Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

He drives with the windows down, warm air streaming around him, swept along in a jewelled red river of tail lights five lanes wide.

They are approaching some great metropolis. The expressway flies over quiet suburban streets with old-fashioned lamps coming on among the elms. A pagoda is silhouetted against the golden west, then a windmill with sails turning, picked out with coloured lights, then a floodlit château with pink pigs standing outside it on their hind legs, sharpening knives and holding up menus. Neon signs flash and shift, ghostly pale against the sunset, brilliant against the piled black clouds in the north. He recognizes some of them — the Pan-Am symbol, Dagens Nyheter, the Seven Names of God. Electric characters announce the temperature and humidity, closing prices on the stock market, and the latest digits reached in the computation of the value of pi. There is a smell of coffee in the air. In the forecourt of a pancake house the gigantic figure of a woman revolves on top of a pylon, picked out by spotlights, standing on tiptoe, high-kicking. He cranes to catch sight of her face, and as she turns towards him he sees that it is Saint Julian of Norwich. “And all shall be well,” she tells him softly, over the car radio, “and all manner of things shall be well.”

He knows that she is right; all manner of things will be well in this city he is entering. He is not at all tired, even though he has driven so far. A restless excitement stirs in him, a sense of being on the verge of deep and different things.

The expressway turns to cross water full of the redness of the sky, and there, floating on the horizon above the shining red water, are the clustered towers of the inner city, purple with distance, lights shining in a million windows — exactly as he has always known they would be. Now other freeways are converging upon his, passing above and beneath, wheeling and turning all round him. He follows the Downtown postings, up, round, through, and over; one of a thousand particles circling the orbits of a complex molecule.

When he emerges from this the towers are much closer. They rise straight up into the sky above him. He can see into some of the windows. In one room two people are dancing to music which only they can hear. In another a family is just sitting down to its evening meal. Faintly he can smell soup and taste radishes and wine.

Now he is driving slowly along a straight street cut like a slot between the towers. It’s hot. People stroll in their shirt sleeves, and sit at sidewalk cafes. One man is just taking another by the arm as he passes, and laughing in surprise. Yellow taxicabs race past, swerving in front of him, braking violently at stop lights.

He drives on until he comes to an open square with people eating at tables under the trees. High up on the other side of the square is a sign on which words pass rapidly from right to left across a bank of lights.

“Howard Baker?” say the words on the sign as Howard gets out of the car. He looks up, surprised, then glances round to see if anyone else has noticed.

“So here you are!” forms the sign smoothly. “But don’t feel any sense of anticlimax, because everyone here wants to meet you, and all sorts of parties are being arranged, and several people are going to be calling you in the morning.”

He grins, embarrassed and pleased.

“The silly buggers!” he says.

In your first few hours in a new place, while you’re still dazed, before you can even really believe you’ve arrived, you see it more vividly and more clearly than you ever will again. Even after a few minutes — even while the porter is still showing him to his room — Howard feels that he has understood a great deal about this city. He could write a book about it.

“There’s something in the air in this place!” he tells the porter. “I really feel alive here!”

“Sure,” says the porter. “You’re really going to have yourself a good time.”

He’s got brown eyes and a smiling face — the sort of man who knows his way around, and who’ll fix anything for you. Howard takes to him. He feels he can talk seriously with him.

“What’s happening here?” he asks him seriously. “What’s the political situation at the moment? When are the elections coming up? Are you free? What do you have to pay for a pair of men’s shoes, for example? Have you been hit by inflation?”

“Don’t worry,” says the porter. “It’s okay here. You don’t have to worry.”

He leads Howard across little courtyards full of hibiscus, where you can hear fountains playing, and people laughing softly; along candlelit cloisters; straight across lawns with metal labels stuck in them saying “Fellows only.”

Howard feels a great need to talk in Spanish.

“Quale sono le questione politiche le piu importance in questo momenta?” he asks effortlessly. “But this is fantastic! I’ve never been able to speak Spanish before, apart from a few odd phrases like spaghetti bolognese and virtuosi di Roma! And here I am just doing it, like that!”

“You can do anything here,” says the porter. “You want to sing? Then sing! You want to dance? So dance! This is the golden land of opportunity. If I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, I could be one tomorrow. Just like that. Just by snapping my fingers. I could have one of the finest practices in the city. Sometimes I’ve thought of going into business. I could do that. No trouble. I could buy up this hotel tomorrow. I could buy up the whole block. Ride up and down in a chauffeur-driven limousine, smoking big cigars. Only one thing stops me.”

“What’s that?” asks Howard.

“I don’t want to. I’m happy the way I am. Why fool around with money, or taking teeth out, when I might not enjoy it as much? This is what I’m used to — carrying gentlemen’s bags up, turning on the lights and the air-conditioner, taking a look round to make sure everything’s just so. This is the way I am, and I figure why be different? But you, you could do anything. You’ve got ambition, you’ve got drive, you’re open to new experience. Have you ever thought of becoming a hotel porter, for instance?”

“No?” says Howard, astonished.

“Because remember — in this place anything’s possible. Look, make a little experiment.”

He stops, and puts down Howard’s bags. They are in a lobby surrounded by staircases and landings.

“Bend your knees slightly,” he tells Howard.

“What?”

“Look, like this. Now, up on tiptoe. Then — push off.”

Howard pushes off. He drifts slowly up into the air.

“This is fantastic!” he says.

He drifts back towards the floor.

