“Ah, that’s the trouble with you, Ralph.” Stimmitz shook his head. “That’s always been the trouble with you. You just don’t get mad at things, do you? If you did, they’d go better for you.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t feel like arguing. Patiently he waited for the dream to end and for comfortable unconsciousness to slip over him again. “You’re a fine one to talk about things going better. You’re dead.”
Michael Stimmitz shrugged. “That’s not important. You’re still dreaming about me, aren’t you? I must’ve made some impression on the universe, or part of it at least, if people are still thinking about me when I’m gone. Right? I mean, your memory is evidence that I existed once. But you, Ralph—boy, I just don’t know.” The dream image of Stimmitz kneaded his forehead with one hand. “It’s going to be one of those names-written-in-water deals for you if you don’t shape up pretty soon.”
“Come on. Give me some slack, will you?” Ralph felt a point of resentful misery penetrate his apathy. “I’m going through enough crap right now without you coming back from the grave and bitching at me.”
“I’m only doing it for your own good, Ralph. You don’t want to die and just be forgotten, do you? No accomplishments?” Stimmitz’s voice dropped in volume and pitch as he leaned closer. “Take a look at what’s in the back seat.”
“I don’t want to,” sulked Ralph. “You’ve probably got something disgusting back there. I don’t want to see it, whatever it is.”
“Go on,” coaxed Stimmitz. “Take a look. What’s the harm? Maybe you’ll even wake up.”
Slowly, Ralph turned his head, his hands still gripping the wheel. Sarah lay curled up on the back seat, her head resting on her bare arm. Her hair spilled down to the floor. She’s dead, thought Ralph. Or at least here she is.
Her skin was white and cold-looking. A tiny drop of red glistened in the corner of her mouth, far below the bruised eyelids.
“What the hell’s that for?” said Ralph angrily. He swung around and leaned over the steering wheel, looking for an offramp. “How do I get off this damn thing,” he muttered.
“There’s more to be considered than just yourself.” Stimmitz gestured with one of his long-fingered hands.
“Thanks a lot. If you’re trying to be so goddamn helpful why don’t you tell me what’s going on with Muehlenfeldt and all the rest of that stuff?”
“Come on, Ralph. I’m just a product of your subconscious. I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
“What’s the point, then. What’s the damn point.” Who needs this, he thought. He turned to face Stimmitz with more angry words forming on his tongue. But instead of Stimmitz, the slithergadee swelled and clattered its scales as it moved across the seat toward him, its jaws gaping hot and wide. The space outside the car grew dark and Ralph could feel the car falling, falling.
He woke up on the couch, surrounded by the dark apartment. Through the window he could see the cold stars still glittering over the desert. What time is it? he wondered. Everything seemed very still, the world in abeyance.
In his stocking feet he padded to the kitchen and looked at the little clock on top of the stove. Three a.m. A dark hour, he thought. So quiet.
Back in the living room, he gazed out the sliding glass door at the base and the desert. Nothing moved out there. In the distance, blue moonlight slid over the flanks of Muehlenfeldt’s jet. The pale luminescence on the ground had large, jagged black rips in it, the shadows of buildings and dunes and other objects, as the moon ebbed closer to the horizon.
The details of his dreams were fading beyond recall, but had left him with a certain melancholy. Sunlight might have dissipated it, but at this hour, Ralph knew, it was a true vision, a glimpse of dark eternity. This is the way it is underneath everything else.
He felt himself alone on the earth. The social construct of time had stopped, along with light and warmth. The dark hours would last forever.
Whatever point of conspiracy and violence his life had been hurtling toward still waited in the future. But this is worse. This is death and knowing you’re dead. He turned from the window, sat on the couch and pulled on his shoes. From the dark apartment he stepped into the dimly lit corridor and drew the door shut behind him.
The building was silent. Ralph passed by the closed doors, feeling like his own ghost. All the familiar components of his life were changed somehow, as though they were never meant to be seen at this hour.
Everyone else, he thought, is asleep or holding down a shift on the dreamfield. Far away from here, in either case. He entered the stairwell at the far end of the corridor and started down.
Outside, the concrete paths were like corroded silver in the partial light. He walked slowly between the buildings, not knowing for whom or what he was looking. This kind of motion is becoming a habit with me.
A small asphalt lot at the corner of one of the apartment buildings held the dozen or so cars that belonged to people on the base. A sad collection, mostly—aged and not well taken care of. Neglect and time had exposed their essential cheapness. Peeling fenders squatted over bald tires. Things have gotten out of hand, thought Ralph with grim humor, when metal starts decaying as fast as human beings. The dusty lenses of the cars’ headlights watched as he went by.
A honk from one of the cars’ horns startled him. He spun around on the sidewalk and stared at the dark windshields. Wobbling loosely at the end of a sleeve, a pale hand emerged from a side window and beckoned to him.
“Metric,” called a voice. “Hey, c’mere.”
Ralph bent forward, trying to see who was in the car. “C’mon, c’mon,” the voice shouted again. “Up and at ’em, dream watchers.” Ralph’s muscles untensed as he stepped off the sidewalk and headed toward the car. It was Blenek the operations chief, his voice recognizable even beneath a slight blurring of syllables. Drinking at this hour? wondered Ralph.
A brewery odor spilled from the car as he approached. Blenek waved an open can from his seat behind the steering wheel. “C’mon in and have a couple.” Beer slopped from the top of the can and rolled down his wrist.
Without saying anything, Ralph circled the car and got in on the other side. The seat was damp and a little sticky from the dregs of a couple of empty cans that rolled and fell to the floor as he sat down. They clattered softly against the ones already there. The cans rolled under Ralph’s feet as he pushed his legs into the space beneath the dashboard.
Blenek tore a full one from the six-pack on the seat between them.
“Here ya go,” he said with boozy friendliness.
Ralph felt intuitively that he had nothing to fear from Blenek; the man was, like the watchers he supervised, simply used and kept in the dark by the ones at the top. Whatever additional connections Blenek had with that uppermost layer were of no more importance than simple instructions to be carried out, revealing nothing of the designs behind them. Ralph knew there was nothing sinister about the car in the unlit parking lot—just a car with an inebriated occupant. The beer, though—Ralph pulled back and waved it off with his hand spread wide.
Blenek looked puzzled at Ralph’s motions, then nodded wisely as he signalled an Okay with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. “Don’t worry, man,” he said. “ ’S all right. It’s not that stuff they stick in everybody’s ’frigerators around here. I bought this stuff down in Norden myself.”