Fantastic Metropolis

Susan saw him coming from a long way off. He wore a red checkered shirt, blue jeans and boots; his long dark hair was tied in a ponytail. About to go in what looked like a hotel, he stopped, tilting his head to one side. A man stopping on his way through her dream, staring just a little as if there was something odd about her, as if he’d grown up playing a different game than she, but thought he might still like to teach her his rules. The man stared and stared, as if through layers of dream, or of glass. Like stop-motion photography, she thought inexplicably.

Wind turbines mounted high on tall poles lined this, what appeared to be the main street, powering, Susan guessed, gear-work mechanicals inside the compact wood-frame buildings. She peered through the heavy, uneven glass windows of storefronts and read signs; there was a smith, a tailor, a bakery, a pottery, a shoemaker, a sail-maker, and a furniture store, but of all these establishments the hotel was by far the biggest, and the man still stood there, his hand on the door as if he might go in, but not yet. Still looking at her look.

A stream tumbled down from hills that climbed behind the town, turned a huge wheel beside the hotel, ran under a bridge across the main, unpaved road, and down water carved steps to the sea, hidden behind a breakwater. She could hear the stream join the surf there, crashing against the water wall. The young man let the hotel door swing shut, was approaching her as she’d somehow known he would.

“Are you Susan?”

“Yes,” she said, pleased but somehow not surprised he knew her name, not here, not now.

“Care for a cold beer?” he asked. “I’m Stiv, by the way.”

“Hi Stiv,” she said, and “Cold beer sounds good.” Didn’t tell him she didn’t go for beer with strange men. But if a dreamboat invited you for a beer you had to go, didn’t you? Besides, he was beautiful. And he might be someone important. In the dream. In her painting. For Marina. In all three together; in her life. If she turned him down, explored the town alone, or tried to wake up, she’d never know if any of it was true. Of course he might yet turn out to be an evil astral murderer, and not a cute guy in handmade boots, smelling of sea spray and linseed oil.

He showed her to a table, pulling out a chair for her with a courtliness that seemed either European or otherworldly. He went to the bar and came back with beer as he’d promised; two hand-blown green glass bottles, like all the windows she’d seen here, slightly uneven and more memorable because of it, with pretty hand-screened labels that read “Green Turtle Ale.” The beer tasted so good and was so cold she laughed out loud, forgetting one can’t taste in dreams. He raised his eyebrows, questioning.

“It’s excellent. The bottles are so beautiful. And the labels—who drew these turtles? Everything here seems made with such care, such attention to detail, love even.” Susan had never talked so much in a dream before; so many words felt odd, clunky, in spite of having spilled out as easily as life. She expected this pretty, cosy world to shatter before her eyes as if she’d broken a glass vase by singing too high a note, but it didn’t and she was grateful. Smoothed the table with her hands; it felt wooden, hefty, dense, mostly comforting. The speedy vertiginous sensation receded, a little.

“Have you got a lot of breweries in the hills?” Stiv asked.

“The hills?” Back outside she’d seen them, climbing behind the town, densely forested, white runnels of waterfalls marking them here and there. He thought that was where she was from and she didn’t know how to answer. Afraid to lose him, the moment, a room full of excruciatingly beautiful handmade things, from a world so long lost she’d never find it again, or perhaps it never existed, ever, in her world. “It’s cool in here,” she deflected, “which is nice, but couldn’t we sit outside somewhere? You don’t think I’m being rude, do you?”

“Of course we’ll go outside if you prefer,” Stiv said, and pulled her chair out for her again. As they walked she stopped to look at framed drawings on the walls. There was a toaster, a hair-dryer, a lawn-mower and a four door family sedan. Each was done in what appeared to be felt pen, in red and blue and green.

“Who did these?” she asked. Exploded diagrams of electric motors from the gods.

“Grandfather,” Stiv said a little wearily, as if he’d seen them once too often. “This way,” he said, gently propelling her, his words still like bells or water over stones.

She smelled his breath on her cheek, was willingly swept up again into the strangeness. She glanced at the far wall and then out the window again by way of checking; once more the world clouded a little, filled with fog.

And then they pushed through the back door, a rusty screen door on squeaking hinges; like so many things here it was made of dark, heavily polished wood.

The blinding sunlight. Her eyes hurt.

“In the shade,” he said.

The table was made of red tin. Wicker chairs painted many different colours, all peeling, dug their way into a dune that encroached from across the path, trying to take over the patio. Or sand box, more like.

