Linda Romero
Chamber of Dreams
A man fell in love with a woman and asked her to be his wife. “I can only marry you under one condition,” she said. “In our home, there must be a little space that is mine alone. It need only be the size of a closet, big enough for a table and a chair, but it must be completely mine. When I am there and the door is closed, you must never, never disturb me.”
“But why?”
“It will be the space where I do my dreaming.”
“Do you mean you will sleep there?” asked the man, worried. “Instead of with me?”
“No, I’ll sleep with you in our bed. In my own room, I will dream.”
The man thought about it and agreed, although he did not understand. “Very well,” he said, “In our house there will be a room that is entirely yours.”
“No disturbances?” she asked.
“None.”
“Forever mine?”
“Yes.”
After they were wed, the husband supervised the building of a small room attached to their home, with a window to let in light. It was sturdily built, with a low sloping ceiling and a floor of wide wooden planks. It couldn’t have been more plain, but the wife was delighted. She inhaled the smell of newly-milled lumber while she patiently waited for the workmen to complete the construction. She asked them to move a small, heavy table to a space by the window, and a single straight-backed chair. These were the only furnishings.
“Wouldn’t you like a more comfortable chair?” asked her thoughtful husband.
“No, this is just fine. The hard seat will keep me from falling asleep.”
“But how will you dream if you don’t sleep?”
“I haven’t the words to explain,” she answered. Quietly, she closed the door between them. He heard the scrape of the chair against the wood planking. When the sun was about to go down, the door clicked open and the woman came back into the kitchen and began to prepare dinner for the two of them, humming to herself.
Some days she didn’t use the room at all, leaving the door ajar so the light from the window illuminated the living room. Her husband noticed that on the table was a stack of papers, and leaning against the wall were some colorful paintings.
This went on for some time. Some mornings, she was already in the room when he rose from bed. She never stayed for more than a few hours. Sometimes he asked, “How did it go in your room today?” and she would say little, maybe only, “Fine. It went fine.” The answer was sufficient for him. He didn’t need to hear the details. He suspected she was drawing pictures or writing poems, but he was not particularly curious about it. It was nice to have a wife who was quiet and who stayed at home.
Most days continued like that first one. She would give a little wave and he would nod, busy with this or that, and she would go. Later, she’d emerge as if she had never been gone, although she was usually in good spirits after her time in her room.
“What does she do in there?” a friend of the husband’s asked one day when they met in town.
I think she writes or paints or something,” said the husband. “I never disturb her.”
“She is probably writing love letters to someone,” the neighbor suggested. “My wife had a lover once. I found his amorous notes in the pocket of her apron.”
“No, she has no lover,” said the man confidently, but he began to wonder. He put his ear to the door one afternoon when his wife was sequestered in her room and thought he heard sounds. He walked outside and looked for footprints outside beneath the window. The grass was so thick it would have been hard to see such footprints, but he thought perhaps there were one or two. From that day on, when the wife went into her room to dream, he sat in the main room, watching her door. He inspected the walls when she was out, to see if someone could come in through a secret entrance, and he found none. She certainly looked more beautiful lately; maybe she was in love.
“How did your dreaming go today?” he asked as usual.
“It went well,” she said, setting the plates on the table.
“Are you painting and writing in there? Is that what you’re doing?” he asked.
She nodded. “Mmmm,” she answered.
“That’s what I thought.”
The husband continue to honor his vow to leave his wife undisturbed when she was in her dreaming room. Still, one day his curiosity got the better of him. Standing with his ear to the door for a long, long time, he did not hear a single sound. Not the scrape of a chair, not a sigh. Nothing. What if she were in some trouble? What if her heart, say, had seized up on her and she was unable to call for help? What if she had fallen asleep at her table and knocked over a candle, creating a danger for herself and for their entire home?
Finally, after much soul searching, he decided to knock. There was no response.
