Chapter Twenty-four

        Sitting at the back of the Paradise Theatre, Yvonne observed the converging dream. From her peripheral vantage, she watched the angels congregate. Jamie, Julian, and Angelo McGuire, who were now the angels Leon, Art, and Beezly, respectively, were also stagehands in this dream that was a play. Yvonne yawned, moved to a more comfortable position, and sleepily watched, knowing she was to leap in with great energy and concentration on some cue she didn't yet know, but that would be a while in coming. The whole involvement would be like jump rope, no doubt, demanding timing and causing exhaustion. So she followed the rhythms and conserved herself by her distance from the dream.
        "So what's this play of Lord's about?" Beezly was saying on the empty stage.
        Leon replied, "Oh, minerals, water, air, fire, light, flesh,..."
        "All right! Flesh!" Beezly leered.
        "...flesh and thought and words..." Leon went on.
        "Oh, too bad. That ruins it. Still... Thought and words, huh? Maybe something can be done with that..." mused Beezly.
        "Are there stars in this production?" Art asked. "I love stars."
        "Yes, stars. And humanity. Dust and fire."
        "Humanity?" Beezly sputtered. "That makes no sense. This is theater. This is all show. Man's too dense. All clay from head to toe. Now stars glitter! Better to give lines to mannequins and then set them on fire than let humans act things out."
        "Well, see, the point of the play, the dream, is to make sense of the human. To bring some order to some old wild notions. And conversely, Felix wants to breathe some fire into some dead hopes. The thing here is to play out some humanness. Come up with an image of man," Leon raptured.
        "Shit, that won't be hard," Beezly snorted. "Man's a simple beast."
        "It'll take a lot of art," Art countered.
        "Stop punning on your name. It's arrogant," Beezly reprimanded.
        "Leave him alone, Beezly. Art's entitled."
        "That's okay, Leon. I get this all the time. It keeps me conscious." Art told the head angel, and then turning to Beezly he said, "When I said art, I meant Felix Lord's art. We're only stagehands here. We are craft."
        "And where would a play be without craft? Spirit's easy, genius is easy. Craft is the hard part."
        "Then put some craft in your words, Beezly. There's no genius in what you say so you'll have to work harder at your mouth," Leon growled.
        "Speaking of words, Leon, where's the play book?" Art asked.
        "Just a moment," Leon said. He exited stage left a moment and again entered dragging a huge trunk. He opened it and brought out a huge black book as big as a large suitcase.
        "Wonderful," said Art.
        "Good Lord," Beezly yelled. "That's not labor! That's slavery! That's massive burdensome bondage! I'm going to the union about this!"
        "Shut up, Beezly. This is a dream. Don't you know that nothing is what it seems in dreams? And dreams don't weight anything in the end. Look. Here's all of it," Leon said, taking one gorgeous crystal atom out of the book.
        The three angels gathered around the atom and kneeled when Leon put it center stage. "God! The craft's already in it! What does Felix need us for? He's just playing with us," Beezly exclaimed in a pout.
        "Don't be so serious. It's a play, a dream," Leon commanded smiling, not taking his yes off the atom play book.
        "And look at the art in it! And hydrogen and goldfish, Chinese and otherwise. Venus and venetian blinds. Look! I see the Eiffel Tower! And sulfur. And tincture of iodine. And cacti and bagels and fashion magazines and figs and pyramids and shoestrings. Are those hoolahoops?" Art marveled.
        "I suppose so," Leon answered.
        "That was a rhetorical question, but thanks."
        "I see mushrooms," Beezly said blackly.
        "Sometimes you frighten me, Beezly," Leon said.
        "Sometimes I scare myself. But this frightens me more."
        "Stop!" Leon said.
        "But Leon, he's right," said Art. "You can't deny the fearsomeness in here. It's all there if you look. I see hospitals. Oy! And car wrecks. War! Oh no! Leon, look, war! No don't look! War!" The angel of art was swooning and holding his head like a migraine victim.
        "Art, Art," Leon said. "The goldfish, Art. The leaves on the trees. The white parallels of the picket fence. The veins in celery and the wet smiles of the dolphins."
        "Yes, yes," said Art. "I see them. The lovely, handsome, pretty, beautiful. Those. Yes."
        "Boy is this schizophrenic!" Beezly scoffed. "He sees the homely, ugly, wretched, hideous. But he says the other to exclude there being both the beautiful and ugly. Well, I guess some just can't take it."
        "And you can?" asked Felix, entering stage right.
        "Oh, Felix, how many blue stars would you like me to make?" asked Art.
        "As many as you can think of, Art. But put the book away. Adam will be here soon. Leon, could you go find him? He's wandering the streets in his sleep. He seems to have misplaced the Paradise." Leon exited and Art put the atom in the book, the book in the trunk and whisked it off stage. Leon and Adam entered just then.
