Mom’s place, actually. You show up with a big chocolate cake, and just as my sister Loris made her wish. a giant bear jumps out of it and chases us all inside. I start running around, making sure all the doors are locked and the windows shut. Then — I’m kind of fuzzy on what happens next — but alter a while I’m standing on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere with you and an old man with a beard and pyjamas.”
“No kidding?”
“Oh no. An Old Testament prophet, I think. The sea’s rough and filthy. I’m trying to keep clean and dry but there’s no way. I feel dizzy and think my head’s bleeding, but you tell me I’m OK. I say something like — I forget what, exactly — then you give me a plastic whistle and the old man pulls out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we all eat. That’s when I woke up.”
“Whew. Pretty wild.”
“I know. Amazing, eh?” Delbert leaned closer and chuckled while he ran hot water over his blade until the basin steamed. “I wonder what it means?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
Moon winced, as if he’d nicked himself, but his razor was still in the sink. I twist my face up and away from his so I could better shave my neck and put some distance between us. His breath smelled sweet and ruined, like a butter tart in a garden compost.
“Sounds funny.” I smiled gamely. “Especially the chicken.”
“Sure, sure, there’s some humour in it,” Delbert agreed, lathering his cheeks. “But I wonder: maybe there’s something else going on.” He must have glimpsed my unease because he laughed curtly and shook his head, and then explained himself. “Don’t worry, bro’. I don’t mean any of that Freudian garbage. Freud and Jung,” he spat, pronouncing the J as harshly as he might for “Jesuit” or “Jehovah’s Witness.” “Reich — Have you heard of him?— full of demons, all of them. We may as well burn their books, because they’re burning themselves right now.” He shook his head with revulsion, and then looked at me with a slight, incongruous grin. “Sorry to go on like this. Anyway, all I mean is, I wonder what the Ford’s trying to tell me.”
“Oh….” That’s what I was afraid he’d meant. After all. I knew Freud only second hand, thanks to the Montgomery Clift movie and bits on The Carol Burnett Show.“Don’t you think — I don’t know — it could be just a dream, right?”
“Just a dream? Have you ever had just a dream? ‘And it shall come to pass that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams ….’ Joel 2:28. I think we always need to listen for that still small voice, even in our sleep. Maybe especially in our sleep. It’s scriptural. It’s like God’s shortcut to our hearts. Plus, this being the last days and all Then softer, conspiratorially: “Not everybody here goes for that kind of talk. This kind of talk, I mean. No one says anything, but a lot of people suspect I’m some kind of Pentecostal or something.” He shook his head slowly, rolled his eyes and smiled.
“I’m sure God can use dreams,” I said carefully, and in the mirror caught Donny Loveless’s concerned glance as he shuffled behind us before turning towards a urinal. At sinks on either side of us and in stalls quietly feigning a shit, there were godly men confirming their judgements of Moon and shaping their judgements of me. There was a hush about us. The walls wouldn’t take our words, but they were absorbed by the porous souls of holy ghosts. I wished Delbert hadn’t singled me out for conversation. I wished he hadn’t told me his dream. Most of all, I wished he hadn’t dreamt of me. “The thing is, if we really believe the Bible to be God’s final Word, don’t we have to be awfully careful about how we interpret stuff?”
“Oh, absolutely, absolutely,” Moon nodded vigorously, drawing his razor with long strokes down his slender, unlathered neck. There was silence between us until I wiped my face dry. Then: “What’s your schedule like today?”
“Well, Delbert, it’s pretty crazy. Lots of stuff. Dean says I need a haircut before classes Monday.”
“Come by my room if you’ve got a minute. How’s after breakfast? It won’t take long. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. After breakfast then? Got something for you, too.”
“Really?”
“Don’t sweat it.”
My room could have been any other in the Abner Henry Residence for Men. An olive, all-weather carpet stretched across an uneven floor 12 feet square, separating a pair of stacked, pine bunks bracketed to gyprock and a chipped, silver radiator beneath a small, screenless window that had been painted shut. Against each of the other walls a formica-topped desk squatted beneath pressboard cupboards and pressed against a narrow, oak-panelled closet with a door scuffed from years of radiator strikes. A cheap tuna-coloured loudspeaker — wired to the dean’s office and without an off switch or volume control — was screwed into the plaster over the door. Every wall was antique white, and every ceiling washed in a stormy ivory stucco with a stingy splash of homely copper spangles. At night, in moonglow and the high-beams of infrequent traffic, it resembled the empty starfield of a hyperextended universe.
The week of my arrival, I gathered with the other frosh in O.B.l’s tabernacle for a special exhortation from Dean Blier on the godly principle of stewardship. He admonished us to “live as sojourners, calling no land but heaven home,” and referred us to page 44 of the school handbook, where we read that room damage would earn us five property damage points. Twenty points could mean suspension; 30, expulsion. If we wanted to decorate our rooms we needed to use an adhesive putty called “NoMar,” which was the colour and consistency of a dry wad of grape bubble gum and, taste aside, about as useful. In four years, the only friends whom I never heard grouse about the property damage rules were from Singapore, and therefore, I supposed, somewhat accustomed to pernickety despotism.
Despite the risk, few left their walls bare. In my first week I hadn’t seen an unadorned, occupied room until I visited Moon’s.
Delbert was sitting at a desk with his Bible open to Revelations, wearing a shirt the colour of unstirred yoghurt. His pants were a flared Tory-blue wool blend — too heavy, I judged, for this time of year, though his room seemed unusually cold — with ringmaster-white pinstripes as thick as pencil lead running up his shanks. Dressed like that, it seemed odd he was barefoot.
There were no posters on the walls, no books on the shelves, and the only bedding I could see was a rolled up khaki sleeping bag at the head of the top bunk. There was little evidence he lived there. He was an over-dressed extra on an under-dressed set.
“Hi bro — breakfast’s over, huh?” He tucked a yellow felt highlighter in his breastpocket and folded the Scriptures shut. I nodded. “I hardly ever eat breakfast. Don’t like to rush devotions. Come on in and close the door. Pull out the other chair.” He read my face like I read Dagwood Bumstead’s, and smiled as though he saw a halo of question marks. “I know. I guess I like things tidy.”
“I guess. Where’s all your stuff?”
“I don’t need much — not like I used to. What I have, I keep out of the way. I refuse to be tyrannized by thinghood. I won’t be possessed by possessions. Cluttered room means a cluttered mind. I like both of mine to be shipshape.”
“My place is a mess already,” I said as I sat. “Mostly my roommate’s stuff. Books and socks and boot polish everywhere.”
“I see, I see,” Delbert grinned and nodded too sharply. “I’ve got a room all to myself. Where are you from, Gideon? Gideon— you’ve got such a neat name. He’s one of my favourites from the Book of Judges. ‘The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.’ He’s right up there with Deborah and Barek — way cooler than Samson. Casting the fleece to test the Lord — I mean, we do stuff like that all the time — but then, reducing the number of his army so the whole world would know that it was God’s victory …. Now that’s a real hero. You’re fortunate to have such a neat name.”
“I’m