Archive of Our Own

Prez is twelve when he discovers the Garden. It hadn't been there before, and he knows that it likely won't be there again; but, as he does most things, Prez takes its appearance in stride. He lives in a world where strange things happen and though he never takes them for granted, he doesn't let them bother him overly much either.

It is a vast garden with many winding paths and turns and he chooses his steps carefully. In his hand, he holds the brass watch he'd only just managed to fix, its small cogs and springs so elusive, he'd wondered if maybe he would never hear it tick again.

The watch keeps time with his footfalls, and he has to choose a path many, many times. Though he loses track of which way leads him back, it doesn't occur to him that he might be lost. He has faith that he will find his way through.

He is midway through – and he isn't sure why he knows that, but somehow he does - when he meets a man. Prez thinks it is a man, anyway. He is tall and robed and a cowl covers his eyes. When Prez looks hard, he thinks that perhaps the man's eyes are blind beneath it. When he looks again, he thinks that maybe he has no eyes at all.

He smells of leather bindings and old libraries, of dust and time, and he holds a heavy book in his hands. Prez, who'd been taught to always be polite, smiles in a friendly manner. "Excuse me sir, but I've never been to this garden before – which way is the path out?"

The man looks at him, and he turns a page, and Prez sees a flash of a chain dangling from one wrist. He thought it a watch chain at first, but he realizes it leads to the book. The man looks at him, he doesn't smile, but he doesn't frown, and Prez isn't sure he is capable of either. "The paths all lead out and in. Strange. I knew you were to be here, but it's not at all normal."

"Strange things happen to me, sometimes, sir."

"Yes. I know."

Prez looks at the book, which seems thicker the longer he stares at it, and at the chain, and he thinks, perhaps, he understands. "What happens when you get to the last page?"

"I stop reading."

"And the garden ends?"

"Perhaps."

"Have you ever flipped to the end to see what happens?'

"No."

"I didn't think so." Prez fidgets, because while he is old for his age, he is still a child and it is hard to hold still, sometimes. "It would seem like cheating."

"You can't cheat the Book. You would flip and find that there is no end, and the page you read just says that you had turned to the end, but it wasn't an end."

"Is it heavy?"

"More than oceans and worlds and time."

"You must be tired then."

"It is my duty."

"I know my duty. I've always known."

"Yes. I think that is why you're here."

Prez was surprised at that. He had thought perhaps this man knew everything. "You mean you don't know?"

"I know what is written. Sometimes, what lies between is of less concern." The man begins to walk, slow and methodical, fingers slowly turning a page that rustles. It sounds like the soft slide of the curtains in his aunt's house, when they'd gone to pay their respects to a woman he only remembers because she was dead, and cannot remember without seeing the box they'd buried her in. "Choose your path, and it will lead you where you mean to go. Or it won't. I will see when I turn your page."

Prez wonders, for a moment, what would happen if he followed the path the blind man took. The man walks his slow, stiff way and Prez looks down at the twisting flowers that line the garden path. He drops the watch in the flowers to his left. Bread crumbs to lead Hansel and Gretel back before the witch eats them up. It is practical and wise and insightful. Prez is called that all of the time by his teachers.

But he leaves the watch as a gift, in case the man ever passes again. He isn't sure why he does it. The man's path would never lead him the same way twice.

Somehow, Prez is sure of that.

He chooses his path, and the garden narrows and changes and suddenly there is only one path, lit in the soft glow of a sunset, where once there had been many. It is straight and narrow and lined by flowers of red, blue, and white. He walks out of the garden, and behind him, it vanishes as if it had never existed.

Prez never searches for it again. He has always known his path.

~~~

He is fifteen when first he dreams the man. He sits in the oval office, a spaniel puppy at his feet and Kathy, who is in his first period English class and smiles like a sunbeam, is waiting patiently for him to finish so that they can eat their dinner. He is where he is meant to be. He is content.

Across the office a tall, pale man watches him. His dark hair is wild and to meet his eyes is to stare into a starry night and know that the stars are staring back. Prez thinks that the man is fearsome, but he has no fear of him. Though he has never seen him, Prez knows, somehow, that they have always belonged to one another.

They are both creatures of dreams.

He has seen him a dozen, perhaps a hundred times, drifting through the multicolored dreams that color his nights. Sometimes the star-eyes watch him, sometimes they look elsewhere. Prez does not mind the man's presence. He doesn't think that it would matter if he had minded, though.

One night he dreams of Niagara, and a boat that falls over the edge, only to land in calm waters while the otters swim lazy circles around the hull, and onlookers laugh and applaud. He is dressed in a suit and when he waves they take his picture.

The water does not touch the pale man beside him and Prez asks him, "Are you my dream, or am I yours?"

The man does not smile and his eyes are faraway stars, caught up in matters men cannot understand. "All things are dreams, in the end. And nothing is."

"You sound like a politician," Prez – who has vowed to never indulge in veiled truths and murmured lies – tells him, laughing. He feels his dream-teeth and they are large and sparkling white. The otters' tails beat a tattoo on the ship and he knows that he will wake soon.

"I sound like many things."

"I will be President, one day."

The man looks at him and he does not smile, but he is amused. Prez can't be sure how he knows that. "There is as much truth in dreams as there is lies, and much that is neither."

"I'm waking up."

Prez wakes with the sound of rain on the roof and for a moment it is otter tails. In the corner beside his bed, the shadows shift and he imagines, for a moment, pale skin and star eyes wrapped in long black robes. He stands and retrieves his newest repair – large and silver with roman numerals along the face and oddly crooked hands that are hard to read, though never wrong, now that he has coaxed them to tick again. He sets it in the corner and goes back to sleep.

He never looks to see if the shadows hold anything. The watch is gone when he wakes. Prez does not search for it. He has always known where his dream lies.

