∞

Our unconscious brains use dreams to express unconscious desires.  You can’t be held responsible for these.  In waking life, you take a stock broker and an athlete and a heroin addict and an English teacher and there is a decent chance on any random night all of them or any two of them might put their heads down and have the same dream.  For example:  dreams about teeth.  Lots of people dream about their teeth crumbling or falling out.  This dream is supposed to signify that the dreamer has a fear of losing control or of public embarrassment.  Broker or barber, it’s a common dream.  Whatever grace humans manage to project in their waking life, at night the reptilian, childlike part of the brain takes over and we have the same fears.

A few months after Sarah died, you woke up with a broken tooth in your mouth, amazed you hadn’t swallowed it and mystified by how it might have happened.  Your dentist said there was evidence in your mouth that you were grinding your teeth; it’s a common response to stress and anxiety, he said.  So, in addition to dreaming when you were asleep, you’d been grinding your teeth and breaking them.  You wonder what sound that makes and you know this must have just started because you know Sarah would have mentioned it because she was a light sleeper and because she slept pressed up against you and she would have heard you or felt you doing it.  Without anyone other than Jeeves[3] beside you to notice, hear you, poke you with an elbow to stop, you never knew you were doing it.  You were unconscious.

The dream is a literary cliché you hope to God you are not resorting to, but you can’t help it, you are dreaming and slightly aware of it.  Tomorrow, you have an all-day new teacher orientation at St. Mark’s that you are dreading.  You think you used to be better at those kinds of things, more relaxed and charming, quick with a handshake and a smile but now it seems to require so much energy and you feel so awkward as a conversation agent – you lose your train of thought in the middle of speaking, your mind wanders rudely while listening and you nearly always have that moment of surreality where your brain screams out ‘my God she’s dead why are you standing here just talking to this person it’s pointless!’  So you had a little Scotch and fell asleep so your unconscious brain could work through your social phobias and unconscious desires.

First, this next part really happened before you fell asleep.  You finished unpacking the last of your clothes and found an old Pearl Jam tee shirt and you thought some music, semi-loud, and a little Scotch might be a good idea.  You admit it, some foolishness ensued.  You’re a 29-year old man wearing a Pearl Jam tee shirt for starters and trying on a bandana in front of your bedroom mirror, rotating your torso right to left to get the effect from all angles is just a wee bit foolish.   Full metal foolish is leaving the room for the sole purpose of casually walking back in and pretending to catch your image in the mirror by surprise to get some objective view of yourself.  And you do that.  You also catch what is obviously a disapproving look from Jeeves and you say ‘don’t judge me!’ to his reflection in the mirror but he rolls over on the bed to avoid witnessing any more of your antics.

“Come on!  It’s not like I sang a John Mayer song into my hairbrush, for Chrissake!”

Okay, you weren’t seriously considering the bandana, but the problem here and the source of your social anxiety is that you don’t know who you are anymore.  You say your name out loud and try to make the sound into a mental picture.  Ask yourself who you will be in this new life because it is a fundamental question.  For a split second being a cheap imitation of David Foster Wallace seemed like a viable option in Phase I of The Reinvention of Jim Halpert.  But while the bandana managed to give Wallace a certain unstudied and hip cachet, you looked like you’d just had brain surgery or suffered some sort of head trauma.  The ideas of how you might evolve carom wildly through your head; the bandana was only the beginning.

What if you were to, say, take up skiing?  Just become crazy for it, and people would know you as a skiing enthusiast.  Or maybe you develop a passion for photography and you’re the guy who always has a camera case slung over his shoulder, with enough knowledge to collect and switch lenses and filters, conveniently placing the camera between your face and the world.  Or maybe you start this whole Granola Halpert evolution where everything you eat and wear and think about is organic.  You start gardening and you start small with maybe a few tomato plants and maybe lettuce and you can see yourself out there in the yard making straight rows of vegetables, neatly labeled.  Of course, you learn a lot about seeds.  You’re practically an expert on soil acidity and you develop a snobbery about hybrids.   A whole new wardrobe probably goes along with this metamorphosis, full of organic cottons and muted colors and some version of a jaunty but functional gardening hat.  Or you could forget the gardening (you get nauseated thinking about the compost pile you’d be honor-bound to have) and just change your wardrobe.  What if you tossed out your chinos and v-necks and started going to school in jeans and cargo pants and Pearl Jam tee shirts and maybe you let your hair grow long like DFW but you eschew the bandana.  That could work if you hadn’t just accepted a position at a Catholic high school that surely has a dress code and might even require a tie.  Try hard to remember how to tie a half-Windsor.

