♥

[thene]

d:eletion: FEVER
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We met about twenty years ago - I was still at music college and hanging around with Canary's brother, who got me into dreamsharing because I didn't, don't and never would either use or tolerate people who use hallucinogens or even pot and he was (or claimed he was) convinced I needed to get out of my own skull. I never really let on about what was going on in there, so even if he may have been right he shouldn't have known it. Back then, dreaming was one of those underground pastimes beloved of hackers and artists and hipsters alike, and such things often turn around people with fashionably dubious connections - people like Canary's brother, people who brought along the promise of dreaming with people who dreamed with people. Not all of us were just dreamers, after all. It was worth a try, even if only in the abstract, even if only to find out if I was any good at it.

I was fast drawn to the idea of forgery - it was a method for countless pranks and wild experiments, and I was good at it. (It takes a certain kind of flexibility regarding truth and the reality of what you are, and life dealt me that in spades.) I doubt half the people I dreamed with ever worked out who I was. I first spoke with Canary on one of those evenings; a shy girl in her early teens, who seemed a little overwhelmed by both the company and her own talents, and we spent some time chatting while I pretended to be her brother. We got talking about her real name, which she dislikes; I told her she needed to acquire a new one. Eventually her brother walked in on us and got interestingly mad at me, and a few days later while he still wasn't speaking to me Canary called and told me that someone they knew would like to get in touch with me about a gig, and not the musical kind.

I asked, hating myself for having to try so hard to avoid sounding nervous, if she had any tips for me. "Just be yourself," she said.



Our first meeting place was a park that seemed intentionally ill-tended; he greeted me politely admist the weeds and deadfall, looking strangely neat for the surroundings. I felt him look me over as he asked me questions about what I tried, and what had succeeded. I've always known I have an unfortunate body for quasi-legal activities - pale, tiny, and with a laundry list of distinctive features. I'm too obvious and too odd. My only physical accomplishment is that most people underestimate me - I'm alive and that demonstrates that I'm orders of magnitude tougher than I look.

I had the rare feeling that I was speaking to someone who didn't underestimate me in the least. He soon led me away to the ops room he maintained in an innocuous nearby basement, and we continued our conversation in a private dream of his. It was a vertigo-inducing hanging garden where we wandered on steep pathways and I stared down overhangs at sheer walls of climbing honeysuckle, glimpsing projections above and below. Angular trees swayed, and movements of breeze revealed black-spined maws that dripped with blue nectar. Dreamers, I decided, must get some fascinating seed catalogues.

He watched me shift my identity; I was Canary for a while, and then the pope - he cracked a smile at me for that, and it filled me with the hope of extracting more. He explained to me, with the smooth and deliberate lack of detail that I later became accustomed to in such clandestine negotiations, what he needed me to do. It was cagey on both sides. I was an unknown quantity and I didn't know what he was expecting from me. What reputation I had, I suddenly hoped he was unaware of. My part of the job didn't sound hard, but it involved trust and responsibility, and I supposed that this garden-spire dream was some way of deciding if I was worth the risk.

I knew I couldn't be oxygen-deprived - it was only a dream - but I sure felt like I was; dizzy from the height and the situation, breathing the sticky flower-scents too deep. (It was a dull late winter in the real world, but even back then he had little appreciation for the flow of time). I remember clinging tight to curved branches that draped around overhangs in odd spiral turns. Things didn't grow that way. I tried to work out what he was trying to do with this place, what measures and messages were hidden in the strange environment. Maybe he'd built it because he could - because he was strong enough to make people believe in something this extraordinary and wanted me know it - but that didn't make sense. He had no reason to try to impress me. Was he belittling the realist shtick beloved of both hobbyist and criminal dream designers? Possibly. Or he was describing, in forms and angles, how different he was from them. He didn't care about dreams, ultimately; he saw them merely as tools with which to influence reality.

But up there with the altitude winds blowing my hair every which way, I wondered if his garden wasn't just an impression he was trying to impart to visitors like me. Strikingly impossible, and - as my bare feet protested - freezing cold; a wonderful piece of design, but far too steep to be worth bothering with.

I'm an artist; I knew damn well that I couldn't extract the details of his life from his work, and that his dream probably wasn't what the inside of his head really felt like. But it was what he'd decided to show to people he wanted on his team, before we had a chance to find out anything else about him, and that had to be at least a little revealing. I felt like he was warning us - me - off.



