Dream Studies

I. Nightwork

A cultural effort on the part of some high-minded local matrons in the 1860s, the Orpheus Opera House had never hosted an opera. It had been a whistle-stop stage in the golden age of the blackface minstrel show, a substation on the Western vaudeville circuit, and, later, a ballroom and a movie theater. By the time I came to Prescott for college, it was a derelict wreck of a baroque wedding cake that the town’s conservative city council, wary of charity, had passed on to my liberal arts school. 

I had a work-study gig my freshman year at the Orpheus, which by then was home to the school’s drama department. Come 10 p.m., I’d swing through the double doors from the alley out back and flick on its lights in a practiced sequence and then set about restoring the green room to rights after that evening’s performance. Most nights I sorted mail, made minor repairs, and restocked the concessions, tuned in to the public radio station out of Flagstaff.

The work at the Orpheus was never done; no sooner had I scraped the gum off the bottom of the theater’s seats than the floral wallpaper in the balcony would drop or a floorboard pop loose or a mysterious watermark materialize on a wall. The place smelled like old carpet and popcorn, and something I still catch a whiff of sometimes in antique stores, which I suppose I just think of as the past. The job paid minimum wage and offered little in the way of transferable skills, but during the night shift the Orpheus was my own quiet kingdom of dreams.

I was actually taking a class that semester called Dream Studies. It was taught by a Jungian psychologist considered eccentric even for Prescott College, and there were only three texts: Jung’s Red Book, Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, and the collected poems of John Berryman. As students, we were supposed to ask a question each night before we fell asleep and state an intention each afternoon when we went down for a nap (this nap was actually mandated by the syllabus—a major selling point for me). When we fell asleep, we were supposed to try to find our hands, which would aid us in becoming lucid, in harnessing our free will in our dreams.

At that point I’d been plagued for months by a sort of fatigue indistinguishable from sadness, and Dream Studies seemed a way to maybe get some insight into why I was always tired, why I walked around all day feeling like there was a thin scrim between me and the world. Moreover, it seemed a way to do so that did not require my having to actually admit to anyone else what I was feeling. I thought perhaps if I could understand my dreams, some deep inner logic would be revealed, some ancestral trauma released, and I would be healed of this mysterious affliction, which I thought of as the sadsickness.

In truth, the condition from which I suffered would have to become much worse before it got better, but in those days, I was always looking for the magic cure: surely if I ate the right foods in the right sequence or did the right exercises at the right time of day or the right kind of meditation with the right kind of breathing, or made sure there were no electromagnetic fields ensnaring my head as I slept, this condition would lift right off of me just as quickly as it had settled.

Each night before I fell asleep I asked the same question: What do I need to do to feel better?

Each afternoon, when I lay down for my nap, I stated the same intention: I intend to wake up feeling happy, refreshed, and alert.

There were a number of times I tried to find my hands in my dreams, but only once did I succeed, and that was the time I woke up in the tunnels under the Orpheus.

II. Rooms

Well, not tunnels exactly, but an underground chamber. A room. 

The walls of this room were plastered in earth tones, and they met in a gentle curve. I’d woken up in the middle of the room on some sort of bench, similarly smooth, as if sculpted of earth. 

As far as I knew, I had never seen this room before.

As far as I knew, I had fallen asleep in the old costume closet under the stairs at the theater.

Slowly, I raised my hands in front of my face, the way the old Yaqui medicine man Don Juan had instructed Carlos Castaneda to whenever he suspected he was dreaming. My hands looked pretty regular, though, and there was nothing wonky about my reflexes, so maybe I wasn’t dreaming.

Maybe I’d just woken up someplace I’d never been before.

A hallway lit by faux-flickering LED lights wound around to the left, revealing three more rooms like this one. The place resembled the artist’s renderings of the ancient pueblo complex at Chaco Canyon I’d seen on a field trip that semester, aside from the fact that this place was underground—or, at least, entirely lacking in windows.

In one room a pair of handcuffs hung from a chain that hung from a hole in the ceiling. 

