Story by James Foreman Ill.u.s.tration by Ramon Perez

DROWNING.

I SAW THE FIRST ADS IN MARCH. A week or two later it was all over the news, and then for the next few months you could not get away from it. Still, none of us expected it to have the impact it did. It was a killer. By November I had only had eight or nine dreams when I used to have three or four a week. This is how I make my living. I have a dream and then I wait. Eventually they come to the office or sometimes I run into them somewhere else, we talk about it, and they give me money. At least, that is how it had been working.

Right then I was down to my last week's worth of savings. I had sold my car in August and my stereo and most of my office equipment in September and every day I was looking around thinking about what to cannibalize next. I was getting more and more pessimistic.

Then I had a dream that I thought was a paying one and I woke up that morning feeling pretty good, not a hundred percent but maybe sixty-five. In the dream I was painting a room with a small bunch of lilies. Specifically, I was back working for Denny Mankino.

I had worked for Denny for two miserable years before I started this new line of work. Denny was a nice enough guy most of the time but maybe two days a week he was a nightmare. He always apologized afterwards, and always paid on time, but I was still thinking about going to work for someone else. I had my first dream around then.

The dream was about our client. She was a nice person I did not know a thing about, other than she always said hi and once she brought me a coffee. In the dream, she was swimming in a pool filled with milk, trying to empty it by drinking as she swam. At the end of each lap the pool would be maybe half-full. The problem was that the whole time she was swimming it was raining milk. Not hard, but enough to keep filling the pool. Now the strange part, as opposed to the weird part, was that in a barn maybe thirty yards away, a farmer was spinning a millstone. It was a huge, regular millstone-type millstone, but he spun it like it weighed nothing, like it was a lazy Susan on your kitchen counter. This is what was making it rain. Like I said, strange. But it was just a dream and when I woke up I forgot about it.

That afternoon while Denny was out doing whatever he did, the client came home, walked up to me and started pouring out a dream she had had in which I was holding an invoice she had to pay. She did not even take off her coat, just walked right up to me and started talking.

I had no idea what was happening and thought maybe she was not a nice person but a maniac and I was about to find out how wrong I had been, but then I noticed that she was drinking from a big carton of milk and my dream came back to me like a bolt of shimmery cloth unfurling across the floor.

We went into the kitchen, sat down, and I told her all about it. When I got to the part about the guy, the farmer, she started paying close attention.

"He had a medium-sized freckle above his right eye, half in the eyebrow."She slowly nodded her head as though she knew what I would say next, and then got up and went over to the sink. I waited. When she finally turned around she said, "Can I give you some money?"She looked like a huge weight had been lifted off her. I was glad she was feeling better, but the notion of taking money kind of creeped me out.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've just helped me. A lot."

I gave her a moment to tell me how but she did not. Instead she found her checkbook and wrote out a check. She handed it to me. It was for five thousand dollars, payable to 'cash.'

As you can imagine, I was dumbfounded, and I guess since I was not saying anything, she felt the need to. "The guy in your dream is my brother. At least, it makes perfect sense if he is. He died, nine years ago tomorrow."

"Oh. I'm sorry."I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

She wasn't finished. "And now, finally, I think I understand. I'm sorry, but I'm kind of freaked out by all this and I'd rather not talk about it. We don't have to talk about this anymore, do we?"

I didn't want to jinx either of us, and now that I had a great big check from nowhere, I didn't want to jinx it either, but I had no idea what we were supposed to do.

"I don't know. Let's see. If you have to tell me, I guess you can come find me. Are you sure you want to give me this?It seems like a lot."

She sat down and looked very calm and smiled a really nice smile. "Yes."

I waited, but she wasn't saying anything else. "Okay then."

She went back to the sink and poured out the milk, and I went back to work.

She never got back in touch with me so I never found out what it was all about, but her check was good. So there was that.

Within about six months the clients were coming pretty steadily. I quit working for Denny and got the office, and for maybe four or five years I made a nice living. It was kind of like I was just walking around, delivering things, but with no real time pressure, and at almost every stop people gave me money. Though it was kind of aimless, there was a weird logic to it all.

Then the machine came along.

I was not convinced that my new dream about Denny was a paying one. Who was supposed to be my client?Myself?That was creepy. The dream just did not make sense the way others had. So I sat in my office, waiting to see what was going to happen next. And then Mr. Watson came in, which I was absolutely not expecting at all.

