IGMS Issue 33 Read online

  Our family never owned a car, so even the school bus ride over the Manhattan Bridge and up the east side of Manhattan was a novelty. It was a brilliantly sunny day in late April, and the East River was a sparkling blue ribbon stitched with the foamy white wakes of tugs and powerboats.

  But if the ride was enjoyable, I was speechless when we turned off of 85th Street onto Fifth Avenue. The museum is set into the east side of Central Park, facing Fifth Avenue. It has a huge limestone façade with paired columns, and adorned with medallions, caryatids and gargoyles. The bus hadn't even stopped moving and I was itching to get out and draw that façade.

  There was the usual lining up and being counted by the nervous mothers along as chaperones. Each of us received a little blue metal medallion with a white letter "M" on its face to clip on our shirts as proof of admission. I still have mine.

  After what seemed like an interminable wait, but was probably less than five minutes, we met our tour guide, Nancy, a gray-haired woman in slacks and a tweed blazer.

  "Who's been to the museum before?" Nancy asked. I think one hand went up.

  "Oh, you're going to love this!" she said. "This is the best place in the world."

  She wasn't faking it -- you could tell from the relaxed, happy expression on her face. I might be a more religious person today if one priest or nun in my years in the Catholic penal system had shown a fraction of that genuine enthusiasm for matters of the spirit.

  In retrospect, Nancy was not only enthusiastic, but knew exactly how to pitch art to a mob of easily-distracted grade schoolers. Rather than lectures about provenance and technique, she gave us digestible bits of information that helped us form the beginnings of a context for the works we were looking at.

  "The man who made this statue of the Discus Thrower probably died 500 years before Christ was born," Nancy said. "It is old. The man who made this might have been a slave -- a quarter of the people in Greece then were slaves -- and he lived on bread, wine, fruits, vegetables and maybe some fish. He would eat meat, probably lamb, only on special holidays."

  The second floor of the museum is a rabbit warren of galleries, and I didn't realize that we were headed for Guardi's Fantastic Landscape pieces until I was standing in front of one of them. For the first time since we arrived, I completely tuned Nancy out.

  Seeing them in person confirmed what I already knew. Francesco Guardi had been to Dreamland, and these paintings were visual records of his travels. I don't know how long I lost myself in those landscapes; I didn't come out of my trance until Father Clem put his hand on my shoulder.

  "Come on, partner, there's more to see," he said gently. I looked around and realized that Nancy and the rest of the group were gone.

  I didn't say anything as I followed him out. I felt like sitting on the floor and crying with homesickness.

  The Temple of Dendur is a whole Egyptian temple relocated to New York and rebuilt a stone at a time inside the glass atrium on the first floor of the museum. Nancy ended the tour there, and we all sat around the low stone benches that ringed the temple, resting our tired legs.

  You can't go into the temple itself -- red velvet ropes and plexiglass panels block off the interior from the wear of millions of tourists' feet and oily fingers. I was sitting in the bright greenhouse sunshine opposite the temple's entrance, feeling sorry for myself. Guardi had again inflamed my ache for Dreamland.

  When I caught the first flash of movement inside the temple, I assumed it was a reflection off the plexiglass. It took me a moment to realize that I was somehow looking through the temple, and into a landscape beyond, where a cloud drifted across the sky.

  I didn't blink, I didn't breathe. I was looking into Dreamland. I stood up slowly, afraid that the motion would disturb the vision, but the green hills and high, blue sky stayed right where they were, framed by the temple's sandstone pillars.

  I wasn't even conscious of stepping over the velvet rope until someone took me by the arm.

  "Come on now, boy." He was a tall, shaven-headed guard with a Caribbean accent. "You're not supposed to go in dere."

  I looked back into the temple -- there was Dreamland, just a few tantalizing feet away. But there was no resisting the guard, whose hard muscles were obvious even through the blue polyester uniform.