In the next room sat a wooden lectern covered in dust.  

And in the third room was a table with a book on it. 

It was a photo album, I found, with plastic page protectors that crackled as I turned them. I had to look at those old black-and-whites a long time before I understood, really understood, what I was looking at—that they were all pictures of white people got up to look like Indians. In their wigs and war paint, loincloths and buckskin, these people looked laughable, like kids in a community theater production—especially toward the end, when the photos went color and you could see how stiff those old wigs were. But the faces of these people were serious. Whatever was going on here, it was not a joke to them.

In this room the plaster was flaking, and in some spots, chunks of it had fallen off, revealing itself as a sort of crappy theme-park façade; it appeared to have been troweled over the same red bricks that clad the Orpheus. There were drains in the floor, I noticed, and ventilation shafts in the ceiling—this place wasn’t all that old, just made to look that way. 

But why? 

And by whom? 

III. Tunnels

There are people who will tell you there are tunnels beneath the streets of Prescott, Arizona, dug by Chinese immigrants, the ones who came through with the railroad in the 1800s and stayed to work in the saloons and laundries downtown. Orientals, as they were known at the time, were routinely attacked come sundown; they dug these tunnels so they’d have a safe route home after dark.

There are people who will tell you all about it. They’ll go on, if you let them, about some bricked-up entrance they found beneath the restaurant where they washed dishes or flipped burgers, back in the day. They’ll claim that it’s all right there in the archives of the local historical museum if you know where to look.

There are also people—including the people who actually work at the local historical museum—who will tell you there is no evidence for this whatsoever.

IV. Critics

Likewise, there are people who will tell you that the old Yaqui medicine man Don Juan is a fiction on the part of Carlos Castaneda, that the old man’s teachings are no more than a mashup of various Meso-American indigenous traditions, the philosophies of Wittgenstein and C.S. Lewis, and quotes from some obscure 1960s anthropology journals. 

The Jungian psychologist who taught Dream Studies was well aware of the controversy around Castaneda’s work. And yet, she said, if it was fiction, it was fiction with truth at its core—she herself had experienced the power of the practices Castaneda ascribed to the perhaps-mythical Don Juan (in addition to trying to find your hands in your dreams, these included sleeping with your head at the foot of the bed, or with one foot hanging off the mattress, gazing at the sunset through your left eye, and staring into shadows). Whatever we might choose to believe about Castaneda, she said, his techniques for lucid dreaming worked. She’d experienced this for herself. Moreover: she’d taught this class for twenty years, and in every class, at least one person entered what Castaneda termed the nagual: a powerful dream state that felt entirely real, and entirely lucid—experiences these students reported as life-changing.

Which I suppose made sense to me at the time. Who cared if this stuff was real, right? As long as it worked.

V. Fetish

Which, by all appearances, it had. Though I suppose it did seem strange that my life-changing lucid dream experience would include faux-flickering LED lights. 

I returned to the room where I’d woken up and found a handful of little stone animals on the bench where I’d been lying, which I could have sworn weren’t there before. I’d seen these sorts of things in stores that sold Native jewelry: fetishes, they were called. 

I examined these stone animals closely. Each was exquisite, cunningly carved, no bigger a few inches: a white polar bear with a black arrowhead secured to its back with waxed twine, an onyx turtle with an abalone shell, a pretty little jasper cicada, and a red pipestone lizard with a turquoise stripe down its back that fit perfectly in my palm.

Ever since I’d moved to the Southwest, I’d had this thing with lizards. I loved those funky push-ups they did, the way they closed their eyes in the sun—whenever I was camping or hiking or even just walking to class, lizards always seemed to find me.

My friend Mara would have rolled her eyes at that, the idea that all these lizards were somehow in communication with each other, with perhaps all of lizardom, or were in some way seeking me out at the behest of some higher power. And when you said it like that, it did sound dumb—extremely unlikely, at least. But people have always believed extremely unlikely things, and at that moment, standing in the tunnels under the Orpheus, in the midst of what appeared to be a very weird, very specific lucid dream, this is what I believed: this little stone lizard wanted to come home with me. That was the whole reason I had found this place: it wanted me to find it. This little lizard wanted out of here.