In the shade of an ancient mango spreading its shadowy limbs and hearing rusty hinges again, Susan looked up, saw a hand-carved turtle sign swinging there, almost hidden by dark leaves. Like the chairs, it needed sandpaper and fresh paint.

“What do people do here?”

“We fish; we build boats. We farm too, of course, and there’s workshops where we make things people need. Clothes, shoes, dishes, cooking pots, eyeglasses.”

“If you have iron you must have mining.”

“They’re that way past the dunes,” he said, pointing. “I don’t know much about that though; I work on boats. In between working on other people’s I’ve been building my own. Want to come see her? She’s beautiful.”

“I’d love to,” Susan said. Didn’t ask, how can we have such a long conversation in a dream? She shivered with the strangeness of it.

Stiv too seemed hesitant, shy, still seemed to find something about her odd, a little unseemly but was careful with it, as if, like she herself he didn’t want to break the spell. Maybe he wasn’t from here either. Maybe he was from Montreal.

“Best beer I’ve ever tasted,” she repeated, not wanting to inadvertently say anything jarring, like food preservatives, or computer, or open-heart surgery. Keep it simple.

“My Uncle Martin makes it, bottles it himself. He owns the hotel and the brewery.”

The beer bottles made beautiful green lights on the red tin table, marked by rings from many bottles. Susan wanted to stay, have another. It was very hot, even in the shade of the mango tree, and the beer was cold as ice. “How d’you keep the beer so cold?”

“It’s kept in a well,” Stiv explained, “cooled by an underground spring, come down from the mountains.”

“You mean when people order beer,” Susan asked, “the bartender doesn’t get it from the fridge under the counter—he winches a box up through a hole in the floor, full of beer—”

“You got it exactly right—the wood is oiled to prevent the box from rotting.”

They left their empty bottles on the table, and this time he didn’t pull her chair out for her: too hard to drag it through a soon-to-be new dune, she thought. “The shipyard isn’t far. You’ll like it; there’s roses.”

“Okay,” and she got up too.

“Will you be spending the night? I can tell someone to get a room ready. They’re really nice. I used to live here when I was a kid.”

“With your uncle?” she asked.

“My parents died. Out sailing when a freak storm blew up but we’d lived here too, even before.”

“I’m not sure how long I’ll stay.” She was afraid he’d take her elbow, point her the right way down the path. But he didn’t. Crinkled brown banana leaves, fallen from palms, crunched beneath their feet as they walked.

“They all built the hotel together. My parents were going to get started on their own house but they died before it ever happened. I built my own eventually. I like the peace and quiet, not so many people always.”

She nodded, had the urge to take his hand, as if they’d known one another for a long time, or perhaps used to be friends years before, were just today re-united. The way he was shy and comfortable both, almost as though they were related.

Walking on the sandy path through the woods she could already hear the ring of hammers. She asked him the names of plants along the way. One enormous, gnarled, almost impossibly spreading tree turned out to be a banyan. She sat down for a moment in its shade. A large black bird screamed at them from the upper branches.

“Cormorant?” she asked because of her painting, although it didn’t really look like a sea-bird.

“It’s a raven,” Stiv said.

Ravens in the tropics?

“Did you know they can imitate human speech, like mynas and parrots? Tool sounds, too. They hang around the shipyard, and then you’ll hear them flying overhead, making the sounds of ringing hammers. It can be quite disconcerting.”

Susan laughed. “I guess. So was that a raven we heard, or a real hammer?”

“Real one, I think. Although sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

They walked and he sang. She saw masts, knew the shipyard was just around the next corner, over the next rise.

“In Marina you’ll build a boat,
In Marina wild roses bloom
In Marina you’ll build a boat
And sail for home…”

“What’s the song?”

“Old song. Everyone around here sings it.”

“Where’s home, then?”

“It’s about the other home, Home Across The Sea. No one’s ever gone back, they just come. Or they used to. Still it’s our heritage. No one talks about this stuff, or do they, where you live?”

“Not actually,” Susan said. Nor did they ever discuss a kind of dreaming that fit like a glove, like she was born to it. In-between being terrified, she’d never felt so at home.

“How did people come here then?” Maybe they came as she’d just come, dreaming, and she’d never get back now, like them.

