Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups Read online

  American poet Susan Holton recast Ole Lukøje as ‘the Sandman’, in 1928, in a short poem – and he has stalked popular culture’s subconscious ever since, leaping from one artist’s reverie into another visionary’s nightmares.

  Roy Orbison had the idea for his 1963 hit song ‘In Dreams’, which features the sandman, while ‘half-asleep’. He heard a radio disc jockey announce the song as Elvis Presley’s newest offering but then, frustratingly, didn’t catch the end of the track, thinking to himself, ‘Boy, that’s good. I need to finish that. Too bad things don’t happen in my dreams.’ Except Orbison then woke up. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and, within twenty feverish minutes, had finished writing the song of his dreams. ‘In Dreams’ is today considered a classic, its instrumentation underscoring a ‘magic night’ of unconsciousness, dreamily evoked by Orbison’s ethereal vocals.

  By all accounts, Orbison was alarmed when, twenty-three years later, David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986) nightmarishly appropriated his ballad. A grotesque rendition of ‘In Dreams’, and its account of the tiptoeing, whispering, ‘candy coloured-clown they call the sandman’ sends the demonic Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, into a tailspin. Lynch had twisted Orbison’s lovelorn, little night music into a sinister phantasm.

  Yet, today, the sandman is probably more associated in the popular cultural consciousness with Neil Gaiman than with Lynch, Orbison or Andersen. Gaiman’s graphic novel The Sandman is a seminal classic of its genre. Its writer has since continually enchanted readers the world over, weaving webs over grown-ups and children alike, for instance in 2014’s The Sleeper and the Spindle (with Chris Riddell).

  In The Sandman, Gaiman and his artists tell the story of Morpheus, the King of Dreams, and his kin, the Endless. In the first volume, ‘Preludes and Nocturnes’, this oneiromancer – his angular frame covered head-to-toe by black, much like Gaiman himself – must quest through hell and back to retrieve his pouch of sand, his helm and his ruby. Indeed, the narratives of both The Sandman and The Sleeper and the Spindle are bedecked with rubies. They blush within the plots – as in ‘The Happy Prince’ – and glow also in this next tale from Neil Gaiman.

  ‘Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot,’ says Morpheus in ‘Dream Country’, volume three of The Sandman.

  Mr Gaiman, bring me a dream . . .

  Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Tale

  by Neil Gaiman

  Once upon the olden times, when the trees walked and the stars danced, there was a girl whose mother died, and a new mother came and married her father, bringing her own daughter with her. Soon enough the father followed his first wife to the grave, leaving his daughter behind him.

  The new mother did not like the girl and treated her badly, always favouring her own daughter, who was indolent and rude. One day, her stepmother gave the girl, who was only eighteen, twenty dollars to buy her drugs. ‘Don’t stop on the way,’ she said.

  So the girl took the twenty-dollar bill, and put an apple into her purse, for the way was long, and she walked out of the house and down to the end of the street, where the wrong side of town began.

  She saw a dog tied to a lamppost, panting and uncomfortable in the heat, and the girl said, ‘Poor thing.’ She gave it water.

  The elevator was out of service. The elevator there was always out of service. Halfway up the stairs she saw a hooker, with a swollen face, who stared up at her with yellow eyes. ‘Here,’ said the girl. She gave the hooker the apple.

  She went up to the dealer’s floor and she knocked on the door three times. The dealer opened the door and stared at her and said nothing. She showed him the twenty-dollar bill.

  Then she said, ‘Look at the state of this place,’ and she bustled in. ‘Don’t you ever clean up in here? Where are your cleaning supplies?’

  The dealer shrugged. Then he pointed to a closet. The girl opened it and found a broom and a rag. She filled the bathroom sink with water and she began to clean the place.

  When the rooms were cleaner, the girl said, ‘Give me the stuff for my mother.’

  He went into the bedroom, came back with a plastic bag. The girl pocketed the bag and walked down the stairs.

  ‘Lady,’ said the hooker. ‘The apple was good. But I’m hurting real bad. You got anything?’

  The girl said, ‘It’s for my mother.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘You poor thing.’

  The girl hesitated, then she gave her the packet. ‘I’m sure my stepmother will understand,’ she said.

  She left the building. As she passed, the dog said, ‘You shine like a diamond, girl.’

  She got home. Her mother was waiting in the front room. ‘Where is it?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl. Diamonds dropped from her lips, rattled across the floor.

  Her stepmother hit her.

  ‘Ow!’ said the girl, a ruby-red cry of pain, and a ruby fell from her mouth.

  Her stepmother fell to her knees, picked up the jewels. ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘Did you steal them?’

  The girl shook her head, scared to speak.

  ‘Do you have any more in there?’

  The girl shook her head, mouth tightly closed.

  The stepmother took the girl’s tender arm between her finger and her thumb and pinched as hard as she could, squeezed until the tears glistened in the girl’s eyes, but she said nothing. So her stepmother locked the girl in her windowless bedroom, so she could not get away.

  The woman took the diamonds and the ruby to Al’s Pawn and Gun, on the corner, where Al gave her five hundred dollars no questions asked.

  Then she sent her other daughter off to buy drugs for her.