The room with the handcuffs was smaller than the others, and perfectly round, with a conical top, like the hat of a gnome. The two chains the handcuffs were attached to hung from a hole in the ceiling; whatever the chains were attached to was lost to darkness. 

The handcuffs hung at eye level—they were stiff leather, vaguely medieval looking, but for some reason, not all that threatening, like stage props. Carefully, I grabbed ahold of them and gave the chains a tug. They tugged back, like someone on the other end had been awaiting my signal. 

I got a better grip and hung on them with my full body weight; I suppose I wanted to see if I could bring them down. I wanted to see who, if anyone, was up there.

But it was as if I had caught hold of the rope that lifted the stage curtain of the theater; somewhere, some heavy counterweight dropped, and I began to rise. 

VI. All New Revue

I awoke in the old costume closet under the stairs at the Orpheus. I knew immediately where I was, because I was snuggled up against the matted old buffalo head on the Victorian divan, which for some reason always smelled like perfume.

The old costume closet saw less use than the new; everything in here was covered in plastic, which in turn was covered in dust. Even so, the antique, hand-painted signs against the back wall were still bright and clear: Edwards and Ansehlm, Masters of Minstrelsy, All New Revue. A blackface cartoon with red, red lips and white, white eyes stared forever into that darkened space—an artifact too historic to dispose of but too problematic to display.

I’d gone in there for a push broom, I remembered, which I’d seen reclining against a wall, and then wound up reclining a bit myself. It felt as if I couldn’t have been asleep more than a few minutes, but when I flipped open my phone, I found more than an hour had passed. It was nearly two in the morning. 

By the light of its screen, I noticed the way the bricks in one corner of the old costume closet were slightly different from the ones around it, the way they formed an arch. Once, it seemed, there had been a door there—but a door to where? As far as I knew, there was nothing on the other side of that wall but the building’s elderly, increasingly temperamental furnace.

I was still wondering as I shrugged into my backpack in the green room, headed home for the night. The boiler room was ticking, clicking, and the air down there felt pressurized; I could feel it in my ears. 

Then, all at once, that faulty old furnace roared to life—as if waking, after a century of sleep, to cough up something stuck in its craw.

VII. Signs

Walking home from the theater, I cut through the parking lot of Cassidy’s and found my friend Benson smoking beneath the street light. I asked him what he was doing out so late on a Tuesday night, and he smiled his crooked smile. “Looking for Mr. Right.”

“I thought it was Mr. Wong.”

“Mr. Wong went back to San Francisco. Mr. Right is right here.”

“How do you know he’s Mr. Right?”

Benson gave me the side eye, bemused. “Not right as in right. Wright as in Orville. Fly boy.” He made the motion of an airplane taking off. 

“Really?” Somehow, it was hard for me to imagine Benson—a reference librarian at the Prescott Public, who’d been in a community theater production at the Orpheus that fall—with one of those ROTC boys from Embry Riddle. “You fell for a jarhead?”

Benson stubbed out his cigarette, even as he reached for his pack. “Well,” he said, “if the lid fits.” And he laughed in that endearing yet dickish way he had.

Benson Yazzie was Navajo—Diné, I reminded myself—and it occurred to me maybe he might know something about the animal fetish I’d found.

“Hey,” I said, “check it out.” And reached, without thinking, into my back pocket, the same way he had reached for his smokes. As if I’d known that little stone lizard would be there. As if, of course it would.

Unlikely as it may seem, it was.

“Huh.” Benson took the little lizard from me and set it in the palm of his hand. “Zuni, I’d say. Or maybe Cheeno.”

“Cheeno?”

“Chinese.” 

“Like Mr. Wong?”

“I believe Mr. Wong’s father is from Taiwan.”

“Oh jeez,” I said, “sorry.”

“No problem,” he said. “All yellow people look alike to me too.”