The job went smooth. I had a feeling like diving into dark water and raising up my head to take a breath, and being surprised that I was still alive and the surface was the same as ever; that I'd won. I'd wanted him to know that I could do this, he could trust me, I could trust me, I was good for something other than sex and music. It had been nothing like the games I'd played before; my mind felt bent out of shape by his intents, which spanned dimensions beyond the usual three, and I wanted to grab the experience and hold it but it was too insubstantial, like a dream about dreaming.

I guess he picked up on my dazedness, because he asked if I'd like to join him for a drink or few. I couldn't refuse, and I expected to end up at some soulless upscale bar that would leave me out of cash for the rest of the month, but he led me straight back to his flat. I still remember following him up the stairs as if I were headed into a land of mystery; obvious possibilities ticked in my (feeling bloated beyond its usual limits) head, but mostly I was just fascinated.

There wasn't much to it - little human clutter, little to make it more habitable than the hanging garden in his dream. There was dust inside his drinks cabinet; we spent that first glass in his tiny kitchenette, him cooking while I felt sort-of out of place and useless. He talked to me about the importance of keeping grounded, about having a totem and keeping your post-dreaming hours real and routine, to go home, to act like a real person with a real life.

It didn't make the place seem more than it was. The opposite, really. Emptier.

I kicked off my shoes and looked around while he lined up jars of spices. The one thing he had a lot of was music. I read down a bookcase of titles, detecting tastes that ranged from the excellent to the questionable. I don't know what I'd expected; his kick music was by the Nine Inch Nails, but I knew you couldn't always tell much from that. There was a worn-looking acoustic stashed above the shelves and once we'd got beyond food and into the third glass, I asked him about it.

He shrugged it off. "I'm not that good. I don't have much time to keep in practice."

"You make time tenfold. Don't you make music in dreams?" He didn't; I was surprised, as it had been the second thing I'd decided I had to try. (I was already thinking about toying with dream-acoustics and ambient sounds, something I still love doing; and if you know your client's tastes, or even age, busking for a crowd of projections is a decent way to keep up a cover. No one thinks it odd to hear music in their heads.) I insisted. "There's time right now."

He tuned up and played me something that I hadn't heard in years, and he was obviously rusty and unsure in the light of my interest, but he played like he cared, and I thought of the weather in his dreams - biting winds, summer warmth that faded abruptly into evening, and I could sense the same passion in his presence in both cases. It was tonal, echoing. He meant what he did.

He looked at me as if he expected criticism, and I couldn't refuse him entirely, but I was gentle; I felt a wall of reserve had broken down. I told him he needed to play for me more often and he told me I needed to forge for him more often and that was that. I sensed all the connotations of the word - forging, making, going forward, crafting great fictions - swilled them around in my mouth and swallowed them. There was an inkling of him, an aftertaste at the bottom of the fourth glass; isolated, unpeaceful. He dealt in concepts of reality that few others could understand, and expressed himself mostly in mazes and imaginary savagery. I'd given music back to him. That meant something - we had something civilised in common, a way to communicate that wasn't part of a shared dream. There were multiple truths to be shared. My thinking was getting drunker.

I stopped counting drinks. I stopped being able to count drinks. We stopped drinking because we couldn't find the corkscrew any more. I was drunk and my mind was still dancing from the success of the day's endeavours, so I made a pass at him. I wanted to sleep with his reputation very much. It was deeply enticing to me. I imagined it would be delicious enough to attract subsequent bedmates on the mere strength of degrees of separation (which it was, but by the time I confirmed that I no longer gave a fat flying damn).

He didn't say no. He brushed me off with an awkward determination to pretend it hadn't happened. My frustration welled in a form that surprised me - not I want to sleep with you but I want to understand you - and it was so thick in my throat that I could have choked on it.

I don't remember much more of that night, other than what I saw as my gaze sank to floor level. I told him I'd found it - it had fallen into one of my shoes. I tried to pass it to him but he waved it back into my hand. I didn't understand, but I began learning it on my way home the next day. You shouldn't make a totem from something that someone else has owned, but I did it because I was young and obsessed and I didn't know any better.



The money came via a numbered electronic transfer, and the figure turned me numb. I tried recounting the zeroes a few times. I tried forgetting about it and acting like it wasn't there. The first feeling that resurfaced was resentment. If I'd added up all the money I'd ever spent in my entire short life, that number would have dwarfed it. If I'd added up everything I'd ever needed it would have come out close.

