'dreamcake'

He's seated in the front row, passing a blue stress ball back and forth between his hands. It shrinks and expands, shrinks and expands. He didn't win anything, but I can assume he's intellectual. He has the hair for it, all in his eyes and choppy. He's concentrating on the ball's pattern, and I want to know what stresses him out. I think about stealing one of his hands. Leaving the ball on his chair and rushing him out of the building without speaking one word.

Before I realize it they plant me on stage, nudging me towards the microphone. The echo of my voice sounds painfully young. I feel completely isolated, with my toes lined up at the tape and my mouth reading separately from my brain. The words of my so-called "art" sail into the air and fall at all the parents' feet. Their hands are folded like Origami, and their ears are shut off except for when it is their own child's moment of glory.

No one in the room is hearing what I actually mean, even those that are listening. They are interpreting my poem, and they shouldn't be. But there is a sort of solace in this realization, much like I would feel if I were to be shipped to a deserted island with only a notebook and pen. I am living my dream, or an extension of it, I guess.

But I'm not even allowed to read my whole poem. My stepping back is a trigger for the audience to proclaim their existence. Their clapping sounds robotic and forced, like the applause during a State of the Union address. I exit stage left.

Another victim from the line of abstract-minded and outcasted kids steps up onto the short stage, folding and unfolding his excerpt. He reads too, and so do eight others. Then the silver second-place kids come up in conveyer belt fashion, merely stating their name, school, and category before stepping off and sitting back down.

It's a parade of differences. A towering, long-armed girl with a whispery voice and a pink flowery shirt with too short of sleeves. A greasy blonde trying out dreadlocks, all done up with rubber bands. An eleven-year-old boy in a suit who has to crank the microphone all the way down to reach it with his lips.

Such an array of bodies, like a mismatched bouquet. We have nothing in common here, except that our ambitions are all wrong.

The president of the art institute marches up and smoothes down his script, ready to give us a pep talk. His unattractive lips skim the microphone. He insists that we chase our dreams, slapping his hands on the podium. His whole speech is a mixture of group therapy and virtual reality. He says whimsically, "Life is all about finding what you enjoy and pursuing it. That is why we are here today. All of you are looking at very promising careers in the art field!"

Except that we'll all become bankers, zookeepers, corpses, or vegetarians instead, out of distaste for the exhaustion involved in pursuing any artistic occupation.

"College is a very fundamental part of an adolescent's life," he's saying. I stare straight through my knees, past the floor and into the confinement of my mind. I think about the boy in the front row with the stress ball.

He's looking at me quizzically now, us standing on the sidewalk regaining our breath, and introducing himself as Dylan.

"But your voice isn't fucked up enough for you to be named Dylan," I say.

"Well damn," he says. "Maybe I should work on that."

I smirk and say, "It's okay. Let's go somewhere."

By this time, it's night. The storefront windows gleam under every artificial light fixture ever invented. They're better than the sun. Everything feels alive and vibrant, except for the zombies walking the streets. People bundled in gray pea coats, people hurrying to their cars with keys jingling along in their pockets.

Dylan thinks up this parking garage a couple blocks down, so we brave the nearly acidic winter air, keep our hands clasped, and shuffle our feet. I guess I could ask him his favorite color or why he went to the ceremony, but I don't. Instead we lug ourselves up the cement flights of stairs.

Several signs are posted warning trespassers not to trespass. I point them out to Dylan.

"What're they gonna do, sic the cops on us?" he asks as we climb the final staircase.

I have no jacket, but my body's heated from the strenuous exercise of ascending the stairs anyway. The top floor is a big gray open space with a couple of deserted cars.

He wanders over to a corner and chuckles at the city.

"What?" I ask, crossing my arms on the ledge.

"Oh, nothing. We're just all so hopeless."

The wind takes advantage of the little pinholes in my sweater, where the fabric is not sewn so tight, and it chills my skin in a dotted pattern. Dylan, on the other hand, is sheltered by a dirty jean jacket with buttons pinned on it randomly, mostly obscure black-and-white band logos.

I shiver. "Yeah, we really are."

Dylan grabs a green package of cigarettes from his pocket and graciously offers me his jacket. The sleeves are large and hang limply around my wrists. It smells like copper and cigar boxes. The cigarette pack looks like a bar of soap in his hand. He hits it against his other palm until some cigarettes peek out. He slides one out with his teeth.

"Want one," he asks, cigarette bobbing between his feeble lips.

"It's the end of the world anyway," I murmur bitterly to the lit-up city.

I pinch one and pull it out, my fingers like tweezers. I close my lips around the end of it, almost choking on just the idea of it being in my mouth.

He lights it for me, gentleman that he is. Our ends burn a vivid orange. I inhale and endure the smoke with a mere cough into my hand, removing the cigarette from my lips with my fingers poised all correctly. I shake a bit of excess ash over the edge and follow it with my eyes until it blends into the street.

"I could go for some suicide right now," Dylan muses.

"Me too," I say. "It's all such a joke."