His face was expressionless, his tone flat. Was he joking? Was he not? With Benson, I could never quite tell. Like the part he’d played in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief: Benson was a good actor, and he’d played the part straight, but once you got to know him better, you realized that might have been his idea of a joke.

A group of women in bedazzled jeans swept past us on the way to their car, and one of them turned and flashed Benson her smile. For some reason, the dude was a magnet for drunk white ladies twenty years his senior, like he was some kind of exotic dish they’d been meaning to try.

And yet, even as I stood there thinking that—about how weird it must be, to have white people project these weird ideas onto you because of your nonwhiteness—I wanted to ask him whether he thought maybe this little stone lizard might have come to me because the lizard was my spirit animal. Like, if he thought my finding it was possibly a sign. 

Which was clearly not the right question to ask. The right question might have been something along the lines of, Do you think it’s possible that I’m dreaming right now? 

Or, Have you ever heard of anyone who was a kleptomaniac in their sleep? 

Or even, Have you ever seen anything that looked like an old tunnel in the basement of a building downtown?

Instead, I was about to ask this dumb question, which of course wasn’t a question at all—it wasn’t like I was even asking his opinion on the subject. I just wanted him to endorse the opinion I already had regarding this lizard fetish I’d found, that it was a sign, intended just for me, some type of animal medicine that would heal me of the sadsickness.

As I was trying to find the words for this dumb thing I wanted to say, I noticed a tall man in a black cowboy hat staring at Benson from the door of the bar—a white man, with his two white friends, staring with what seemed some hard purpose at Benson Yazzie. “Is that Mr. Right?” I asked.

Casually, Benson looked up. And just as casually palmed my little lizard.  “Where’d you find this?” 

“In these tunnels under the Orpheus.” Which at that point seemed easier than trying to explain that I had actually found it in my dream.

“A bunch of rooms? Underground? Pictures of white people got up like Indians?” 

“Yeah.” Which meant—what? I suppose it meant that if I had been dreaming, I’d been dreaming something real. This whole thing was starting to make my head hurt.

Benson kept his eye on the cowboy as he spoke. “The White Corn People. One of those creepy old-time secret societies—all the business owners around here were part of it. Had these ceremonies they ripped off from them Injuns. Same ceremonies we were still getting thrown in jail for in the twenties—those white people were doing them right here downtown in 1880. Snake dances and such. Freaky, innit?”

“For real? Like, you can read about this somewhere?”

At the entrance to Cassidy’s Bar and Grille, the cowboy in the black hat leaned toward his friends, listening. He still had not taken his eye off of Benson. 

“Publicly,” Benson was saying, as he discreetly handed the lizard fetish back to me, “it was just a Moose Lodge type of thing. But in the Mystic Testimony of the Inner Sanctorum, or whatever shit they called it, these people claimed to be the lost white tribe of the Pueblo.”

“Crazy. Like, all those people really believed that?”

He shrugged. “You’d be surprised. There are folks who’ll tell you they’re still around.”

“So…” I said slowly, trying to get my head around this. “The White Corn People. It’s sort of—a made-up religion for white people?”

“Yeah. Like the Masons.”

Slowly, the tall man in the black hat pushed off from the wall of Cassidy’s—which, come to think of it, was a bar with a bricked-in tunnel entrance in the basement, according to a guy in my intro class who used to bar back there. The cowboy’s friends shook hands with him, flashed some sort of hand sign, and left. 

“Benson,” I said, “can I ask you something?” 

He shrugged, finally lighting the cigarette he’d been holding.

“This fetish I found, the lizard—” I slid it back into my back pocket. “Is it—like, did I rip off some sacred Native American artifact?”

He shrugged. “If you did, you ripped it off from the people who ripped it off.” 

“What does that mean?”

He looked over at me—with what, I could not say. Amusement? Anger? Pity? “It means whatever you want it to mean. That’s the idea, right?”

I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but then the tall man in the black cowboy hat was making his way toward us across the parking lot. 

 “Go,” Benson said quietly.

“What?” 

