Sammy told me he’d been having some dreams lately, and he wondered if I could interpret them. He said it sheepishly, so I thought maybe it would be something hilarious. I had no idea how terrifyingly non-hilarious it would be. He said that he’d had a recurring dream for the last few nights: “We're standing in a river holding a canoe. Inside the canoe is Boyce and a bunch of bologna sandwiches. We tell him, ‘You’re going to be fine,’ and he tells us the same. Then you let Boyce’s canoe go and he begins to float away with the current. We watch him float, but as we do the river begins to get much larger with a much faster current. But you, Cyrus, you begin to grow enormous. I started to shrink, though. I scream I'm going to drown, and you say, ‘No, just take that owl out of here.’ I look up and this giant owl comes and picks me up out of the water. You say, ‘This is the way it ends,’ and the owl takes me up into the clouds.”
I watched Sammy’s face as he narrated the dream. I tried to hide my facial expressions to the whole thing, but when he finished I couldn’t help but blurt out, “You made that up. You never dreamed that.” He swore he did, and asked me what it could mean. I told him I had no idea why he was making things up, but there was no way he dreamed it. If he did dream it, based on the archetypes, his storytelling, and Sammy’s personality, it could only mean that he believed himself to be the life-giving messiah of a world populated by Jews and firefighters.
Sammy nodded his head a bit and said, “Right, okay. I guess that’s it, then. Thanks.” I told him again he made the dream up, and he should tell me what the real dream was. So finally he said, “Boyce came and told me you shot yourself.” I stopped him to say he shouldn't be nervous about a literalist reading. Often times death signifies something different, at times even life. “Well you shot yourself, and I was traveling through traffic in a canopy bed on wheels. Your ghost jumped on the bed and I asked you what it was like, death I mean. You didn’t answer me, but you did grab me by the shoulders and say, ‘You’re worth three mabbits of diamonds. Three mabbits!’”
I asked him if that’s all, and he said yes. He told me he had no idea what a mabbit was, and he must have made it up. I told him it didn’t matter, and then asked him if he had made up his mind or not. Sammy knew I already understood everything, so he said that since Boyce was leaving, nothing was going to be the same. That if either of the two of us were leaving, we would be eaten up by the idea that the other two were still together. I told him that’s not true, but he kept going and gave me the details: the Tax Day promotion had finally caught on with some of the corporate bigwigs at Arby’s. There were a few regional manager jobs out west, and any of them were his if he wanted them. “I’ve lived here my whole life, Cyrus.” Me too.
On his way out he said it wasn’t for sure yet, that he was asking for time to decide. He told me that if things were too hard on me, that I should just come with him. I said maybe, but we both knew I wouldn’t. Rachel would always be here, even now.
Once, when Rachel was going through some of my father’s old photo albums, she got really excited. She pointed at a picture of my father as a young man. My uncle (my mother’s brother) was with him, along with a couple other people I didn’t recognize. They couldn’t have been older than sixteen, all sitting at a diner booth. Rachel asked me if I knew what was so special about the picture. I said that my uncle apparently was never offered a straw by the waitress, because there wasn’t one in his glass nor an extra one on the table. "No," she said. “Your dad is smiling.”
That wasn't the only time I saw my father smile. Once I saw him smile when we were at the grocery store and a cart full of groceries got away from a lady in the parking lot. It rolled right out of the lot and into the road and a minivan came by and hit it. Those groceries blew up into about ten thousand pieces,
and I thought my father's heart would explode he laughed so hard. I also one saw him smile when we saw a Cooper's Hawk steal a tennis ball in mid-air from a couple of little kids who were playing with it. The Cooper's Hawk carried it about two hundred yards and then dropped it in the middle of a pond. My father smiled for about three days over that one.
