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  Contents

  Sweet Dreams

  Cultural Relativity

  Dr. King’s Refrigerator

  The Gift of the Osuo

  Executive Decision

  Better Than Counting Sheep

  The Queen and the Philosopher

  Kwoon

  The Weave

  Publishing History

  About Charles Johnson

  For the founders of the Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association

  “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

  —Francis Bacon

  “Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.”

  —Alfred North Whitehead

  “Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”

  —Mark Twain

  Sweet Dreams

  “PLEASE, COME IN. Sit down,” he says. “I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting.”

  You cautiously enter the Auditor’s tiny office, holding in your right hand the certified letter you received yesterday, the one that says “Department of Dream Revenue” in the upper-left-hand corner and, below that, the alarming words “Official Business.” The letter had knocked you to your knees. It has been burning in your hand and giving you a headache and upsetting your stomach all day long. So it’s almost a relief to finally be here, on the twentieth floor of a gray government building on First Avenue—almost as if you have been a fugitive from the law, running and hiding, and looking nervously over your shoulder. In fact, the letter said you would face prosecution if you didn’t travel to downtown Seattle and take care of this business immediately. But now the anxiety is over.

  You are there to pay your dream tax.

  As administrative offices go, this one is hardly more than a cubicle. The furniture is identical to every other bureaucratic compartment in the building so that no government worker feels that he or she has been issued more or less than his or her coworkers. There is a cluttered desk, a wastebasket on top of which sits a cross-cut paper shredder, a small table containing a Muratec fax machine and a Xerox copier. At the rear of the room, a four-drawer filing cabinet is pushed against the wall. Resting on this is a small Dream Meter just like the one the government attached to your bed and everyone’s bed many years ago—a little black box roughly the size of a cell phone, with an LCD that digitally reads out the number of dreams you have on any given night, their duration, category, and the fee assigned for each one. Not being a very technical person, you’re not sure exactly how the Dream Meter works, but you do know there is a hefty fine for tampering with it—greater than for tampering with a smoke detector in an airplane’s toilet—and somehow the Dream Meter works in conjunction with the microscopic implant your doctor inserted in your neck through a hypodermic needle, using the same process by which stray dogs are given their own bar code for identification at the city’s animal shelter. To the left of the cabinet, on which sits the Dream Meter, is a calendar turned to today’s October twenty-first-century date.

  “Can I get you anything?” the Auditor asks. “Coffee? Tea?” When you tell him that no, you’re fine, he sits back in his chair, which creaks a little. He is a pale young man; his color is that of plaster, perhaps because he sits all day in this windowless cubicle. You place his age at thirty. Thirty-five. He has blond hair, perfect teeth, and wears a pinstriped shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. All in all, he seems anonymous, like the five hundred other bureaucrats in cubicles just like this one—like functionaries in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil—but your Auditor has tried his best to personalize and give a bit of panache to both his office and himself. He wears a brightly colored Jerry Garcia tie. On his desk where your dream file wings open, he has a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade on a solid brass base. And he wears a ring watch on his right index finger. A bit of ostentatious style, you think. Something that speaks to his having a smidgen of imagination, maybe even an adventurous, eccentric spirit beneath the way the State has swallowed his individuality. Right then you decide your Auditor is someone like you, a person who is just trying to do his job and, who knows, maybe he really understands your problem and wants to help you.

  “Is this your first audit?” he asks.

  You tell him that yes, it is.

  “Well, don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll try to make this as painless as possible for you. Have you been read your rights as a taxpayer?”

  You nod your head, yes. His assistant in the outer office did that.

  “And,” he asks, “did she inform you that if you fail to make a full payment today—or make arrangements to pay in installments—that we can take your paycheck, your bank account, your car, or your house? Did she explain that?”

  For a moment your heart tightens in your chest. You feel the sudden desire to stand and run screaming out of this airless room, but instead you bite down on your lower lip and bob your head up and down.

  The Auditor says, “Good. Don’t be nervous. You’re doing fine. And I assure you, everything we say here is confidential.” He peers down at the paperwork on his desk. Slowly, his smile begins to fade. “Our records show a discrepancy in the amount of dream tax that you paid last year. You declared on form ten-sixty that you enjoyed the experience of three hundred and sixty-five dreams during the previous tax period. But your Dream Meter recorded five hundred and seventy-five dreams during that time. Dreams, I regret to say, for which you did not pay. Do you have an explanation?”

  Now the room has begun to blur and shimmer like something seen through a haze of heat. You feel perspiration starting at your temples, and you tug on your shirt collar, knowing the Auditor is right. You tell him you love to dream. One of your greatest pleasures is the faint afterglow of a good dream once it’s over, the lingering, mysterious images as wispy and ethereal as smoke, which you try to hang on to for the rest of the day, tasting them like the memory of a delicious meal, or a secret you can’t share with anyone else. You tell him you enjoy taking a nap in the late afternoon, a siesta like they do in Spain, and that’s why your Dream Meter reading is so high. You thought only dreams at bedtime counted. You didn’t know naps in the daytime counted too.