“Go.” He lifted his chin across the lot, toward the quiet residential street beyond. As if to say, It’s after dark, and you’re downtown.

Only then did I realize that the man in the black hat hadn’t been staring at Benson at all.

This whole time, he’d been staring at me.

VIII. Dreamcatcher

By the time I got home that night I was so exhausted that everything had taken on the tilted quality of a dream. Even so, I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, staring up at the dream catcher I’d thumbtacked to the bookcase beside my bed. It was wrapped in sky-blue leather, adorned with red, yellow, and white plastic beads, and some tacky turquoise feathers that had probably originated on a chicken—I’d gotten it at a truck stop in Oklahoma. A sticker I’d removed had attested that it was Made in China. 

Mara, who was taking a class that semester called Postcolonial Perspectives in Latin America, had suggested to me—told me, actually—I should get rid of the thing, that it was a prime example of cultural appropriation, and disrespectful to the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples. And yet, I’d found I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or maybe just didn’t find her line of reasoning compelling enough to do so. 

I knew the story, that dreamcatchers were supposed to catch bad dreams, that they had something to do with the goddess Spider Woman and were said to protect children. But for me, that pretty bit of commercial kitsch represented the dreams I’d had in moving West. The dreams I’d had for a bigger life than the one I would have had if I’d simply gone on to attend some state university, the way all my friends back home had. 

So I’d gone west, the way so many before me had, into a real landscape, in pursuit of an idea—the West. Wide-open skies. Room to move. Progressive ideals. And instead, I’d found … what? Some very stubborn, very conservative ideas, if I was being honest with myself, just beyond the borders of my college campus. And some very problematic history that felt a little too close for comfort.

Somehow, the landscape of the Southwest felt familiar, felt like home—like it was my place. And yet, within days of my moving there, the sadsickness had settled over me, like dust. 

IX. Kill a Feller 

A coral snake slithered down the hallway, with its bands of black on red on yellow. It appeared and was gone, lost around a corner, out of the corner of my eye. I was being pursued by someone—I was not supposed to be down here. 

Here was the first room, with the bench where I’d woken up. Here was the room with the handcuffs, the room with the lectern, and the room with the book. 

Beyond these rooms were other rooms, I knew, and other corridors—those that led to the Shanghai tunnels of Portland, to the horrific basement brothels of the Tenderloin, to the subterranean speakeasies of L.A., where mobsters stashed their stiffs. Further back still, I sensed, were the labyrinths beneath the ancient cities of Mesoamerica, and the ruins of the cities they’d been built on. All of these hidden histories were connected down below, and it was hard to escape the sense of impending violence.

And yet, I sensed, down one of those corridors, through one of those doors, was the answer I’d been seeking. Through one of these doorways, all would be revealed.

X. Good Luck

Later that day Mara and I met up in the library for our weekly study sesh; we were both psych majors, taking the same two courses, and given the fact that we saw each other so much, she was the person with whom it was hardest to maintain this fiction I’d created, that I was feeling fine, and not in the least bit tired or constantly on the edge of tears or secretly wondering if I was dying. Looking back, it seems ludicrous that I never said anything to her—at the time, Mara was my closest friend—but all those New Age books I’d ingested in high school had led me to believe that my words were spells, that I created my own reality, and that to name the sadsickness would be to make it real.

Still, though, I think she suspected; whenever I tried to smile especially brightly at her, to convince her of my good cheer, she got this concerned look on her face. Lately, when she asked me how I was doing, it seemed like she was actually asking.

“Look!” I said, in an attempt to pre-empt all that. “Look at this.” And as we settled into our study carrel, I pulled that little pipestone lizard from my pocket.

She took it and examined its perfect little carved-in toes, the turquoise stripe down its back. “Weird. My grandpa used to have one just like this.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“At a swap meet in Quartzsite.”

Mara was from back east too, but her grandfather, as I recalled, had been one of those old guys who wintered in their RVs up by the Grand Canyon. 

“Always kept it on him,” she said. “Claimed it was good luck.”

