31.

Joshua knew he was in his mother's arms before he opened his eyes. . Her scent was there-her scent tinged with moisturizer and a nameless something-familiar about her skin. Now he did open his eyes, and found himself on clean white sheets, in some heavenly bed in her arms. The thin white curtains, puffed up by the wind coming through the tall, open, rectangular windows, blew inward into the room. It was summer--it was summer or some tropical place where it never got cold.

He turned and looked to her face. Her eyes were warm, receiving his gaze. "Mother," he said--"Mother, you can see!"

"Yes, yes," she said simply.

He nestled next to her breast. She was dressed in a clean cotton gown.

"Nothing makes sense here," he said.

"From the beginning of the time men have tried to make sense of the world," she said; "they have ever taken it as a premise rather than a conclusion that the world was logical, coherent, sensible. Why is it no one looks to find the laws of nature in dreams?"

"Is this a dream?" he said.

"What they don't get is that human beings are hardwired to think in coherent patterns and forms, but the world itself, in itself? It will have none of that nonsense. It is not logical--it does not make sense. There is no rule in the world that says so much as: 'P is P.' The answer is always, 'P is sort of P, kind of not P.' Not even this quite strictly applies."

"Mother, when will the Dreamtime end?" he said.

"Just shut your eyes--just rest from your nightmares, child," she said.

He clung tighter to her ribs and breast, began to weep. It was a gentle cry, one with few sobs but profuse with wet running tears. He silently, peacefully sniffed, as the tears poured out of his eyes.

"Yes," she said. "The Dreamtime is horrible. When man looks for the world to make sense, he's asking for logic in a dream, he's deducing laws about hallucinations and madness. Don't look for the Dreamtime to make sense. Just cry your eyes out, my darling child. The answer to everything in this world, every idea a philosopher has ever proposed, is 'Not applicable.' If it had been useful to human evolution that men believe everything were made of cheese, there would be not a human being anywhere capable of conceiving that anything were not made of cheese. The things humans believe, about deductive logic, about mathematics, about no contradiction being true--it is only the human organism believing things that have helped him flourish. None of it is quite strictly true--no, not even what I'm saying right now."

Joshua's tears had stopped running, and he went on awake, enjoying his mother's embrace, that smell of moisturizer on her skin, the feel of her soft black arms wrapped about his head. He did not want to leave here, for the first time since he'd entered this nightmare he did not want to leave something.

"Sometimes I think that all these people--all these people I've met in the Dreamtime--that they're one person, a single mind. But not you--not you," he said. "I know my mother--no, not you. Please don't let you be an imposter--no."

"What would it take for all the world and everything in it to have never existed at all?" she said. "People seem to think it could not have happened--that the world, something, anything had to exist. But all it would take--all it would take for the cosmos and everything in it to have never been--is for you to have never been, your mother to have never been, even your most ancient ancestor. To you nothing would be at all--which is the same as nothing ever having existed. And if the cosmos had to be--you had to be. How is it we don't know the right questions to ask?--how is it we ask ourselves most often where we go after death? What we ought to ask is how on earth, simply because a woman is impregnated and gives birth--how it is that this means that me, that I should exist? Billions of people born throughout history that were not me. What happened in this world--what rule was followed, or broken--that determined the next baby born shall be me? Did it depend upon who was my mother, my father--or is there some secret in the time, the date of my birth? Was your mother forever fated to be your mother, or could you have as easily been born to a Japanese waitress?--a peasant in ancient Rome? That is probably the only thing in this world that is all or nothing--that is 'thus' or 'not thus'. Whether this baby that suddenly lives is me or not me. Everything else is too blended in with what it is not to have such sharp defining lines as that."

"You said, 'Your mother'--you didn't say 'me'," said Joshua. But she only cradled his wooly hair in her hand and went silent. Neither of them slept, nor said a word for a very long time.

Then she spoke again. "Life," she said. "There's no such thing as a life. There's only a present moment--an incomprehensible, omnipresent, perpetual Now. However long we've lived we don't feel any older--we just have a few more memories because of it, even them getting foggier; the Now is still the same to us no longer how long we've lived. Do you think you'd actually live any longer if you needed five hours less sleep each night? Any shorter if you needed twelve? Your life would even be no shorter if instead of living to ninety you die at forty. Since our grandparents were children there has been only one long moment--a year is never experienced as a year, a decade never as a decade; such large chunks of time don't exist in human consciousness. So long as we are not presently dying, death gives us no terrors. Whether we die at ninety or forty we view the approaching end the same."

"What is right? What is wrong?" he asked her. "I drift about confused with visions, seeking solutions wherein there are none, suffering for sins I do not remember, or committed while deluded and ignorant. Tell me--tell me stories, fairy tales and lies--if only to comfort me in this abysmal endless dream."

She did not quite answer him, but said, "Wrong is not willful--sin is not conscious of wrong--it is in fact blackest sin when the sinner is deceived. When a man kills a man it matters not whether he were deceived or insane at all. He's done a terrible crime, and so what if he believed it was right? He was incorrect in this belief after all. When we are deceived into evil, we are responsible for it as sure as our wrong acts are real. Someone still suffers the consequence no matter what belief led us to it--the evil that the victim suffers is every bit as real, and so its cause requires recompense also. Every man must guess in this world, and base every action upon supposing; if he does anything else he is superhuman, since no man can know what comes tomorrow of his act today."

"That's not justice," said Joshua; "that's happenstance."

"Does God do any different in this world?" said Clara. "If a man believed he could fly because of madness, I suppose you'd call gravity wrong for casting him down from a tower to his death. If Hitler believed he was acting aright, it speaks not to his innocence, but his absolute perversity. It is not this belief that we do right that means innocence; for all history there have been men who have thought the gravest crimes were the true and just thing to do, which meant not innocence, but corruption."

"I do not want to dream--I do not want to discover, to know, to live," said Joshua. "I want to lie here at your breast forever--and best that I lie here a corpse, forever in your arms and seeing nothing, hearing nothing, no thoughts, no more of these terrible dreams."

The biggest mystery about dreams is their source of light, and from what moon or sun we are illuminated in our sleep. The ancients believed there to be light down under the earth whereto we go at death, and the light under the earth and the light seen in dreams have a common source and spring. Perhaps that is why my mother sees here, why she is not blind, thought Joshua as he nestled next to her breast; for the light of dreaming has a source not even failure of the retina can extinguish.