We were halfway to the North Carolina-Virginia border from Richmond when I decided to call it quits. It was dark but the weather was calm and temperate, and I really wasn’t that tired. But I was very hungry and wanted a beer, and knew I wouldn’t want to drive anymore after that. So as soon as I saw a Hampton Inn & Suites with a couple of generic-looking restaurants in the parking lot, I pulled into a spot right behind a bar and grille called Rudy’s and turned off the car, staring straight ahead at the back of the restaurant through the windshield.
“Are you okay to eat here?” I asked Sam.
“Here? What’s it called? Rudy’s? I mean do you wanna look around a little bit more?”
“Not really. I’m tired and hungry and this place looks as good as any other, and then we can stay in the Hampton tonight.”
“Oh so you wanna be done for the day? I don’t mind going for a couple more hours.”
“That’s easy to say when you aren’t driving. Come on, I’m hungry.” We unbuckled and got out, testing our stiff legs with awkward strides in the parking lot and stretching our arms skyward. I cracked my back and pressed my forehead against the cool metal shaft of a lamppost. Closing my eyes, I felt like I could sleep right there.
Finally coming to, I followed Sam inside where the hostess told us that it was a fifteen minute wait, but that we were welcome to have a seat at the bar.
“Why are there so many people here?” Sam asked as we sidled up in stools at the end of the glossy bar. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“They’re driving from the Northeast to the beach in North Carolina or Florida I guess,” I said. “I hope the hotel has a room available.”
“Maybe we shoulda gone there first.”
“Nah, I’m too hungry.” I ordered some local amber ale on tap and Sam got a Blue Moon, and we sat and drank our cold beers in silence. My ale was just okay, but I was in the mood for a beer and nothing would have tasted too much better.
“You’ve been keeping your eyes open, haven’t you?” Sam asked me finally.
“Yeah yeah, of course.”
“Especially around Richmond. I really thought it was around Richmond.”
“We checked every town, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but maybe it was just a little bit further out. We should have asked someone. Do you need me to describe it to you again?”
“No, I think I got it at this point.”
“Then tell me.” I looked at Sam, trying to picture my own exasperated expression, and burrowed my face in my hands. Then I took a pen from my pocket and began to sketch on the back of a paper placemat I grabbed from just behind the bar.
“Okay, so there’s the central part of the town over here. That’s where the restaurants are, along this street.”
“Trendy restaurants,” Sam reminded. “And bars. Like cute French crepêries and tapas restaurants and Japanese fusion.”
“Right, like a college town,” I added.
“Exactly.” I drew in a couple of buildings on the first street of the map I was sketching.
“Then up this way to the Northeast, it gets kind of hilly. And there’s a shuttle that runs to the restaurants. This is where the pavilions and dorms and stuff are. And maybe some lecture halls.”
“Right, but it’s not a campus,” Sam corrected again. “It’s still part of the town.”
“I know I know, I never said it was a campus. But there are dorm-type buildings, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. And then up here and to the left, that’s where the serious hills are.” I drew in some hills up and to the left of the campus part.
“But not mountains. Just rolling hills, with soft, yellow-brownish grass in the autumn that you can roll down.” He took another sip from his beer and then resumed his position looking at the map over my shoulder.
“Now up to the North, there’s a path that runs from the campus-like area to the forest. And the forest is filled with very tall trees, like redwoods.”
“But not that tall.”
“I know! Stop interrupting, I know they aren’t redwoods, cause we’re in fucking Virginia. Just all trees, and nice grass.”
“Right.”
“Now to the East of the campus, that’s where the main road lies. It goes North-South and it’s like a two-lane highway. And there’s a path that leads out to it with little houses on either side.”
“Yep, but not with yards and stuff. Just free sitting houses.” I drew the houses the way he wanted me to.
“And that’s it, right?”
“Well, you forgot the other pavilion.” He took my pen and drew a pavilion between the campus and the woods. “This is where we were taste testing different jams and people were playing bingo. And then also, to the South, there are like soccer fields, and some brick business buildings with apartments on the top. And they bleed into the restaurants and stuff.” Finishing up the map, complete with little sketches of hills and pavilions and trees, he slid it between us and slapped the pen down on top of it.
“And that’s all you remember. Not what’s on the other side of the hills, or through the forest, or beyond the downtown or where the highway goes.”
Sam shrugged and took another sip of beer. “I’ve tried really hard, but I can’t. I didn’t go there in the dream.”
“But you must have in real life. You must have come and gone from somewhere. Did you ask your parents?”
“Of course I did. They don’t remember any town like that.”
“But you’re sure it’s real.”
