I wake shifting sheets. I am in a small room somewhere in England. There is a cemetery nearby and a garden out back. I am in a book.
What book? Sisters. An apartment. The cemetery. I search to recall as if in the aftermath of an evaporating dream.
I
sleep and half-wake again. I cannot see the cover. The book is not a recent
read. The sisters have come from America. There is a man living in the
apartment downstairs. There is someone living in a flat above as well. I feel
the cozy comfort of small space, the sofa’s cushions.
Half sleep. Toss. Rearrange the pillows. It is 3:17
a.m.
The sisters may be twins. May not be twins. Once I was
reading books that all had twins in them. "Cutting for Stone" was one. That
places the reading at three years ago, before I was blogging about books I read.
I remember "Cutting for Stone," but not
the book I am in.
I sleep and wake. The sisters have come to visit an
aunt? Maybe I am writing this story.
Strange things happen in the apartment. Like levitation. I read this book. I didn’t make this up.
Dawn arrives and I toss the covers aside. I make
breakfast for our houseguests, a cousin from Israel and his wife who grew up in
London. Her voice curls in soft
cadences. She calls the overdone blueberry pancakes “lovely,” – a word she also applies to her travels,
the landscape, our visit. I have only coffee
and green tea; she prefers black, but graciously chooses coffee. Last evening, we sat intimate as schoolgirls on
my couch while she showed me all the books on her new Kindle Fire. We
swapped titles and descriptions of books we had read or were planning to read.
Likely all that talk and her lovely lilt launched me back into this book. What book?
I
go to work. All day a sense of the book
intrudes as I try to call up the title, more details – and perhaps
the writer. To little avail. In the past when a book has arisen in half sleep, it’s
been one I was reading or had just finished. Usually I wake with some great
deep insight, which is I often decide is either not so great or completely silly on waking.
This is different. The title and plot
remain out of conscious reach, and I roam the vague setting like an invisible
observer, an unseen under cover sleuth.
A few days pass, our guests depart, and I remember that
comfortable half-conscious world. I determine to give it a name. I type in my
clues: twins, book, England, cemetery in an advanced search. Abracadabra.
Google gives me the answer to my dreams: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. I seek a little deeper into
cyberspace and much of the plot is revealed and remembered: Two American twin
sisters move to apartment near Highgate Cemetery in England. Their aunt Elspeth
has bequeathed the flat to them on condition that they live there a year and
that their mother, the deceased’s twin, not visit. There is indeed a garden
out back as well as upstairs and downstairs neighbors, including one of
Elspeth’s former lovers. The deceased returns as a ghost to haunt the nieces.
She practices levitation, controls a Ouija board, grows stronger in her
abilities to interact, and eventually finds ways to return to work on unfinished
business.
Elusive
title netted. Case and cover closed.
Yet, I
preferred that sense of being under and between the covers, a delicious mix of
dreaming and reading, not quite knowing what was happening and surely not
knowing what might happen next. How wonderful if my final sleep could be like
this. In one version of my personal heaven
I’m tucked into my favorite books, wandering amid their plots, invisible to the
characters, haunted and .... haunting.
Given time I
might even practice a little levitation. And if
I turn out anything like Elspeth, I may want to consider what character I would
most like to inhabit.
Oh the choices. . . .
