Here, Everything Is Dreaming by Moss Robert

Author:Moss, Robert [Moss]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781438447155
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

THE SIGN LANGUAGE OF THE WORLD

A STRANGER CAME to our town. He spoke with a foreign accent, and his ways were different. Some people said he came from Amsterdam, others said he was from Venice. Soon the rumor spread that he was a magician. People began to visit him, usually in the hours of darkness, because this was a very respectable town and none of the burghers or their wives wished to be seen consorting with a magician.

One night the wife of a wealthy merchant mounted the steps to his brownstone and raised her hand, trembling a little, to the lion's head knocker on the door. She raised the knocker, but did not let it fall because she was suddenly so nervous and embarrassed, she felt ready to flee back to her own comfortable home. But the door opened smoothly and noiselessly, and she found herself flowing down a long hall and through the open door of a study where a fire crackled in the grate.

The magician received her in a dressing gown of oriental design, embroidered with dragons and tigers, and did not apologize for smoking a cigar.

He addressed her by name—Eva—directed her to a comfortable easy chair, and proceeded to describe to her the most intimate details of her life. “Your life is airless,” he told her. “You cannot breathe in it.”

This so exactly evoked her own feelings that she was ready to appoint him her guru, shrink, and personal trainer.

“Tell me what I must do. I will do whatever you say.”

The magician shook his head.

“You must take responsibility for your own life.”

“Name your fee.” She got out her checkbook. “You know we have plenty of money.”

The magician shrugged. “You are free to pay me whatever pleases you. But that will not make me the keeper of your soul.”

She wept splotchy mascara tears.

“If you wish to know what to do,” he told her, “you must listen to your dreams.”

But in our town, people had fallen out of the habit of listening to dreams, to the point where many questioned whether they dreamed at all. Talk of dreams made the merchant's wife more nervous than before. She explained that she took pills to sleep and woke with an alarm clock into the hurry of her husband's world.

“Very well,” the magician told her. “If you cannot listen to your dreams, you must listen to your waking world, which is also a dream and will speak to you in the manner of dreams if you know how to attend to it.”

“I don't understand.”

“If I were truly a magician, and could give you any help or guidance that you need, what is the one thing—the one thing—you would ask for, from the beating heart of your life?”

“I would ask—oh, I don't know.” Her breath came shallow and fast. She felt close to a panic attack. Yet the sense of airlessness was different from at home, and was not to be explained by the haze of cigar smoke. She felt she was trying to breathe at high altitude, from a high mountaintop.

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