Way

WAY

For some reason, this bookstore was arranged by publisher. Once he realized this, Luke found what he was looking for, a translation of Tao te Ching. This volume was fascinating, if a little maddening, as the spine was on the right-hand side—something Luke had never seen before—and he handled the book awkwardly for several minutes, getting his bearings. The cover bore a single letter: W. “Must be for Way,” Luke thought. At the cash register, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the book cost only one dollar.

As he opened the door and stepped outside, Luke woke in his bed, feeling around for the book. He felt a sense of loss. He thought about the cryptic W, the unorthodox binding, and he wondered whether he might reacquire the book in a dream, keep it somewhere specific and find it again each night—whether, in fact, he might possess a large store of items, real in dreams and kept there, and thus have two distinct but equally tangible sets of possessions.

Luke spent much of the day at his home desk, strewn with a number of leather notebooks containing drafts of poems going back a decade or more. He was working on a poem—in small, black leather notebook—that was uncharacteristically long, and although he was nearing the end of available pages, his ideas seemed to falter and he noticed he was using the same ineffectual words over and over. Days like this, he began to doubt his ability to write at all.

He was quite sure anyone viewing his situation from the outside would think he placed far too much importance on this habit of writing poems—and he was sure that was how they would think of it—a little habit of writing poems. It disheartened him.

Preparing for bed that evening, Luke felt a deepening sense of futility. He remembered having dreamed about the strange volume of Tao te Ching and went to find his real copy on the bookshelf. It wasn’t there.

He looked around the house for it in all the likely places—on the table next to his reading chair, on his desk, in the stacks of books scattered around the floor, all to no avail. “The book that can be found is not the eternal book,” Luke joked to himself, and went to bed.

As he was walking into the bookstore, Luke stumbled over something in the doorway.

Looking down, he saw it—the odd Tao te Ching, just where he had dropped it upon waking up the previous night. A thrill raced through his body and he felt like a child again, like everything was mysterious and anything was possible. He picked up the book, ran his fingers over its W. He opened the book, fumbling again with the unusual binding, and read the first page:

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

Luke entered the bookstore, determined to find a hiding place for the book so that he might return to it on subsequent nights. The little cowbell jangled as the door closed behind him. A few people were strolling the aisles, and a small black dog with large pointed ears and one brown eye, one startling blue, looked toward the door from a corner nook. Luke had a hunch he’d find a likely spot in that corner, with its threadbare armchair and sparsely populated bookshelves.

The dog sniffed Luke’s shoes as he knelt to inspect the underside of the chair. He found a tear in the fabric that would allow him to stash the book. Reaching inside to test the size of the opening, he touched something that felt vaguely skin-like and jerked his hand back. Probing more carefully, he felt a rubber band and some sort of fabric or paper. It was roughly palm-sized, and he took hold of it and pulled it out. He was looking at a wad of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in a rubber band. Held in place by the rubber band on one side was a small slip of paper that said, simply, “Enjoy!” Well, Luke thought, I guess now I can buy as many books as I want.

Luke returned the cash to its hiding spot and sat in the chair, the dog napping again. He pulled a pen from his pocket and began writing a poem on the blank verso pages of the Tao te Ching. He wrote with more ease and assurance than he ever had before, even in his moments of greatest inspiration. Each word seemed to appear of its own accord and seemed just right—irreplaceable, indelible. He felt he was finally achieving his purpose in life.

He wrote for two hours before he woke. Throwing off his sheets he ran to his desk and opened the journal where lately he had been eking out meager line by meager line, only to strike through them in the end. There were pages and pages of abandoned starts.

He turned to a new page and closed his eyes, trying to hold on to the rush of creative energy from his dream. He touched pen to paper. But nothing occurred to him. Not a single word.

Begin! he told himself. Just begin! Write . . . anything. Anything at all. On the page he slowly drew the word A-n-y-t-h-i-n-g. He stared at it for ten minutes before giving up and getting ready for work.

Over the following weeks, Luke’s waking efforts to write grew less and less frequent, while in his dreams, always returning to the corner chair where he’d hidden the Tao te Ching, he continued to expand the epic poem that he now thought of as his lifework. He did spend some of the cash on additional books, and kept them stacked under and around the chair. But nothing ever drew him the way the volume of Tao te Ching did, and in it alone did he compose his poem. Despite the size of the book, he never ran out of verso pages on which to write.

Now, in waking life, books felt strange in his hands, the left-side binding like an alien format.

Some years later, at a pretentious cocktail party full of his city’s finest literati, he noticed lots of feigned smiles and sideways glances, even an awkwardly abandoned conversation as he walked up to a couple novelists at the hors d’oeuvres table. Word had gotten around about Luke’s waning—no—non-existent output over the past few years. And it was true that in this life, Luke had stopped writing. But in his dream life, he was assembling his masterpiece.

A well-known critic sauntered up to him, known for her devil-may-care eviscerations of both established and fledgling authors. “So, Luke—writing much these days?” she asked in what might have been a sardonic tone. “Well, yes,” Luke said. “I’ve actually been quite prolific lately.” “Oh, yes?” She seemed intrigued, if suspicious. “And where might one read some of this writing?” she said with a razor-edged smile, martini olive moving toward her mouth. Luke set down his glass and smiled sweetly. “Maybe in your dreams.”

He made his way out to the sound of her laughter.