He shakes his head and runs his free hand through his cinnamon hair.

"So you're going to be a writer," he says.

"No," I say.

"Why not? I liked what you read."

"Yeah, well." I sigh. "Nevermind. What are you going to be?" I open my lips and push a trail of smoke out.

"I'm not sure, but I think it'd be fun to work at the zoo."

"There are refreshments and cake in the back there, and I urge you to admire all the wonderful work we've displayed before you leave. Thank you all for coming!"

I blink multiple times and look around. My nails are much shorter suddenly, and everyone's getting up. My parents come at me like affectionate wolverines and congratulate me on my award. This is only regionals.

I stumble to the refreshments table and pour some coffee into a small cardboard cup. I add powdered creamer and grab a packet of cocoa and three littler packets of sugar. Moving on to the cake, they're all cut up and massacred in boxes, and a woman is smiling as she assembles the slices on paper plates. I decide on white.

A hand reaches out in front of me, crossing my path to seize a square piece of chocolate cake. The jean jacket gives him away, and I stall briefly. He smells like dirt. I pick up my plate of plain cake and watch him vanish into the hungry crowd.

I sit down. My parents tell me I was the best speaker up there, but the whole affair seems like an illusion. I tear open all the packets and stir them into my coffee with a thin popsicle stick. I succeed in covering up the coffee taste, but now it just tastes like flat hot chocolate.

I chew the airy, sugary cake and watch the boy with interest as he walks around and eats simultaneously. He examines the art and writing posted on the walls, just as I did before the ceremony started. He chews slower and eyes a charcoal drawing of a bony pair of girl legs. He stops to watch a claymation video on a tiny TV. He passes right over my poem.

When I finish my cake, my parents ask if I would like to leave.

"Yeah," I say, having no opposing argument.

We pick up a manila envelope at a table by the door with my name on it. I peek inside and see a certificate, pin, and fat pen. I pull the pen out and click it as we walk down the sidewalk towards the car.

My dad drives, and we listen to a classical station on very low volume. A piano and violin are making love, seductively teasing each other, each with their own haunting tune. I put my new pen away and gaze out the window.

The city is no help. It feeds my fire passionately and continuously. It boasts broken-down people and neon nights, wool scarves and wind, streetlights and vintage clothes shops.

Sure, every street corner is a homeless person's bed, but I want nothing more than to live in this city. I want to pack myself in like a sardine in a one-bedroom apartment, get a job making coffee, and write in my free time. If I lived here I would want to die every night with the happiness, or at least concoct every demise imaginable for myself.

The apartments here are stacked so high I have to wiggle down in my seat to find the top floor. The seat belt cuts into my strained neck. So many curtains are drawn, some of them glowing. Behind them, girls are taking baths, boys are brushing teeth, couples are celebrating anniversaries. In the built-in laundry mat on ground level, quarters are clinking around in palms and clothes are whirring like tornadoes.

I spread my fingers like cobwebs on the windowpane. I long to tell my father to slow down, drive the speed limit, give me time to suck everything in, ingest it all. Let me roll the window down and cross my skeleton arms on the edge. Thrust my tongue into the air like a dog, undo my hair and give it flight.

We pass a Safeway that should be a bookstore, more cafes than fast food joints, and the adjoined buildings of the college. They have sky walkways between them that look like bridges over a river of Saturday night traffic. The art museum sits, nothing more than cube of concrete next to a park infected with memorial benches and pigeons.
  
I want to take the story from everyone's eyes: the ratty couple with their cardboard plea, the whorish 20-something in heels and a fur coat, the two turtleneck boys who buy gourmet chocolate and eat it at a rusting table outside in the cold. Take those instances, grind them up and make peopleloaf, or dreamcake. Dreamcake is more catchy. I could advertise it as "instant inspiration!" and sell slices for $3.25 on some street corner.

I can't decide if I would want to sell out like that. I probably would, just to keep myself from becoming a starving artist.

At the same time, I want the car to speed up. I want the orchestra to turn inside out and clash with its own chaos. To race through the city like a bullet, so that the colors and lights smear like finger-paints on a black canvas. To drive until the road turns into outer space. So fast that no impact can be felt, and death comes like an old friend.

We merge onto the freeway with all the other ordinary cars. The city slips into retrospect, like a fish pulled downstream by the current. My dreams go too, bound to wash up on someone else's shore.

The whole dream thing is so depressing. I can feed my dreams with optimism and awards and a bit of practice. I will always take pleasure in the smell of old books, the scribbling noise of ballpoint pens, the thrill of my name on a printed page. But dreams are always dead end roads. Constant reminders of a freakish, intangible bliss that I will never experience. They're as haunting as black lungs and unpaid bills.

It's like the tooth fairy, or the invalidity of an deceitful lover's lips. Everyone tells me to hold my breath when I go through a tunnel. They sing to me and prompt me until the candles are blown out. I trick my body into staying up for the sunrise.

They tell me to guard my wishes closely. If I tell a soul, I'll jinx it.

But I know my dream is already jinxed. There's no use trying to untangle it.