Dreamland

I was slipping into a dream one night when I saw Judy’s face behind my eyes. Judy, my former coworker, who was only 25 when she left the company. It was Judy who encouraged me to try the Indian restaurant around the corner from our office. I rarely ate Indian food from a buffet. “You’ll love it,” Judy said in her deep confident voice. She was right. I did.

I didn’t know why she flashed into my mind. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time. Occasionally that happens to me—a person’s image appears before I drift off. Sometimes I know the person, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes it is a celebrity or a political official. Sometimes, when sitting in stillness, drinking my morning coffee, I hear voices, too, like a distant radio station I can tune into for only a moment. I can never tell if the voices are imaginary, or from a different dimension. Maybe they are spiritual guides.

But Judy. Why Judy, and why now? Before she left the editing job, she was having a mental breakdown. She developed feelings for a man in the office and broke up with her boyfriend one night after a fight. She wasn’t the same after that. She began drifting from one single rich man to the next, flirting with older men in our department, pulling us all aside to complain about the problems of the world. She started coming in late, leaving early, taking tests of Plan B from the drug store, worrying if she was pregnant. She told me that maybe having a baby would be the best thing for her. Her millennial friends kept telling her if she wasn’t careful, she was going to get a disease. Then one day, our manager’s manager told Judy she had used up all the good graces the company had; she had to leave. So Judy took her cat and some things and moved back in with her parents in New Jersey. “I’m going to get a job in Manhattan,” Judy said. “Philadelphia sucks. It’s all grit and no gold.”

I was so busy with my own problems, I barely talked to Judy during her chaos. She seemed so lost in her own world, and angry. I was angry, too, about my divorce, about the job I had to take to feed my kids even though I was bad at it, the pants that were tight around my middle, the reality of sitting in a cubicle all day rather than traveling to France. I had to breathe and keep my head clear and focus on good things. So I dropped away from Judy.

Still, I loved her.

**

Judy and I always talked about our visions for the future, about relationships, about writing. In the morning when we got to work, we told each other the dreams we’d had overnight.

The first time Judy came by my cubicle to tell me a dream, she sat down in the special chair I’d put in the corner, joking that I was like her therapist. Then she described the recurring crocodile. It glittered and sparkled on a beach, she said. She was always looking at it, but she didn’t want to get close, because the crocodile was scary and she thought it might bite her.

“What do you think the dream means?” Judy asked.

“I think the crocodile is something inside you,” I said. “Something you are afraid to explore and know better.”

She nodded. Then she went back to her desk.

Another morning, I told Judy my dream.

“I was in this apartment building. It was a large house. And I had just moved into the second floor, and it was small, but it was mine, and I was content with it. Then underneath me, in the apartment below, people moved out. Their apartment was much nicer and they were showing me what I could have if I wanted to switch apartments and move in. But I didn’t want the bigness of that apartment. I just wanted my own small space that I’d made for myself.”

“That’s like your life right now,” Judy said. “And you’re not in a relationship, and I think the first floor apartment is like a relationship. You don’t have time for that. You can only manage what you can manage.”

I nodded and agreed.

**

While walking to meetings, or standing at the machine that made a putrid excuse for coffee, Judy and I talked about our childhoods. She told me how her parents had moved to America from China. She was left with her grandmother for a long time, who she said was a little crazy. Eventually, her parents saved enough money working at restaurants to bring her over to live with them in New Jersey.

“I dream of my grandmother all the time,” Judy said. “The days before we moved here. The way my grandmother would get scared and tell me stories about people in nearby buildings. I didn’t know if they were true. In one of my dreams, everything was on fire, and my grandmother rushed us out of the building. I had to leave all my things behind. That dream always made me really upset.”

Judy loved her grandmother, despite all of her flaws and her wild ideas. They had a special bond, because she spent so many years with her, alone.

“What did your parents tell you,” I asked, “about not getting to live with them? Did you miss them terribly?”

Judy tilted her head. “They didn’t tell me anything. I felt abandoned. I had no idea why they left. No one talks about anything like that in China.” She paused. “What about you? What was growing up like for you?”

I told Judy some things. I said her feelings growing up and my feelings growing up were probably very similar. We just lived in different locations, and the people in our lives had different origins. She always smirked when I said stuff like that.

**

Sometimes, over lunch at the Indian restaurant, Judy would come up with a new plan for herself.

