Quatre

In which a lover from the previous piece is seen with a new lover.

Jared dreams with extreme and inexhaustible frequency. If he stares at something white or off-white or pale white or eggshell colored or cream gray too long his mind will blank out. It is like a button. He has to be careful in the winter. Gray skies of the wrong hue will capture him. They capture him because of their vastness. If he accidentally looks at a white brick wall he’ll void into a dream, but he’ll snap out of it when the dream is over. He’ll look away a couple inches in a sort of jerk reaction. And if the wall ends there he’ll be back to reality. But a vast dead sky, that can go on forever. If a plane flies overhead on a winter day and Jared looks up, he’s doomed until dusk.



Jared doesn’t talk much but when he does he seems very straightforward. Almost plain. Because unlike most people he’s spent only about five or six hours a day truly awake. So it’s really like he’s only eight or nine years old in terms of the world. His true self is his dream-self. In terms of dreams and stories and ideas and pictures, he’s already lived several lifetimes. You can dream an entire novel of a dream in only a few seconds.

Jared was outfitted with cuteness from birth. He ends up with lovers pretty often. Particularly ones with an appreciation for dreaming or honesty or unclogged simplicity. But it can’t last too often. People want attention.

One day Jared came to a carnival. It was accidental. He walks. He comes to things. If he sees something white, he dreams and then he alters course, especially if he oneirambulates, which means dream-walks. So he walks and dreams and ends up places.

(Jared lives by himself. He does a very good job at not getting hit by cars or dying despite his constant dreams. That says a lot about him.)

This carnival happened to be a good place for Jared. Carnivals are busy, colorful and detailed places. There are lots of little things. Occasionally there is a white teddy bear in the balloon dart booth or a white carriage on the Ferris wheel and Jared starts to dream but then the bear is won or the carriage turns and the dream winks out. Jared shakes his hair to clear his head. He is happy. Except in his bedroom, which is painted like a crayon box and has a computer with its screen color-tuned to make white look pink, there are not many places he can be and not constantly dream. Not many places with people.

Jared likes his dreams, he has to. But he likes people too.

This carnival is red-striped and gold-striped and dirty and smells like bananas and horses and grease and rubber and the people are beige in yellow v-necks and brown in olive sweaters and apricot-colored in daisy-spotted dresses and opal-colored in Go Sports Team t-shirts and cider-colored in aquamarine blouses. Jared has green money on him and buys orange tickets and uses them to get bubblegum cotton candy and butter popcorn and sits on the Ferris wheel in a silver carriage and looks at the blue sky. He drinks a clear bubbly soda and rides the haunted house through darkness by neon vampires and gossamer white ghosts, which give him nightmares. Jared laughs and laughs.

Jared buys a ticket to the snake-charmer-woman’s tent, which is where he falls in love, which is what you’ve been waiting for.

***

Mittal was born in the same room as a snake.

Then she spent the next twenty years of her life afraid of snakes like millions of other people. It wasn’t destiny. She joined the carnival a female bullfighter, a star attraction, because she grew up on a farm with bulls and people liked to watch her dodge them in her ruby sequined leotard. The carnival lost money over time and the bulls were too expensive to transport. Snakes fit in luggage.

Mittal didn’t stop being afraid of snakes. She did the work she had to do. The way she did it was the same way she handled the bulls. She talked to them. Animals talk with all their senses, or at least with more than humans do. Mittal was never a talker. She was born with no tongue. Maybe the snake had taken it.

Mittal talked to the ducks and chickens on her farm with little noises and with movements of her body in various directions and with thoughts of food. She talked to the pigs with love and touch and laughing. She talked to the bulls with staring and alternating between giving off fear and giving off power. Pheromones and smells. They listened, or when they didn’t listen, Mittal heard what they thought. So half the time in the bullring she dodged the bulls, and half the time they dodged her.

(The way Mittal talked to people was without words, too. But most people she met at the store or on the street never knew she had no tongue. She used thoughtful “um” and “hm” and “tsk” sounds, and made facial expressions and everyone she met felt they had had a wordy conversation with her even when they hadn’t. That says a lot about her.)

Mittal could never stop herself from fearing the snakes. They could smell that. It took time. She studied with the animal handler, a skinny man who had been bitten hundreds of times and was a bad choice for anything in front of the suckers or customers. He was a shy lad, who everyone called Andy no matter how many times he demanded "Andrew," and he immediately fell in love with the mysterious and inaccessible Mittal. She slept with him kindly once or twice. He taught her well, enough to get her close to the snakes, where she could learn more on her own. She learned to use a new country of her body and communicate to the snakes with her body heat, which they could read. She told them stories in heat-pictures and they never bit her. She sweat up a storm, though.

As part of her act, Mittal did the old carnival thing. She wore a great big white turban, and she played a long bone-white flute.

