Stephen Dixon - Letters to Kevin

Great, I thought. Because if I sleepwalked in here, maybe I’ll sleepwalk out to the place where I first fell asleep beside Just Plain Mo. In fact, maybe I’m such a good sleepwalker, seeing how I cooked a dinner while asleep, that I’ll be able to sleepwalk not only out of this room but all the way to Palo Alto.

I went to sleep. When I woke up I was in a huge banquet hall. A long table for about fifty people was in the middle of the hall with many lit candles in a candelabra on it. A plate of food, shiny silverware, cloth napkin and bottle of champagne and champagne glass were in front of the one setting at the far end of the table. Again, I couldn’t find any windows, doors or openings of any kind. I see what it is, I thought. I’m still outside next to Just Plain Mo and dreaming. Well, I’m tired of going from room to room in my dreams. But I’ll still have some food and wine before I wake myself up. Because if this is a dream I’m in, then I must have come a long ways in it from that last room to this banquet hall to be so hungry again. Istuffed myself with steak and potatoes. With the champagne, I toasted to my good health and successful trip to Palo Alto. Then I bowed and bid adieu to all the empty places at the table and pinched my cheeks real hard. But I wasn’t able to wake myself up. Finally I yelled “Hey, anybody around?” I didn’t know why I didn’t yell this before. Maybe I thought nobody was around to hear me. “Come on, if anybody’s around. Let me know you’re here by showing yourself or just tapping on the walls or hidden ceiling or door. Even if this might only be a dream I’m in, or even a dream that I’m dreaming I’m in, I still always like to know who else is in them.” No answer, taps or anything. So far, the only way I’ve been able to get out of these rooms or the cave was to go to sleep. But this time when I sleepwalk, I won’t stop off at the kitchen to cook a meal. Because it might be that after I cook these great dinners, I always look for another room with a table and chair to eat them in. I’ll just sleepwalk straight to the outside, wake up, and find my food out there. I drank some more champagne and fell asleep. This time I woke up in a room as big and empty as a Major League indoor stadium if all the stands, stairs and fences had been removed. I was the only person or thing in this room except for a light bulb that hung on a wire halfway down from the middle of the ceiling. The floor was made of marble, the walls of white plaster, and the ceiling, from what I could make out as it was that high up, of carved wood. It took me several hours to inspect the room for doors or openings. There were none, not even a crack in the wall or floor. It was as if the marble had been put in and walls painted the day before, and had only now dried. Maybe if I fell asleep again I’d be able to sleepwalk out of this room and past the banquet hall to the room with the ordinary-sized table with no silverware on it. Then I’d stand on the table in that room and try and break through the ceiling and climb out to what might be the free sky above. So I curled up in a corner, still a bit groggy from all the champagne I drank in that last banquet hall, and fell asleep. I woke in a room that was as long as two aircraft carriers and so wide and high that it could have fitted three Major League stadiums in it and on top of the stadiums, a cathedral with tall spires. In the middle of the room was something like an enormous stage. It took me three minutes just to run to it. It was a round table, big enough to fit the three baseball teams around and all the families, relatives and friends of the players and maybe a couple thousand of their fans and all the groundskeepers and peanut and soda vendors too. The light in the room came from somewhere way above me. But it was so far up that I couldn’t tell whether it was a ceiling or windows the light was coming through or just an opened roof. There was one setting and stool at the table. And the food, on a soggy paper plate, was two cold hot dogs and splash of ketchup and pint container of milk with a chewed straw inside. Now it didn’t seem possible that I had sleepwalked into this room. Because why would I cook two hot dogs in wherever the kitchen was, leave them with the milk in the middle of this room, and then go to one end of the room about a half mile away from the table to wake up? Only to come back to the hot dogs, which by then would be cold and wrinkled, and the milk, which if I got it cold, was now warm. No, someone must have brought me and my typewriter here when I was asleep, and had the table set up for me before I woke up. But who? “Hey?” I yelled. “What’s the idea of all this? First off, if you know anything about me, then you know I don’t like hot dogs— wrinkled or smooth. And if I must eat them because there’s no other food around, at least give me mustard with them instead of ketchup. Also chocolate syrup for the milk, if you don’t mind. I’m thirsty and the milk with the syrup mixed in it is the only way I can ever get it down.” No voice answered except my echo, which said “There’s no mustard or syrup around, so take what you got or starve.” I ate the hot dogs and milk, as the next rooms I sleepwalked through might be very far away and the food in them even worse. Then