“Now, bounce!” cries the porter. “Kick out hard! Time it right!”

This time Howard goes shooting right past the chandelier, up to the level of the first floor.

“I knew it was possible!” he calls back to the porter. “But before I could never do it! I knew it was just a matter of getting the knack!”

“Push off from the banisters. Do frog kicks. Force the air away underneath you with your hands.”

Howard is enchanted by the slowness with which he can move, and the smallness of the gestures which are needed to change course and height. He steers himself into the current of warm air rising above the chandelier, and is carried effortlessly upwards, past floors where people are sitting at little tables and eating icecream out of metal goblets. Some of them smile at him, and wave.

“This is fantastic!” he shouts back at the porter, now several floors below him. “This is staggering! It’s amazing! It’s … well, it’s fantastic!”

“Mind your head on the ceiling,” shouts the porter.

“Why don’t you take off and come up here, too?”

The porter shrugs.

“Why should I?” he says. “I’m happy where I am.”

“But it’s fantastic up here!”

“It’s fantastic down here.”

Howard laughs. A ridiculous thought has just occurred to him. He glides downwards, vertiginously, holding his breath at the emptiness beneath him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as he sets foot to floor. “That wasn’t Spanish I was talking to you in. That was Italian.”

“Italian — Spanish,” says the porter, shrugging. “Who cares? Here you speak any language you please, and they’ll all come running.”

There’s always a bad moment, Howard knows, after the porter’s unlocked your room, switched everything on, drawn the curtains, and gone away with a huge tip because you had only a folder of fresh bank-notes in your pocket, when you sit down helplessly and think, well, here we are, this is it, I’ve arrived. Now what? Shall I go down and eat in the hotel restaurant, or shall I go out? And if you’re not careful you sit there blankly in the one armchair, with the curtains drawn and your bag on the stand, until it’s too late to do anything.

But just before this moment arrives, as soon as the door closes on the porter, Howard notices the writing table, and all the little giveaways which the management has arranged under the lamp — books of matches, a long-stemmed rose in water, writing paper, and picture postcards of the hotel. The postcards absorb him at once. They show (for instance) guests dining in the hotel’s famous Oak Room, with the celebrated choice of one hundred and forty-two dishes from all over the world, to the accompaniment of a three-piece mariachi band. If you tilt the card back and forth a little, the picture appears to move. The hands of the mariachi players strum their guitars. The forks of the diners flash from plate to mouth and back. Sommeliers reach discreetly forward to refill glasses. The waiters’ spoons dig up down, up down in the great trifle on the world-famous dessert trolley. Gentlemen’s jaws chomp. Ladies’ smiles flash. A couple in one corner kiss discreetly over the brandy.

Howard tilts the card back and forth until he has seen the couple in the corner leave, and the manager discreetly coping with a customer who refuses to pay the bill, then puts it carefully into his pocket to save for his children, who love this kind of toy. He puts four books of matches into his pocket as well. These are for his wife, who smokes. For himself he will take a handful of the pencils they always leave out for you…. But here he makes a surprising discovery. At the top of the blotter, where the pencils should be, is a pencil-case. It’s made of red plastic, and there’s something familiar about it which he can’t quite identify; something about the feel of its grained texture, and of the shiny red popper button on the flap…. He pulls it open. There’s something even more familiar about the satisfying little reluctance with which the popper gives, and something yet more familiar still about the contrast between the grained texture on the outside, and the red smoothness of the inside.

Then for some reason he smells it — and at once he knows. It’s his first pencil-case, that he had for his sixth birthday. For nearly thirty years it’s been lost. And now it’s been lovingly found again by the management of the hotel to welcome him. It has its new smell still — the perfect red plastic smell, the smell of writing numbers in arithmetic books ruled in squares; the smell it had before it got mixed up in the dust and plasticine and tangled electric cord in the toy-drawer.

And inside the pencil-case the management has placed something even more astonishing: a propelling pencil with four different colours in it. The colours appear at little windows in the side, glimpses into the worlds of heartrending blueness and greenness, unattainable redness and blackness, that lie hidden inside the smooth nickel barrel. On the outside of the barrel, to be turned to the colour you want and slid down to push the lead into the tip, is an outer sleeve; heavy, thick, graspable, with eight shining nickel facets, alternately smooth and cross-hatched. Howard moves his fingers over the smoothness of the smooth facets, the complex texture of the hatched ones, scarcely able to absorb the pleasure that their alternation gives him. This is not a relic of his sixth birthday, or any other birthday. This is the pencil he never had — the pencil he longed for. This is the pencil that his kindergarten teacher possessed; the pencil that made the blue ticks and the red crosses in the register; the pencil that he wept for, that his mother went all over town to find, and failed to find, because they were all gone, or not made any more, or kept for teachers, or only imagined; the pencil which he knew would make him happy, if only he possessed it, forevermore.

And here it is, its heaviness lying in his palm, his hand closing over the alternating smoothness and lininess of it.

What a hotel! He’ll recommend it to everyone.

He goes to sleep with the feeling that things are going to go right for him in this town.

And enjoys a perfect night’s sleep — deep, clear, and refreshing, like gliding down through sunlit water on a hot day; such a perfect night’s sleep that he is entirely unconscious of how much he is enjoying it, or of its depth, clarity, and refreshingness, or its resemblance to gliding through sunlit water on a hot day; so perfect that from time to time he half wakes, just enough to become conscious of how unconscious of everything he is.