What if you became interested and involved in small-town politics and ran for councilman as the last honest man devoted to public service?   What if.  You might become a Big Brother or finally learn the guitar or run a marathon.  Ask yourself who you will become in this new life.  Say your name out loud and try to turn the sound into a mental picture.

For some time right after she died, you played the role of the quintessential shattered poet.  You didn’t do it intentionally and you lacked the energy and devotion it takes to be a true icon of the banal, but now that you’re in the market for an identity, you’re going to hang onto that one.  You tuck it in your pocket like a horded candy and in case none of this other crap works out you can be the drunken, shattered, tortured poet.  It could be the perfect life for you:  shoulders stooped, lank and unkempt hair falling over the forehead, Scotch-filled and brooding, bitter and broken.  How perfectly ironic you would be. 

When the bandana and compost dream ends, there’s an abrupt shift of scene to a classroom and then to your old bedroom in the summer heat.  Sarah, sweat, a tick-tick-ticking ceiling fan and the smell of sex.  It’s like a Mickey Rourke movie, but when the poetry starts in your head you wonder how fucked up you have to be to start dreaming in couplets.  Neruda couplets.   The dream is so vivid you can taste her skin on your tongue.

You’re  standing in front of a classroom of juniors lecturing on the sonnet.  The Italian, the Spenserian, the quatrains, the proposition, the couplet, the resolution.  As you turn back from the board you realize you are  totally naked except for a bandana around your head and you  immediately reach down to cover yourself with your hands.   Nobody’s laughing, your students don’t appear to think anything is amiss.  For a minute, you think this is okay. Either nobody notices or it’s perfectly okay that you’re  naked in front of a classroom discussing iambic pentameter, just like that.  You even try to get hold of your dreaming self to ponder whether it’s normal for you to teach nude, and  no.  You decide that it is just plain weird, not to mention humiliating, that you’re naked, as you  wear chinos and v-necks with a t-shirt underneath every day, like a uniform. You  don’t teach naked.  You crouch down behind your desk to hide and then you hear Sarah’s voice.

She’s sitting in the front row, though you swear she wasn’t there a second ago and she’s telling you something that you can’t quite hear.  Her lips are moving and she’s got her head cocked to the side like she does when she’s considering you. You  can’t hear her – it’s like your hands are over your ears, it’s all muted and muffled.  But then she’s inside your head talking nonsense and  saying something about the dog or your hair and you say, ‘I’m naked.  Is that okay?’ and she laughs and that is also inside your head.

‘Talk to me,’ you beg.  ‘Please talk to me.’

And suddenly the classroom is gone and you’re both lying naked together in bed, the air heavy and humid. You put an open mouth to her shoulder, tasting salt and you scrape your teeth against her skin, wanting to bite down, with the strangest wish on your tongue and familiar words filling your mouth like cotton.  You  wrap your arms and legs around her, surrounding her like a shell and hiding her.  It’s part memory and part dream when she swats at you and says ‘it’s too hot!’ but then she’s kissing you, her mouth like water.  You’re momentarily aware that you’re  dreaming but with the urgency of her tongue in your mouth you refuse to believe it’s not real.  From your memory you recite the words, pulling them one by one, like threaded cotton from your mouth, timing their rhythm to the Greek chorus of her sighs, punctuating the lines with kisses on her smooth skin.

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!

How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,

still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,

oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force

in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.

