The Dream Thieves

Ronan didn’t know much about Kavinsky’s home life, other than the legend everyone knew: His father, rich and powerful and Bulgarian, lived in Jersey where he was possibly a mobster. His mother, tanned and fit and made of non-factory-standard parts, lived in the suburban mansion with Kavinsky. This was the story Kavinsky told. That was the legend. The rumor was his mother’s nasal septum had been eaten away by cocaine and his father’s patriarchal instinct had died when Kavinsky tried to kill him.

With Kavinsky, it had always been hard to say what was real. Now, looking at him holding a fraudulently perfect chrome firearm, it was even harder.

“Is it true you tried to kill your father?” Ronan asked. He looked right at Kavinsky when he said it. His unflinching gaze was his second finest weapon, after his silence.

Kavinsky didn’t look away. “I never try to do anything, man. I do what I mean to.”

“Rumor has it that’s why you’re here and not Jersey.”

“He tried to kill me,” Kavinsky replied. His eyes glittered. He had no irises. Just black and white. The line of his smile was ugly and lascivious. “And he doesn’t always do what he means to. And anyway, I’m harder to kill than that. You kill your old man?”

“No,” Ronan said. “This killed him.”

“Like father, like son,” Kavinsky noted. “You ready to go again?”

Ronan was.

Pills on tongue. Chase it with beer.

This time, he saw the ground coming. Like being spat from the air. He had time to hold his thought, hold his breath, curl his body. He rolled into the dream. Fast. Tossed from a moving vehicle.

Soundlessly, he rolled into the trees.

They watched each other. A strange bird screamed. Orphan Girl was nowhere to be seen.

Ronan ducked low. He was quiet as rain under a root. He thought:

bomb

And there it was, a Molotov cocktail, not very different from the one he’d thrown into the Mitsubishi. Three rocks jutted from the damp forest floor, only the tips visible, eroded teeth, mossy gums. The bottle was tipped between them.

Ronan crept forward. Closed his fingers around the dewcovered neck of the bottle.

Te vidimus, Greywaren, whispered one of the trees.

(We see you, Greywaren.)

He clenched his hand around the bomb. He felt the dream shifting, shifting —

He exploded awake.

Kavinsky was already back, doing a line of coke off the dash. The light outside was dull and dead, past twilight. His neck and chin were lit like a garden feature by the dash lights below. He wiped his nose. His already keen expression sharpened when he saw Ronan’s dream object.

Ronan was paralyzed as usual, but he could see perfectly well what he’d just produced: a Molotov cocktail identical to those at the substance party — a T-shirt twisted and stuffed into a beer bottle full of gasoline. It looked just as it had in the dream.

Only now it was burning.

The flame, beautiful and voracious, had chewed well down into the glass. The gasoline was slicked up the side, reaching for demolition.

With a wild laugh, Kavinsky hit the window button with his elbow and seized the bomb. He hurled it into the dusk. The bottle only made it two yards before it exploded, shivering glass against the side of the Mitsubishi and in through the open window. The smell was terrific, an aerial battle, and the sound sucked all of the hearing out of Ronan’s ears.

Hanging his arm out the window and looking profoundly unconcerned, Kavinsky shook glass shards off his skin and into the grass. Two seconds later, and he wouldn’t have had any arms to worry about. Ronan wouldn’t have had a face.

“Hey,” Ronan said. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

Kavinsky turned his heavy-lidded eyes to Ronan, eyebrows raised. “Check it.”

He lifted his dream thing: a framed diploma. Joseph Kavinsky, graduated from Aglionby Academy with honors. Ronan hadn’t seen one to know if the creamy paper was correct, or if the wording was accurate. But he recognized the spattered signature from Aglionby correspondence. President Bell’s artistic scrawl was unmistakable.

It was badly against Ronan’s code to be impressed, much less show it, but the accuracy and detail was striking.

“You’re too emotional, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. “It’s okay. I get it. If you had balls, it’d be different.” He tapped his temple. “This is a Walmart. Just go to electronics, swipe some TVs, get out of there. Don’t wallow around in there. This would help.”

He gestured to the powder still dusting the dash. Barely there. A fine memory of powder. Ronan shook his head. He could feel Gansey’s eyes on him.

“Suit yourself.” Kavinsky retrieved another six-pack from the backseat. “Ready to go?”

And they dreamt. They dreamt and dreamt, and the stars wheeled overhead and away and the moon hid in the trees and the sun moved around the car. The car filled with impossible gadgets and stinging plants, singing stones and lacy bras. As the noon boiled down, they climbed out and stripped their sweaty shirts and dreamt in the heat instead. Things too big to be contained in a car. Again and again Ronan punched into the forest in his fraying dreams, snuck between the trees, stole something. He was beginning to understand what Kavinsky meant. The dream was a byproduct in all of this; sleep was irrelevant. The trees were just obstacles, a sort of faulty alarm system. Once he short-circuited that, he could take things from his mind without worrying about the dream itself corrupting them.

