The real point of the story

This girl finished her story, her fork poised over a half of a Belgian waffle she’d bought mid-way through, and devoured very slowly, between sentences, gazing in the interim at her fork as if it were a piece of some distant star landed on earth, worth consideration, which is to say, she barely noticed it at all. It had started raining outside while she’d been talking, a loose, uncommitted rain, that seemed to fall in sheets and downpours in odd places, a copse of trees was near dry while a fire hydrant and a rack of bikes was drenched nearby.

She slowly chewed the last bit of waffle and he listened with a vague sort of disgust to her mastication. “So, the body was you, and that’s what convinced you?”

                “Well, that and the presence of the unwatched city.”

                “I see,” he answered, sipping his coffee.

                “What does it mean to see yourself dead in your own dream?”

                “Well, I imagine it’s a sort of anxiety dream, some indication that something is deeply wrong in your life.”

                The problem arose months later at a party on the upper west side of town. A group of his friends was meeting to talk about literature and drink wine, and she tagged along as they were kind of dating by this point, though he wasn’t willing to commit to it as an actual thing. Anyhow, they were all sitting around the house talking about literature, McCarthy specifically, and the subject of dreams came up, and he, stupidly, started telling a much abbreviated story of his new girlfriend’s dream, not noticing the embarrassing flush that rose to her cheeks because he’d had at least three very full glasses of wine.

                And anyhow, he moved through the story at a brisk pace because he couldn’t be entirely sure of the details as he was searching through a dream third hand now. But, he felt, he gave a pretty good accounting of what had happened that particular night and how it had played a central role in this girl becoming a very committed Christian. And everyone politely nodded at the end, and asked the girl questions about her dream, which she answered despite her obvious reticence, because she was, after all, a nice girl.

But anyhow, on the ride home, she burst into tears, and he thought it was because she thought that his friends didn’t like her, that they’d been cruel to her or something. An old girlfriend had been there and perhaps she’d said or done something that had left this very kind young woman distraught, and he pulled the car over, very slowly, onto the shoulder and asked her what was wrong, taking his left hand and kneading the back of her neck, very gently and looking out the window at the stars, which were bright and clean.

And she shook her head, as if to tell him that she couldn’t talk about it, but he told her that he’d like to talk about it, that she was a central part of his life now, and that her happiness was becoming correlated with his own in a very particular way. And she looked up just then, meeting his eyes very fiercely, and asked him how he could have gotten the dream story wrong then. If he regarded her so highly how could he trivialize the very event that she considered to have been the most central thing in her small and meager life up to this point. The point at which she’d accepted her Lord and Savior on the beach.

And, he leaned back and started to apologize for botching some of the finer details, trying to remember if he’d gotten any of the particulars wrong in such a way that would bring forth this much emotion, but really just trying to soothe her by brushing her hair, which she wasn’t having at all, her nose running like a faucet that she occasionally wiped with her left hand. “Why would you lie about Him just to impress your friends?”

“Who,” he asked, not having any idea what she was talking about by this point.

“About Him being on the beach. His presence. Opening his eyes and me just knowing from that light that he’d been watching all along, just like he was watching those tiny people on the brink of destruction. It fails as a metaphor and just become one more involuted and self-referential trick if it’s me on the beach. No. It had to be Him.”

He’d dated his fair share of women that he’d characterize as crazy, but this particular manifestation astounded him. She’d changed essential details about her story, for what, for God knows what reason, and now she was actively blaming him for it. As though he could or should have known that

“What?” she said.

“Like, if it’s just a normal type day and you’re relating this particular dream to say, a group of really interested school girls who are all going to grow up to be marine biologists, is the body on the shore, is it a seal?”

“What?” she said again, wiping a tear from her eye, and forming a nasty scowl by drawing the skin on her forehead in a particular manner.

“I’m wondering what parts of the story are contingent, malleable, audience dependent?”

The story, she insisted was not audience dependent but manifest just as she had related it tonight, with all the people working obliviously in the city and the body of Christ washed up on the shore, seemingly dead, but really, quite alive, and that it had never been or could be anything else, and how could he possibly think that she’d confuse or intentionally muddle the details of what she regarded as her raison de etre for existence. 

Was he insane?

He had drawn that conclusion about her by this point, and he drove her home in relative silence, though for weeks afterward it was if he was in a haze. What could possibly make a person suddenly decide to shift gears, jump off a bridge, change something essential about their character. He acknowledged that perhaps the mistake was his, in assuming that anything was stable, the malleability of the world, of religion, of science, of ideas had been proven time and time again. Why did he assume that people would ever be any different? From that point forward he resolved to try and never be surprised by anything that a person said or did based on previous assumptions, which were really nothing more than guesses, approximations, thick clouds overhead that suggested but could not promise rain. Afterwards, he’d sometimes wander down third and Liberty in hopes of running into her. Why? He didn’t precisely know. He’d have nothing to say to her.