“I think I should go to business school instead of trying to be a writer,” Judy said. “Writing won’t make me any money. I need to study for the GRE and go to grad school for business, and make a lot of money and take care of my parents. It’s not wise to focus so much on art in this day and age. Art doesn’t get you anywhere.”

I had sacrificed my own artistic ambition and ideals to have a family, so I thought Judy was very wrong. I got married at 24. I started having kids at 27. Now I was nearly 37 and divorced, starting all over again, at a job very ill-suited to me. What I wished I had done at 21 when I graduated college, was wait tables and write and not get married for a very long time. I thought if I waited tables and wrote novels, I wouldn’t have to sell myself out for something that seemed “professional” to other people. I could just focus on my art and make money on the side. If Judy put all her time and attention on a business degree, she’d be throwing her talent out the window. I read the stuff she wrote. It was good. One story was about a man selling balloons.

“Please don’t make the mistake of business school,” I told Judy in between sips of ice water. I put aside my naan and my Chana Masala. “Do what you’re good at, what lights you up, what makes you fall in love. Don’t worry so much about money. The money will follow.”

Judy scrunched her lips and shook her head. “What I’m good at can be a hobby. Art comes too easily to me. I should challenge myself more.”

I sighed. “Do you think a surgeon says, ‘I’m too good at his, I ought to find something else to do for my career’?”

Judy laughed. “No. Because surgeons have more money than God.”

**

The morning after I had the surprising nighttime vision of Judy, I woke up and made coffee and sat down at my desk. I journaled about seeing Judy and about the dream I’d had overnight. I was in California, standing next to a pear tree. Souls that looked like white ghosts were flittering above me, spiraling around each other. The pear tree next to me had a scent of rust. I was standing alone and didn’t know where to go.

Should I call Judy? I wondered. What ever happened to her boyfriend, her job?

But then my kids woke up and I had to make them breakfast, and pack lunches, and I forgot about Judy for a long while.

**

It was a few weeks later, sitting in my manager’s office for a team meeting, that we all learned Judy had died.

An administrative assistant walked in. She wore glasses she was always nudging back in place with her forefinger. She told us she’d just read a feed on Facebook where people were expressing condolences about Judy, saying they were sorry they didn’t know her better.

“Did she get hit by a bus or something?” my team member Alicia said.

“Oh God,” I said, and dropped my forehead to the table in front of me. I knew what had happened immediately. “She killed herself,” I said with my head down. “I know she did.”

“No, she wouldn’t do that,” Alicia said and rolled her eyes. Alicia didn’t know Judy very well. She had been jealous of Judy’s and my relationship. I heard her once calling Judy a “spoiled brat.”

I spoke again. “She did. She couldn’t get it together.”

After the meeting I found Judy’s boyfriend’s number in an old text exchange. I left a message for him. He called back.

Killed herself, yes, he said. Took a bunch of pills.

**

“Listen,” an older woman from our company had said to me one day before Judy left the job. Her name was Serena. We were eating noodles from a Thai restaurant on our lunch break. “That girl just needs a mother.” She had been watching the whole drama with Judy unfold from the other side of the third floor. The break-up with her boyfriend, the dating of single men, the late-to-work habit. “She’s a mess, now, but I want her to go away and come back in a couple of decades so I can meet the 45 year old Judy,” Serena said. “The 45-year-old Judy, I bet, is really pretty cool.”

I smiled at her vision. I wanted to meet the 45-year-old Judy, too.

**

When I knew Judy only a few weeks, we’d gone to a happy hour after work and ordered sangria and flatbread. I don’t know if it was the plum in the wine, but something made me terribly honest. I told her something I hadn’t told anybody else.

“I just want someone to save me,” I said out loud. “I don’t want to have to do all this alone.”

Judy was chewing on tomato, olive oil, arugula, caramelized onions. She put down her food and looked at me. “It’s better to save yourself,” she said, wiping her face with a napkin. She looked completely unconcerned.

I was annoyed. I had hoped she would just nod and say, “He’ll come.”

I made up an excuse to leave early. When I got home, I lay on the floor of my bathroom and cried for a long time.

**

Now I am left with the dream of the pear tree, the white spirits battling and drifting up to the sky. Was Judy sending me a message before she passed on?

Maybe there was a spark inside her, a tiny grain of sand, a piece of her soul that was trying to speak. Perhaps it was screaming, “Wait. I don’t really want to die.”

Image: Crocodile