        "Dreams are like movies and plays," Art commented at the arrival. "You go to get someone and... whoosh! There they are. None of this heel-toe and pounding pavement and hailing cabs stuff. Just interplanetary instant transportation. Whoosh."
        "Pleasant," said Felix.
        "But things can disappear just as fast, too," said Beezly, talking behind Felix.
        "Beezly, go feed the beasts and clean up after them," the producer ordered. "Art, go plant trees, please. Leon..." But the producer waited until Beezly and Art had left. "Leon, watch over Art, and watch out for Beezly."
        "Of course," said Leon exiting and nodding.
        "And now Adam," Felix started with the waiting dreamer. "Are you ready?"
        "I'm ready, but this place isn't. Where's the universe?" Adam asked, strolling the naked stage, gazing around him.
        "Oh, the dark and light and firmament and so forth? Well, you're a writer dreaming, use your imagination. This is just a little play. Besides, you existentialists love your wasteland so well, I thought a bare stage would suffice."
        "Existentialists? I've never understood what that means. In college I wrote a little joke: What's existential despair? Answer: Existential despair is despairing of ever knowing what existentialism means. Besides, isn't it true, Felix, that at heart existentialists have these really opulent souls? I mean, isn't it just childish disappointment and bitterness taken to obsessive, intellectual, adult extremes? I mean, existentialism and these other -isms. Everyone really loves what's glittery and pretty and rich in their secret hearts. Aren't you going to make the universe? You've gone to this much trouble already," Adam reasoned. "Couldn't you please make the universe?"
        "By the book, eh? Alright, there's virtue in that. Go sit in the first row," Felix said to Adam. "Chaos! Unpaint yourself!" he said to everything. "Beezly! Give us some chaos!"
        There was about fifty seconds of intense and lesser chaos. Though it was modulated to human bearableness, it got the nothingness across. There was a cacophony of whining wind, hints of TV audio and flickering, scraps of rock music, a split second out of a thunderclap, miscellaneous factory din, then shattering silence. Then an electronic voice said, "I'm coming. I'm going," then repeated itself at various speeds. Then there was a scratching sound. Great rats. Rats as big as Quonset huts, it was supposeable. All of this happened in the pitchest black of the undreamable. With shatters of lightning guttering through, but not bringing light, bringing darkness.
        At last there was a sonorous wind on the stage. Yvonne, dreaming in the back row, was hyperventilating with relief. She had thought it was adorable when Adam had Felix make the universe, but she had lost her detachment and found terror when the chaos had pierced the many veils between theater, dreams, and reality. In the sonorous wind Felix spoke: "Light! Good! Darkness! Good! Now the great light. Slowly. Slowly. Like first light, like morning. Ah! Good! Now bring that watery effect down, leaving the backdrop lit. Ah! Yes! Good! Like sky, like seas. Now pool some of the water, making some of the stage dry like land. Oh! Good!" And Yvonne's heart was saying "good, good", too, and so was Adam's with the order that was being made of things.
        "Now, Beezly, let me see the night. The day. Sun. Form it more round but magnificent. Yes! Great! Now night. Give me a moon, dim but great. Good! That marks the night but puts off the dark. May I have stars?" But a bit of chaos resumed. "No, clumsy, wrong! Stop! Art? Art! I need you, Art." Felix called, wounded by the bad work on the stars.
        "Here I am," the beautiful angel said, coming on stage.
        "Come and array the stars. Go to the switches. Tender now!"
        "But Felix, my hands are full of dirt from planting trees," Art worried. "I'll get the stars dirty."
        "No, no. That's good! It will help you plant the stars. It's all the same stuff after all; plants, stars, dirt, switches. Go take the switches."
        "If you say so," Art said, exiting.
        After a moment Felix said, "Oh! There! The stars! Come here, Beezly, and look at the stars with me. Art was made to make the stars." Beezly came on stage, his arms crossed, his shoulders hunched. To him Felix said, "See the darling stars? Light light? See all the blue ones? Like old glass shattered in the desert? It's remarkably full, vast, endless, impossible, hopelessly beautiful, Beezly. There is scarcely a more stuffed reality anywhere outside of the universe. And yet there is so much room. Room is less of a problem than stuffing. It's a fitting paradox. It's the universe! It's as empty as the molecule, honeycombed with space, stuffed with emptiness. And, Beezly, you'll like this: Nothing. That is, see how the sweet, dreamless, whimsical, unconscious, vigilant stars display my wondrous invention? My invention, nothing? Nothingness? What better frame for things than nothing? Oh things. Oh stars. My darling nouns. Said in a vacuum. Written on the night. Fiery ink. My signature voiding the void!"