Sam looked across at me, and there was a little bit of hurt in his weary eyes. Even though I was the only one driving (Sam couldn’t drive stick), I knew he too was tired. He was mentally tired. It had been a long week of searching. “That is why we’re here, right? That’s why you came with me? You believe me, right?”
“I mean yeah. If I really felt like I had to find a place, if I really felt like I had to do something, I would need my best friend to trust me and go with me. So even though I think you’re crazy, I know I gotta do this with you. And I know that sometimes these feelings really do lead to something. So yeah, I’m with you.”
He nodded and looked back down at the bar. “I’m sorry we haven’t found it. And that I’m wasting your time.”
“It’s not a waste, dude. We’re having fun, right? Last night was pretty fun.” The night before we had visited Sam’s friend at University of Virginia, where they hadn’t graduated yet and were in their senior week. We went to a massive house party, got very wasted on Miller High Life and Svedka shots, and didn’t get started on the road again until noon. I had been talking with a girl named, what was it now, Lana? Lisa? Laurie! I had been talking to a cute, freckled, red-headed girl named Laurie all night and I was so sure I was in and then Sam got sick and while I was taking care of him she left. C’est la vie.
“Yeah, last night was a blast. Sorry for puking.”
“Nah it was alright.”
“I just feel like I need to blow off steam, you know? Like I need to forget about the town for awhile. Maybe if I can do that enough, I’ll forget about it for good.”
“You only had the dream once, correct?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“And it was April of junior year?”
“Mhm. The date in the dream journal is April 2nd, 2014.”
“So you haven’t stopped thinking about it for over a year now.”
“I mean sometimes I go a few days or a week without, but yeah it does pop back into my brain every time.”
This was all information I had heard a hundred times already, I just kept cycling Sam through it, hoping something new would come back to him. I knew the dream by heart. The beautiful town. The campus. Taking the shuttle, going out to eat downtown with his high school friend Saori. Walking back to the campus area, going up the hills. Rolling down them. Finding me and our other friends in the pavilion, where we were taste testing jams and playing bingo. It gets dark. He walks into the forest with Saori. They play guitars on the soft forest floor. It’s a crisp, beautiful night and they go out running around together in the soft grass with their shoes off. They sleep together in the dorms in the campus area. But they hardly sleep, ‘cause they’re up all night talking with each other and cuddling and smiling and looking into each other’s eyes. He wakes up and knows his visit is over and he has to leave. They have breakfast in the downtown area again, at the crepêrie. His friends all wave goodbye. He sees a sign on the path into the town with the name, but as hard as he tries, he can’t recall it. He hugs Saori and nearly cries as he leaves, knowing that it was the best day of his life and that he has to come back someday. Then he wakes up.
“What was going on with you that week?” I asked him. “You said April 2nd was a Sunday. What happened that weekend?”
“Well me and Nina got jam at the farmer’s market, so I’m pretty sure that’s where that comes from.” Nina was Sam’s ex-girlfriend. They would break up later that April, under pretty rocky circumstances. He really was in love with her, but the relationship was killing them, because there were so many differences and disagreements. For months afterward he would find her when they were drunk and they would sleep together, then fight about it the next day and he would say he hated her, then he would do it all over again.
“And the crepêrie?”
“Hmm…. we ate at Slice of Paris a couple times last year. We may have gone that week.”
“Okay how about the hills? The grass?”
“Those are always in my dreams.”
“And your friends? And the guitar playing? That’s in a lot of your dreams too, right?”
“Yeah. Repeated imagery.”
“And Saori?”
“Well she’s my soulmate of course. So she pops up quite frequently too. But we never have as good a time together as we did in this dream. We never slept together in any other dreams.”
“So isn’t it possible that this dream was just a conglomeration of all the good shit from your other dreams? All wrapped into one really, really good dream?” I sipped my beer and weighed the silence. Sam shook his head and looked at me fiercely.
“You don’t understand. I’ve had hundreds of dreams. Thousands. I catalog as many as I can, I write down as much as I remember. I’ve never, never, been able to so perfectly picture a place. I’m not saying it’s exactly like how I saw it, but it has to be based on someplace, right? It’s gotta be based somewhere! I can’t just make up these beautiful scenic towns from nowhere! I’m not like someone from fucking Inception or like Michelangelo or something. I’m a C.S. major!” He pounded his fist on the bar, and the bartender gave us an uneasy look. I signaled him to bring us two more beers.
“But-”
“Hold on,” he said, interrupting me again. “I’m not a creative type, I couldn’t sculpt this place out of nowhere. But I can’t remember where it is, so that means it’s from my childhood or at least adolescence. And the only places I went were around the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic.”
“You did say you took trips out West with your family, though.”