“I was born here. And my parents’ generation. But the generation before, they all drowned on Earth. Woke up here, but still remembered. At least that’s what they say. But a lot of people my age don’t believe a word of it. And some have never even heard those stories. Like you.”

She felt slightly relieved. There’d be a way back yet, unless you could drown dreaming, or painting. Sometimes it sure felt like that. Like when the turtles laughed, or the ceiling rained, or the telephone echoed, oceanically. They sat down on the edge of one of many wharves, listened to the clink of rigging.

“D’you go out?” Susan gestured at the ocean.

“Sometimes. I’m not afraid of the water exactly, but it’s not my favourite thing, either.”

Of course.

He hummed the song again. “In Marina you’ll find a boat, in Marina the roses bloom…”

It was true. There were wild rose bushes hedging the yard, keeping the dunes at bay. Beach roses, they seemed a minor impossibility themselves, like southern ravens. The boats smelled of new varnish. Some were very old, sea stained, hauled out of the water to be recalked. All the boats were made of wood; some were fishing boats and others yachts; sloops and ketches and schooners for hugging the shoreline, or sailing out to sea.

Susan looked in wonder at the clean new ribs of a half-built boat. Something wonderful about a shipyard, seeing the parts of boats usually submerged beneath the water. People, too, she saw, lived on boats they were in the midst of building, strung lines for laundry between hulls. Ladders rose to decks where wooden chairs encircled little tables and charcoal barbecues. In the corner of the ship yard an outdoor solar shower and two outhouses served as washrooms.

A thickening mist was rolling in from the sea; carrying a sad mood, it reminded Susan of her friend. Was Marina here, in a town that was her namesake? The mist, now painted mauve by the setting sun enshrouded spindly boat skeletons, and the masts with their rigging kept up their clink clinking in the evening’s breeze. The sea turned mauve too; sad dead fish floated around the pylons below their feet. Water slick with grease, the smells of rope and varnish, roses. Wild red roses everywhere, struggling in the dirty sand at the water’s edge. She’d thought roses couldn’t grow in sand.

“Is there a beach near here?” On her right, past the boat yard, a scrubby sandy hill, also decorated with roses, led to a point. Maybe Marina, even now, stood on the beach stamping her feet in the rain.

It wasn’t raining, though.

“The beach shifts position, year to year as the currents change. It used to be the rookery, too. For the turtles.”

Susan shivered; ice water poured through her spine. Wondered if they laughed, the turtles here.

“Would you like to go and see?” Stiv asked.

There was something opaque in his courtly manners, difficult to read. So nice she figured he might be like that with everyone. “Maybe in a while. It’s so nice here I don’t feel like moving yet. So, tell me Stiv—both in town and here—why are there no engines?”

“Engines?” Stiv asked, sounding honestly puzzled. “There are engines. A wind machine is an engine, and—”

“I saw you have lots of wind and water power. But no solar cells.”

“Well, solar power would be the black canvas rain collector for the showers, say.”

“Yeah.” Never mind explaining what solar cells were, not now.

But he asked, “What’s a cell, then?”

“Same idea only more efficient. Collects sunshine, stores it in batteries. I’m not much of a technical person and I’m sorry I can’t give you a better explanation.”

“Batteries. I’ve seen the drawings for those. But he didn’t draw any solar cells,” Stiv said, “although I might’ve missed them. I could look through the books again.”

“Books?”

“Of drawings.”

And around and around we go.

“What about cameras?” Stiv asked.

“You couldn’t have those.”

“We don’t except for the one he brought with him. It was the kind that makes the pictures inside so there’s even one of me when I was little. But there’s no more film.”

“Polaroid,” she named it for him. Think too much and it’ll disappear: look, it’s already starting to fray at the edges. Touch wood, knock on it. She did. There was hardly a dearth of wood to knock on, after all.

“I want to build a camera.”

“So build one,” she said, not knowing why; it just came out that way.

“Well, there’s that whole thing with the film and what’s it called—processing? I need something simpler, a beginner’s camera.”

And Susan suddenly remembered the History of Photography course she’d taken at art college, and picking up a stick she drew him the design of a pinhole in the sand.

“It captures?” he asked, astounded.

“Not. It projects. And upside down. But our eyes do that too; it’s the same principle, a lens. Talk to the guy who makes your eyeglasses; he’d understand and explain it better than I can.”

“But I want to capture the pictures on paper. A real camera.”