        "You certainly get into the drama," Beezly pouted.
        "Adam wanted drama, setting, the whole story. And who wouldn't be thrilled with stars? Look at them!"
        "There!" Beezly said triumphantly. "That one died and fell."
        "And so a little space is born; and over beyond that galaxy? A hundred galaxies were just born. Beezly, look at the whole of it. Can you see the big picture?" asked Felix, spreading his arms to encompass the heavens.
        "Yes. No. Yes."
        "And that's as true as it gets. It's a beautiful ambiguity, but sometimes embraceable," sighed Felix.
        "I don't know about embracing it, but I think a bear is hugging my eye. Is that the picture you mean? Is that a big bear there, and that a little bear over there?" asked Beezly, his neck beginning to hurt from staring upward.
        "You're seeing things. I haven't made bears yet. When I do there'll be no mistaking them. But maybe I'm too hard on you. Of course ambiguity begets metaphor. But don't be so quick to find monsters. Look at the stars for themselves."
        "I don't understand. You said to look for the picture," Beezly demanded, looking at Felix now, who was still looking at stars.
        "Let it go. I don't mean anything else but the stars. You mustn't work too hard at what's been already worked."
        "I would rather comprehend," Beezly demanded.
        "But it's too comprehensive," laughed Felix.
        "Then I despair," said Beezly, stalking off stage.
        "That's too much work, too. Despair of stars? Such a contradictory universe! Imagine despairing of inspiration!" And Felix shook his head. And then he ordered days and nights, and he made the plants and animals, all of them, and said each thing in turn was good. And then he called Adam back onto the stage, asking him, "Are you ready now?"
        "I'm sorry, Felix. Your universe is so beautiful! But I need a place in it where I can do this thing you want me to act out. I mean I need ambiance. Where's Eden?"
        "Leon! Beezly! Art!" Felix called, and the three angel stagehands appeared. "Here's what we need: This Adam is a method actor. He wants atmosphere. We're going to have to suggest Eden in stage dressing. We'll make it like a solarium. Bring props."
        "I'll figure it out, Lord," said Leon, and he and the other angels left the stage, returning almost before they'd gone. They each took a dozen trips carrying, pulling, or pushing props. They brought dozens of potted plants from Felix's livingroom, and the one avocado tree that Adam had taken from Jamie's apartment. They brought the globe, aquaria, terraria, and Leon brought the telescope that he had set up in Adam's apartment when Leon had been Jamie and Adam knew in a waking state who this acting angel was. Beezly and Art carried a huge Victorian couch and placed it center stage. Then Leon and Art brought Felix's beautiful, big, elegantly worn, plum colored leather chair and placed it at right angles at the end of the couch. While Leon and Art brought writing desks and chairs placing them downstage and facing each other across the stage so that the couch was unobscured from the audience, Beezly was dragging a bookcase full of books onto the stage. "No, no, Beezly, you don't understand. These people aren't going to be reading in Eden! They're innocent. They don't need to sift through books to find truth or find lies to confirm their own lies. They know everything, though they don't know they do."
        "But, Lord, look," said Beezly, winded, pushing the bookcase with a last shove to where he wanted it. "This is just an aesthetic thing. See how it balances the stage? See the globe and telescope on that side balanced by the books here? If they're innocent, they won't understand these books anyway. What's the harm?"
        "Alright, but I'll put a sanction against the books. They do look handsome. Now, Adam," he said, waving to the departing angels and nodding his thanks to them, "are you ready?"
        "Felix, I have a psychological problem. I have this dream I need to dream. It's separate from Eden, but in a way not. I had the dream once, privately. It's the dream I made public by writing it into Roses and Horses. It was a dream I need desperately to hang onto personally. I diluted its power by putting it into my art. My father was right, you know. That play may have been wonderful, but it was too personal, too real. I gave away my soul with that play. I'm afraid that if you put me into a deep sleep, I'll die because I've given up my soul. It's one thing to lose consciousness, it's another thing to not have a soul to carry you through. I've been stalling you. But it is a beautiful universe and Eden."
        "So you want your dream back?"
        "Yes. Act III, Scene II, if you can."
        "Of course I can. So lie down, sleep, dream, sleep deep, and then I'll waken you. Is that it? Are you ready?"
        "I hope so. Here I go." He lay on the couch and slept. Felix sat in his chair and dozed. Yvonne sat in the back of the theater dreaming away, but restlessly now, what with all of Adam's procrastinations. She understood that he was afraid, that he thought his soul was lost with his childhood so he would die if he became innocent again. She was fearing this for herself as well. She had certainly been cut off from her childhood, too, having been as precocious as Adam, having had Julian happen to her. But she had faith in this dreaming process. And she had grown eager to get onstage. It wasn't a bookcase that was needed to balance the play! It was a woman! Specifically herself. She sensed that her moment to join the masque was coming soon.