***

Jared pays his fee and chews his brick-colored hot dog with cherry-colored ketchup and blonde mustard and goes in the musty tent. A techno remix of an Indian sitar raga is playing with loud bass. He chews happily and walks to the front by the Plexiglas that separates the dangerous snake and his charmer from the audience.

Mittal comes in and sits down. She takes the lid off the jar that the cobra coils in. She pulls out her flute. She doesn’t even look at the audience. She doesn’t have to. They are always the same. The snake is always different, so she pays attention there.

She plays the stereotypical snake-charmer’s melody. She bobs back and forth. The snake starts to come up. Her oscillating figure is basic snake charming. It is what the professionals use to mesmerize the snake. If that was all she did she wouldn’t be the attraction she was. Of course her skills were only half-remembered by skeptical carnival-goers, but she could have gone on talk shows.

She makes the snake dance. She makes him dance in time. The stories she tells with her body heat trick the snake into moving this way and that. The snake gets into it and in a good performance, Mittal convinces the snake to snap its fangs up into the air. This always scares her visibly but luckily the audience is scared too, seeing that snake bite so close to that pretty woman’s head, so they never notice her momentary flash of fright. Her eyes wide and white around their copper centers.

She manages that trick this time.

Mittal with her fully bloomed apparatus immediately senses something wrong or something different. She usually feels her own fear exploding inside her heart when the snake snaps, and she feels the tidal wave of the audience’s come at her like a blast from a furnace. But this time there is a hole.

She’s had fearless audience members and skeptics who think it’s all a 3-D movie and the animal handler himself watch before, of course. But there’s always some fear. Even an audience member not paying attention reflects the fear of the other people. They hear the gasp and that makes their own heart jump, even if they did not see the snake snap.

But this time there is a hole. Right in the front and center, a gap, like a sunspot on the sun. Someone is not afraid. Someone is more than not paying attention. Someone has inserted the sweet reedy smell of tranquility right there in the middle of the fear wave.

Mittal looks up.

Her white turban moves. Jared comes back from his dream.

Mittal looks at him. He looks at her. Her eyes are big and white around their copper centers. It is just enough for a split-second dream for Jared. Eyes don’t usually do it for him, luckily otherwise he’d never be able to talk to people. But these eyes dream him for a moment.

***

Jared’s split-second dream in reality lasts about ten minutes in dream time. It is a musical dream, a very strange one. Most people would name this their most memorable dream and tell the story often. But Jared has had many musical dreams with full Broadway plots. This one seems to be about cheese. It is like the Sound of Music except the chorus of delightful children and singing about cheese curds and how to whip them. They are whipping cheese curds in time with the music with bull-whips. The song’s instrumentation is entirely made by the sounds of people sloshing mouthwash around in the mouths. It is very avant-garde. Jared is not particularly amused but he watches all the same.

He is about to discover that his role in this dream is as the singing scarecrow when he realizes something. There is something wrong. Something very unusual. Jared has dreamed it all. This is new. There is a hole.

It’s not really a hole. It’s like looking out a window when it’s dark inside and mostly light outside, but there’s one tiny lamp on behind you, so there’s this specter of a reflected image interrupting the otherwise perfect view of the landscape. Something from the wrong plane has entered Jared’s otherwise clear-eyed dream.

It is Mittal of course.

Mittal reads everything. Although Jared’s eyes in reality are blank, are vibrating back and forth with half-hearted REM, she sees in them, and senses in his scent and the twitches of his hand muscles and the inaudible hum in his throat (singing, “cheese, cheese o’er the mountain”) what is happening to him. Her body is used to responding to unusual communications. So she instinctively communicates back.

Jared has had all sorts of encounters in his dreams. He has had more sex than most film actors and met more famous people than most Presidents and loved every sort of automaton that could be dreamed of, from beautiful human lovers to mermaids and nymphs to this one dream where he took the form of a crawfish and fell in love with a barnacle. But he can tell he is not dealing with another dream-lover. This is nothing out of his head. This is a real woman. The singing children disappear.

“Hello,” says Mittal.

“Hello,” says Jared. “You’re the snake-charmer.”

“Yes,” says Mittal.

“Your eyes are lovely,” he says.

“Your dream is lovely,” she says.

Jared smiles. Mittal smiles.

And then the snake bites her.

***

This story has a happy ending. The cobra is a very poisonous snake. It hurts Mittal gravely. But the animal handler has anti-venom. Mittal is feeling fine within a couple hours.

Jared visits her in the carnival infirmary. It takes her right up until she is feeling better to talk his way in, not the least because the door to the trailer is white.

He comes into her, Andy the animal handler leaving when Mittal gestures for him to leave. Jared sits beside her. She looks at him. He looks at her.

Silence.

Then they understand each other and what is obvious. Her bed’s blanket is lime green but the bedsheet underneath is white. Jared places his hand on her hand and looks at it. Mittal looks at him.

By the time the animal handler comes back inside – which is very quickly, because of his jealousy – Jared and Mittal have been dreaming together for two and a half minutes. And they have been in love for a thousand years.