Did he have a name?
No. No name.
What did you call?
I simply called upon him to stay and stay he did and so I slept on and the traveler turned to me and waited.
I guess he was surprised to see you.
A good question. He seemed indeed to be surprised and yet in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras appear commonplace. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet. I got another question. You want to know if the traveler knew that he'd been dreaming. If indeed he had been dreaming. Like you say, you've told the story before. Yes. What's the answer. You might not like it. That ought not to stop you. He asked me the same question. He wanted to know if he'd been dreaming? Yes. What did he say? He asked me if I had seen them. Them people with the robes and the candles and all. Yes. And. Well. I had. Of course. So that's what you told him. I told him the truth. Well it would have served as well for a lie wouldnt it? Because? If it caused him to believe that what he dreamt was real. Yes. You see the difficulty. Billy leaned and spat. He studied the landscape to the north. I better get on, he said. I got a ways to go. You have people waiting for you? I hope so. I sure would like to see them. He wished me to be his witness. But in dreams there can be no witness. You said as much yourself. It was just a dream. You dreamt him. You can make him do whatever you like. Where was he before I dreamt him? You tell me.
My belief is this, and I say it again: His history is the same as yours or mine. That is the stuff he is made oPS What stuff other? Had I created him as God makes men how then would I not know what he would say before he ever spoke? Or how he'd move before he did so? In a dream we dont know what's coming. We are surprised.
All right.
So where is it coming from?
I dont know.
Two worlds touch here. You think men have power to call forth what they will? Evoke a world, awake or sleeping? Make it breathe and then set out upon it figures which a glass gives back or which the sun acknowledges? Quicken those figures with one's own joy and one's despair? Can a man be so hid from himself? And if so who is hid? And from whom?
You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.
So is that the end of the story?
No. The traveler stood at the stone and on the stone visible to see were marks of axe and sword and the dark oxidations of the blood of those who'd died there and which the weathers of the world were powerless to erase. Here the traveler had lain down to sleep with no thought of death and yet when he awoke he'd no thought other. The heavens which he had been invited to scrutinize by his executioners now wore a different look. The order of his life seemed altered in midstride. Some haltstitch in the workings of things. Those heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to pulse with a reckless energy. As if in their turning things had come uncottered, uncalendared. He thought that there might even be some timefault in the record. That henceforth there might be no way to log new sightings. Would that matter?
You're askin me.
Yes.
I think it would matter to you. About him I got no idea. What do you think?
The narrator paused thoughtfully. I think, he said, that the dreamer imagined himself at some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the death of things. I think he saw a terrible darkness looming.
I need to be gettin on.
The man did not answer. He sat contemplating the roadside vegas and the barren lands beyond now shimmering in the newest sun.
This desert about us was once a vast sea, he said. Can such a thing vanish? Of what are seas made? Or I? Or you?
I dont know.
The man stood up and stretched. He stretched mightily, reaching and turning. He looked down at Billy and smiled.
And that's the end of the story, Billy said.
No.
He squatted and held up his hand, palm out.
Hold up your hand, he said. Like this.
Is this a pledge of some kind?
No. You are pledged already. You always were. Hold up your hand.
He held up his hand as the man had asked.
You see the likeness?
Yes.
Yes. It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.
So what happened to the traveler?
Nothing. There is no end to the story. He woke and all was as before. He was free to go.
To other men's dreams.
Perhaps. Of such dreams and of the rituals of them there can also be no end. The thing that is sought is altogether other. However it may be construed within men's dreams or by their acts it will never make a fit. These dreams and these acts are driven by a terrible hunger. They seek to meet a need which they can never satisfy, and for that we must be grateful.
And you were still asleep.
Yes. At the end of the dream we walked out in the dawn and there was an encampment on the plains below from which no smoke rose for all that it was cold and we went down to that place but all was abandoned there. There were huts of skin staked out upon the rocky ground with slagiron pikes and within these huts were remnants of old meals untouched and cold upon cold plates of clay. There were standing stores of primitive and antique arms carved in their metal parts and inlaid with filigree of gold and there were robes sewn up from skins of northern animals and rawhide trunks with latches and corners of hammered copper and these were much scarred from their travels and the years of it and inside of them were old accounts and ledgerbooks and records of the history of that vanished folk, the path they had followed in the world and their reckonings of the cost of that journey. And in a place apart a skeleton of old sepia bones sewn up in a leather shroud.
We walked together through all that desolation and all that abandonment and I asked him if the people were away at some calling but he said that they were not. When I asked him to tell me what had happened he looked at me and he said: I have been here before. So have you. Everything is here for the taking. Touch nothing. Then I woke.