Free Love Enough by Dionne Brand

identical glass of whiskey on the identical banister. When June arrived home that afternoon, there he was in the same position, it seemed, with the same advice in her own house. That time he added, “The other parts are the casualties and the fantasies.” Her father was a bright man haunted by certain failures; certain situations that should have gone his way but didn’t. June and he found solace in the business pages of the daily newspapers. He taught her how to read the architecture of a society in the printed word of passing governments and rising industry. He had been promised a job by a politician for pulling in votes in their area and he had been totally ignored after the man’s victory. That wasin another country, another city. And June has stored this information like a jewel in a safe. Her father might have failed personally but not politically. That is, he had been correct about the world.
    Sibyl appeared a week later to report to June on the progress of changing to another dream. She was trying to settle on a dream strong enough to displace the Clorox dream. A dream such as that, as everyone knows, has to be fairly powerful. It had left her with papery, itchy skin and various compulsions. She was forced to carry around a bottle of Clorox on all her journeys throughout the city, to scour subway seats, to spray bus shelters, door handles, money boxes and railings in the streetcars and buses. She had adapted one bottle with a spray mouth for easier use. Such a powerful dream needed a replacement more powerful still, since it had virtually taken over her entire life, to the extent that Sibyl was besieged by her impulses. She felt responsible for bleaching the entire city. “Who sent the keys?” she asked June, “Did you send the keys? When I touched the first one last night it softened and bent.”
    “I didn’t send the keys,” June told her, and then she asked the woman, “Did you see a door anywhere?”
    “I told you, there’s no door.” Sibyl was radiantly annoyed with June.
    “Well,” June said, “I think you have to find a door for the key.”
    “Anyway, forget the keys, they don’t help. There’s no door I said!” Sibyl glowed with anger and then subsided. “I’m here about the magnesium and mercury. I have to swallow magnesium and mercury and everything will turn out right.”
    “Who says?” June asked. Why was she in this negotiation, this relationship, with this woman?
    “Do you know where I can find magnesium and mercury?” Sibyl asked. That’s all she wanted, June now saw. She had lost credibility asking about a door.
    “Mercury is not good for you,” June said, “they’ve found it in dead fish.”
    “You don’t know that for sure, do you? You’re not a scientist, are you? You don’t know anything. The magnesium and mercury drink is not poisonous for me.”
    At this difficult point, as Sibyl got up to go, Gloria walked by the door, her head rigid.
    “Dream something else, Sibyl.” June was desperate.
    “I have to go,” Sibyl whispered. “I’ll tell you how it works out.”
    Where Sibyl spent her other days June did not know. Sibyl detailed her dreams, not her whereabouts. She mustlive somewhere, June thought. She could not live on the streets, her Clorox fetish would not work there. Sibyl had told her she’d been thrown out of several shelters because of her habits, compelled as she was to sanitise each space she occupied and the paths leading to it. She had tried to adjust. She carried small perfume bottles to disguise her Clorox. One small green bottle from Christian Dior, one atomiser from DeVilbiss, one Givenchy bottle and one eau de cologne by Elizabeth Arden. She showed them to June as you would jewellery, a certain pleasure beaming through her damaged face. These bottles, of course, were not hers to begin with—she’d acquired them through various means June could only guess at. The atomiser was Sibyl’s favourite—she did tell June she had swiped that one