“Was it? Good luck?”

Mara shrugged. “My grandpa got crushed by a tractor when he was seventy-two. I suppose he was pretty lucky up till then.”

XI. Mr. Odd

Odd’s Ends was one of those high-end tourist traps downtown that students like me usually entered only at the behest of visiting family members, and only then to prove we were good sports: the merest Southwest knickknack in that place—say, a decorative chile ristra—ran more than I made in a week’s worth of nightwork at the Orpheus. But I’d been walking past the store that day and stopped, transfixed by a collection of Zuni fetishes in its window—and now here I was, peering into the glass case by the counter inside. There was the white polar bear with the arrowhead tied its back; there was the onyx turtle with the abalone shell, and that pretty little jasper cicada. 

 “Anything special you’re looking for?” 

The proprietor of Odd’s Ends had appeared from behind what a sign announced was a genuine stuffed mountain lion. He was an older, unnaturally tan man with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, in the California style. You could tell he’d been hot when he was young. 

I felt shy then about showing him the pipestone lizard I’d been carrying around with me, the way I had practically everyone else at that point. But that seemed silly; why else would I have come in here?

Mr. Odd peered down at it through his jeweler’s loupe. “You see that cross, carved under the back leg?”

He was talking about a funny little divot, something that looked as if it might pair with a Phillips head. “What is that?” I asked.

“It means it’s very old,” he said. Without actually answering my question. “1817, at least.”

“Wow.”

“Tell you what,” he said, setting the stone lizard on the counter between us. “I’ll give you a thousand for it, cash.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

He considered me. The man reminded me of someone—not in the way he looked so much as in the way he felt. Maybe our landlord when I was a kid, Mr. Bill. Mr. Bill, whose veiny old man’s hands had always held a strange revulsion for me.

“How about ten?” asked Mr. Odd.

“Ten?”

“Thousand. This is very rare. A collector’s item.”

“I—” Momentarily flummoxed, I said, “I can’t, it belonged to my grandfather.” 

I didn’t know why I was lying. It wasn’t like I—a kid from the gas-fracked corn country of eastern PA, digging myself deeper in debt each semester—couldn’t have used that kind of cash. But it was as if I could feel that little lizard recoiling from this strange man’s touch, from the intensity of his bright blue eyes, the likes of which must surely have given those old-time Indians fright.

Finally, with obvious reluctance, Mr. Odd slid my lizard back across the counter. “Are you by chance Italian?” he asked. 

I was taken aback by the question. “No, why?”

He smiled, revealing perfectly white teeth. “Oh, I just thought you might have some Italian blood in you.”

For some reason, even as he spoke, I understood that this man wasn’t really talking about what he was talking about. What he was talking about was the fact that my great-grandfather was four shades darker than anyone else in an old-time formal photograph of my dad’s clan. The proprietor of Odd’s Ends was talking about the fact that my great-grandfather had the same last name as half the population of Greenville, South Carolina, and a complexion my grandmother described as swarthy.

My skin is fair and freckled, my hair ash brown, my eyes blue. But somehow this man had seen that in me. 

Somehow, he knew. 

XII. One Way

I’d taken to falling asleep with the lizard fetish under my pillow, and that night, once again, I dreamed of the tunnels under the Orpheus. Whoever or whatever had been pursuing me was gaining on me; I could hear the scuffle of shoes, a stirring of breath. Worse, I knew that there was only one way out of this place, and I was headed in the wrong direction.

I was, in fact, headed somewhere so horrific it had no part of recorded history. 

XIII. Boon

That night I awoke with a start. It sounded like someone had just shut the front door behind them.

“Ellie?” I said. My roommate was supposed to be spending the night with her boyfriend.

That’s when I remembered: I’d been dreaming about the tunnels again, about the catacombs under the Orpheus. If I had explored the chambers farther back and deeper down, I had no memory of it, but I understood now which rooms were important, and those were the four I had initially glimpsed, the ones that were still in use: the room where fear was inflicted, the room that told the story of the past, the room where the speaker spoke, and the room where the dreamer dreamed. That last was the room where I’d originally awoken, the one with the bench and the animal fetishes, and that room was the thing I’d been seeking this whole time—the temple of the ancient god.

