“Science is anything but dull,” Ling said. “And I need to test things.”
“These atoms you talk about. What are they?”
“They’re building blocks of energy. Everything in the world, all matter, is made of atoms,” Ling explained. “Even us.”
“What about dreams? What are they made of?” Wai-Mae asked.
“They’re born of people’s thoughts, I suppose. Their emotions. Endlessly renewing, endlessly creating,” Ling said. But she wondered: Could an energy field be generated from all the thoughts, desires, and memories inside dreams? Was that how the dead were conjured? And what happened when you put a few dream walkers inside that landscape? Could their interactions transform dream into reality?
Each night, toward the end of her dream walks, Ling conducted her experiments. First she marked her hands with ash from a fire. When she woke, she examined her hands for the marks, but there were none. The next night, she slipped a few pebbles into her pocket to see if she could bring them out of the dream, but it didn’t work. She’d even tried to bring a pheasant feather into the dream world for Wai-Mae, but when she stuck her hand into her pocket, there was nothing there at all.
“Perhaps some things are beyond testing,” Wai-Mae mused as she watched a sparrow hopping from branch to branch before it flew off toward the shimmering rooftops of the village and disappeared altogether. “Perhaps there are things that exist only because we make them so, because we must.”
Henry and Louis spent hours fishing the river or playing music on the cabin’s front porch, Louis on fiddle and Henry on harmonica. Other times, they’d go for long walks with Gaspard, and Henry would tell Louis all about New York and his friends there. “I’ll take you to Evie’s radio show and we’ll cut a rug at the Hotsy Totsy with Memphis and Theta—you’ll love it there. You get that train ticket yet?” Henry asked.
“Not yet, cher. But I’ll walk over to the Lafayette PO in the morning and see if it’s there.”
“Louis, do you ever remember your dreams in the morning after you’ve woken up?” Henry asked, worried. If Louis didn’t remember, then how would he know to go pick up the ticket?
“I reckon I must. Who could forget this?” Louis said, nuzzling Henry’s throat.
“Just in case, I want to try something. Louis: When you wake up, you’ll remember. You’ll remember everything.”
“Everything,” Louis whispered, and he kissed Henry, taking his tongue sweetly into his mouth.
There was only one uneasy moment in the dreams for Henry, and it was the thicket of morning glories. Every time they passed the purple-blue blooms, Louis would pull Henry away. He wouldn’t go anywhere near the thicket. In fact, he seemed downright afraid of it.
“What those flowers ever do to you?” Henry joked on one such occasion.
Louis didn’t laugh. “Don’t know. Just gives me a bad feeling,” he said, rubbing his head. “Smell gives me a headache.”
But the moment they were away from the morning glories, Louis’s mood lightened once more. He broke into an easy grin, yanked his shirt off over his head, and tossed it at Henry. “Gonna get to that rope swing first!” he shouted, running toward the sparkling river.
“Wait!” Henry called. Laughing, he dropped his own clothes on the grass and ran after Louis.
Sometimes, a part of the dream world lost its color or winked out, like a lightbulb that needed changing. When this happened, Ling and Wai-Mae would concentrate, pushing their energy into the dead portion, and the dreamscape would shift under their hands, warming and blooming.
“My, but that is something,” Louis would say, and if he was envious that he and Henry couldn’t seem to perform this alchemy, too, he never said it.
Above their heads, a steady stream of ones and zeros trickled down like rain, which made Henry think about music theory and song structure and Ling of the Bagua of the I Ching. Whole dream worlds were born of this numerical rain: The ghostly jazz bands of New Orleans’ West End inked themselves into existence against the filmy sky. A swooping Coney Island roller coaster skated a constant figure eight, a memory from Ling’s childhood. A Chinese puppet show appeared, the sticks operated by unseen hands.
It was as if all time and space were unfolding at once around them, a river without end. The borders of their selves vanished; they flowed through time, and it through them, till they didn’t know if these things they saw had already been or would come to pass. Henry had never experienced such a profound sense of happiness, of being right in his self and in the world.