And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,

and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Suddenly, the bed has rails and your arms are cradling her with your cheek pressed against her hair.  Wanting only the sound of her voice, you say, ‘talk to me’ but no answer comes and the only sound in your head is a mechanical, metered chirping.  It morphs from monitor to alarm and you awaken startled, shaken, and sweaty, the last lines of the poem ringing in your ears.

Oh, farther than everything.  Oh, farther than everything. 

And but so the dream lingered in your woken mind, fogging your vision, and you thought this is no way to be starting a new life, no way to reinvent yourself.  You try to shake it off and wander to the front porch with your coffee and your Pearl Jam tee shirt and your messy hair, squinting at the sun just starting.  You jump, yowl and curse at the paper that comes flying at your bare feet along with the hot coffee jilted from your cup.  The paper boy hangs, the long hair, the goddamn baggy shorts, so adolescently sure and entitled to give you shit and the bull’s horns and a snarled lip like Billy Idol. 

“Rock on, dude!  Pearl Jam rules!”

“Shut up.”

“Whaa..?”

“Don’t throw the paper at me like that and don’t make fun of me.”

Pathetic.

“Okay, man, sorry.  Just having a little fun with you.”

You huff and he walks away and you think that this is no way to start your ultimate extreme life makeover.  

A year from now you won’t remember this particular exchange with the paper boy[4] because the day is a full one.  You spend a full day at St. Mark’s for orientation.  You swallow that ‘first day, new teacher’ feeling and smile a bit and remind yourself you are installing Halpert 2.0 and that all seems to be going well.  St. Mark’s uses a mentor system and it strongly believes in this system for assimilating new teachers.  It’s hard enough to attract teachers to a small, middle class Catholic high school in a small town in Vermont; St. Mark’s is not about to lose any lobster it snares by being sloppy with care, feeding and indoctrination.  The assignments are announced and your name is paired with a teacher named Paul Heiser[5] and when your pairing is announced there is a loud female snort that comes from directly behind you[6].  Suddenly there is female breath and female laughter and female whispers in your ear saying ‘good luck with that!’ and you turn to see a girl with curious hair. 

[3] Jeeves was a semi-famous pound dog before you adopted him, having been featured in the local paper as the Adopt-a-Pet of the Week. Abandoned by his owners at age 7, Jeeves suffered from separation anxiety which meant he could not even pee alone, and he insisted on having his own couch and half of whatever you were eating.  Unwilling to call him the Dog with No Name, you settled on Jeeves because of some dark coloring on his upper lip that suggested a very proper British moustache and an air of sophistication that his Labrador brain did not possess. You remember an early journal entry from Sarah called “Ode on Jeeves – A Labrador Haiku”

You gonna eat that?

Smells good.  You gonna eat that?

Hey!  Hey!  I’ll eat that!

You have only recently resumed conversing with him as though he were human. 

[4] You learn later his name is Justin just like every other boy his age, but what Justin has going for him is a pretty keen sense of observation and he walks the neighborhood every day delivering papers, so he notices a lot of stuff.  Later than that, your conversations turn friendlier and you fall into this routine on Saturday mornings where he delivers you last and the two of you sit on the porch and gossip like two old women.  You give him a little extra each week and he brings you a bagel to have with your coffee and you make him a hot chocolate and you gossip.  This is something you never could have imagined doing, ever.  But you like it.

[5] Even without his slight head nod and two-finger wave, you would have known which one was Heiser, because he is the one you most fear being paired with.  During a perfunctory coffee and donut session, you size Heiser up as a colossal tool.  He’s about 45, you’d guess, short and naturally muscled with big black-framed glasses crowned by a crop of rusty grey hair.  He teaches Latin and English, he’s a ball-buster with excellent aim and you can’t help feeling like your sack is in his sights.  The old you would be rubbing your hands together at an opportunity to deflate this guy’s ego just a bit.  The new you just wants to hang onto your testicles in case you are ever lucky enough to need them again.

[6] You were vaguely aware of someone coming in late, but it was during Sister Mary Donata’s presentation on the importance of a spiritual inner life for lay teachers, so you kept your attention, respectfully.  This late person sat behind you, intermittently distracting you with toe-tapping and heavy sighing.