Mr. Watson was the shop steward of my local, Local 111 of the S.S.C.W.I. For a long time I kind of thought the union was a scam, a way of conniving me out of 5% of my earnings, until they helped me out of a legal sc.r.a.pe that otherwise would have sunk me. That, and they offered a pretty good medical package that included dental, and of course a pension.

For a moment, just long enough to see that he was not my client, I looked at him without saying anything. He sat down on the corner of my desk and looked back at me. I had no idea what he was up to so I kept my yap shut. It must have looked pretty silly, both of us staring at each other, blank-faced, as though we were having some kind of conversation but without actually speaking.

He did not look good. He was in his late fifties and cultivated a Columbo look anyway: rumpled trench coat, cigarette, bad haircut and if you got close enough a deep, almost subliminal smell of smoke, but still. He was close enough that I smelled the smoke. That was his day job. He was an investigator for the fire department; the rumor was that he had a perfect record. I do not think this had anything to do with his side job, though; he was just a tenacious and thorough guy. He once explained that he was really only a witness anyway. "If you pay close enough attention," he'd said, "ninety-nine percent of the time it's obvious how it all burned down."

"Okay," he finally said, then got off the corner of my desk, walked over to the window, looked down at the street and then came back and sat in my client's chair, the one people used to sit in and then give me money from.

"You do any other work in here? A side job of some kind?"he said, taking in my steadily-emptying office.

"I was a house painter before this."

"That's right. That's not such bad work."

"I didn't mind it, but my boss had some real problems."

He looked around some more, nodding his head. "You don't even have a coffee machine?"

"Sold it. I can call down to the diner, they'll send one right up."

"The Brazilian place?"

"No, the other one."

"Oh. Yeah, sure."

I made the call. When I hung up he didn't say anything. He seemed distracted, maybe even morose, which was not like him at all. He was generally a pretty light-hearted guy.

For laughs I started my spiel. I thought he might get a kick out of it. I sat on the edge of my chair, leaned comfortably forward onto the desk, looked him in the eye, and said in my most neutral voice, "So, I had this dream."

He gave me a very stern look. "This is no laughing matter,"he said. He was really in a sour mood.

"But I did have a dream."

"Seriously now?"

"Well, kind of. I mean, I have one I'm working on but I don't know who the, uh, client is yet."

"Oh." He looked away, annoyed. "That's what we thought. Look, it's also why I'm here. We're having some problems down at the hall. As you might have heard, we got no orders coming in. You're maybe one of ten people who've had anything in the last six months or so. Ever since that f.u.c.king machine came along. So, I just came to tell you, and luckily you don't have any medical stuff going on, but we're going to have to cut back on medical coverage, substantially, and no more dental."

I had a dentist appointment next week. I was finally going to take advantage of the dental plan. This really was no joke.

I first met Mr. Watson maybe a month after I got my office. He walked into my waiting room one morning and said, "What kind of a waiting room is this if you got no magazines?"

I got up to see who it was and didn't recognize him. "I beg your pardon?"

"If this is your waiting room, where're the magazines?"

"I guess not many people actually wait there. Can I help you?"

He gave me a slightly surprised look. "Oh. I'm Jerry Watson, I'm the shop steward of Local 111 of the S.S.C.W.I."

I gave him a blank look.

"The Sub and Supra Consciousness Workers International. We call it the S.S.C.W.I., though, to keep from freaking people out."

He stuck out his hand and I took it. He had a firm, comfortable handshake and an open, honest face. Immediately, for no good reason at all, I liked him.

"I came by to take your application."

"My application?"

"To join the union. If you want. There's no pressure, honestly, but we do offer a pretty good health and benefits package, and we watch your back if things get out of control."

"Out of control?"

"Like that guy last month who didn't want to admit he was cheating on his wife? If that had gotten out of hand, we could step in for you. But, really, it's your choice. I have the form for the application here, and if you're accepted we'll mail you the medical and all the rest of that c.r.a.p, so you can look it over at your leisure."

I was pretty surprised, as you might expect. Of all the big changes my life had been going through, I did not foresee this. I had not even belonged to the Painter and Plasterer's Union. There was something about Mr. Watson I trusted though. He reminded me of an uncle who would bail you out and keep it quiet. So when I got over my surprise I asked him the one thing that had really been nagging at me, figuring if anyone knew he would. Namely, what the h.e.l.l was going on?

"Oh. Right. Well, it's like a swimming pool, a big swimming pool everyone swims in every day. Some for longer than others, but no one for too long because the water is too cold. The only ones who stay in for a long time are some coma victims, and a lot of them are kind of only half in, half out."