  The girl was selfish. She saw the dog panting in the sun, and, once she was certain that it was chained up and could not follow, she kicked at it. She pushed past the hooker on the stair. She reached the dealer’s apartment and knocked on the door. He looked at her, and she handed him the twenty without speaking. On her way back down, the hooker on the stair said, ‘Please . . .?’ but the girl did not even slow.

  ‘Bitch!’ called the hooker.

  ‘Snake,’ said the dog, when she passed it on the sidewalk.

  Back home, the girl took out the drugs, then opened her mouth to say, ‘Here,’ to her mother. A small frog, brightly coloured, slipped from her lips. It leapt from her arm to the wall, where it hung and stared at them unblinking.

  ‘Oh my god,’ said the girl. ‘That’s just disgusting.’ Five more coloured tree frogs, and one small red, black and yellow-banded snake.

  ‘Black against red,’ said the girl. ‘Is that poisonous?’ (Three more tree frogs, a cane toad, a small blind white snake, and a baby iguana.) She backed away from them.

  Her mother, who was not afraid of snakes or of anything, kicked at the banded snake, which bit her leg. The woman screamed and flailed, and her daughter also began to scream, a long loud scream which fell from her lips as a healthy adult python.

  The girl, the first girl, whose name was Amanda, heard the screams and then the silence but she could do nothing to find out what was happening.

  She knocked on the door. No one opened it. No one said anything. The only sounds she could hear were rustlings, as if of something huge and legless slipping across the carpet.

  When Amanda got hungry, too hungry for words, she began to speak.

  ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,’ she began. ‘Thou foster child of Silence and slow Time . . .’

  She spoke, although the words were choking her.

  ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know . . .’ A final sapphire clicked across the wooden floor of Amanda’s closet room.

  The silence was absolute.

  (2008)

  ★

  Jacked

  by Michael Cunningham

  This is not a smart boy we’re taking about. This is not a kid who can b
e trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.

  Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last asset.

  We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans. The guy claims they’re magic beans, and that, it seems, is enough for Jack. He doesn’t even ask what variety of magic the beans supposedly deliver. Maybe they’ll transform themselves into seven beautiful wives for him. Maybe they’ll turn into the seven deadly sins, and buzz around him like flies for the rest of his life.

  Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?

  There are any number of boys like Jack. Boys who prefer the crazy promise, the long shot, who insist that they’re natural-born winners. They have a great idea for a screenplay – they just need, you know, someone to write it for them. They DJ at friends’ parties, believing a club owner will wander in sooner or later and hire them to spin for multitudes. They drop out of vocational school because they can see, after a semester or two, that it’s a direct path to loserdom – better to live in their childhood bedrooms, temporarily unemployed, until fame and prosperity arrive.

  Is Jack’s mother upset when he strides back into the house, holds out his hand, and shows her what he’s gotten for the cow? She is.

  What have I done, how exactly have all the sacrifices I’ve made, all the dinners I put together out of nothing and ate hardly any of myself, how exactly did I raise you to be this cavalier and unreliable, could you please explain that to me, please?

  Is Jack disappointed by his mother’s poverty of imagination, her lack of nerve in the face of life’s gambles, her continued belief in the budget-conscious, off-brand caution that’s gotten her exactly nowhere? He is.

  I mean, Mom, look at this house. Don’t you think thrift is some kind of death? Ask yourself. Since Dad died, why hasn’t anyone come around? Not even Hungry Hank. Not even Half-Wit Willie.

  Jack doesn’t want, or need, to hear her answer, though it runs silently through her mind.

  I have my beautiful boy, I see strong young shoulders bent over the washbasin every morning. What would I want with Hungry Hank’s yellow teeth, or Half-Wit Willie’s bent-up body?

  Nevertheless, her son has sold the cow for a handful of beans. Jack’s mother tosses the beans out the window, and sends him to bed without supper.

  Fairy tales are generally moral tales. In the bleaker version of this one, mother and son both starve to death.

  That lesson would be: Mothers, try to be realistic about your imbecilic sons, no matter how charming their sly little grins, no matter how heartbreaking the dark-gold tousle of their hair. If you romanticize them, if you insist on virtues they clearly lack, if you persist in your blind desire to have raised a wise child, one who’ll be helpful in your old age . . . don’t be surprised if you find that you’ve fallen on the bathroom floor, and end up spending the night there, because he’s out drinking with his friends until dawn.

  That is not, however, the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

  The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.

  In ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, the stranger has not lied. The next morning, Jack’s bedroom window is obscured by rampant green. He looks out into leaves the size of skillets, and a stalk as thick as an oak’s trunk. When he cranes his neck upward, he sees that the beanstalk is so tall it vanishes into the clouds.

  Right. Invest in desert real estate, where an interstate highway is certain to be built soon. Get in on the ground floor of your uncle’s revolutionary new age-reversal system. Use half the grocery money to buy lottery tickets every week.

  Jack, being Jack, does not ask questions, nor does he wonder if climbing the beanstalk is the best possible idea.

