. All his photographs begin in his memory. That is the point. He might be the only man on earth who can photograph the past.

He stops suddenly, feeling a presence outside the door.

“Codi?” He listens. “I’m printing, it will be a few more minutes. Codi, are you there?” He hears nothing. It’s a Monday morning, she can’t be here. She’s teaching school. He drops the print into the fixer, annoyed, and goes back to the enlarger to try again. He should lock that door to guard against accidents. What a shock that would be to the girls, a locked door. They have always had rules about this; a closed door is a sacred thing. Privacy is respected. There is no call for bolted doors in the Noline household. But she still locked him out-she was in the bathroom that night for more than four hours. When he walked by he could see that the upper bolt was turned. She’d gone in right after dinner. There are rules about this.

“Codi?”

He listens again, but there is no sound at all.

He knocks. “I just want to know that you’re all right.”

“I’m all right.”

She is crying softly. “I can hear that you’re crying,” he says. “Your sister is concerned. You could just tell us what’s wrong.”