Mind Games by William Deverell Read Free Book Online

elevator down as well as up, and didn’t implode in panic. Note that I am now cognitively aware of former irrational thinking.
    If only the dreams would go away. They seem to foretell doom …
    This one, for instance, Saturday night, after too much wine and loneliness. Aware, even in sleep, that Sally would not be there to greet my awakening, I went deeper, into a Stage I-REM dream featuring (yes, it’s back) an oompahpah band in lederhosen serenading Sally as she signed copies of her latest,
Miriam Runs Away from Home
. I was struggling toward her table. I was late. So far, this dream is as obvious as a fart at a funeral.
    But it becomes tangled. My progress is halted by a banjo player, who says, “He’s vaiting for you.”
Who’s
vaiting for me? Sally disappears without as much as a curtain call, and I’m in a panic, lost in a crush of people propelling me to a car. Then I’m in the front passenger seat, Alpine vistas below, brakesscreeching as we fishtail around a bend, and I can’t escape – the door handle is missing.
    I look at the driver, and an even greater fear grips me. He is in a robe, wearing a false beard, and as he removes it, I see Bob Grundison – he is the spectre of death …
    Whereupon I bolted upright in my cot in the bow of the
Altered Ego
and banged my head on a beam. I was in a sweat, tangled in my sheet like a mummy.
    He’s vaiting for you
. Help me with this one, Allis. Why was a banjo player even
in a
brass band? Why was he serving as the messenger of Death?
    As I wandered about the
Ego
, numbly brewing tea, I was returned to the real world by the discovery of a hair clip among my socks. I’m continually finding scatterings of Sally from our sails together. A sketch pad, vistas of Desolation Sound cross-hatched in soft pencil lead. Her spare toothbrush, a tampon.
    I sat down to camomile tea and dry rye toast and ascorbic acid tablets and garlic pills – a breakfast routine so ritualized that Sally (in a bad mood) claimed it drove her around the bend. A shiver wriggles up my spine as I consider that bend, and now we see how free association helps unravel the metaphors of dreams: her brakes are screeching, my door handle is missing, we go off the road.
    I am no aficionado of cars, though I occasionally ride in a taxi or with Sally in her Saab. One can at least escape from a car (given door handles); elevators and airplanes make for a far grimmer test of courage. My preferred conveyance is Vesuvio. Astride it, I can whisper through the streets at night, unseen. I can wheel silently past the bungalow on Creelman Street to ensure that Sally is safely at home, her car in the driveway. Occasionally, when I cruise the alley, I see her silhouetted behind the wide windows of her studio.
    So far, I’ve not seen any man being entertained, though on one occasion, at dusk, I saw her entering a Kitsilano pub with the queen of punk, Celestine Post, who collects men as somedo buttons and pendants, who knows the singles bars. From a vantage point outside the open door, I watched them spread maps and books on their table. Michelin maps?
Frommer’s Guide to the Single Men of Italy?
    The next morning, I called Sally on my newly purchased cellphone, and claimed false surprise and falser delight when she told me Celestine has snapped up the cheap ticket to Europe offered by Chipmunk Press; they’re leaving in a few days. I take relief only in the fact her tripmate isn’t, for instance, Ellery Cousineau. (A frequent flier who owns a Cessna and has told Sally he’d like to “take her up.”)
    Sally has promised to meet me on her return. She’s promised we will talk …
    Enough of that. I haven’t told Sally about the strange note. Let her have her carefree holiday, unaware that someone is
vaiting
for me.
    Or is that someone you? You’re waiting, silently demanding: Open up, tell me about your father, stop blocking. I will, I will …
    At Beaver Lake, in the silence of Stanley Park, you sat on a bench to