I stretched out on the table to fall asleep. Even if there were doors or openings here, the room was so big that it would take days to find them. Since there wasn’t any more food around, where would I get the energy for such a long search? I’ll just wait till I awake in a much smaller room before I start looking for an opening to the outside. I woke up in the same room. The furniture and milk container were gone and I was lying on the floor. Did Isleepwalk through a hidden opening that I can only find when I’m sleepwalking, and carry the table out with me and then return to the middle of this room to wake up? Impossible. Even if there was a door large enough to get that table through, and another room large enough to store it, the table would still have been too heavy to carry alone. I would have needed the help of all those fans, players and groundskeepers. Or maybe while I was asleep I broke the table up into a million or more pieces and carried it out of the room that way, pile by pile. Anyway, either from lack of sleep or carrying all those piles out of the room, I was much too tired to look for the opening I might have carried the wood through, and fell asleep. The place I woke up in this time was absolutely black. It could have been the same room as before, or one of the other rooms I’ve been in since I fell asleep next to Just Plain Mo. What could I do but bump around or go to sleep again till either daylight came or someone uncovered the cave slit or relit the candle in the first room or one of the many candles in the banquet hall or replaced the lightbulb in that next room as big as a stadium or turned on the light switch or let up the window shade or

opened the roof again in that last and largest of the rooms. I woke in the dark again and walked with my free hand and typewriter waving before me. I actually hoped to bump into something, which might tell me where I was. But nothing got in my way or I didn’t get in the way of anything moving past me. Then I ran in what I hoped was one direction. I decided that if this was still a dream I was in, I’d crash into a wall and wake up. Iran for about fifteen minutes and didn’t crash into anything. So maybe I was in an even larger room than the one where three indoor stadiums, two aircraft carriers and a cathedral with tall spires on it could have stood on top of one another or side by side with all those fans. “Hey,” I yelled, “is this some kind of joke? Well, I’ll tell you it isn’t some kind of joke. It’s no joke at all. That’s right. Because I’m not laughing. And I don’t hear anyone else laughing. Maybe if I heard someone laughing I might consider it a joke. Or if I started laughing you might start laughing, and then we could both consider it a joke. If you really want to get me laughing so you can start laughing, turn on the lights. Or show me the door or get me outside or sing the Happy Birthday ditty or something, but I’ve had enough, you hear?” Nothing answered me but my echo a minute later, which sang a song in another language and then applauded when it was over. Maybe if I had talked faster, my echo would have come back to me sooner. But I still hadn’t a clue how far away I was from the wall. I fell asleep. What else could I do? And now this is the strangest part. When I awoke I was in midair somewhere being carried along in the dark. Certainly an outdoor wind or indoor breeze was flying through my hair and clothes. And I felt I would have been blown off whatever this long thing I was on if I didn’t hold on tight. It wasn’t the neck or back of a bird I was on, for I heard a clump-clumping of feet from below and no flapping of wings. And I wasn’t being held by anything — just lying on some kind of cloth. Below the cloth it felt like the warm part of a body, like tightened muscle or bone. I couldn’t tell exactly what part of the body it was, as I couldn’t find a hole in the cloth and the cloth was too strong to tear. To test how high up I was, I got the door knocker out of the typewriter case and dropped it off the side. I never heard it reach bottom. That doesn’t mean it didn’t. Because there could have been a thick carpet below or water or sand or mud. But if it was one of those soft things below, then the walking sound I heard before would have been a squash-squashing or slosh-sloshing instead of that clump-clumping. So I must have been very high up and the sound of the door knocker hitting the ground was just too far away to hear. I crawled farther along this thing to find out more about it. When I reached my arm above and partly around it while holding onto the cloth with my other hand, all I could feel was air. It was like crawling in the dark on a narrow plank between two moving buildings many floors up. The closest it came to any body part now was a finger. Not just because of its cigar shape. But because when I was crawling, I fell into a ditch of about ten feet deep. That could have been the crack where one finger joint joins the other. One finger I knew it couldn’t be was the thumb. For a thumb only has two joints and one crack between them. And I would have fallen off the thumb’s second joint by now, since I was already on the third. Another thing it couldn’t be was a cigar. Though it was round, long and warm like one that was newly lit, I didn’t know of a cigar that had