Chapter 10
Maurice: Dream a Little Dream
While Maurice is splayed out on the studio floor, he enters another world:
It’s the day of the Winter Festival. Everyone gathers in the town center. It’s snowing, just like it always does, and there’s free hot chocolate and cookies for everyone. The Christmas tree blazes with its colorful lights, children make snowmen and it’s a goddamn winter wonderland. Sleigh bells ring and all that. It’s Norman Rockwell beautiful and Maurice Fetterling stands on a stage surveying the beauty of the town he all but owns. Dusk has arrived and the way the late evening light plays upon the snow casts everything with a magical bluish hue. A sight to behold. A single teardrop makes its way out of Maurice’s right eye, one of those tears his wife usually cries when she’s watching a Hallmark movie. What’s this called? Emotion, yea. He’s feeling some kind of emotion. Pride. Love. The Christmas Spirit. He wants to open his heart and wallet to every person in Greener Valley. Just hug them and tell them how much he loves them and maybe buy them all a Coke and teach the world to sing. He sighs a deep, contented sigh as the winter wonderland plays out in front of him.
Someone taps him on the shoulder. The tap is discomforting. He gets that feeling that his mother used to call “like a goose walking over your grave.” A chill runs deep through his body, a chill so complete that he thinks he may never feel warm again. He doesn’t turn around to see who has tapped him. Something tells him he doesn’t want to know.
A rusty voice whispers into Maurice’s ear. “That’s quite a sight, Maurice. What a nice town you’ve got here.”
Maurice finally turns around. Facing him is a what appears to be a woman, but Maurice knows better. He can feel a strangeness about her presence, as if she’s made of something other than flesh and bones. Maurice thinks he recognizes her, thinks back on all the women he’s had. Maybe she’s one of them. Come to exact some kind of revenge on him. But there’s something too weird about her, something that makes him think she’s not of this world.
“Maurice.” Her voice is soft, her breath is in his face and it makes him think of walking into a florist; the smell of too many flowers. “Do you know your town? Do you really know it? Do you know what lurks in the closets of your friends? Skeletons, Maurice. Lots of skeletons.” The woman, who is wearing a dress that looks to be made of rainbows, sort of glides around him rather than walk. She’s as enticing as she is scary. He wants to run, yet part of him wants to hear about the skeletons. She knows this. And suddenly, Maurice knows her. She’s the woman from Grass is Greener Corporation, the people who built this town. The one who comes to town once a year and surveys the town and leaves without talking to anyone. She sees the recognition in Maurice’s eyes and laughs, a sound like ice clinking, a sound which makes Maurice shudder.
“I’m just here to see how the town is doing, Maurice. And it looks like it’s not doing so well.” She touches him, her slender, pale hand caressing his shoulder. He does not move. He holds in his breath and waits for her to do something horrible to him because in this dream-like state, he’s fully aware that this woman is something other than human. But all she does is lean in close, her lips practically touching his ear.
“I know secrets, Maurice. I can tell you the secrets the skeletons would tell if they could talk.” Maurice wants to hear these secrets. In fact, he’s never wanted anything more in his life than to hear what this monster of woman has to say. He’s vaguely aware that he also wants this woman, or whatever she is.
“Tell me,” he whispers. He’s weak in the knees, a schoolboy about to receive a first kiss.
“Your town, Maurice. There are adulterers and fetishists. Adult women who sleep with high school boys. Drug addicts, Maurice. Teenage heroin users. Tax cheaters and embezzlers. Child beaters. People who spend their entire paycheck on horses and blackjack. Prostitutes. Food addicts. Murderers.” She says this last thing – murderers – in a breathy voice tinged with glee. Maurice claps his hands together. He’s giddy. He’s happy. His face is red and sweaty and he’s rubbing his hands together. “Tell me more. Tell me names. Tell me,” he whispers against her face. “Tell me.”
She walks away from him, leaves him unfulfilled for the moment.
She points into the town center, beckoning him to look at his people. The children appear to all be screaming, adults are holding their ears against the noise. Some are passing out - or dying? and some are running. Lights fizz and buzz, then go dark. The seemingly wholesome, lovely people of Greener Valley stampede and run over one another, pushing and shoving and stepping on backs of children and the elderly to get out of the festival area. The snow is falling harder and faster, covering up the bodies of the trampled. She laughs, a maniacal laugh that pours like liquid out of the sound system. The two of them stand there, watching this unfold, both of them enjoying it for their own reasons. Below them in the town center are children, so many children. They move around trance-like, occasionally emitting an ear piercing noise that makes Maurice’s heart stand still for a moment. Maurice taps his feet in time to an unseen band playing the DeFranco Family’s “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat.”
She leans into him and whispers, “Say goodbye to Greener Valley, Maurice.”
Maurice wakes from this lucid dream, his head aching, his mind swirling.