The Shadow Catcher

So when the first police reports were sent to Beth and Florence, both of them — with Harold — concurred there must be some mistake.

Clara…in a boat…alone? On Puget Sound—?

This must be another case of mistaken identity.

Their mother had never rowed a boat in her life, as far as they all knew. Their father, on the other hand, was a renowned adventurer.

But she was not the type.

They refused to believe that she had perished in a boating accident.

Her body had not been found.

But the police described the clothes that had been bundled in a linen pillowcase and tied to the oarlock: the pillowcase had Clara’s maiden name initials embroidered on its edge, and both Florence and Beth remembered dressing up in clothes from Clara’s painted chest identical to those that had been found.

Still, they did not believe it. Their mother had apparently been missing for some time before the rowboat was discovered on the shore of Puget Sound seven miles from Seattle and how were they to know the letter from Denver had arrived, from Hercules’s lawyer, explaining he had died, trying to save a horse from drowning in a rapids. How were they to know the comfort that their mother found in the muted sound out on the water when the mist was thick and still.

How it made the world into a concert hall where every drop of water could be heard.

How the mist reminded her of snow, and of her parents.

How the way she thought about the passage of her life had been reduced to those few moments she could count as purely joyous.

When she had realized that she loved him.

When she had filled a copper tub — that little boat — and taken off her clothes.

When Edward had appeared.

When the thought had run through her like Revelation: stand. Stand up. Stand up so he will see you.

She had tied the clothes that she was wearing in a bundle.

And through the mist the man she loved had called to her.

That name he had for her.

So long ago.

And once again — so proud, so free, so joyous — revelation shot through her.

And she stood up.

an american place

I wake up in my car in Vegas, in the parking lot of Sunrise Hospital, to realize I’ve been dreaming of the dead.

My unzipped sleeping bag is rutched around my knees, my neck is stiff and it takes a couple moments for me to realize the persistent beeping in my ear is the alarm clock that I set at three o’clock this morning to go off so I wouldn’t miss my rendezvous with Lester Owns His Shadow at seven. I adopt what the yoga people ominously call the “corpse” pose and close my eyes to focus where I am and I realize I’ve been dreaming about people who are dead — except by dreaming them, I’d made them come alive.

Which is normal for a novelist because we dream non-living characters and animate them with our words but I’d never dreamed Red Cloud before which is probably my mind’s way of processing yesterday’s encounter with an Indian.

In the dream Red Cloud and I were standing at a precipice that sometimes looked like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and other times looked like the edge of Acoma Mesa facing out across the plain. I knew who Red Cloud was in the dream because he looked exactly like the famous Curtis photograph of him, which means his head was down and his eyes were closed when he addressed me and I remember saying that he looked a lot like Dante in that pose, the way Signorelli painted him, which happens to be the portrait on the cover of the Penguin Classics version of The Portable Dante I found in the back of my car when I was making up this so-called bed at three a.m., left there after a Great Books discussion at a professor friend’s house a couple weeks ago in Santa Monica.

How the average person dreams is pretty much how the average novelist puts a page together. Random bits of seen material float in, dismembered parts of memories, skeins of information knit and shred in contrast to their logic.

In our dreams, as in our tales, we use the dead to tell us things we’d otherwise have to admit that we are saying to ourselves.