finger joints on it. What did scare me for a moment was maybe this was a very unusual cigar with joints and cracks. If it was one like that and lit, maybe I was crawling to its burning ash. But then I knew I’d feel the heat of the ash long before I reached it. So I decided it was a finger I was on. And the tight cloth around it was part of a glove, as maybe its hand gets cold or the thing whose hand it is likes fancy clothes or plays golf or was out gardening. Of course, this hand could be like none I’d ever known. With more joints and cracks than the usual type fingers. And with the rough cloth being the hand’s skin — smooth to someone its own size, but rough to me because I can feel every pore and finger groove. Not to take chances with whatever kind of hand it was, I stopped crawling. Since if I was crawling along the finger to the wrist part, it might be unsafe if let’s say the palm was cupped into a deep ditch I could fall in. Or if I was crawling to the finger tip, then the next ditch I came to might be a drop of several hundred feet with no carpet below. “Excuse me, whoever you are,” I yelled. “If you are a you. Or whatever you are. But where are you taking me, if I can ask? If I can’t ask, please don’t think anything more of it as I won’t ask again. But if you don’t mind my asking, maybe I could also ask if you’re taking me some place you think I might not want to go to. Or maybe I’ve hooked onto you by accident and you didn’t know I was here till I justmentioned it and you definitely don’t want me along. If you didn’t know I was here, then please forget I told you. But maybe it’s best for me you do know I’m here and also something about me. For you see, I’m quite the harmless little fellow, so don’t think you have to flick me off like you would a flea. I can get off myself nice and peaceful-like anytime you want me to, though I think it would be best if you first stopped. If you did know I was here and in fact stuck me on you, then all I ask is you try not to trip or run into any wall or chair or anyone the same size as you who might be in your way. And maybe you could also give me a brief warning if you suddenly feel like leaping through the air. By the way, if this is your finger I’m on and I’m yelling too low for you to hear me from way out wherever your ears or hearing organs are, please say so and I’ll yell extra loud.” No answer. So I told myself: “Relax. Act like this is a roller coaster you’re on. You know: enjoy the ride, get a little scared, even scream your lungs out if you want, but don’t stand up or let go.” I held on tight till this thing stopped moving. Then something soft and about the size and shape of a double mattress standing on its end nudged me off the finger to the ground. I quickly stuck my fingers in my ears, as I knew I was so close to this thing’s feet now that its clump-clumping might sound like bombs going off near my head. Even with my ears plugged, my eardrums must have gotten a bit shattered. The noise wasn’t any big feet clumping away either. But what sounded like one whale of a door being screeched shut and then this slam as loud as that cathedral and two aircraft carriers and three indoor stadiums with all its ticket booths and vending machines and cases of empty soda bottles collapsing around me at the same time. And no matter how loud it was to me, there is a possibility that this thing, maybe realizing how small my ears are and how much sound they can take, might even have had the consideration to close the door as gently and quietly as it could. But I was outdoors again and was going to stay awake till morning and I could see the place I’d just been released from. When daylight came I found myself at the bottom of a mountain. It was half a mile high and flat right up to its top like a modern skyscraper, but with no windows or doors on it, just rock. It was a mystery to me. How come I was now at the bottom of this thing when yesterday or sometime before I was in a flat field with Just Plain Mo snoring away beside me and no mountain or even a hill or tree in sight? “Hey, you in there,” I yelled, banging on the side of the mountain as if it was a door. “That’s right — I’m talking to you, because I want some things cleared up. I don’t like mystery stories, understand? If I have to read one because there are no other books around, then I like the endings neatly tied up. First tell me whose rooms were they in there? And who brought me into your mountain and then moved me from cave to room to banquet hall? Is there a kitchen inside? Many kitchens connecting up all those rooms? Or just a couple of short-order cafes and a classy restaurant that also has take-out orders? If not, then who cooked all that food? At least give me the recipe for the spaghetti sauce I had in the first room or tell me how you knew I liked my steak medium-rare. And who lit the candles or kept blowing them out or unscrewed the lightbulbs or carried me past the door in this mountain on his or her finger and nudged me to the ground? I’m sitting here till all my questions are answered, you got that straight?” I stayed by this mountainside for two days and nights. I thought that if whoever or whatever it was inside didn’t want to show itself in the day, maybe it would whisper the answers into my ear at night when it couldn’t be seen.