“Sure, but this didn’t look like that. The grass was from the East Coast, I promise. It was such nice brown grass, so soft and only a little itchy and perfect for rolling on. I remember that grass. That’s East Coast grass. That’s not Rocky Mountain grass or California grass. You know what I mean? And the beckoning. The call. The need to go back. None of my other dreams have ever affected me like that. None of them. Why this one? There’s something there, you said it yourself. You gotta follow this stuff up. I asked you two weeks ago if you thought I was crazy and you said no and said I should go for it. I gotta go for it. It’s calling me.” The bartender brought the next couple of beers and we sat silently again while he sipped at his new one and I rushed to finish my first so that the bartender could take the glass away.
“Maybe,” I said, speaking slowly and calmly, “the dream isn’t telling you to find the place. Maybe it’s telling you something else. About Saori. Isn’t that possible? Wasn’t she the best part of the dream?”
“Me and Saori were born under an unlucky star, that’s for sure.” He ran his hands through his long brown bangs, pushing them back, and checked his cell phone from his pocket before shoving it back in. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’ve spent more time with her in dreams or in person. She’s different in dreams. She’s flighty and she doesn’t pay a lot of attention to me. She’s always trying to get somewhere and I’m just following. But not in this one. In this one, we were in it together. We were right where we wanted to be. There was no rush, there was no following. We spent as much time as we wanted to, and she looked at me and talked to me and wanted to be there with me.”
“When’s the last time you talked to her?”
“Ehh, I texted her when I was home last week, and she said she was still in school but maybe we could try and get together after her semester ended.”
“Maybe you should go out to Yale and see her. Maybe that’s what this is telling you; not to find the town, but to find Saori.”
“Ugh, but it was so miserable the last time I visited her at Yale. I showed up and she picked me up at the train station. We talked the whole time walking through New Haven, and ate at a nice restaurant and got to drinking, and it was two dollar drinks! Every cocktail was two dollars, every beer! It was amazing! We drank and we got drunk and then we went back to her room, and I was so excited, and we were sitting on the couch together under a big fluffy blanket watching Adventure Time, and then all of a sudden she gets up and says she’s going to stay at her pseudo-boyfriend’s place and that I could sleep on the couch or in her bed, and that she’d be back in the morning. And then she left and I fell to pieces. I don’t know if I wanna go back to Yale. She didn’t mention him once all night up until then! Fuck. That was really rough. Fuck.”
I gave him a pat on the back and swiveled around on the stool, looking at the denizens of the restaurant. Old married couples. Parents with their kids. Middle-aged people. A group of women in their thirties, sitting around drinking and laughing. No students from what I could gather. But then again, Sam and I weren’t students anymore, either. There were no beautiful young couples or dreamers or free spirits or anything of the kind. Just normal people stuffing food into their mouths, rushing to get back to their cars so they could drive off and get back to their lives. So they could die a little quicker. Rudy’s was where passion and excitement went to die. It was disgusting. I turned back to the bar and watched my beer bubble under the hot yellow lights.
“And you know what?” Sam started again. “I’m always with someone, too. It’s partly me. I want to be with her when I’m not with anyone else, but when I am, I don’t think about her too much. She’s like some old standby reservoir. But not for anything physical, more like a basin to store my emotional shit in. So maybe I’m the same for her, and I don’t even notice because I’m always with someone. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, like you only need each other when you’re single and it never lines up, right?”
“Exactly.”
“How about now? Is she single now?”
“She actually is,” he said. “She just ended things with some tennis player a few weeks ago, she said she wanted to be single for a long time. She told me in the last letter she wrote me.”
“So maybe this is the time. You’ve graduated, you’re not held down anywhere, right? Maybe you should go see her and think about moving to New York or something.”
“I can’t live in New York.”
“How ‘bout New Haven?”
“Fuck no. Have you been there?”
“Providence?”
“Fuck the bears out of Provincetown.”
“What?”
“It’s a song lyric. Vampire Weekend.” He sighed. “Thinking about Saori always bums me out. You’d understand if you met her. She’s just so absolutely perfect for me. I feel like I’m gonna get married and I’ll still think about her and feel like I missed it. That I messed up what this life obviously set up so perfectly for me.”
“Or maybe there’s someone out there even more perfect than Saori, and you just can’t fathom it because you’ve never met anyone like that. Like trying to comprehend a fourth dimension.”
“This is true.” We drank our beers and I gave Sam a nice look over. He was the same height as me, five eleven. He was lanky and had green eyes and brown hair and an excellent smile. His smile was by far his best quality. His laugh was awful, but I’d seen him win people over just with one smile.
But I was seeing it less and less, especially toward the end of the year. He smiled, but he wasn’t happy behind it. He got drunk constantly our last semester, going out and sleeping with whoever he met and running and playing guitar and soccer and taking trips almost every weekend, but at the end of it all he was nervous and his smile was not genuine. I can’t say how I knew. It’s something you can just tell when you’re close enough friends with somebody. I was worried too, but I was also brave. Sam was not brave, but he was an excellent actor. That was the difference between us.