  “They do—and so do daydreams,” he says. “You neglected to declare one hundred and eighty dreams experienced during naps. This is a serious offense. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. By my computation, you owe the Department of Dream Revenue ninety-one thousand, six hundred and forty-five dollars and fourteen cents.”

  That much? you say.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he says. “The amount of your dreams places you in a thirty-three percent tax bracket.” From his desk he lifts a sheet of paper that details your dream underpayments and a long column of dates. “Do you see this?” he says. “Your actual underpayment comes to fifty thousand dollars. But we charged you a penalty because, according to our records, you did not estimate the dreams you intended to have and pay the correct amount of tax due. You did not file for an extension. Furthermore, that payment is now two years late. So we had to charge you interest. I must say that a few of your dreams were very lavish and long running. They were in Technicolor. Some of them were better than the movies at Blockbuster. You do have a vivid imagination. And you should be thankful for that. Did you know that in a few Native American cultures, dreams are seen as an extension of waking consciousness, that a dreamer considers his vis
ions when he’s sleeping to be as much a part of his history as the things he experiences when he’s awake?”

  No, you say. You weren’t aware of that.

  “You know,” he says, “I especially enjoyed that dream of yours where you find yourself shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific, with no one there but you and a whole tribe of beautiful women who play a game of tossing a golden ball back and forth to each other. I’ve been thinking about that. Do you suppose the ship that goes down, the one you escaped from, symbolizes your job? But I can’t figure out—in terms of Freud, Reich, or Maslow—what that damned golden ball means.”

  You tell him you don’t know what it means either. But the night you had that dream, just before you went to bed, you were reading Homer’s Odyssey, the part where Odysseus meets Nausicaä and sojourns among the Phaeacians.

  “Oh, that explains it then.” With his fingers the Auditor makes a steeple as he leans forward, nodding. “That one dream cost you five hundred dollars. You should be more careful about what you read at bedtime. Well, let’s get back to business. We have all your dreams recorded. I’ve reviewed each one, of course. Recurrent dreams—like the one where you marry your high school’s homecoming queen—those must be taxed at twice the rate of regular dreams. Nightmares, like the one where your mother-in-law comes to live with you and your wife forever, or the one where you are giving a presentation to your company’s board of directors and discover you are naked, are taxed three times higher. And it shows here that you had sixty-seven undeclared wet dreams, which—as you know—place you in a higher tax bracket. Does all this make sense to you? Do you wish to contest anything I’ve said?”

  No, you say, you won’t argue. You did do all that dreaming. But you tell him you can’t afford to pay that amount. That it will devastate your savings, maybe drive you into the poorhouse. You will have to borrow money from friends. Take out a second mortgage on your home . . .

  The eyes of your Auditor soften for a second when he hears that. He sits back in his chair again, folding his hands, and sighs. “I know, I know. Those who dream more always pay more. I wish to God I could help. All I can do, in my official capacity, is explain the situation to you.”

  Please, you say. How did all this come about?

  He says, “Oh, that’s easy to answer. The Dream Tax started early in this century. In Seattle voters were presented with a ballot measure that would cut vehicle license fees to thirty dollars and require public votes on all state and local tax and fee increases. The initiative failed, but passed a decade later in its entirety. And not just in Seattle. It passed all over the country and exacerbated a revenue crisis that had been worsening every year since September eleven, two thousand one, what with the collapse of the high-tech industry, a deepening recession, the bailout of the airlines, the rebuilding of New York, and an open-ended global campaign against terrorism. A new source of revenue was needed to fund all kinds of domestic projects, homeland security, and public works—highway maintenance, public health programs, day care centers, and so forth.

  “We had to start thinking outside the box, as they used to say. To find a way to tax intangibles like thought itself. There, you see, was a vast, unexploited realm for underwriting public works and salvaging the national treasury—dreams, subjective phenomenon, and the immaterial products of the soul. The bureaucrat who dreamed it up remains nameless to this day, and he was, of course, taxed for his stroke of brilliance. But that was the beginning. As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Once the need was clear, the Dream Tax, and all the technology to support it, were rushed into place in a matter of months.”

  The Auditor pauses to reach into his desk drawer and remove a receipt book. “Now, will you be paying by check or in cash?”

  A check, you say, wearily. In fact, you already have it written out, and hand it over to the Auditor, asking him if he can perhaps work with you a little on the payment by waiting a day or two before the Department of Dream Revenue cashes it.

  “Yes,” he says, smiling. “That’s the least we can do. After all, we are here to be helpful.”

  Just then the room seems to tilt, leaning to the left like a ship on tempestuous waves. You squeeze the bridge of your nose with two fingers to steady yourself until this spell of dizziness passes. Then you turn to leave, but stop suddenly in the doorway because there is one final question you need to ask.