  "You can look from out here now," he said, gently but firmly steering me back beyond the ropes.

  I wanted to scream with frustration. I toyed with the idea of plunging back in as soon as he let my arm go, but he hovered too close, obviously reading my intentions.

  I went back to the bench and got out my sketch pad. With shaking fingers I tried to capture every detail I could see through the narrow temple entrance. I was still at it when Father Clem herded us back to the bus, drawing furiously to hold on to Dreamland.

  Kevin Lester's funeral mass was on a Thursday morning. It was supposedly an accident: he'd slipped in front of an oncoming F-train at Jay Street. I knew differently. Kevin had finally escaped from whatever was tormenting him.

  My father came to the church, miraculously sober and dressed in his one and only suit.

  "What are you going for?" my mother said when the note came home about the mass. "You don't even know the kid."

  "I'm not going for the kid," he said, mingled pity and contempt for my mother in his voice.

  At the church my father sat in the back with the other adults, and he turned to look at me as my class filed in. I was struck by the subdued weariness on his face. To this day I'm not sure whether he attended the funeral mass for my sake or his own.

  All the kids in church looked shaken, too, including Roger Rogers, who'd regained some of his status as class joker-slash-bully since our little encounter. He didn't avoid me, but he didn't go out of his way to talk to me, either. He could still be mean, especially to some of the smaller kids.

  It was strange thinking of Kevin lying in the bronze casket in the center aisle of the church. I wondered if he was messed up from the train, then pushed the image out of my mind. I was sorry he was dead, and felt bad all over again about getting him in trouble.

  Kevin's mother and father sat in the front pew. His mother cried softly through the whole mass. His father sat erect and unmoving, except to kneel and stand as the service required. When they walked out of the church I dared a look at his face, hard and expressionless as a fist.

  "Hey partner, whatcha eating?" Father Clem asked, slipping onto the bench opposite me in the lunchroom.

  I'd been sitting there, half a salami sandwich in my hand, unable to swallow past the lump of sadness in my throat.

  "I feel bad for Kevin," I blurted out.

  "I know," Father Clem said. "Me, too. He was a good kid."

  I wanted to cry. I mean I knew Kevin wasn't a "good" kid, not most of time I'd known him since first grade, but I knew what Father Clem meant.

  "He was just . . ." I didn't know what I wanted to say. "It shouldn't have happened." I was mortified to realize that tears were starting to run down my face right in the middle of the lunchroom. I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose.

  "It's okay," Father Clem said. "It's okay to feel sad. It's how we let Kevin know we miss him."

  "You think he knows?" I said, my voice shaky.

  Father Clem reached across and squeezed my arm. "I think he went to a better place," he said.

  I felt comforted by Father Clem's hand, warm and firm on my shoulder. Neither of us said anything for a minute or two, then the bell rang.

  I looked around to see if the other kids had noticed me crying to Father Clem, but they all seemed wrapped up in their own little worlds that day.

  "Do you really think Kevin is in heaven?" I asked as I got up.

  Father Clem gave me an odd little smile. "Who said anything about heaven?" he answered as he walked away.

  I walked home from school that day, even though it was raining lightly. I wanted to be alone. I was sad, and I didn't want to be at home, where the anger and tension radiated off my mother a
nd father like x-rays. I kept turning Father Clem's parting words over and over in my head. Could a priest not believe in heaven? Could he know something about Dreamland? I didn't even know how to begin to ask those questions of an adult, much less a priest.

  I walked over to Bedford Avenue, though it took me out of my way, so that I wouldn't have to walk past the lot. There was a house on Bedford and Clifton Place that some of the kids called the Addams Family house -- a run-down Victorian with an overgrown yard. The house had boards nailed over the windows, and broken glass littered the walkway.

