“Okay da.” Joe held out the diaper.
“Hmm,” Charlie said, suddenly suspicious.
He called up Anna and got her. “Hey snooks, how are you, yeah I’m just calling to say I love you and to suggest that we get tickets to fly to Jamaica, we’ll find some kind of kid care and go down there just by ourselves, we’ll rent a whole beach to ourselves and spend a week down there or maybe two, it would be good for us.”
“True.”
“It’s really inexpensive down there now because of the unrest and all, so we’ll have it to ourselves almost.”
“True.”
“So I’ll just call up the travel agent and have them put it all on my business expenses card.”
“Okay, go for it.”
Then there was a kind of wet cracking sound, and Charlie woke up.
“Ah shit.”
He knew just what had happened, because it had happened before. His dreaming mind had grown skeptical at something in a dream that was going too well or badly—in this case, his implausibly powerful persuasiveness—and so he had dreamed ever-more-unlikely scenarios, in a kind of test-to-destruction, until the dream had popped.
It was almost funny, this relationship to dreams. Except sometimes they crashed at the most inopportune moments. It was perverse to probe the limits of believability rather than just go with the flow, but that was the way Charlie’s mind worked, apparently. Nothing he could do about it but groan and laugh, and try to train his sleeping mind into a more wish-fulfillment-tolerant response.
It turned out that in the waking world it was a work-at-home day for Anna, scheduled to give Charlie a kind of poison ivy vacation from Joe. Charlie was planning to take advantage of that to go down to the office by himself for once, and have a talk with Phil about what to do next. It was crucial to get Phil on line for a set of small bills that would save the best of the comprehensive.
He padded downstairs to find Anna cooking pancakes for the boys. Joe liked to use them as little frisbees. “Morning babe.”
“Hi hon.” He kissed her on the ear, inhaling the smell of her hair. “I just had the most amazing dream. I could talk anybody into anything.”
“How exactly was that a dream?”
“Yeah right! Don’t tease me, obviously I can’t talk anybody into anything. No, this was definitely a dream. In fact I pushed it too far and killed it. I tried to talk you into going off with me to Jamaica, and you said yes.”
She laughed merrily at the thought, and he laughed to see her laugh, and at the memory of the dream. And then it seemed like a gift instead of a mockery.
He scanned the kitchen computer screen for the news. Stormy Monday, it proclaimed. Big storms were swirling up out of the subtropics, and the freshly minted blue of the Arctic Ocean was dotted by a daisy chain of white patches, all falling south. Polar vortexes. The highest satellite photos, covering most of the Northern Hemisphere, reminded Charlie of how his skin had looked right after his outbreak of poison ivy. A huge white blister had covered Southern California the day before; another was headed their way from Canada, this one a real bruiser—big, wet, slightly warmer than usual, pouring down on them from Saskatchewan.
The media meteorologists were already in a lather of anticipation, not only over the Arctic blast but also a tropical storm now leaving the Bahamas.
“Not that impressive, this guy calls it! My God, everybody’s a critic. Now people are reviewing the weather.”
“‘Tasteful little cirrus clouds,’” Anna quoted from somewhere.
“Yeah. And I heard someone talking about ‘an ostentatious thunderhead.’”
“It’s the melodrama,” Anna guessed. “Climate as bad art, as soap opera. Or some kind of reality show. Do you think you should stay home?”
“No it’ll be okay. I’ll just be at work.”
“Okay.” This made sense to Anna; it took a lot to keep her from going to work. “But be careful.”
“I will. I’ll be indoors.”
Charlie went upstairs to get ready. A trip out without Joe! It was like a little adventure.
Although when he was out the door and walking up Wisconsin, he found he kind of missed his little puppetmaster. He stood at a corner, waiting for the light to change, and when a tall semi rumbled by he said aloud, “Oooh, big truck!” which caused the others waiting for the light to give him a look. Embarrassing. But it was truly hard to remember he was alone. His shoulders kept flexing at the unaccustomed lack of weight. The back of his neck felt the wind on it. It was somehow an awful realization: he would rather have had Joe along. “Jesus, Quibler, what are you coming to.”
It was good, however, not to have the straps of the baby backpack cutting across his chest. Even without them the poison ivy damage was prickling at the touch of his shirt and the first sheen of sweat. Since the encounter with the tree he had slept so poorly, spending so much of every night awake in an agony of unscratchable itching, that he felt thoroughly and completely deranged. His doctor had prescribed powerful oral steroids, and given him a shot of them too, so maybe that was part of it. That or simply the itching itself. Putting on clothes was like a kind of skin-deep electrocution.
It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping into it through the portals of his senses.
He took the Metro to Dupont Circle, got off there just to take a walk without Joe. He stopped at Kramer’s and got an espresso to go, then started around the circle to check the Dupont Second Story, but stopped when he realized he was doing exactly the things he would have done if he had had Joe with him.
He carried on southeastward instead, strolling down Connecticut toward the Mall. As he walked he admired a great spectacle of clouds overhead, vast towers of pearly white lobes blooming upward into a high pale sky.
He stopped at the wonderful map store on Eye Street, and for a while lost himself in the cloud shapes of other countries. Back outside the real clouds were growing in place rather than heaving in from the west or the southeast. Brilliant anvil heads were blossoming sixty thousand feet overhead, forming a hyper-Himalaya that looked as solid as marble.
He pulled out his phone and put it in his left ear. “Phone, call Roy.”
After a second: “Roy Anastophoulus.”
“Roy, it’s Charlie. I’m coming on in.”
“I’m not there.”
“Ah come on!”
“I know. When was the last time I actually saw you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going in for?”
“I need to talk to Phil. I had a dream this morning that I could convince anybody of anything, even Joe. I convinced Phil to reintroduce the Chinese aerosols bill, and then I got you to approve it.”
“That poison ivy has driven you barking mad.”
“Very true. It must be the steroids. I mean, the clouds today are like pulsing. They don’t know which way to go.”
“That’s probably right, there’s two low-pressure systems colliding here today, didn’t you hear?”
“How could I not.”
“They