  At the beanstalk’s apex, on the upper side of the cloudbank, he finds himself standing before a giant’s castle, built on a particularly fleecy rise of cloud. The castle is dizzyingly white, prone to a hint of tremble, as if built of concentrated clouds; as if a proper rainstorm could reduce it to an enormous, pearly puddle.

  Being Jack, he walks right up to the titanic snow-colored door. Who, after all, wouldn’t be glad to see him?

  Before he can knock, though, he hears his name called by a voice so soft it might merely be a gust of wind that’s taught itself to say, Jaaaaack.

  The wind coalesces into a cloud-girl; a maiden of the mist.

  She tells Jack that the giant who lives in the castle killed Jack’s father, years ago. The giant would have killed the infant Jack as well, but Jack’s mother so ardently pled her case, holding the baby to her bosom, that the giant spared Jack, on the condition that Jack’s mother never reveal the cause of his father’s death.

  Maybe that’s why Jack’s mother has always treated him as if he were bounty and hope, incarnate.

  The mist-girl tells Jack that everything the giant owns belongs rightfully to him. Then she vanishes, as quickly as the wisp of an exhaled cigarette.

  Jack, however, being Jack, had assumed already that everything the giant owns – everything everybody owns – rightfully belongs to him. And he’d never really believed that story about his father getting dysentery on a business trip to Brazil.

  He raps on the door, which is opened by the giant’s wife. The wife may once have been pretty, but no trace of loveliness remains. Her hair is thinning, her housecoat stained. She’s as offhandedly careworn as a fifty-foot tall version of Jack’s mother.

  Jack announces he’s hungry, that he comes from a place where the world fails to provide.

  The giant’s wife, who rarely receives visitors of any kind, is happy to see a handsome, miniature man-child standing at her door. She invites him in, feeds him breakfast, though she warns him that if her husband comes home, he’ll eat Jack for breakfast.

  Does Jack stick around anyway? Of course he does. Does the giant arrive home unexpectedly? He does.

  He booms from the vastness of the hallway:

  Fe fi fo fum

  I smell the blood of an Englishman.

  Be he alive or be he dead,

  I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

  The giant’s wife conceals Jack in, of all places, the very saucepan in which her husband would cook him. She’s barely got the lid put down when the giant lumbers in.

  The giant is robustly corpulent, thundering, strident, dangerous in the way of barroom thugs, of any figure who is comical in theory (he wears a jerkin and tights) but truly threatening in fact, simply because he’s fool enough and drunk enough to do serious harm; simply because he’s a stranger to reason, because killing a man with a pool cue seems like a justifiable response to some vaguely insulting remark.

  The giantess assures her husband that he merely smells the ox she’s cooked him for lunch.

  Really?

  Here we move, briefly, into farce. There’s nowhere else for us to go.

  Giant: I know what ox smells like. I know what the blood of an Englishman smells like.

  Giantess: Well, this is a new kind of ox. It’s flavored.

  Giant: What?

  Giantess: It’s brand new. You can also get Tears of a Princess Ox. You can get Wicked Queen Envy Ox.

  She serves him the ox. A whole ox.

  Giant: Hm. Tastes like regular ox to me.

  Giantess: Maybe I won’t get this kind anymore.

  Giant: There’s nothing wrong with regular ox.

  Giantess: But a little variety, every now and then . . .

  Giant: You get suckered in too easily.

  Giantess: I know. No one knows that better than I do.

  After the giant has eaten the ox, he commands his wife to bring him his bags of gold, so he can perform the day’s tally. This is a ritual, a comforting reminder that he’s just as rich today as he w
as yesterday, and the day before.

  Once he’s content that he still has all the gold he’s ever had, he lays his colossal head down on the tabletop and falls into the kind of deep, wheezing nap anybody would want to take after eating an ox.

  Which is Jack’s cue to climb back out of the saucepan, grab the bags of gold, and take off.

  And which would be the giantess’s cue to resuscitate her marriage. It would be the time for her to holler, ‘Thief,’ and claim never to have seen Jack before.

  By evening, she and her husband could have sat laughing at the table, each holding aloft one of Jack’s testicles on a toothpick before popping them in their mouths. They could have declared to each other, It’s enough. It’s enough to be rich, and live on a cloud together; to age companionably; to want nothing more than they’ve got already.

  The giant’s wife seems to agree, however, that robbing her husband is a good move.

  We all know couples like this. Couples who’ve been waging the battle for decades; who seem to believe that if finally, someday, one of them can prove the other wrong – deeply wrong, soul-wrong – they’ll be exonerated, and released. Amassing the evidence, working toward the proof, can swallow an entire life.

  Jack and his mother, wealthy now (Jack’s mother has invested the gold in stocks and real estate), don’t move to a better neighborhood. They can’t abandon the beanstalk. So they rebuild. Seven fireplaces, cathedral ceilings, indoor and outdoor pools.

  They continue living together, mother and son. Jack doesn’t date. Who knows what succession of girls and boys sneak in through the sliding glass doors at night, after the mother has sunk to the bottom of her own private lake, with the help of Absolut and Klonopin?

  Jack and his mother are doing fine. Especially considering that, recently, they were down to their last cow.

  But as we all know, it’s never enough. No matter how much it is.