  It wasn't an inviting place, but that day it suited my melancholy mood. I pushed past the broken wrought-iron gate and stood in the front yard. An ancient elm tree leaned against the side of the house -- or maybe the house leaned against the tree -- under which there was a dry patch carpeted with years' worth of fallen leaves.

  I sat under the tree in a brown study, not particularly thinking of anything, when I realized I could hear birds singing. That was a little strange, as it was in the middle of an afternoon rain shower, but I recognized those calls -- they were stiletto birds.

  Heart thumping in my chest, I followed the birdsong around to the back of the house. The rear of the property was a riot of overgrown grass, small trees, and shrubbery gone feral. Trying not to get my hopes up, I pushed my way into the middle of the yard, oblivious to the rain and the wet plants soaking my pants.

  The birds' singing seemed to be coming from everywhere, but all I saw ahead of me were more head-high tangles of weeds and bushes. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they were just ordinary birds. My heart sank with the feeling that it was just a yard. Then I heard the water.

  I came out of the bushes about fifty feet away from the Down River. The familiar green landscape rolled away from me to the horizon. As always, the sun was warm and bright in a blue sky.

  I sat in the pale green grass, choked up with joy and gratitude. I took in the rich scents of earth and grass and water were like they were wine. Home.

  In the first week of eighth grade I discovered another entrance to Dreamland, through the cellar steps of a shuttered liquor store on Myrtle Avenue. By December I'd discovered two more -- always in places abandoned or ignored by other people.

  The summer before high school I got a job at a road construction company, running little errands and spending as much time as I could around the surveyors, then dashing out after work to try out new tricks in Dreamland. When I left, one of the boss's sons, Gene, let me have an old, cracked transit.

  I was never home in high school. I discovered the joys of schoolwork from a handful of patient, overworked teachers at Abraham Lincoln, and the real world started to seem a little bigger and brighter. I discovered girls, too, and how little sleep I really needed in balancing school and life and my explorations in Dreamland.

  Sometime in my senior year it occurred to me that my parents, especially my father, had been shrinking gradually. His hair was now mostly white, and I was a head taller than him. His smoker's cough turned into emphysema, then pneumonia, with long stays in the loud, open wards at Coney Island Hospital. I knew he was really sick when they moved him to a private room.

  My father's death, the pathetically small funeral and alcoholic embraces of relatives we hardly knew, seemed to have almost no effect on my mother, other than making her more fantastically determined to wring unhappiness out of life. She will live to be 100, every one of her days an acid bath.

  This is me at fifty years old, sitting on a hill in Dreamland, capturing the long shadows of the trees on a green meadow. It is no longer morning by the sun's position, but four o'clock, I'd say, having moved across the sky in insensible increments over the years.

  I make a good living from my art and books, especially An Atlas of Dreamland, a giant coffee-table volume with color plates that costs a shocking amount of money. Over the years I've learned not to panic when a door to Dreamland closes or disappears; another one inevitably opens. Every now and again I see a piece of art, or read a book that I think must be created by a fellow traveler. I have never seen another living person here.

  I don't know why I have the gift of entering Dreamland when others do not. I don't think it springs from any special virtue or talent on my part. Over the years I've made peace with that mystery, among others.

  I sit in my patch of dappled sunlight, surrounded by my hills and plains, absorbed in work I've done all my adult life and yet, pleasurably, have infinite room to improve. There will always be blank spaces at the edges of the map.

  The Other City

  by J.S. Bangs

  Artwork by M. Wayne Miller

  * * *

  The man stumbled through the gates of Salem with a bundle in his arms. "Let's eat him," the boys said and scampered down the grassy hill to the wall, hooting and hollering and grabbing sharp sticks and stones as they went.

  Jeska picked her way carefully down the slope, and got to the bottom just in time to say, "Wait."

  The man cowered beneath the thirty-foot iron wall that guarded Salem. He clutched the blanketed bundle to his chest. The boys threw stones, but held back when Jeska scolded them. They knew to respect her fifteen years. But Little, a boy too young to have earned a real name yet, could not restrain himself, and he threw one last rock that glanced off the man's forehead.

