She butted out her cigarette, shaking her head.
“No, I had no idea that was going to happen.”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“It was a mistake.”
“It didn’t play out the way you’d planned? Maybe Somchai told you that he only wanted to smooth things over. No hard feelings. But you had some doubts, and that’s why you asked me to come around to meet Rob. For protection. Backup in case, as you say, you made a mistake.”
She brushed her hair back from her face, never taking her eyes off Calvino, who’d picked up the Chekhov bio. He leafed through a few pages be
fore putting it down, waiting for her to say something. Now that he’d laid his cards on the table, she saw a winning hand. She held a busted flush.
“I have a feeling you’re making the same mistake again,” said Calvino. “You’ve worked out a deal. How does that work, when Somchai wants him dead?”
“It works because Somchai’s a businessman. Rob dead will cause him a lot of trouble he doesn’t want. He’s got that message. Letting him live makes him a lot of money. And he’s got that message, too. Men like him choose money over trouble.”
Calvino thought about what she’d said. It had the ring of truth. Guys like Somchai had much the same wiring. He lived like Udom inside a world where violence and the threat of it served a business purpose. Businesses need stability in the illicit world as well as the licit one. Men in that world stayed alive by paying attention and respect to someone bigger than them, more violent, more ruthless and connected. That was the best path, the one less likely to lead to a sheer drop from a cliff.
“What is Somchai afraid of?” asked Calvino. “That Udom’s going to visit him in his dreams?”
“In a way, yes. Dreams explain choices.”
“Henry Miller walked into your dreams and said, ‘Hey baby, put on your dancing shoes.’ You’re getting back your bookstore, and Rob Osborne walks away a free and clear man,” said Calvino.
Years ago, every upcountry girl who worked a bar dreamt of owning a mini-mart. The saddest part of poor people’s dreams was how modest, how threadbare, they were. Dreams woven into a garment that easily fell apart.
“You’re making fun of this. You shouldn’t.”
To the Burmese dreams weren’t a laughing matter. She was right; he wasn’t taking it seriously. Dreams as a social currency. It wasn’t something he’d encountered before—searching for reality inside magical and imaginary worlds, dense and filled with possibility. When he talked with the Burmese in the real world, they dragged their dream scripts with them, using them to direct their actions. He hadn’t decided yet how to deal with Burmese dream sharers and dream merchants. The Burmese, once they started in on their dreams, gave off the “uncanny valley” vibration—that disturbing feeling that someone or something stumbled upon in the real world isn’t quite fully human or slightly more human than it should be.
Calvino looked at Mya, smoking, dreamy-eyed, watching him as he stood across from her. She saw that he hadn’t quite reached the point of deciding what to do next. Most foreigners who entered into the modulated reality of Burmese dreams found it repulsive and ran for the exit.
“Tell me about your dream,” said Calvino.
If stepping into that imaginary world was what was needed to learn Rob’s future, he was willing to pay the small price.
“What you need to know is the dream of my aunt, my mother’s elder sister.”
“And afterwards, you’ll tell me yours.”
She shook her head, leaning forward, one elbow against the cash register.
“Not my dream. My mother’s dream comes next. The one she had on the same night as my aunt,” said Mya. “They came together in each other’s dreams.”
When a woman says her mother and her aunt literally shared a dream, there was only one response: “How did that happen, exactly?”
He thought about Rob dropping acid to reach his own dream state, where visions of the impossible flickered like puppet shadows on a brick wall, firing up all of his senses and remaking the world.
“It started with a barking dog,” the Black Cat said with a Cheshire Cat grin.
A golden retriever howled in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the normal sound of a dog playing or greeting its master. The dog stood guard at the gate. Not long after, a neighbor’s small terrier joined in with a tenor howl. Soon the whole neighborhood of dogs bayed in a chorus as if the ghosts of All Souls’ Day had misread the calendar.
The incident with the barking, yapping and howling dogs occurred at two in the morning on the third day after the cremation ceremony of Mya’s grandfather. On that day five monks arrived at the house, walking in single file. They stood at the front gate at five in the morning, waiting for an invitation to enter the compound. On the fourth day, Mya’s mother forgot to provide a meal for the dead. It had been so hectic, with the monks and all, and she’d been tired, exhausted by grief. Up to that day her five-year-old daughter, Mya, had also left food before a photograph of her grandfather, but that day she hadn’t.
Three monks came to Mya’s mother in a dream and told her she’d forgotten to leave a food offering. No one had looked after her father’s spirit, and he came into her dream to say that he was hungry. She saw her father in a vision, inside the crawl space between dreaming and conscious-ness. He was sitting with her mother in the bookstore, behind the cash register, smoking a cigar. He had a book open on the counter. He read and smoked just as she remembered him doing, when she was a young girl and she and her sister let their father read to them each afternoon after school.
The bookshop exploded in a blaze of colored feathers. A goddess riding on the back of a peacock settled down next to her father. When the goddess opened her bag, she extracted two fish, a goldfish and a catfish, a female and male.