decision but a practical one. I remember saying to myself, I wish this were a dream; but I knew it wasn’t. It was like the dream I had about my father after he died, in which we met and, knowing he was dead, I argued with him over whether it was a dream, and he kept telling me it wasn’t. Now, in this dream, I was looking through a window on a large yard, trying to read a notebook with words written close together in blue ink; a fleeting memory says Sally was in one of the rooms of the house. … A murdered woman, lying in the corner of my apartment, who I had the vague sense of having known. … There was an instant, however, when she seemed to turn her head; and when I looked again she was gone, and in her place on my apartment floor was my desk lamp, lying on its side, the tall metal one that Viv says looks like the kind used in gynecological examinations. For a moment I was elated by the possibility that this murder hadn’t happened after all, but part of me wouldn’t accept this; and in the months after Sally, I constantly had dreams like this, that questioned themselves and their own dream-nature, dreams built on memories rather than visions—not a vision of a woman being murdered but the memory of it. Memories, in other words, of things that not only never actually happened but that I had never even dreamed before; and yet in these dreams the memories were already there, delivered from some place that was neither consciousness nor unconsciousness.
In a little gallery in Baghdadville not so long ago, I found these silver balls. About four inches in diameter, and breathtaking in their uselessness. You can’t look inside them to see colors, like in a kaleidoscope; you can’t put them to your ear and hear the sound of the sky, like shells on the beach that hold the sound of the ocean. As artifacts they’re distinctly uninteresting except for how uninteresting they are: round in shape, and nothing but round; silver in color, and nothing but silver. They don’t stay in one place but roll maddeningly back and forth from one end of my shelves to the other. I bought half a dozen. It was only later that Viv read to me an ancient Chinese legend from the Tsui Dynasty, about winged dragons that flew over China snatching white mares up into the sky and mounting them. Drops of the dragons’ semen spilled to earth, freezing into silver balls that littered the hillsides. Now, after hearing this story, when I put the silver balls to my ear, I hear the sky after all. Now when I gaze into their reflection, I see the embryos of little dragons swirling in a sea of sulfur. At night, when I’m in bed between Viv’s legs, they drop from the shelves to the floor and roll into the moonlight, waiting for its cold gleam to evaporate them homeward. …
Sally is married. I found out a couple of nights ago in a bar from someone who, like everyone else, had been waiting for someone else to break the news to me, and assumed that by now someone had; thus, given the half-life of a rumor between the time it is rumor and the time it is truth, one can calculate it must have happened a while ago, perhaps as far as last spring. I gather that Los Angeles is full of people who have known about Sally’s marriage for some time, and wondered how long it would be before I found out. She called a couple of months back, right after bumping into Ventura on one of his trips to Austin. When he got back to L.A. he told me he’d seen her, but not much else; maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t. She left a couple of messages and I called back and left a message with whoever it was that answered the telephone; then I didn’t hear from her again. Then I ran into this woman in a bar, a good friend of ours when Sally and I were together, and we were talking and she let slip about having been Sally’s bridesmaid. “Bridesmaid?” I said, not sure I heard right over the clatter; but even in the dark I could see her face go from one shade of white to one of red
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