My Boyfriend's Dream

Angus tells me his recurring dream first appeared when he was seven years old. He is playing on a green hillside near a railroad track. The sun is high and hot. He’s sitting on the grass, pulling thick bunches up by the roots. Maybe he’s whistling.


Two men come his way. They appear to be brothers, dressed identically in faded bib overalls. They wear no shirts or shoes. As an adult in the middle of this dream, he guesses their ages to be in the mid-twenties. As a seven year old he sees them simply as tall older men with identically receding hairlines. The bald sections create a glare. They have come to take him away.

They put him on a handcar and join in a steady, powerful effort that moves the three of them far away from his home and into cold, misty hills. By the time the hand car comes to a stop, they are deep into a pine forest, near a log cabin that has a ribbon of smoke coming out of its sheet metal flue. On the porch is the oldest woman he has ever seen. Her hair is wilder than Einstein’s. She stands in a long dress, its pattern faint, on the covered porch. Her hands have landed on her waist as if she is just about to approve, or disapprove, of something. She is not threatening. She is blind.

The dream ends as the three of them get down from the hand car and walk in the direction of the porch. The dream ends with my boyfriend feeling he has been the third brother all along.

Men. Angus tells me the other night he dreamed the dream again. We are sitting on the concrete stoop, watching the cars go by and roll through the four-way stop at the corner. The long heat of the day is just now giving way to cool. He can’t figure out what triggers the dream or what he’s supposed to get out of it.

What makes you so sure there’s a message? I ask him. Personally, I think the messages are many, and clear as can be.

There has to be one, he says. Dreams untangle us, or at least they try to.

The worst thing to do in seaweed is to struggle, I say.

That makes sense to you, of course. Everything you ever need to know, you learned on a surfboard.

That’s about as stiff as our disagreements get. Half the time, we’re not so much disagreeing as, like now, looking to talk something out. Maybe we like to listen to each other. I can’t imagine ever really shouting at him. He raised his voice at me once, then started laughing. It took him a few minutes to compose himself enough to apologize, to say he realized he was wrong but still chose to go dramatic, that just after he raised his voice he pictured the set of I Love Lucy and himself in the role of Ricky Ricardo, shouting like an angry Cuban. That image set him off. What I love about Angus is he can be this gentle large being who takes pleasure doing what I do and loves me for qualities I didn’t even know I had—while also perching like an oriole on a high branch, watching the actual Angus go about his business down below. A guy like that never takes himself too seriously, never treats other people like trash.


He sometimes misses what’s right in front of him, though, and whether that’s his problem or the problem of men in general, I don’t know. Understandably enough, he has never shared the dream’s details with his mother the therapist. There’s a lot I don’t know, but it doesn’t take a Kiki Lamonica to see, for instance, the power of the primitive in his dream, or the mysterious wise woman. I want to tell him he fell deep inside his own personal Tarot deck, but it’s not my job to help him read it. My friend Chloe would probably jump at the chance, but that’s where she and I are different. When it comes to private places you arrive at alone, you need to return from them alone, with whatever friend, whatever set of instructions you found there.

A Prayer Kiki Found Herself Saying in a Dream

May I know what I mean to be
May I be what I know to mean
I mean and be what I know

May I watch the water listening
May I hear and watch the river
Water listens, watching back

Old ones die before they leave us
Leaving, old people will die first
They die, then leave, then grow old

May my sins turn back to desire
May desire sin again in turn
Turning back, may I want more

Kiki at the Shore

After three days in the car, 1334 miles from San Clemente to Lakeside, Kiki and her brothers spilled from the station wagon and ran to the water’s edge, hopping like cartoon characters every time a bare foot found a sharp rock. They had only just pulled into the spot next to the three-room cabin where they would spend the summer. Her grandmother had turned to them a few minutes ago, still on the highway, and said they needed to help unpack before thinking of anything else. Olive watched them now, running through the cherry grove toward the tiny beach near the dock. She wasn’t angry or surprised.


Two of those days were in the desert. After the climb out of the basin, over Cajon Pass and onto 395, Kiki saw the world go the color of alkali. She liked the brief change at Little Lake, the big hotel on a rise, the cattails waving next to blue water. But mostly the day resembled Owens Lake, drained off years ago to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, a lake dry and flat now, a place the Navy tested weapons. She looked forward to their lunch stop in Lone Pine, where she had a grilled cheese sandwich and a coke. She looked forward to passing that guard house north of town, at Manzanar. It was the only building left on land that once held in thousands of Japanese. Soon they would reach Bishop, the Travelrest Motel, swimming until closing at the municipal pool. Then the California Café, where they always went for dinner. The next day meant Tonopah for lunch and slot machines. If the kids were good, they would each get a silver dollar and a roll of nickels on the way out of town. The desert ended, more or less, on the other side of Twin Falls, Idaho. They all marched to the middle of the Snake River Bridge and looked five hundred feet down. Then they returned to the Jordan Motel, its new pool, the restaurant across the street where the waitress, no matter how large the party, memorized everyone’s order.

