Free People Park by Pasha Malla Page B

remove — the eye of the storm, so to speak. So your neuroses interest me. Come, let’s sit down.
    Olpert and Starx followed him inside the suite. The illustrationist seemed to glide across the marble floor.
    Sweet digs, said Starx, collapsing onto a plush white settee. Olpert joined him.
    Raven moved to the window that overlooked People Park. Yet when he spoke his voice seemed somehow inside Olpert’s head: Now, Mr. Bailie, what else fills you with fear?
    What? Else?
    I ask because I wonder what it was about this morning that struck fear into you. Perhaps it is at the heart of something. As I’ve said, as the generator of the experience, all this is beyond me. I want simply to understand. To achieve some . . . clarity.
    Raven’s voice seemed come from somewhere out the window.
    Perhaps we are on the wrong track, said Raven. At the risk of sounding forward, could you tell me your dreams, Mr. Bailie. Your most secret dreams. Are there motifs.
    Sorry?
    Motifs, Bailie, said Starx. Patterns, themes. Stuff on repeat.
    In the scary ones? There are snakes sometimes.
    Snakes, said Raven.
    Though that might be because of Jessica.
    Starx perked up: Who’s Jessica?
    What else appears in your dreams, said the illustrationist — he sounded now high above, hovering against the ceiling.
    Other than snakes?
    Yes. Tell me.
    Something heavy and hot clamped upon his shoulders — Raven’s hands. Olpert tensed, but from the illustrationist’s fingers a soothing, sedative warmth spread into his body. When Olpert spoke the words came slow and didn’t seem his own: Motifs in my dreams are less things in my dreams than things not in my dreams. Absence as a motif. And by that I mean total absence. I’m all alone and there’s nothing else there.
    Raven let go. What else, Mr. Bailie?
    Well I have this one dream . . . Olpert had no idea what he might say. But the words just kept coming, tumbling more quickly now one to the next: I’m on this big ship, as big as a building, one of those ships that’s so big it feels like a mall or something.
    An aircraft carrier? said Starx.
    Mr. Starx, please, said Raven. Then, to Olpert: Go on.
    Okay, the ship’s so full of people I can’t move. You can’t imagine how many people. Millions. And everyone’s lined up for something, but I’m for some reason smaller than everyone else so I can’t see what it is. I can’t see over their heads. I’m a kid. Or feel like a kid, clarified Olpert, though none of this was true, he’d never had this dream, it spilled out of him from nowhere. Anyway, he continued, everyone’s looking at this . . . thing , whatever it is, at the front of the ship — starboard? aft?
    The bow, said Starx.
    The bow, indeed. Thank you, seaman Starx, said Raven. Continue, Mr. Bailie.
    So I want to see it, Olpert said, or at least find out what it is, but when I go to talk no words come out. I can’t ask anyone, and getting to the front is impossible too because the crowd is packed so tightly in. And it’s then I get this feeling, this wash of a feeling, that I’m alone. All these people are united by this thing and I don’t even know what it is. And that’s when the crowd starts spreading out from me. Like we’re on an iceberg breaking apart. Nobody’s actually moving but the space around me just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s not even that I don’t want to move, I don’t know where to go. There’s no one in the crowd I know, no one to go to, but the feeling of being alone like that — I can’t even describe it to you. I can’t. And the deck of this ship is expanding all around me, and the crowd is fading farther and farther away. I stand there and stand there and let it happen, until the crowd is eventually gone — they’ve disappeared. They’ve vanished.
    Vanished, whispered Starx.
    Oh, Mr. Bailie, said Raven, without even pressing you, we learn so much about your heart! Now, continue, please.
    Well then I’m just alone, on this big open grey deck of some