~~~

Prez is newly twenty and the litter of the party that marked the occasion lies across the ballroom of the White House. He is flush with wine, laughter, friends, and the knowledge that he is doing what he is meant to be doing. He is doing something that will make the world a better place.

In the corner they dance, among the last left at the party, siblings, the children of an advisor. They are golden and laughing and the boy spins his sister in a mocking circle that leaves her squealing and hitting him playfully on the chest. They are beautiful in their teenage innocence and simple joy.

Her skirt flares as she turns and his arm tightens as he spins her and something longing and warm curls in Prez's stomach and settles in his loins. A voice murmurs in his ear and slides inside his head, warm and wet and filled with all the things he has ever wanted.

The room is frozen in shades of gold and red and smells of candles burned too low on iced cakes and perfume and people. The world glitters and narrows and all he sees is warm yellow eyes, skin of smoke and sin, and a smile that wants to drown him.

She smiles and he sees everything he has never tasted. He laughs and the sound is the moans, gasps and cries of the things he has never known he wanted to hear.

Neither woman nor man but something beyond both, it is the thing you dream of just before you wake, when you are least guarded and the most alone. (And when he thinks that, somewhere in Prez's memory a pale figure with star eyes doesn't smile, but Prez images that he has heard the thought, and is amused.)

The figure smiles, blade-sharp and dangerous as a snake. "You can have them, Prez. All your life, you've only wanted one thing. And now you have it." It slides behind him and arms curl around his neck, he breathes in the scent of the Oval Office when he first entered, of Kathy's perfume, of the ink as he signed his first Bill. "And now what do you want? Everything can be yours."

In the corner the boy and girl spin in eternal repeat and he wants so badly he throbs and writhes. But he thinks of Kathy, and of Nixon, who said that none of this would matter. He thinks of Boss Smiley, who would have given this to him long ago, had he let him. Prez shakes his head and the room begins to move. Behind him a voice he will spend the rest of his life dreaming of laughs and vanishes.

That night the red watch he'd repaired for Kathy is swept away with the trash of the party. He lets it go and never sees it again. He has always known what he wanted.

~~~

Prez is twenty two and he stands in the sands of a desert whose name he has forgotten, though he knows he knew earlier. In the building behind him they sign peace treaties he has drafted. In a compound, just beyond where he can see, they burn a terrorist commune to the ground before any can escape to hide in other cells. He can't hear them screaming, but images that he should. If the world were as it should be, Prez should have to hear.

He cries into the sand, and the grains drink the moisture before the wet of them can even be seen. When he bends over to be sick, it pools thick and viscous before it slides away into the sand.

A heavy hand falls onto his shoulder and a bearded man smiles kindly at him. "Way it goes, huh? Burn it down ta put it up, eh lad?"

"It isn't how I thought it would be."

"Never quite is."

Prez wonders if this is what Nixon meant – that for every gain there is a loss, and even if no one else ever knows it, you always will. "I'm going to change this. I won't do this again."

The red-haired man laughs, big, hearty, and warm, and slaps him on the back. "Don't dream too big, laddie – call attention to yourself. The family always fights over the best toys, you know."

The man smiles and leaves. Prez's pocket watch – not his father's but another, a gift from a friend – lies in the sand displaced by his heaving. He leaves it there and walks away, imagining the slow sift of sand eating it away until nothing is left. Prez leaves the watch. He will not let the sands eat him away.

~~~

He is almost twenty-eight and his last term is drawing to a close. They talk of changing the rules and of allowing him a third term. In the streets, the mad prophets are proclaiming the end of his presidency a sign of the Apocalypse. Braless girls with doctorates are holding sit-ins in each of the Seven Sisters Colleges to encourage him to stay. The Ivy League is camped on the White House Lawn with signs and posters and blaring music that he knows means something, but he can't remember what.

They all want what he can't give and in his head tawny eyes and smoke skin slips against him and asks him what he wants now as a blind man turns pages and star-eyes don't watch him, and don't ask him if he thought anything he did mattered – but he knows that's what he's being asked, anyway. Always somewhere he feels Boss Smiley watching, and sometimes his yellow eyes look the same as another pair and he wonders whether there is ever any real difference in those who deal in want.