He called me to ask, though not in so many words, if the money had come through. I gave him an indifferent confirmation, and I can only assume that he sensed that I wasn't the contented, minted, new forger on the block that any reasonable avaricious young fool should have been. He asked me if I was free to do lunch with him the next day.

In retrospect, what happened next seems ridiculous. The part of me that never, ever, stops calculating had successfully convinced the rest that I needed to keep my hands to myself from now on, for the sake of my new career. Better for him to brush it off as a drunken accident than to decide I was a nuisance and get rid of me, which in his line of work could, I fearfully reasoned, land me at the bottom of the river. So I showed up in town to meet him, and he bought me lunch at a place that I previously wasn't sure whether to be real or a journalistic cliche, and he resumed our previous conversation exactly like I hadn't inappropriately broken it off. The part of me that does the calculating felt totally confounded, especially when the bastard picked up the tab without me ever seeing it.

Then he took me shopping.

I felt like I was being fed a whole new equation, one that I may never have discovered had I continued trying to construct it solely from first principles; the money didn't matter. The eye-watering amount in my previously negative bank account, the incredibly good lunch, the places he was taking me - it wasn't worth his worrying about. I knew from the night before that he was just as happy or happier staying home. I knew from his home that he didn't accumulate possessions, though he dressed well - maybe that was it, he didn't want such a scarecrow on his crew? Though he hadn't hesitated to take me out to lunch the way I was. He hadn't done a thing to tell me to change anything about myself, only to show me what was now possible.

Whatever. I was going to own clothes that weren't third-hand for the first time in my life. I paid amounts that could have previously fed me for months, and ignored them, tried not to feel them passing out of my hands. He offered advice in between picking out a few things himself, and seemed to greatly enjoy doing so.

We bought coffee and drank it on the curb of a strip of wasteland. He wasn't from the city, and for all his class and money and that the life he led would be impossible anywhere else, he seemed to find comfort only in its green spaces - however small and untidy, they served as brief retreats. He inquired if I'd like to work on another dream with him sometime soon, and I said 'yes' a little faster than I'd meant to. After we parted, and he hared off on the pretext of another appointment, I stayed in town for a while, walking the streets and fuming. The way I'd been treated by him - rejected, sought out, wined and dined and used as a dress-up doll, left on ice again - was somewhere between maddening and fascinating. Three times I'd tried to understand what he was playing at and failed. If there was anything to get, I wasn't getting it. Yet.



We spent weeks frantically preparing for a job. It was worse than theatre - level prep and research and hours spent in dreamsets getting my role down pat. I think he was surprised by the extent of my familiarity with the world of barely organised crime. I took on more of the work, learned as much as I could about every aspect of the dream trade. Canary sometimes came by after school to help us out - testing levels for line-of-sight and elevation issues, the kind of stuff she's always been great at picking up on. She stared at my clothes, a mix of new and old with a corkscrew poking out of one pocket, like she could see my life changing and see it getting closer to his. I worried about her, not because she was fourteen and getting in deep with people who were legally little better than gangsters, but because I could see her trying with all her might to do things he did, bending time through circular motions at the edges of levels, hiding extra dimensions inside möbius walls, structures founded on fringe physics - and getting nowhere. However much potential she had, it was plain to see that she'd never be him and attempting it was only going to destroy her. (I look back on this thought like it's a blueprint drawn on the surface of time; the reality it described wasn't constructed until nearly ten years later, but all that - my second trip to Limbo, her only one - is better not dwelt upon.)

I was still trying to keep up with college, trying to spend as much free time with him as possible because with so much going on the indulgence of it kept me feeling human. (Wanting something I can't have is still the feeling I use to remind myself that I'm alive.) He never turned me away. He started using one of my songs as a kicktune. He needed a forger, and I entertained the madcap idea that he needed me. We talked of what was possible in dreams and what was moral, and he lent me books about string theory or landscaping and psychological papers on why people dreamed; some had it that we dreamed to forget our days as they passed, and I started hashing out the question that would later come to absorb me; if it were possible to learn or plant information inside someone's dream, could one not also destroy it?

(Yes. Well, sort-of.)

When I gave any hints of seeking more than collaboration and friendship from him, there was no indication that he didn't welcome my approaches, and no indication that he did. It was like walking into one of his edge loops. He unhappened my attempts to step closer.

It felt like he was afraid to even try to be happy. (And yes, I understand that a lot more clearly now than I did then.)