The light stretched long and thin, nearly to breaking, and then there was night with its tantalizing reflections off one hundred white cars. Ronan didn’t know if it had been days or if this was the same night as before. How long ago had he wrecked the Pig? When was his last nightmare?

Then it was a morning. He didn’t know if they’d already done a morning, or if this was a brand-new one. The grass was wet and the Mitsubishis’ hoods were beaded sweatily, but it was hard to tell if it had rained or if it was merely dew.

Ronan sat against the rear fender of one of the Mitsubishis, the smooth surface cool against his bare back, and wolfed Twizzlers. They felt as if they floated in alcohol inside him. Kavinsky was inspecting Ronan’s latest piece of work — a chain saw. After he’d satisfied himself it worked by mutilating some of the tires on the other Mitsubishis, he rejoined Ronan and accepted a single Twizzler. He was too high for food to be very interesting as anything besides a concept.

“Well?” Ronan asked.

Chainsawing had blasted little flecks of rubber across Kavinsky’s face and bare chest. He said, “Now you dream the Camaro.”

44

Now it seemed simple.

Pill. Beer. Dream.

A Camaro sat among the trees of the dream forest:

no more difficult to imagine than any of the other dream objects

Ronan had pursued. Just larger.

In

Out

Silently, he put his hand on the door handle. The leaves of the trees shivered above; a bird sobbed distantly.

Orphan Girl watched from the other side of the car. She shook her head. He put his finger to his lips.

Awake.

He opened his eyes on the morning sky, and there it was. A glory-red Camaro. Not perfect, but perfectly imperfect, smudged and scuffed as the Pig. Down to the scratch on the door where Gansey had backed it into an azalea bush.

The first sensation wasn’t joy but relief. He had not ruined things — he had the Pig back, he could return to Monmouth without begging. And then the joy hit. It was worse than Kavinsky’s green pills. He was hurled into the emotion. It pummeled and thrilled him. He’d been so proud of the puzzle box, of the sunglasses, the keys. How stupid he’d been then, like a kid in love with his crayon drawings.

This was a car. An entire car. It hadn’t been there, and now it was.

An entire world.

Now it would be all right. Everything would be all right. From the front of the car, Kavinsky sounded unimpressed.

He’d lifted the hood. “I thought you said you fucking knew this car, man.”

After Ronan’s limbs had feeling in them again, he joined Kavinsky by the open hood. The defect was immediately apparent. There was no engine. Ronan could see all the way to the stubbled grass. It would probably run, of course. If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life. But that was no comfort.

“I didn’t think of it,” he said. “The engine.”

The joy was fading as quickly as it had appeared. How could Ronan hope to hold all of the Pig’s foibles in his head? Gansey wouldn’t want a perfect Pig, a Pig that ran sans engine. He would want his Pig. He loved the Camaro because it broke down, not despite it. Despair rang in Ronan’s thoughts. It was too complicated.

Kavinsky abruptly punched the side of his head. “Think? There’s no thinking, fool! We’re not professors. Kill your brain.” He surveyed the empty engine compartment again. “I guess Dick can use this as a planter. Put his petunias and shit in here.”

Irritated, Ronan slammed the hood shut. He climbed onto it — no point to sparing the paint from scratches — and flicked his fingers against his knee while he tried to get his mind back together. No thinking. Ronan didn’t know a better way to get the car from his dreams. He didn’t understand how to hold the concept inside him as he was thrust into sleep. He was weary of his dreams. They felt as tattered as the night horror’s wings.

“Hey, man, I’m sure he’ll like this one,” Kavinsky said. “And if he doesn’t, fuck him.”

Ronan merely leveled his heaviest gaze. Kavinsky was not Gansey, so maybe he didn’t understand its meaning. There would be no fucking of Gansey. Ronan hadn’t intended to wreck the Camaro when he’d first taken it, but he had. He wasn’t going to add insult to injury by bringing back this impostor. This car was not a truth. This car was a very pretty lie.

“This,” Ronan said, pressing his hands flat against the warm metal of the car, “is a very shitty goldfish.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Yours.”

Kavinsky had said he’d teach him. He was not taught.

“Yours. I practiced, man!” Kavinsky gestured broadly to the field of Mitsubishis. “You see all these losers? It took me months to get it right. Look at that bitch!”

He pointed to one with a single axle, right in the middle. The car rested sleepily on its front bumper. “I get it wrong, try it again, wait for my dream place to get its juice back, do it again, get it wrong, do it again.”

Ronan repeated, “What do you mean, get your juice back?”

“The dream place runs out,” Kavinsky said. “Walmart can’t keep making TVs all night long! It’s getting low now. Can’t you feel it?”

Was that what he felt? The fraying around the edges? Right now, he could only feel anxiety, dulled to stupidity by beer.

“I don’t have time to practice. I need it now or I can’t go back.”

Kavinsky said, “You don’t have to go back.”

This was the most nonsensical thing he’d said since this entire experience had begun. Ronan didn’t even acknowledge it. He said, “I’m doing it again. I’m doing it right this time.”