A Midsummer Night's Dream

Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.

—   A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“You were magnetic up there,” said Tatiana, starry-eyed and spellbound, as though the music and wine had entered her bones, the lyrics her heart. Her marrow and cartilage were alive with it, her tendons vibrating like guitar strings.

She might have imagined the smile reach Jack’s eyes, the rouge in his cheeks, the lip-bite. She felt light, lighter than she had in a long time; she was dreaming, only she wasn’t.

“Is that right?” said Jack, pulling up a stool beside her.

As he ordered a whiskey neat, Tatiana studied his Cupid’s bow, chestnut curls, and forearms blazing golden against the cherry wood countertop – she knew him; she knew this stranger.

“A Blossom Fell was mesmerising,” she said.

Jack raised a brow. “Well, that’s one way of putting it.”

“I watched Badlands just last week.” It somehow felt destined – Tatiana’s head was in the clouds, you see, her heart away with the fairies. This peculiar sense of certainty, of providence, bewitched her every word, and she was imbued with an unfamiliar confidence which emanated like an aura. She was enchanted; she was no longer acting of her own volition but reading the scripted lines and stage directions written in the stars – or, perhaps, she was merely intoxicated.

“That’s where I first heard it, too,” said Jack, sliding the bartender a note.

“The dream has ended, for true love died,” Tatiana sang under her breath.

Jack paused an instant and set his amber eyes on her, brilliant like tree resin.

“If I could unhear it, I would,” said Tatiana. “Just to hear it for the first time again tonight.”

Jack remained silent, and Tatiana studied his forearms, his white dress shirt folded at the elbows, veins protruding like tree roots.

“Have you heard of love-in-idleness?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Have you read A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

“In seventh grade, maybe.”

“It’s a flower – ‘the juice of it on sleeping eyelids [makes you] madly dote upon the next live creature that [you] see.’”

“Are you on something?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re as high as a bloody kite.”

“Maybe it’s the alcohol talking,” said Tatiana, “but I feel like you awoke something in me tonight – as though I’d been sleeping all along without having realised it.”

“Does that line usually work?” said Jack, raising the glass to his lips.

“Five out of ten times,” said Tatiana.

“Call me crazy, but I feel like I know you.”

“Does that line usually work?”

“Five out of ten times.”

 “What was your name again?”

“Tatiana.”

“Well, Tatiana, you come on very strong.”

Pause.

“I’ve never been particularly good at socialising,” said Tatiana.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“That’s mean.”

“It’s just that it can be… overwhelming.”

He gave her a reassuring nod, a disarmed smile – he wasn’t mocking her; it was understanding, compassionate, explanatory.

“I just say what I think,” replied Tatiana.

“Not everybody does, and so it might come across as disingenuous.”

Tatiana’s ears pricked up. Had he said disingenuous? She absorbed him in a daze—his dark lashes were strikingly long against his honey eyes—and the blood rushed to her cheeks, the wine to her head. Yes, he’d said disingenuous, and by God, she could see the faint outline of his biceps beneath his dress shirt, a thin layer of sweat under his arms, broad shoulders, calloused fingertips, wide nail beds, protruding knuckles, a freckle on the inside of his left wrist.

“Have you read Kafka?” asked Jack.

Tatiana suppressed a moan. “Only Metamorphosis.”

“What was that?” said Jack, a hint of amusement on his brow.

“Metamor—”

“No, that expression.”

Had she pulled a face? “I’m just relieved you read.”

“Well,” he continued, “there’s a quote along the lines of, ‘I was ashamed when I realised life was a costume party and I’d attended with my real face.’”

Tatiana had heard it. In fact, it was a favourite, and that very quote on Jack’s lips only fed her fantasy – it was meant to be.

“I’m not ashamed to attend with my real face,” said Tatiana.

“Too much honesty too soon makes us vulnerable to manipulation.”

“That’s what my psychologist said.”

Jack nodded, lips pursed.

“So, are you a musician?” he asked, nodding towards the small stage – which, come to think of it, might very well have been a wooden pallet with a rug atop it.

“I’m an aspiring writer.”

“Aspiring.”

“Aspiring,” agreed Tatiana.

“Anything you can show me?”

Tatiana opened her Notes app and slid him her phone. There, beneath her shopping list, was a diary entry she’d written that very afternoon, still teeming with typos. Jack leant over her phone, his face awash with white light.

I know we’re not supposed to write about dreams. And then she woke up, right? But sometimes my dreams are realer than reality, if there is such a thing. Sometimes, it is in my dreams where I seek refuge. There are people who love me there which is something I cannot say when I open my eyes, when the dreamworld slips away like a lover’s fingertips, and I’m alone on this grey railway platform staring after something, someone, that shrinks and then is gone. Waking up is hard. Contrary to popular belief (or Mary Poppins), a spoonful of sugar does not make the medicine go down. Nor two, nor three, nor four. My morning coffee is a great, big cup of diabetes, I assure you, and it does little to dispel the bitter taste of being awake.

I read somewhere the following question: What is your favourite part of the day?

And I sat with it. When I was a little girl, I dreaded going to bed. I wanted to play, of course; why should the day end? But now, as a woman, I long for sleep. Or, perhaps, it is not so much sleep I long for, but the life (or lives) I lead when I close my eyes.

People talk to me in there, you know? People listen. People look me in the eyes, they rest their hands upon my own. There is still life in there.

Jack cleared his throat and returned Tatiana’s phone. He slid his whiskey across the cherry counter into her hands, wrapping her yielding fingers around the glass. “How does it feel?”

“Sorry?”

“The glass – how does it feel?”