“Silver emulsion. I don’t know. You’d have to get the right chemical formula, experiment, or I could try and look it up for you, bring it next time I come. If I come again.”

“I don’t have that one. Could I come visit you, maybe borrow it or just look through it?”

Sure. Whatever. But she asked, “Could you visit? Have you done that before?”

“No. Now we’ve finally met, I will. I’ve thought of you, even made a present to bring you. Thought if I did that I’d actually go.”

“You shouldn’t have.” What else to say?

“Want to go to the beach now, see if it’s still there?”

“I’d love to, some other time. But I should be getting home.” Because it’s all too weird again.

“Why?”

“Work,” she deflected. “I’m a painter,” she said, “you know, an artist.”

“Oh. What are you painting right now?”

“A place. It’s a lot like this, except it’s a beach.”

He nodded. “Come see my boat before you go?”

“Okay.”

It was like skipping stones, their conversation. Like going on a scavenger hunt into another dimension, having run out of places on Earth to look. She felt as if she’d painted it and then stepped in, this crazy adventure, this whole gossamer-fine world that felt so alarmingly real. Butterfly wings crumbling in too bright sunlight. Don’t look in the shadows among rose bushes. Don’t.

However rosy they smell.

Still, she liked it so.

If I don’t find her here, I might yet find her cure. If I do find her here, it doesn’t mean I’ll find her Earth-side.

Earth-side. Now there’s a word. Alien. Shivery.

Stiv stood, and she followed, walked beside him back the way they’d come, turned left this time on the track past the largest dune she’d seen yet; children played with trowels and hurled themselves down the sides. They’d be needing hot solar showers before they went home to dinner, Susan thought, else they’d sleep in gritty sheets for weeks. Hope there’s enough water.

“Mashed Potatoes Mountain,” Stiv said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s been called that ever since I was little. Grandfather named it, I think.”

“So that’s where they went.” That swoopy dangerous feeling again, and so she hid from it, asked, “Who do you dream, then?” It seemed a reasonable question, since they were all so busy dreaming one another.

“I dream a painter, a woman on Earth. She paints a gate.”

So that’s what I do with my life. All this time I’ve really been a gate-maker. Maybe I have another life here, Susan thought then, live in a hill village, have just forgotten, or not woken to it yet. Like the foggy corners of rooms it might come clear the longer I stay.

He’d stopped at a smallish ketch, largely finished; Susan climbed the ladder first as she knew he’d expect her to with his unfamiliar but not entirely unwelcome manners. Once on deck they descended again, down the companionway hatch, another ladder into the cabin.

“I’m working on the cabinets,” he said, showing her.

There were two bunks, one on either side of the hull, built into the bulkheads. One of them had bed linen on it, beautiful hand-embroidered white linen.

“I sleep here sometimes,” Stiv said, “when I’m working late.”

She sat down on the bed, looked around the small cabin, humbled by the detail work on the cabinetry. “You’re too young to be so good.”

“I started at fourteen.”

“And you designed it all too?” Amazing what you could learn if you didn’t spend your high school years in high school. Never mind the television.

“I’m not a master yet, won’t be for years but I learned from one.”

Susan was tired suddenly. It was very tiring, whatever it was, like using muscles that had only just been invented. She didn’t want to damage them. Broken butterfly wings. “The sheets smell like roses,” she said, surprised.

Stiv looked sheepish. “My mother Heloise used to rinse everything in rose water. I still do it sometimes, in memory of her.”

“I have a cat called Heloise.”

Stiv glanced at her curiously as though he wanted to know more, but then shyly not speaking opened the one finished drawer and took out a little model boat, carved painstakingly from ends of lumber and glued together. There were bits of string for rigging, and tiny sails hand sewn from scraps of coloured canvas. It was so small it fit into the palm of his hand, and then hers.

“You made this too? It’s beautiful.”

“It’s yours.”

She turned it around and around in her hand, saw on the back a tiny brass plaque with an engraved name, “Susan.”

“You made this for me?”

“I’d been planning to visit you, meet you, wanted to bring a gift. Only you came first, beat me to it. Can I still come?”

“If you can.”

“I’ll try. Good-bye Susan. Be careful on the way home.”

It was all gone then, and she woke in her loft bed, staring at the ceiling only inches away and yet his smile so warm, and she could still, for just a moment, feel his breath on her cheek.

Welcome home, sailor.

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Ursula Pflug’s Green Music is published by Tesseract Books.