"Sometimes there're fewer people in the pool, and sometimes there're lots more, and when there're lots and lots more, we go out and get new hires."

"Like me?"

"I guess. I dunno, you ever have these dreams before?"

"I dunno."

"There you go. There're a lot more we don't know than we do."

The other workers in the local were, for the most part, just like me. Regular, boring people: accountants, lawyers, teachers, maintenance workers, actors. Most all of them kept their day jobs and no one made a big deal about this sideline. I suspect most would have even denied it if asked; it was all pretty far-fetched. The "union hall" was actually just the backroom of a diner where we met periodically, or if you had something come up, Mr. Watson or one of the other officers would meet you there.

"The problem is this new machine has been giving a lot of people the idea that they don't need to swim in the pool anymore. And that, as you might have guessed, has seriously screwed with the natural order of things."

"Huh. Is there anything we can do about it?"

"We're working on that."

We were both quiet for a moment. The coffee came, and after the guy left, I thought I might as well ask him. "You do it yet?"

He looked at me with a deeply annoyed look. I half expected him to tell me to blow it out my a.s.s. I was not just giving him a hard time though, I really was curious about whether he had checked it out. These machines were scabbing our work and I wanted to know he was on top of it.

"You mind if I smoke?"he finally asked. I got the ashtray from the windowsill and put it on the desk, close to him.

He lit up, offered me one. I put up my hand. He leaned forward in his seat, took a sip of his coffee, and made a surprised face. "Wow, that's good coffee."

"Isn't it though?You'd never guess."

He put the cup back on the edge of my desk. "I did do it. Not just out of a sense of professional responsibility."

"So you were curious?"

"About what?How I'm going to die? Who gives a s.h.i.t how they die?I'll die when I die and after I die I'll be dead, so what do I get from knowing 'how' I die?No, I had to know how it felt."

He squinted and looked past me out my window, made a small grimace like he had sciatica, then back.

"And it was weird. It wasn't what I expected. I was hoping it would be something big, you know, but it wasn't. I mean, all right, you suddenly know how you're gonna die and that's something I had to sleep on for a couple of nights to really get a handle on. But on a deeper level, on the level where we earn our living, well, let's just say I can see how it's polluting the waters.

"For about half an hour after I found out, I felt like I was catching a wave, like, you know when a car goes over a hump and you get that 'Whoa!' feeling? It was like that, and then on the other side of that I felt very calm, and at that moment I knew it was bulls.h.i.t."

"Bulls.h.i.t?But it works. It tells you how you're going to die."

"Well yeah, but that's not what it's selling. And they better not because it's f.u.c.king expensive so they sell it as the be-all and end-all. Which is the bulls.h.i.t part, because they're selling peace of mind, and we all know peace of mind is a racket."He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. "What did you think of it?"

I tried to give at least half a smile. I wanted to tell him what I thought he wanted to hear, but I could not. Ever since third grade when Sister Anne-Marie found out I was lying about eating the chocolate eggs in the Easter display and wailed for a solid half-hour, I just do not have it in me. Call it coercive but I loved Sister Anne-Marie, and every time I'm faced with the opportunity to lie I see her sweetness and know lying will once again break her heart and I cannot do it. Surprisingly, this has brought me far less trouble than you might think.

"I haven't done it."

He seemed taken aback. I didn't think he would be so surprised. I almost wished I could un-say it.

"You what? This is your vocation."

"I know and you're right. But it just smells of really bad luck and I can't bring myself to do it."

"Bad luck?" He suddenly looked like he'd never thought of it that way, and wasn't sure if it was worth the effort. "Bad luck," he said again, and then suddenly started to lighten up.

His phone rang and he dug it out of a pocket, bringing his pack of cigarettes up with it. He lit one up as he answered. He made a couple of grunting noises and stood up, then put his phone away. "I gotta go. Work."

The office suddenly felt very small and hot and I had to leave too. I had to. I stood up with him and grabbed my jacket. "Let me walk down with you."

He seemed to have let go of any misgivings he had about my choice. In fact, he seemed happy now.

In the stairwell he turned back to look up at me. "I'm gonna die by drowning." He gave a little "would you get a load of that" eyebrow b.u.mp as he said it.

"Really?"

"Yeah. So I just bought a boat."

"What if you pa.s.s out in the tub?"

"Exactly!Those f.u.c.king a.s.sholes. I wish I could get the Teamsters on their a.s.ses."