Slowly, he lifted the latch and pushed open the heavy door. Of course there was no lock on it. He had given his word, after all. But what he saw made him shake in his boots. In the stiff wooden chair, its back to him, was an enormous fish with scales of iridescent blue. The fish curled its sparkling body over the table, peacefully opening and closing its shiny pink-lined gills. Water poured like sweat down its sides and onto the porous wooden floor, and strewn about were sheets of paper wet with drops.
Confused and frightened, the man backed out of the door and closed it tight. Later, when the sun was about to set, the door squeaked open and his wife emerged. She went to the kitchen sink and held her hands under the running water.
“How did your dreaming go today, dear?” he asked nervously. “Did you write?”
“I must have, because when I came to, there were pages and pages of prose. I guess it was a good day,” she said. He peeked into the room and it all looked the same, although the sharp smell of sea water was a shock to him.
Now the husband was more worried than ever. One magnificent fall day, he knocked again on the door to his wife’s dreaming room, and again there was no answer. Only silence. He pushed open the door and again was astonished by what he saw. Crystals of blue ice, bright as diamonds, swirled crazily about the room. It was as though a blizzard had been unleashed in that small, protected place, like a galaxy of stars in the frenzied moment of their creation. And standing at the table was the oldest person he had ever seen. White hair, translucent face the color of quartz. Scaly hands gestured, like the hands of an orchestra conductor directing a stormy passage, and while they moved, flakes of ragged skin fell from the frostbitten fingers. Air spun around an invisible vortex, a wind with no origin. As the husband stood transfixed, the frozen being let loose a sigh and dropped its head to its chest as if seeking for rest. Crystalline tears tinkled down its cheeks and plinked to the floor with a sound like glass. Terrified, the man backed out of the room.
Many days later, he was still frightened. What was happening to his wife that she changed her very form when she was closeted in her dreaming room? Could this be safe? Was this normal? What should a man do?
That night she spoke to him. “Once I was writing a story about the bottom of the sea, and I felt your presence in the room. But I was more in the sea than I was in the room, and eventually you left me, which is good.”
The man said nothing, ashamed to have broken his promise.
“Then, not long ago, I dreamed I was the most ancient of winter creatures. A snow witch, perhaps. All past and future of snow was within my knowledge. I felt the power of winter winds, the cold of the north and west. It was a good day for dreaming. But then, in the midst of it all, I sensed myself beginning to thaw, to disappear. It was as if someone was near my dream world, draining the cold, which was my life energy, taking me to the threshold of death. Was that you, my love?
He admitted that it was, and he felt ashamed. “I thought you needed my help,” he said weakly. “I couldn’t hear you moving in there.”
She sat very still for a moment with her hands in her lap. “You know I love you very much. And I know you love me. What you love in me, though, is born of my dreaming. Without dreaming, I would not be a person you would love. I would be an ordinary human.”
He looked at the kind wife who sat across from him at the table. “But love you exactly the way you are.”
“Then I will tell you one more thing and you must believe me. This is the rest of the truth. If you touch me when I dream, even a soft tap on the shoulder, even a light kiss on my hair, I would shatter and the pieces of me would fall through the cracks in the floor and there would be no way to put them together again. You might still see the shell of me, but that would be all. It will be as empty as air. Emptier, because air is full. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I believe you because of what I have seen. I will not disturb your dreaming again.”
So the two of them continued to live happily ever after, and the wife is able to keep dreaming, and her husband, never mistrusting her for another moment, goes on with his life, too. And when she comes out of her small room, he no longer tries to get her to snap out of her state with a question or a touch. He’ll have her attention soon enough, as the dream wears off.
Sometimes during the quietest part of the night, she awakens in his sleeping embrace, and she smiles to see he is not man at all but an tremendous bird with feathers of white and claws the size of tree branches. His eyes dart behind leatherly, lashless lids, and his breath smells of forest. His dreaming as well, she observes as she drops back into sleep, is going as it should.