        Adam was dreaming the dream he had had when he was seven. On the night before his Uncle Robert's funeral, Adam's mother had held him in a rocking chair, soothing him to sleep. He had fallen asleep held in her soft strength, smelling her soaps and cosmetics and perfumes, listening to her sing Old English folks songs. And he dreamed that he was dressed for the funeral and it was the next day, the day of the funeral. But everyone had left without him, and he was alone sitting outside on the steps to his house. And the sun was so lovely and warm that it made him sleepy. And through the sleepiness, down the sidewalk, Adam had dreamed he saw his newly dead uncle walking. Walking! No burned up legs! Robert walked along whistling, tall, happy. And he stopped and picked up Adam and hugged him to his chest, kissed him and tossed him in the air. He told Adam that it was okay now. He was sorry about the suicide, he hadn't known Adam would find him like that with all the blood. But everything was okay now. Robert said he didn't hurt all the time now. And he could walk. And Robert walked off away, and turned and waved, smiling, and was gone. Adam dreamed this now in the midst of dreaming about Eden. He dreamed it personally; it came back completely unsullied by having been reported in Roses and Horses.
        Tears streamed down Adam's cheeks as he slept on the couch on the stage of the Paradise Theatre from whence his dream had been told to thousands.
        Tears streamed down Adam's cheeks as he slept on his new pencil post bed in his new apartment down the hall from where Jamie dreamed he was an angel named Leon.
        When his tears stopped, Adam slept deeply.
        Felix woke, stood, took the few steps to where Adam lay. He leaned over and kissed Adam's head. He went and sat again in his chair. Adam awoke and said, "God! I never dreamed! What is this? Where is this? How is this? Who? Which? When? Where? Why? I mean, thank you. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just overwhelmed to wake up here."
        "I understand. I'll answer your questions. The what and where of it are that this is a stage, an Edenic stage, in Eden. On earth. In the universe. The how is that I've put this little picture together and painted you into it. The who is that you are Adam--that is your name--and I am Felix Lord, producer of producers, director of directors, playwright of... Well, suffice it to say that I am the creator. The which is that there is no other I nor you nor Eden. The when is that we begin now. And that's all the answers, except to answer your why, but I'm not good at that form of conversation. And you are quite welcome," Felix Lord said, watching Adam curiously look around.
        "Tell me more what. What will I do here besides wake?"
        "Eager to work! That's my boy! You are going to write a play and act in it. But be careful asking what; what comes close to why."
        "Write? What words do I know? I can act, I think, at any rate I can walk and talk. But where will I get words? Do you have a dictionary I could use?" asked Adam.
        "Oh yes! The whole of creation is my dictionary; each level, lever, participle, particle, and part of it are my encyclopedia; my child's garden of information. And they're yours, too. I have placed the universe at your fingertips, your nostrils, eyes, ears, tongue. It'll tell you what it is, and the words will come from thin air and from the bottom of your heart."
        "What is the name of this play?" Adam asked, continuing to look about him.
        "Yes, that's the point of words, isn't it? To name things. The name of the play is: A Catalogue of Delights, Animals, Plants, and Minerals. By naming things, by bringing all the things of the earth and air into your language, you will have a certain mastery over them. I have given these all to you to have a certain rule over."
        "I rule over the earth?" Adam asked, incredulous.
        "So to speak," said Felix.
        "But I am just a...a...what am I?"
        "Man."
        "See? I am just a man. How can I rule over earth? I'd have to be like one of those things.... What are those things?"
        "Stars, Adam. Do you like them?"
        "I love them. But I'd have to be like them to rule over earth. Stars, huh? I thought they were the words from thin air."
        "No," Felix laughed. "But you're made from the same stuff they are from. But you have words, language, so you rule the stars and everything else that's made from them. Everything is made from star stuff."
        "But if it's all the same stuff," argued Adam, "why not call it all the same name?"
        "Because then there wouldn't be a play. How long can you stand on a stage and say 'stuff'? But your whys are making me feel like a kindergarten teacher. Save your whys for when you get to quicksand and fool's gold in the catalogue. Here, sit here," he told Adam, directing him to one of the writing desks. "Paper; pen. Start with the stars. I'll leave you to Eden and your work. I have to go do some things."
        When Felix left the stage, Adam considered the stars. Then he considered his hands. Then he reached up for the stars. Then he wrote. After a while he went and lay down on the couch and fell asleep, clutching the page he had written to his chest.
        After another while, Felix came along and read what Adam had written. "I'll take this," he said. "It holds your heart as well as a rib. I'll fill this prescription. Sleep deeply, this has been very hard work for you. Imagine being in Eden with no Eve!"