Excerpt: The Reincarnations of Miss Anne

Vera swam up through layers of dream to the surface of wakefulness. It was a clear crisp autumn day outside the windows. Blue sky blazed behind calligraphic swirls of cirrus. It had rained during the night, furiously beating against the windows, trees thrashing. It had rained and blown and blown through, leaving crystalline sunshine and the razor-sharp sparkle of new rain on car tops, on the minute ridges in the asphalt, slick mirror on driveways and new tar, glitter on the edges of leaves.

She lay in the covers, wrapped in warmth, as if fallen from a great height. She dreamed—had dreamed three nights in a row—that she was flying in the arms of someone, a man or a woman or both, who was Destiny itself, whose warm arms enfolded her in flying drapery like a Renaissance angel. Destiny or Love or Fate or the Apotheosis of the World Spirit Moving in History. That would teach her to read Hegel and eat cheese popcorn before going to bed.

She fell a thousand feet out of the painted baroque sky of dream into the warmth of her bed, covers around her in El Greco folds, all sharp geometry with shadow folded in between. All warmth; she cuddled a fold of blanket, but the marvelous body of the angel was gone. Who had that been? A man or a woman, dark hair flying against her face. She can almost feel that flutter of silk against her cheek now. In the dream, she didn’t turn to see the face of the one bearing her up. It wasn’t fearful, that turning-away—not like the nightmares in which the face behind her was the rotted skull of a five-years-dead corpse or a body out of a mass grave. No, this was the trust of a lover, the sense of a child that its mother was abiding behind it, warm lap and foundation of the world.

She already missed that presence, waking up alone. No, not entirely alone, as a furry orange face nuzzled hers. Crabcakes. “Crabcakes,” she said, and the cat replied, quite intelligently, “Mrow.”

Which she already knew how to translate: “It’s morning, and you’re not awake. My food bowl is in a deplorable state. You know I don’t like those nasty dried bits that stick to the bowl overnight. If you really were the intelligent animal you claim to be, you’d be up already and doing something about it. I’m not asking for rational animal, though. I’ve learned better. I would settle for featherless biped. Just so long as you do something about the food situation.”

With a sigh of resignation, she got up and wrapped her robe around her. the apartment was chilly, as one would expect in late October. The polished bamboo flooring was smooth and cool against her bare feet. A nice apartment, with a nice floor, that felt as much as possible like silk, the more so if she traversed it in (slippery) socks. The floors extended into the kitchen, where she got the cat food down out of the cabinet, unzipped the can and set it on the counter before she cleaned the cat’s steel food bowl. She never liked the plastic bowl he’d had before, because the smell stuck to it. She imagined he liked it even less.

Crabcakes immediately showed his appreciation by padding up to the bowl and tucking in, so far as a cat ever did that—nipping at the food with quick, fastidious, sharp-toothed bites, whiskers twitching.

Out the window was bright October morning, blue-skied and splendid. In the dumpster one floor below gamboled grey squirrels of truly Rubenesque proportions, that is, if Rubens had painted squirrels. Their plumy tails flourished and their pillowy haunches twitched as they made their way among pizza boxes, the cardboard wrappers of twenty-four-packs of soda, beer, and various other things. Cereal boxes, candy wrappers, packaging from various kinds of electronic toys, …

… and a flash of glitter, or was that fallen rainwater?

Glitter-bedizened drapery as in a nativity scene, like the cheap one her parents had had when she was a child, the one in which the angel in flying draperies had had to be glued to the pediment of the stable each year, and each succeeding year, he—or she—or it—had fallen down again. The angel’s back, behind its wide-spread wings, was smooth and it resisted the glue…

… a flash of glitter, like sun on metal. But it isn’t sun or metal or even Christmas glitter. It’s a feather, a feather made of silver or sunlight, and it reflects the blue of the sky.

Vera stared down into the dumpster, not quite believing her eyes. The blue was the blue of the Mediterranean about the Greek isles, the blue of shadow on white adobe under the New Mexico sun, the shiver of alabaster and lapis, Egyptian faience in a three-thousand-year-old necklace nestled in a tomb, little ship to take you to the blessed isles…

The harbor at Utopia is shaped like a crescent. Twin arms of white-and-gold headland wrap tenderly around the bay like the horns of the moon, like a mother holding a beloved child. Favilla Vogel looks out over the water, rising from her bed under the great window. The weather in Utopia is delicious for sleeping, nights cool enough to make the weight of a sheet and perhaps a blanket quite pleasant, and the warmth of a lover’s skin not unendurable.

Favilla loves the morning more than any other time. it’s the sweet interval between dream and life. She has been dreaming of flight, her favorite dream. In Utopia, dreams are a favorite form of entertainment. In Utopia, no-place, also spelled Eutopia, the good place, a harbor town on an island shaped like the moon, waxing or waning depending on how you approach it, dreams and stories are the main entertainments. There’s a famous opera, Songs from Euclid, that takes as its subject the first book of that notable text; the dances are performed against a shifting background of colored diagrams. Children know the words and they sing along as the dancers play out the theorems.

In Utopia, no-place or Eutopia, the good place, dreams are solid as marble and blue as the sea. Favilla Vogel, whose name means a bird, has been dreaming of flight. She had her arms wrapped around someone whose face she could not see, whose back nestled into her chest and belly as if they were sleeping lovers or mother and child, someone who trusted her, for not once in the course of the dream did her partner in flight turn to see who it was to whom belonged the encircling arms. Around them the crisp snap of drapery, snap like a silk flag in the wind or the more substantial flap of sailcloth in a stiff breeze—the sort of fair wind that would send your little skiff sailing across the open bay of Utopia, and make you burst into song.

Which Favilla did—in a fine contralto voice—several times a week, on the stage of the Passionate Series of Song. This twelvemonth they were staging The Loves of Vera Pavlovna, an opera from New Russia. Favilla loved the ballroom scenes, which called for vigorous figures of dance and boisterous singing, as well as fine cookery—the New Russian operas were particularly notable for the fine refreshments that passed from the stage to the audience, and this one in particular, which at its conclusion dissolved into a festival in which audience and performers mingled in the final dance.

The Happy Ending Big Revolutionary Dance Number.

Which of course in Eutopia, in Utopia, isn’t quite the same as in more sorrowful human realms, because the contrast with ordinary life isn’t quite so sharp.