Ketrin Valente - The Bread We Eat in Dreams

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. Shes an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. Its that kind of story.

The lady in question stands in the corner of my office, lighting the cigarette dictated by tradition with shaking hands.

You gotta help me, mister, she says.

Im a miss, but that doesnt matter. In situations like this, you have to stick to the formula. Shes the damsel in distress, I see that right away. Im her knight in shining armor, even if that armor is a size eight slingback in Antique Pearl.

Tell me all your troubles, I say in my best baritone, and pour her a whiskey, straight. She drinks it, leaves a frosty red lip-print on the glass.

And she takes a deep breath that makes her black dress shift just so. She tells me a man is after her because he wants her heart. He chases her through the dark, through the neon forest of rainy streets. Or she has this brother, see, with a withered arm he carries in a sling, crooked like a birds wing. She was supposed to protect him from their father but she just wasnt strong enough. Or her stepmother cant stand the sight of her and beats her every night for a dozen sins shes never thought of. Or shes waited and waited for a child but nothing doing. Or she pricked her finger on a needle when she was sixteen and oh, glory, the things shes done to keep on pricking. Or she woke up and all her savings accounts were gone, the money turned worthless overnight. Maybe its a simple one: the mirror said she wasnt pretty anymore. Maybe its complicated, she got in over her head, and now she has three nights to cough up a name or an ugly little man is going to take her son.

Ive heard them all. Its what I do. Im not so much an investigator as what you might call a consultant. Step right up; show me your life. Ill show you the story youre in. Nothing more important in this world, kid. Figure that out and youre halfway out of the dark.

Call them fairy tales, if that makes you feel better. If you call them fairy tales, then you dont have to believe youre in one.

Its all about seeing the patternand the pattern is always there. Its a vicious circle: the story gets told because the pattern repeats, and the pattern repeats because the story gets told. A girl comes in with mascara running down her face and says that she slept with her professor because she thought hed love her forever. She wanted to walk in his rarified world of books and gin parties and wickedly sardonic quips instead of treading water in her dreary home town. She tried to speak the way his friends did and dress the way he liked, tottering on those topless high-heeled Iliac towers. She made herself write the way he did himself, made herself like his music and his opinions, and now hes gone and shes got this knife, see, but not a lot of courage. Shes in so much pain. Every step is like walking on knives.

And I say: Sweetheart, you gave up your voice for him. That was bound to go badly. Now, how do you want to proceed?

Because theres a choice. Theres always a choice. Who do you want to be? You can break this tale, once youve got a sightline on it. Thats why they come to me. Because I can open up my files and tell them who they are. Because Ive got a little Derringer in my desk with six bullets in it like pomegranate seeds. Because I have the hat, crooked at just the right angle, that says I can save them.

So who do you want to be?

Sure, no great loss to be the ingenue, sacrificing yourself for your love. Put away that knife, fix your make-up, drop his class, watch him with his hand on the waist of some blonde thing at the faculty partynever forgetting that shes in a story too, and you cant tell which one by looking at her, and maybe shes the true bride and maybe shes bleeding in her six hundred dollar shoes to convince him shes the right girlbecome like dancing foam on the waves of his society: glittering, beautiful, tragic. Maybe thatll buy you what youre looking for. But its not the only solution. Sometimes its better to choose the knife, cut his tenure, go back home, where youll be exotic and urbane, for all your experience in that strange, foreign world.

I dont judge. I just give them options. And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. Theres power in that, if youre after power.

Then theres the back alley deals, the workarounds, the needles and the camels. You can turn around in the dark, with the man who wants your heart looming so big, so big over you, and you can give it to him, so bright and red and pure that it destroys him. Getting what you want has that effect, more often than you think. But thats a dangerous move, the intimate exchange of hearts in the shadows, and sometimes the man in the dark walks off with everything anyway.

Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. You can let the old witch dance at your wedding, hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping. You can just walk away, get on a horse, and go wake some other maiden from her narrative coffin, if youre brave, if youre strong. What do you want? Do you want to escape? Or were you looking for that candy house?

Sometimes they dont believe me. They cant see what I see. They cant even see how we play out a story right there in my office: her showing a little leg, me tipping my hat over my eyes, the dusty blinds, the broken sign beyond my window, blinking HOTEL into the inky night. Its a pretty broad schtick, but it helps make my point: nothing here but us archetypes, sweetheart. Still, when I tell them it was always fairy gold, all that money those sleek men in their silk suits said was so wisely invested, they get angry. They think Im having a joke at their expense. But thats what fairy gold is: fake money, wisely invested. The morning was always going to come when you opened your 401k and it had all turned back to acorns and leaves. They throw water in my face or they beg me to hunt down the leprechaun that sold them that rotten house, and sure, Ill do that. Whatever you pay me for. You choose your role in this. I provide an honest service, and thats all. I dont try to sway them either way; it wouldnt be fair. After all, I can see their cards, but they cant see mine.

Its a lonely life. Me and my patterns and scotch and ice. The nature of the process is that they leave when its over, exeunt, pursued by a bear with an empty porridge bowl. If they dont go, I didnt do my job. You have to keep moving, stay ahead of the oncoming plot. Never stop to rest, not here, not in the woods.

And me? Well, it doesnt work that way. If you could narrate yourself Id be out of a job. I need them to tell me who I am. If Im a savior in their story, or a devil. If Im a helpful guide, or temptation in a trenchcoat. No ones ever guessed my name. And thats the way I like it: clean, no mess, no mistakes. No attachments. Attachments beget stories, and Im no protagonist. Eliot had a bead on it. A bit player, a voice in the smoke. A Greek chorus, thats me. Or maybe a mirror on the wall. Point is, I dont work in the spotlight. Im strictly in the wings. So they walk into my officenot always dames, sometimes a paladin in an ice cream suit, and oh, if he doesnt have that girl with the hair down to god-knows-where hell just die, or his wife is bored and unhappy and maybe she only ever liked him in the first place when he was a beast, or a wolf, or hes just lost, and he can hear something like a bull calling for him from the deeps, and I fall for them because thats the drill, but losing them is part of the denouement, and I know that better than anyone. Itll make you hard, this business. Hard as glass.