His advisors stalk the office and launch plan after plan, while he stares at the tiger skin rug they walk across. He wonders whether dead things remember what it was like to be alive, and whether it is crueler to remember what can't be had again, or to never remember that you were free.

There is a buzz in his left ear that won't go away and Kathy's face in the picture on his desk has begun to blink away blood tears whenever he looks at her. He has begun to forget what her laugh sounded like. When he sniffs the bottle of perfume that was her favorite he remembers the feel of her against him and he wants so badly it frightens him.

When he looks up, he sees her. It is not the first time. He has seen the girl playing on the lawn with the Presidential Dog – who hasn't recognized Prez since he was a year old, though he wags his tail and licks affectionately on command for the cameras. He has seen her wandering the halls, fishnet stockings torn and strange hair askew. He thought her the child of some employee.

She sits in the chair across from him and one blue eye is fixed on him while the green one beside it wanders. "I never liked this room. It's umm . . . like an egg. Only the yolk's all squeezed out and all that's left is the goo that goes with it."

"The white."

"Uh huh."

"You've been here before?"

"Sure. I think maybe the desk is too heavy. It fills up things and then they can't get out from underneath and they start to buzz."

"My ears are ringing."

"Do you like it? It could sound like seashells in love, if you wanted."

She looks at him then, both eyes – vein blue and emerald green – watching him with the blank, lidless fascination of someone who will never see the world the way a normal person does. "Were they mad, when you came?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes after."

"Did they get better?"

"Sometimes."

"I miss Kathy. I dream of her dying in this office and the paper piles on top of her and everything is lost and I just sign things on top of a body while she dies."

"I don't do Dreams. Dream's funny. He has eye-things instead of eyes. He smiles but it looks like a frown. I miss my doggie."

"I'm sorry."

"I hear the buzz. It's like bees in your head. Birds and bees. That's what they say instead of sex, sometimes." She picks up the watch on his desk – he hasn't yet gotten around to repairing it, and it lies dead and heavy in her hand. She curls small fingers around it and her hair shimmers and becomes a bird that tries to swallow his eyes, but changes its mind. The buzz in his head becomes a hive and stings the inside of his eyelids.

He closes his eyes and when he looks up, she is gone, and the buzz is just static in his head. He doesn't search for her. He signs the papers one by one and then fixes watches for two weeks until his terms ends and he walks quietly away. Somewhere, a dead watch goes un-repaired and Prez realizes that no one who spends their life in a dream – even a real one – is without their share of madness.

~~~

He can't remember quite how old he is when a squat grey face with pointed teeth stares back at him from the face of the clock he's fixing.

He stares at the face until it becomes his own reflection, and then stares at that until he can no longer tell the difference.

When he looks up she stands opposite him. She is heavy and grotesque and naked. Rats circle her fleshy legs and scraggly hair covers her scalp. She is hideous and grey and somehow he looks at her and thinks of skin like smoke and yellow eyes and wonders what could have brought up the comparison.

When she speaks, he thinks of Kathy's coffin. Of the war in Iraq. Of the child's body found two blocks from his house. He thinks of all he has failed to be and all he might have done but didn't. She speaks, and his heart drains way and turns to ash. "You had all you wanted, and now come to me. It is often the way."

From want to have to desolation. He understands that.

He starts to cry and when he is done she is gone. The grandfather clock across from his workbench ticktocks its way through the days and he reads the papers. He reads of wars and decay and sees Nixon in his bedroom, telling him nothing matters.

In the glass face of the grandfather clock a rat scurries and a grey face smiles – pointed and hopeless. He throws a screwdriver into the glass and it shatters, the breaking shards jamming the gears and grinding them to a slow halt.

Prez watches the clock stop and he stands. It occurs to him that he is not old enough to feel this tired, but that doesn't change the ache in his limbs and the pounding of his head. He packs a bag and leaves, watch parts and newspapers scattered across the table. Prez will see the America he tried to save, and find where he failed. When he looks in a mirror, he will see his own face and that will be all.

~~~~

Prez is not yet born. He is squirming and barely formed, a life form without name or purpose. Arms hold him and he is safe and loved and she smiles at him, and he believes that there can be a perfect world.

She speaks to one Prez cannot see, but it doesn't matter, because he will not remember anyway. "Isn't he cute?"

"He is a dreamer of dreams."

"Aren't they all, little brother?"

"For some they are more real than others."

Death tickle Prez's stomach and Prez gurgled his love. "He'll be one to watch then. Won't you Duckie?"

A voice that sounds like the hum you hear just before waking, when the sweetest or most vicious of dreams has just slipped away from you, answers. The speaker is not smiling, but somehow he is, and Prez – who knows what his name will be, though he will not remember that he knew – knows him.

She hugs him once, and let shim go, and Prez goes from Death to Life.