  "Ow," the man said, and jerked back. He jostled the bundle, and it let out a plaintive cry.

  "Look what you've done," Jeska scolded Little. She smacked him on the cheek, but lightly. Little was her favorite. She walked up to the man and peered over his shoulder at the tiny, pink, squealing baby.

  "Where did you get that?" she asked.

  "Leave us alone," he said. He fussed with the child to try to calm it, but it only screamed the louder.

  "Can we eat him?" one of the boys called out.

  "Quiet," Jeska snapped. The man did look like good food, with a healthy face free of cancer and parasites, straight limbs and unscabbed skin. He had a little fat around his waist, which Jeska had never seen before. But he was much taller than Jeska, and looked strong. She could never take him down with the boys, unless they surprised him when he slept. She was more interested in his soft clothing and the belt of precious leather at his waist. And she wanted to hold the baby.

  "Do you know the mother of that baby?" she asked.

  "Of course I knew the mother of the baby," the man sad. "It's my child."

  "What do you mean it's 'your' child? Are you going to eat it?"

  "I'm not going to eat him!" He gaped at her with a red, horrified face. The baby wailed.

  Jeska was taken aback. She had never seen a man take a child, except for food. "Some wild boys ate my baby four days ago. But what are you doing if you're not going to eat it?"

  The man studied Jeska for a very long time, lingering on her swollen breasts and black, callused feet. "Somebody ate your baby?"

  "Yes."

  The man put his hand to his forehead. "And don't you care?"

  "I have other things to worry about." She wasn't prepared to take care of a child right now, with her sisters dead and four little brothers to care for. She comforted herself with this truth in the lonely nights when her breasts ached.

  The child's wail rose again. Jeska said, "He's hungry. Let me take him."

  She reached for the baby, and the man shrank back. He eyed her with suspicion. "Are you going to -- to hurt him?"

  "No. I'm going to feed him."

  He cautiously extended the child to her. She held the child to her breast, and he sucked with greedy hunger. It took a little while for her milk to come, but soon the child nursed. The man watched with wonder and relief.

  "Where is his mother?" Jeska asked.

  "She died giving birth."

  "Then why do you have the baby?"

  "Because I wouldn't let them kill him."

  "Who are they? Did they want to eat him?"

  The man laughed bitterly. "Only metaphorically. They are the matrons of Salem. Because
the child is deformed, it cannot live in the pure city."

  Jeska hadn't noticed that the child was deformed, but she looked again. The right foot was bent in and warped, and the first three toes grown together. "That's all? But every child has something like that." Three fingers of her own left hand were curled and fused.

  "But you live in the Polluted. I lived in Salem." He turned to the dull metal walls of the city and shouted, as if hoping the inhabitants would hear. "Salem, the New Garden! Where the water is clean and the earth bears unpoisoned fruit. No place for the deformed, the mutant, the fruit of our forefathers' sins." He slumped against the wall. "When I wouldn't destroy the child, they expelled us. Do you understand?"

  She didn't, but she nodded anyway. "What is your name?"

  "Danyel."

  "I am Jeska. Would you like to join our family?"

  "What family?"

  "Me and the boys." She tossed her head towards the boys behind her, who had lost interest and started hunting bugs in the grass. She hoped the man would say yes. Since her sisters had died, she desperately needed a big brother or sister.

  But Danyel shook his head. "I'm going to the Other City."

  "Oh. What's that?"

  The man sighed. "Probably a legend. In Salem we have heard of a city to the south, past the desert, where civilization still lives. Sometimes people leave seeking the Other City. But no one ever comes back."

  "Oh," Jeska said. "We know about that. We call it the City Without Walls."

  Danyel's eyes brightened. "Then you know where it is?"

  "Well, no. No one knows where it is. But we have heard the rumor."