“Look, we’re only in Virginia,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to visit Yale. Let’s say we turn around tomorrow and head up to Connecticut? We could make it by tomorrow evening if we’re not looking for the town, and you could surprise Saori. That’s what the message is, isn’t it? Of course!” I grabbed his shoulders. “You’ve been getting these signs from the dream for a year, but now we’re actually pursuing it because it came to a head. Why did it come to a head? Cause you’re both single now! And you’re in a place where you can move anywhere! This is the sign, don’t you think? This is what you have to do!”
Sam stared straight ahead for a few seconds, then planted his flat palm down hard on the map we had drawn. “No, Nick, it’s this!” Slap. “This right here!” He slammed the paper hard a few more times and the couple next to us paused their conversation about Netflix to look over. “This is what I have to find. This. And you said you’d come with me, and now you’re trying to be my dream interpreter all of a sudden ‘cause you’re sick of this trip. You have no idea, you know that? You only know what I’ve told you and you weren’t there and you never met her and I guess that’s not your fault but now you’re fucking bailing on me. Well then you go out to California and have a nice life, and I’ll take a bus and ask everyone I see and I’ll sleep in the fields if I have to just to fucking finish what we- we– started!”
He practically fell of the stool standing up and bumped right into the hostess, apologized rather calmly, then stormed out of the restaurant. I took a deep breath and sipped my beer as I watched him go. The other patrons watched as well, then looked at me, then cautiously returned to their conversations.
“Uhm, we have a table for two ready,” the hostess said to me carefully.
“Can you give us five minutes or so?” I asked.
“Absolutely. We have a few tables opening up.”
“Thanks.” I took a couple of minutes to finish both my ale and Sam’s Blue Moon, then paid the bartender, grabbed the map (which was damp in places from spilled beer), and walked curtly outside. I circled around the restaurant and saw Sam sitting in the back of the car, the door open and his guitar neck poking out. He didn’t see me and I faintly heard the strumming of chords between the sounds of the highway in the twilight. I paused where I was, then walked back to the front of the restaurant and took a deep breath.
I sat on the curb and thought for a while. I suddenly remembered something from back when we were sophomores. Sam was going on and on about how his friend Saori was visiting during her fall recess. His best friend, soulmate, really smart, tons of fun. He had mentioned her before, but in the days before she was to come he was practically gushing.
Then a funny thing happened. She didn’t come. Sam told us that she wasn’t coming, and that was it. Her break lined up with our own, so Sam took a trip by himself out to Big Bend and camped. He said he needed some alone time, away from technology and school and friends and just about everything. When he came back he was quiet for a few days but was back to himself by the next weekend. Though he never really talked about Saori much after that. Not until the whole business with the dream came up this semester.
I circled back to the car and approached my friend, who looked up but didn’t stop playing. I listened to him sing a song he had written sophomore year, one that I had heard bleeding through the wall that separated our rooms many a time. From what I could interpret, it was about climbing a mountain with someone who wanted to separate from society. When the song ended, I handed him the map.
“If you’re gonna go around asking people, you might need this,” I told him.
“Thanks.” He took it and tossed it on the seat behind him.
“But we should keep searching together. I think I know what it looks like better than anyone else.”
“You don’t have to. Thanks for coming with, but you can go home if you want. I know it’s crazy. I know I’m never gonna find it. I just feel like I’ll know when to stop. Something will tell me and I’ll know. But I haven’t felt it yet.”
“I’ll stay on for a little while longer. I’m having fun. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks man. Sorry for throwing a fit in the restaurant. Lots of driving, I’m tired, you know?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. You scared the shit out of the hostess though.” We laughed together and he put the guitar back in the case on the back seat. “Do you still wanna go back in there?”
“Not really.”
“Wanna go through the Wendy’s drive through and eat in the hotel room and order a movie?”
“Yeah, that sounds great. Can we pick up some beer from a grocery store or a gas station or something?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks.” We went through the drive through and got a bunch of hamburgers and fries, and got a thirty rack of Milwaukee’s Best from a big Wawa gas station, then started the movie and ate and drank in the room. But after about an hour, Sam fell asleep in his clothes right on top of the bed sheets and everything, staring perfectly straight up and snoring quietly. I didn’t care for the movie too much, so I shut it off and went to bed too. We were supposed to search around North Carolina the next day. Sam had a hunch that it could be near Wilmington. Then again, it might be back up in Eastern Tennessee. We’d get there eventually.
Short stories, by HR Huber-Rodriguez 