I was thwarted, and it made me turn the obsessive pressure inward - I reflected and schemed, wrote selfish things, came up with a new plan. It never occurred to me to give up, and not even because of how I felt about him, but because I couldn't bear the thought of leaving him to be alone. He deserved better than that - better than me, I knew it, but if no one else was willing to keep throwing themselves into that loop, I'd have to hope I was good enough.

In stolen moments, I built a dream. Canary's brother helped me, because he's my friend and wasn't that mad at me really and because he's enough of a prick that he didn't want me to let the whole thing go. It wasn't big or complicated; all it needed was a structure with a lockable door, and a garden. There wasn't much design to it, but the lighting and acoustics were good.

I got through that month the way most dreamers do; by learning to cut back on non-work-related sleep. I had my dream in my pocket when we went on the heist, right beside my totem. It didn't go smooth, but we made it.



Four of us split three different ways - I think the others, both professionals, were thoroughly fooled by his mirages of distance (or wished to be) and I never enquired where they ran when they went to ground, and if he knew he didn't risk their lives by telling me. We went back to his flat. I felt tense and still thrilled by success, poised on a moment before a moment. He was oddly calm, as if reserving half a moment to stop worrying about absolutely everything and simply be. I told him I'd been working on something, and asked if he'd give it a try, and I still remember that shift in his eyes when he realised that what I was offering was dream, not music.

In the dream, it was nighttime and feverishly warm. Knowing I wasn't trying to be an architect (much less anything like him) he was charmed by my amateur efforts, I guess as much so as I was charmed by his music. The details he added to my quiet backstreet - insects and stars, a distant traffic-rumble, projections walking dogs, the scent of city - touched me; I'd heard that it's easy to feel like that when you see someone fill out your dream, like your work's been comprehended and internalised by another mind, but to see him absorb what I'd made in that way meant more to me than that. My moment was happening.

I'd left a key under a pot of roses on a doorstep. Once inside, I locked the door behind us, making one of those spaces where secrets could be found or be written; safes, prisons, homes. He explored; I'd shied well away from specifics, because I'd never lived in an ordinary house like this and didn't know what it should feel like from the inside. I knew little of conventional domesticity. If I messed anything up then he chose not to mention it. Part of me was waiting for him to judge me for not knowing something, either about dreams or about real life, but he projected nothing but an acceptance that made me recklessly bold.

I watched him interpret the inside-space. The walls had a faint metallic sheen, like he knew exactly what they meant and was no more than superficially putting it out of mind. He wouldn't quite look me in the eye. He stared out of an upstairs window at the garden lit by sodium-glow; only a framing story, I almost told him. I almost walked up to him and kissed him, but - especially here in the lockbox of his dream - I wouldn't go against his will. He had to know he could have picked up the key and walked out the door at any time. We needed that liberty.

He'd done right to turn me down the last time; I hadn't known him then, and my intentions had been terrible. I couldn't be sure that they'd improved any, only that - for all the selfish, stubborn want I was still holding - I wanted to make him happy, more than anything, and if that were beyond me I could damn well spend a night easing his pain. I don't know when I started talking out loud. I wouldn't let him ignore this any more. He finally looked at me and he said we were worlds apart and I was too young to know what I was getting into, and I felt maddened by the new and headstrong knowledge that if he believed that he was wrong, I had finally figured out what I wanted to get into and until now I'd been running far astray of it.

I asked if he honestly thought it would be the first time I'd dreamed about having sex with him. He looked at me, guilty only of keeping a secret - he didn't have to say that he'd been dreaming of having sex with me. This was already happening, in two disconnected halves at the backs of both our minds. We couldn't pretend there wasn't something between us.

I told him that I was in love with him.

The simplest way to plant an idea in someone's head is to tell them and to make it damn clear that you know that they already know.



There was nothing new about waking up beside him. 'Sleeping together' was a redundant euphemism among our crew, an injoke. I'd spent many nights with him, dreaming, aware.

And yet.

He reached over to remove my connectors; I remember his hand brushing over mine, his touch barely intentional but somehow making me feel like my life had just changed forever. My left hand found my totem, and I clutched it tight.

We cooked dinner together and talked for a while, and then we made love for real. It was different. His scars weren't in the same places.



We bought the house on Avenue Road three real-world months later - we chose it because it was a little like the one in my dream, but the garden was shambolic and that gave us something to work on together. I'd already sensed it, knowledge sprouting from hidden places, but it was then that it really struck me that what we had was for the long haul. I could plant pear trees on it. This was the real thing.

By a year after that, he was - for want of a better word - dead.



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