“Smooth?”

Jack gestured that she take a sip. “How does it taste?”

“Oddly sweet,” said Tatiana

“What else?”

“It burns a little, it’s warm.”

“OK, and what do you hear?”

“Clinking glasses.”

“And?”

“Muffled conversation, a buzzing.”

“What do you… smell?”

“Sweat and cologne.”

“Mine?”

“Yours, but it’s nice.”

Jack chuckled. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Alright,” he said, taking both her hands in his and leaning in, eyes wide, brow raised. “What do you see?”

Tatiana averted eye contact and made to pull away.

“Don’t. What do you see?”

She surrendered to his gaze and studied him an instant – his eyes golden like whiskey, his lashes ink black. “You.”

“What else?”

A moment elapsed as he kneaded her palm with his thumb, his eyes studying hers, hers studying his – pupils darting, registering something, someone.

“Another person.”

“More.”

“Another human being.”

“More,” he urged, his eyes glued to hers, sticky and golden like maple syrup. She could see them flowing, liquid, as his pupils swelled like black holes.

“What do you see?” repeated Jack.

“Myself.”

“Exactly,” he said, releasing her hands. He reclaimed his whiskey and took a final sip as Tatiana sat there, frozen, watching him. When was the last time someone had looked her in the eyes? When was the last time someone had seen her? the last time she’d seen them? She was alive again, branded with the burn of whiskey.

For a while now, she’d started to feel that there was nothing left to see beyond her eyes, that peering in would reveal an abandoned home, a billowing curtain, a moth-infested couch. Absence – peering in would reveal only absence.

What if I told you I’m already dead? she’d written just a week ago.

Your lips against those of a corpse

whose eyes are the windows into an empty husk

whose soul was pressed and extracted like perfume

essence absolue dabbed on the wrists, the ironed collars

of a hundred ungentle men.

But now there was someone looking in, someone who saw her.

“You feel real to me,” murmured Tatiana, tracing the lip of her glass.

“Others don’t?”

Tatiana gulped. “They feel like… smoke. And when they don’t, I do. Sometimes, it’s me who feels non-existent. Then someone, bless them, smiles at me on the street, and I’m reminded that I do exist, that I am seen.”

“Meet me in the bathroom,” said Jack.

“Sorry?”

He leaned in and Tatiana could smell the alcohol on his warm breath, acrid.

“Meet me in the bathroom,” he whispered into her hair.

Tatiana’s voice caught in her throat like a sweater on a branch, and with it the illusion unravelled – a little red thread leading to nowhere, to nobody.

“I don’t want to,” she managed.

“Come on,” he continued, his nose against her neck.

“I said I don’t want to,” Tatiana repeated, firmly this time.

Jack straightened up and met her eyes, mirroring her stiff expression like a theatre warm-up. “It was nice to meet you,” he said, sliding off the stool and re-entering the crowd.

An objection rose in Tatiana’s throat like an acid reflux, and she gulped it back down, a sting in her throat, a bad taste in her mouth. She bit her lip—chin scrunched, brow furrowed—and watched after him; not once did he look back, not as he manoeuvred his way through approving eyes and smiles, not as he sat himself amongst a group of musicians, not as he whispered into the long, blonde hair of another performer who threw back her head with laughter which rang out, smooth and rich like a singing bowl.

Tatiana wiped the dew from her neck and shook the mist of Jack’s voice from her hair, irked as though it were an insect dropped down her blouse. Her skin crawled, somehow, and she suppressed the urge to swat at her own neck, to clean her ear out with her pinkie, overwhelmed with a sudden sense of disenchantment as though a hypnotist had snapped his fingers and lifted a spell – the fairy dust was all dirt.

And yet, tears swelled like dewdrops in her leaf-green eyes as she stared into the empty whiskey glass. She pinched herself—physical pain, a distraction—but she didn’t wake up. Orange lights flickered in the bottom of the glass with the moving silhouette of the bartender – it was like driving through a tunnel, through its sporadic bursts of light. Tatiana bit her lip again, harder this time. Why had he made her feel alive? Press the elixir of life to her lips, only to stopper and pocket the precious vial as though she were unworthy? It was as if he’d dragged her limp body from the ocean, resuscitated her, and then stabbed her in the heart.

Tatiana pushed her way out the splintered doors and into the street, the liquid bar lights replaced with a bright solidity – here, her shadow didn’t melt soft against the countertop but held its shape like a paper cut-out, a shadow puppet against a glowing backdrop, against the illuminated grey asphalt and cigarette butts.

She wandered home in a daze, muttering his name into the night like a slur. It was bitter on her tongue; Jack was cough syrup, sweet upon the first sip, but with a standard dose, there was little to mask the bitterness. But maybe this, this very disillusionment, was the antidote.

Tatiana crossed the Hudson Bridge and stared into the river, its silky surface, the blinking stars. It was an inverted planetarium, another singing bowl filled with the galaxy. Endless, hopelessly endless.

She sighed, replaying their interaction in her head, reassessing her unswaying certainty. Had she really mistaken limerence for love? She was sure it had been more than that. All the clichés had suddenly made sense; it was love at first sight, it was a bolt of lightning, and in an instant Tatiana had finally understood what all the poets meant.

The lamppost above zapped with the death of insects, the river croaked, the trees chirped. How could she have possibly been so wrong? She’d known it was love, she’d known it like the back of her own hand. And yet, fingers outstretched, that might have been the problem; her very own hands felt like mist—she clenched and unclenched a fist, two—her very own hands felt like smoke.

I mean, when you don’t feel real, when everything feels like a dream, how can you be sure of anything?