  Does he, the Auditor, dream?

  “Me?” he says, touching his chest with two fingers. “Dream? Oh, no, I can’t afford it.” He looks at your check, smiles again, and slips it into the top drawer in his desk. “Everything seems to be in order, at least for now. You have a good day, sir. Thank you. And sweet dreams . . .”

  Cultural Relativity

  NOT LONG AGO a college student named Felicia Brooks felt she was the most fortunate young woman in all Seattle, and possibly in the entire world, except for one small problem.

  She was deeply in love with her boyfriend, an African student who was the only son of his country’s president. His name was Fortunata Maafa. In the spring of 2001, they both were graduating seniors at the University of Washington. They had been dating all year long, he was more than she could ever have hoped for, and Felicia knew all her friends thought Fortunata was catnip. In fact, she was afraid sometimes that they might steal him from her. Most of them had given up on black men entirely. Or at least they had given up on American black men. Their mantra, which Felicia had heard a thousand times, and often chanted herself, was, “All the good black men are taken, and the rest are in prison, on drugs, or unemployed, or dating white women—or don’t like girls at all.” What was a sistah to do? During high school and college, Felicia and her friends despaired of ever finding Mr. Right.

  But then, miraculously, she met Fortunata fall quarter at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center. He looked like a young Kwame Nkrumah, he dressed as elegantly as Michael Jordan, was gorgeous the few times she saw him in his agbada (African robe), and he fit George Bernard Shaw’s definition of a gentleman being “a man who always tries to put in a little more than he takes out.” Furthermore, he was rich. He could play the kora, an African stringed instrument, so beautifully you’d cry. Yet, for all that, he still had a schoolboy shyness and was frequently confused by the way Americans did things, especially by pop culture, which was so sexually frank compared to his own country that it made Fortunata squirm. All of this Felicia thought was charming as well as exciting because it meant he was her very own Galatea, and she was his Pygmalion, his guide and interpreter on these shores. He dazzled her every day when he described the ancient culture of his father’s kingdom in West Africa. There, in that remote world, his people were introducing the most sophisticated technology, and that was why Fortunata had studied computer engineering. But, he said, his people worked hard to avoid the damaging aspects of Westernization. They were determined to revolutionize their science, but also to preserve their thousand-year-old traditions, their religion, and their folkways, even when the reason for some of these unique practices had been forgotten.

  One night in June after their final exams were over, Felicia played for him the movie Coming to America on the VCR in her studio apartment on Capital Hill, hoping he would enjoy it, which he did. No sooner was it over, than Fortunata slid closer to her on the sofa, and said, “I am so like Eddie Murphy in this funny movie. I came to America four years ago, not just for an education, but really to find a beautiful American woman to share my life. To be my queen. Felicia, that woman is you, if you will have me. Because if I can’t have you, then I don’t want anyone. I just won’t marry, ever.”

  Naturally, Felicia said yes.

  “And,” he added, “you promise not to change your mind? No matter what happens?”

  She did.

  From the pocket of his suitcoat, Fortunata produced a ring with a flawless, four-carat diamond shaped like the Star of South Africa, for precious stones were plentiful in his country, a nation rich in natural resourc
es. Felicia threw her arms around him. Then, without thinking, acting on what she believed was instinct, she brought her lips close to his. But before she could kiss Fortunata, he wiggled away.

  “What?” said Felicia. “What’s wrong?”

  Fortunata gave her a shy, sideways look. His voice trembled. “I’m so sorry. We don’t do that. . . .”

  What?” she said. “You don’t kiss?”

  She looked straight at him, he looked down. “You know I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Please, don’t start this again.” Now Fortunata seemed nervous; he began rolling the end of his tie between his fingers. “I’m not sure why. We just don’t. The reason is lost in antiquity. Felicia, it’s not that unusual. Polynesians rub noses, you know. Samoans sniff each other. And traditional Japanese and Chinese cultures did not include this strange practice called kissing. I suspect they felt it was too intimate a thing for people to do. All I know is that my father warned me never to do this thing when I came to America. We’ve discussed this before. Don’t you remember?”

  Felicia did remember, but not happily. This was the one thing about Fortunata that baffled and bothered her deeply. She understood that his culture was very traditional. For example, Fortunata’s people insisted that sex should be postponed until a couple’s wedding night. All during the past year, they’d done almost everything else that lovers did. They held hands, hugged, and snuggled. But there were no kisses. Not even an air kiss. Or a good-night kiss when he dropped Felicia off at her apartment and returned to his dormitory. The last thing she wanted was to be culturally insensitive, or to offend Fortunata, or to have him break off their nearly perfect relationship. So on those past occasions, Felicia never insisted that he kiss her. Nor did she insist on the night he summoned up the courage to propose.