Slumberland
The Candy Kid
“Wake up! C’mon, Gramps, rise and shine! It’s a new century now, don’t wanna miss any of it. And today’s special, real special. I got word from your floor nurse that you hit one hundred today. Ain’t everyday one of Slumberland’s residents notches up the big one-double-oh.”
The irreverent, irrepressibly careless young voice terminated the old man’s uneasy slumber. Accompanied by a waft of peppermint breath, this morning call for attention boomed annoyingly close to his hairy, flaccid-lobed, aged ear, shattering his shallow anxious dreamless sleep.
He opened his rheumy brown eyes to a placid nebula of sunlight, to the smell of bacon grease and the rattle of dishes on a wheeled trolley. He strained to focus on the blurry pink male face pulling back from his.
“Glasses. Get me my glasses, please.”
The kitchen aide declined. “Naw, I ain’t messing with no glasses. Let the nurse’s aide handle that. You don’t need no glasses anyhow just to drink your kinda breakfast. Nice can of vanilla Enfamil. Mmm-mmm! Look, I’ll power up the top half of the bed so you don’t choke, then I’ll put the straw right ‘tween your lips. Here you go—”
The hospital bed motors whined, and the elderly occupant of Room 1905 of the Slumberland Extended Care Facility felt his withered torso levered creakingly upward.
“Enough, enough.”
“Okay, don’t blow a fuse, centennial dude. Here, sip.”
The man weakly sucked some of the over-sweet nutrituous slurry up through the plastic tube, while the kitchen aide watched approvingly, all the while clicking around an omnipresent breath mint between his upper and lower teeth, as if to accent the old man’s own toothless condition.
“Everything cool now? ‘Cuz I got lots more breakfastses to deliver.”
The old man feebly spat out the tip of the straw. “Fine, fine.”
The kitchen aide turned to leave, but the old man stopped him with a question.
“Is it really a new century?”
“Yeah, sure, why would I say so if it wasn’t?”
“And it’s my birthday today?”
“That’s what your babysitter in uniform tells me.”
“Then I am a hundred now.”
“Cool. Well, save me some birthday cake, Pops.”
The aide left, whistling what sounded improbably like some old Broadway show tune from the man’s youth.
The old man lifted a trembling hand toward the fuzzy image of his paltry breakfast tray positioned over him on the extensible arm of a wheeled bedside platform, then altered the course of his motions to smooth the few wisps of white hair trailing across his bald, spotted skull. Sinking down deeper into his pillows, lowering his eyelids, spurning his insulting breakfast, the old man thought:
One hundred years since I was born.
Ninety-five since the dreams began.
Nearly ninety years since they ended.
And just that long have I been searching for a way back into them.
Impie
Every Sunday like clockwork the dreams had come, beginning when he turned five years old and continuing uninterruptedly for the next six years.
Like nothing else in his life before or since, the dreams had come to lend his whole juvenile existence deep meaning, rich excitement. More vivid than reality, they had cast his mundane life under a shadow, rendering the mortal world’s diurnal colors less bright, its successes less joyful–but also, in partial compensation, its failures less painful. All his waking experiences had paled against the memories of his Sabbath dreams. And only when his weekly excursion into that magical other world arrived did he feel truly alive.
At first, the dreaming had come hard. For several sequential weeks he had known the worst sort of frustration. Each week’s appointed dream during this initiatory period started and ended on repetitious notes, unvarying in their clunky monotony. (Although what occcured between the entrance and exit points shifted fantastically, a constantly changing canvas of wonders.)