Kiki breathed easier when they reached the mountains. While her brothers complained about the curves, she sucked in the pine-rich air, and took in the roar of the Salmon River rushing out of the Bitterroots. Now the world was green again—as green as your eyes, her grandmother had said. Timothy and alfalfa grew everywhere along the bench. Every time her grandmother saw a white horse, she would touch a finger to her tongue, moisten the palm of her other hand, then stamp the spot with a fist for good luck.

Soon enough they were in another time zone, Montana, and everyone in the car found a new landmark to point out during the last hundred miles of the trip. The Evaro Hill. The pullout where they’d taken pictures with the Mission Mountains rising up behind them. The bison range. Ninepipe Refuge. Just before Polson, Flathead Lake appeared over the crest of a hill, and they all fell under its spell again, dropping into the basin past the golf course, the cottages, the tiny downtown before they began the last thirty miles up the west shore. Her brothers talked about the first things they would do when they got to their cabin. Start putting my fishing rod together. Get into my swim trunks and jump off the end of the dock. This is when their grandmother warned them not to disappear too fast.

As it turned out, Kiki and her brothers simply threw open the car doors and ran in the direction of water. Once they reached the shore, they stood there without words, looking east at the Swan Range, far across the lake’s surface and beyond. They watched a skier slice by. They watched Howie and Puddles quack and scurry away from them around the boathouse. No one got wet. Instead, they kicked a little at the gravel on the beach. One brother picked up a piece of driftwood. Another named the owners of three boats in their slips, and thus three of the families who would be staying in camp at the same time. After a few minutes, her brothers drifted back toward the cabin.


Kiki looked at the Swan Range again. Miles and miles of blue began at her feet and stretched to fill the space between them. Her eyes followed the line of the mountains north until they reached another range, then another, and then finally, through light haze, the peaks of Glacier Park. Ten years from then, in November, she would drive up there to watch, in sub-zero fog, bald eagles feeding on spawning salmon. She would hike the Avalanche Creek trail all the way to a frozen lake, aspen leaves suspended in its ice, at the base of a cirque. She would step across a fresh grizzly track on the way back to her car. Now Kiki took two brief steps into the water, and she knew where the cold water had come from.

Kiki's Guardians

After the last angel leaves, Walt Whitman still walks beside her, invisible, blowing kisses into the ears of punks and bankers alike, checking a lapel for sheen and lint, tousling the hairdo of a girl. How has it come to this, that only one committed optimist has not deserted? Surely she is blessed with good air and water, and reckless trucks do not seek her out. She was not beaten by mother or stranger, raped by an uncle. She was not set upon by sores. She is not found lingering near the rails of her town’s high bridge.

Yet she has stood at Minneopa Falls, water falling twice, and not known how to go on. In the deepest part of spring, spray rose up from rocks with the roar of falling, and she could not see beyond her family, losing and finding their ways over and over, losing and finding her. Back in the city, cars go down one street and back the next, and call it change. Drivers look at her like ditch grass or deer, part of the view. How has it come to this, Americans alone in sedans and trucks, waiting for her to flip them off, to say something stupid before they turn off their engines and assault her? How has it come to this, violence the best drug for a deadening routine, Third Street to Broad to Third Street?

When she was eight, the first angel tapped her on the shoulder just before sleep. Maybe it was the way to say she didn’t need him, there in a split-level house, Los Angeles, ocean air a balm for anything. Even then, children stepped on mines. She saw pictures of the swollen bellies, flies drinking a boy’s tears. They had all the right subscriptions in those days. Maybe she didn’t need an angel to keep her lucky, safe from TB in the dust. She had the pink sugar cube that fought polio, the loaves that fought hunger. She lived far away from the reckless truck jumping sidewalks in other parts of the world. Falling asleep, two taps on the shoulder, maybe it was the way to say he’d see her later.

Walt Whitman likes the bars with patios in front, where smokers huddle since the ban, where people drink and sometimes know a sparrow from a finch. Even when she’s talking, he whispers lines she won’t remember. The people roar like water. A friend wears the face of a smoothed-down stone. Another’s arm curves into itself, a bronze leaf. Mid-summer, they drink beer, people who know how salt from a living ocean tastes. Walt Whitman puts his hand over her husband’s chest. He tells her Ben’s heart speaks her name to his fingers. She is telling Ben about her day. Whitman’s hand waves at her from behind her husband’s head.


What would it take to ask them all back, to interrogate their motive, to double-check those days she knew them near—a back alley in Seattle, that tumble under a storm-driven wave? Maybe she had left them. Were they the home ground she could stray from? Would it take real desperation to get them to return? Would that seem contrived? Whitman takes no stand on this score, tugging at strands of his beard. He has had all he will take of her this afternoon, even as he mimics the posture of another self: Walt Whitman the mortal, days after his final stroke. He tries to lift an arm, settling instead on what he can see. The stitching of his quilt. The coat on a chair-back. Sunlight waking up the airborne dust of his room.