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By Root 938 0

the water, facing inland toward a compound of five slightly smaller shingled mansions, and I was holding a red plastic gasoline can by its handle, daintily, like a purse. The smaller mansions were all on fire: there was more flame than wood, more smoke than structure. But there were people still inside the buildings, and they were leaning out windows, clinging to trellises. Each one was holding books; they were all burdened by books. Some of them were throwing the books out the windows; some were lowering overflowing sacks of books down the trellises toward men waiting on the ground below. There was one woman on top of a roof. She was wearing a gauzy, nearly transparent nightgown. Her hair was on fire: the flames ringed her skull like a crown, dripped down her long, curly locks like wax. I couldn't see her face, but it was obvious, in the logic of the dream, that she was beautiful and necessary. She was leaning against the chimney, beating her head with one of the books as if to put out the fire. The book was a hardcover, though, and the woman quickly knocked herself unconscious. Slumped against the chimney the way she was, I could see that the woman had no underwear on: her black pubic hair looked like a tattoo against her pearl white stomach and thighs. One of the men on the ground saw this, too. He became distracted, understandably, and while gazing at the unconscious woman's exposed nether regions, he, too, was knocked unconscious by a falling sack of books. Another man knelt to attend to his fallen comrade, then looked up and pointed to the woman on the roof. Her nightgown was flickering and hissing in the fire; the book, still in her right hand, caught fire and exploded. A severe, sharp cry came from the men on the ground, from the men and women in the windows and on the trellises. It appeared to be the first book lost in the fire. A great despair washed over them all. The men and women abandoned hope, hurled themselves out the windows and off the trellises. The men on the ground below did not attempt to avoid the falling bodies and were crushed.

It was quite a dream, all right, and not at all the kind I usually had. I usually had the kind in which familiar people showed up in unlikely places, like the one in which I found my boss sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, which I found interesting ― my boss had never been in my house and didn't even drink coffee ― but no one else did, and when I relayed these dreams to my family, their eyes glazed over as if they were having a dream of their own. No, this dream was different, and I wished my family were around so I could tell them about it and prove what sort of fantastic dream life old Sam Pulsifer was capable of having ― although I'd have to edit out the pubic-hair part for the kids. Or maybe I wouldn't have told them after all, because the dream didn't make me feel so hot: my head hurt and I was breathing hard. After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life. That's how I felt until I went downstairs (the house was empty again, my hangover more familiar and less terrible, the hangover potion on the table again less urgently needed, though I drank it anyway), opened the Springfield Republican, and discovered that someone had set fire to the Edward Bellamy House in Chicopee, Massachusetts, not twenty minutes from where I sat, reading about it.

At first I didn't remember that Bellamy was a writer, and, by extension, that his house was a writer's house. The headline read LOCAL LANDMARK RECEIVES MINOR FIRE DAMAGE, as though the minor fire damage had come in the mail. Only after reading a little bit did I discover that Bellamy had been a writer and that his most famous book was Looking Backward. Only then did the author's name and his book sneak through the fog of my hangover and appear in my memory bank. I put down the paper, walked to my father's room, opened the end table drawer, rifled through the box of letters, and finally found it: a letter from Mr. Harvey