The next day is a blur.
I remember it, but not in sequence, more as flashes: the harsh white of the desert light, his profile against the windscreen, the dust kicking up behind us, the sunset and the moonlight, the feeling of being both very young and already used up. It’s odd, because in the morning we made a little pact to remember it, to be fully awake, fully present. One last day when it was still just us.
And yet it’s the one that feels most like a dream.
Maybe it was the hangover or the February light out here. Maybe it was knowing this was the last time we’d be alone together like that, before marriage, before Germany, before whatever comes next. Before we couldn’t quite go back.
It’s almost too much for my system to handle.
I tell him I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t either. We go for a drive into the desert. We sing along to the music on the radio, try to lift our moods, but nothing seems to be working.
“Do you also feel like you’re boiling over?” I ask. “Like there’s too much going on and no release? No valve to let out all the steam?”
“Let’s go back to the house,” he says. “I don’t wanna be anything but alone with you.”
***
I ask if I should put on some music, and he shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “I wanna be able to hear myself think.”
We lie on the sofa facing the glass doors to the pool and the garden outside, talking and reminiscing about our lives, together and apart.
The boy thinks we’re living almost unreal lives. “Like somethin’ in a dream.”
He looks at me, and I can’t quite relate, because I exchanged reality for dreams years ago, back in ’44 after Tom died, and since then the two have blurred together in a way where I don’t always know which way is up.
This, him, us, this strange desert suspension, is the most real thing I have.
We talk about the strangeness of the spaces we can enter together: the boarding school in England, God being Mark Twain, how we can go in and out of each other’s minds so easily. We promise to call on each other, and always let the other know if we’re lonely.
“Our drug is fantasy,” I laugh.
“It really is,” he laughs.
He puts on Sinatra’s new record again before sliding open the glass doors facing the pool.
On the Road To Mandalay.
Outside, we do something we used to do back home, we pull two sun loungers together, pile on cushions and blankets, and crawl under the covers, hoping no creepy crawlies find us.
After a day of heat, the temperature drops, the sun slips behind the mountains, and we find each other again.
We talk like children.
We invent a future we’ll never have.
I sing When You Wish Upon a Star for him at the piano, and we sit in silence for a while.
We pretend we’re a newlywed couple planning our grand tour of the world.
The boy wants to go to Japan.
I say I’d like to go on safari in Africa.
Let’s leave our hut, dear…
Get out of our rut, dear…
Let’s get away from it all…
He grins. “That sounds swell. Should we go skiin’ in the Alps? Scale the pyramids in Egypt, and Peru? Sail the canals of Venice? Climb Mount Olympus in Greece?”
I smile at him and say, “We’ve already been there.”
He laughs. “We’re there now.”
Then he pulls me in close and says, “We’re two sleepy people.”
And I sing to him, softly, an old song we both know:
Here we are, out of cigarettes
Holding hands and yawning, look how late it gets
Two sleepy people, by dawn’s early light
And too much in love to say good night…
“I’ll never really leave you,” I whisper.
I look at him again. He looks back at me. We’re back in Casablanca. The film we’ve watched time and time again, reciting the last goodbye:
“-But what about us?
-We’ll always have Paris.
-We didn’t have…We’d lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
– When I said I would never leave you.
– And you never will.”
He smiles. “I’m glad I came here with you.”
And we both know this is our last hurrah, for now.
Because who knows what the future will bring?
“Things happen all the time,” he says.
“Things change all the time,” he tells himself.
And we’re back to childhood, not the fantasy boarding school, not the white Memphis mansion, but here, in the desert. We’ve looked back and forward, and watched it all slip through the sand. As the day fades and our minds go still, it feels like a return to something old, and the beginning of something else.
“What if you’re my imaginary friend?” he asks.
I reply, “If I am, you’ve made me so real I feel mighty alive.” I smile. “And stop this nonsense.”
“It’s hard to be sure,” he says. “If I’m your imaginary friend, why’d you make me so full of flaws?”
“Why not perfect?”
“Maybe ’cause I’m full of flaws,” he says. “Maybe I made you just to mirror somethin’ in me.”
I laugh. “Well, if so, thanks for the rich interior life. Thanks for my incredible outer life. And thanks for not making me merged to you at all times. If I was your imaginary friend, why would we ever argue or have differences? Why would I have a life away from you?”
He sighs. “I dunno. I honestly don’t know. It’s all nonsense, anyway.” He leans in. “Sorry for bringin’ it up. For bein’ crazy like that.”
We lie quietly for a while. I start singing, softly: “Life could be a dream, life could be a dream, sweetheart…”
He isn’t crazy, I think to myself. Sometimes I think he is my imaginary friend too. Someone I made up to deal with life. Someone just for me. A desert mirage.
Maybe these times are just echoes of past lives, or different versions of a life just out of reach? Parallel universes?
It’s silly. We are here now.
We cling to each other in the safe enclosure of pretend Movieland, until the real world reasserts itself and we are forced to cough up to the facts.
From the garden to the desert, the story circles back. Once, we played in the shade of trees. Now we lie beneath a moon that casts no shadow.
I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers…
The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed…
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.
Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers”
My novel GREAT ARE THE MYTHS will be serialised (one chapter each day) over the summer of 2026. If you would rather listen to the audiobook, the full story is available for free on all the usual platforms. Info and links HERE
My World of Interiors 