In my dream, I’d seen the way it worked: the water poured in through the vents in the ceiling, which I had taken for ventilation ducts; the water furled around the sleeper, lying there with those stone fetishes on the bench. The Inner Sanctorum. The dreamer slept there, surrounded by water. That was the means by which you reached the causal plane. 

If you did that, you didn’t have to take vitamins or stand on your head or get rid of your EM fields—or meditate on the wrongs that might have been done to your ancestors, or by your ancestors, or the wrongs that might have been done to you—and you also didn’t have to talk about your sadsickness with your mom, your best friend, or the school counselor. You could just go there, to this room, lie down on that bench, ask for what you wanted, and fall asleep—your wish would be granted. That’s what that little stone lizard had been trying to show me; it was the answer to my question, precisely.

It was a closely guarded secret, this ritual and this room. I knew that without knowing how I knew. It was one of the oldest ceremonies, the deep magic not of the Aztec or even the Toltec but of the people who came before. 

All I had to do was to get back to that room and fall asleep there. The waters would rush in around me. The forgotten god of the underworld would find favor with me. I would be granted my boon.

XIV. Stealing

I awoke without realizing I’d fallen asleep again, already reaching for that stone lizard. Quickly, I sat up, tossed the pillows, the bedding, my natty old hoodie with the fraying cuff; it wasn’t there. Nor was it on the nightstand or the floor.

A flash of Mr. Odd’s eyes, their chill blue against that unnatural tan. Had that strange white man’s face appeared at my window as I slept? Had those veiny old man’s hands turned the knob of my bedroom door? Had Mr. Odd loomed over me as I dreamed, lost in the tunnels beneath the Orpheus, and stolen from me what I’d stolen from someone else, who in turn had stolen it from the original people of this land?

Somewhere in the room, something was buzzing. When I searched the covers, I found it was my phone. A text, from Mara: Ellie said u fell asleep in class. U all right?

And another, from Ellie: Neighbor lady reported some kind of prowler. Anything weird last night?

XV. Speculation

But all I could think about at that point was that little pipestone lizard, which I still saw as mine. All I could think about was Mr. Odd.

For a long moment, I sat there wishing I had the courage to confront that man. Wishing I was the sort of person who could walk right into that store of his to see for myself if that little stone lizard had appeared there—to at least force him to tell me some lie about how it had. He had no right to that sacred object, which he had not made and whose purpose he did not know. He had no right to take it.

But I was not, I was beginning to realize, that sort of person.

In the hard light of day, the green room at the Orpheus looked almost unfamiliar, like a shoddy replica of itself. Quietly, I made my way to the old costume closet, avoiding the office, where my boss was no doubt hammering out another grant meant to save this old theater from demolition. If this place were torn down, I wondered, what would become of the tunnels I’d found? Would all that hidden history be revealed, or would it simply disappear from view, driven further underground? 

The idea seemed entirely plausible at the time. I was so tired, it felt like I hadn’t slept in weeks; so sad, I wanted to take off my body and just hang it up somewhere like an old costume. Quietly, I curled up on the water-damaged divan with the buffalo head and shut my eyes. Noting, in sort of a peripheral way, that the old hand-painted vaudeville signs had been removed.

Unlikely as it might seem, I still believed I could return to that room beneath the Orpheus, the one I had dreamed. I still believed that if I did, some ancient god of the underworld would cure me of my affliction. I still believed, somehow, that all this meant whatever I wanted it to. 

There I lay, willing myself to sleep, even as I could feel some ancient evil drawing near. Even as that faulty old furnace began to tick toward its countdown. Even as the pressure down there made it clear the whole thing was about to blow.

An American with roots in the Caribbean and upper Midwest, Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. Her work has been featured, or is upcoming, in the Writer’s Chronicle, LitHub, Story, StoryQuarterly, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her family.

Published October 15 2024