Matt’s Dream
This was Matt’s dream:
Matt was where he had been all day: on a raft in a deep valley of dark red rock. At first he thought it was a nightmare because he knew he was miles from civilization, with neither phone service nor convenient reminders of humanity like neon lights or gum wrappers or the sidewalks they fell on. The dreamscape congealed and he realized he was in some form of heaven.
The rafts — his and the one tied and dragging behind — were made of soft, puffy marshmallow. Dipping his hand into the river he found it was some kind of frozen mocha drink like at Dunkin Donuts, smooth and creamy and refreshingly speckled-through with diamondettes of blendered ice, a superfine and satisfying crystallized silt. The sun shone buttery rays down on the drama of that dark red brown purple maroon puce pink cliffs and he realized they dripped ever so slightly, as if melting.
The cliffs were made of gelato. Chocolate and dark chocolate gneissed through black raspberry and hazelnut layers, sometimes in perfect rank and file and more often in gigantic tectonic tie-dye swirls that sighed softly, as if longing to be eaten from a sugar cone on a temperate summer afternoon. Mango patches abutted banana, cherry, caramel, vanilla and in places they were shot through with chocolate chips the size of buses or stracciatella of deformed rusty beams of iron from forsaken mining operations.
At first Matt thought he was alone on the two marshmallow rafts but after his wonderment ebbed slightly, there came to be a tall, skinny stranger balanced on the very nose of his raft. The figure wore a most ridiculous oversized straw hat and a voluminous yellow plastic poncho covered his entire body. It held a long pole, decorated with a mushroom at the top, and was slowly and calmly punting the rafts down the chocolate river with slow, thoughtful strokes.
Without turning the stranger greeted him:
“Call me Charon,” it said in a voice that changed with every syllable.
Having spent countless nights under the covers as a child with a flashlight and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, Matt asked, “Is this the River Styx? Am I dead?”
Charon laughed at this, saying, “The dead can’t dream and there’s no dying in dreams. Besides, do you think the road to Hell has ice cream?”
“My nutritionist said it might. And you laugh a lot for being the ferryman of the dead.”
“Who said I’m any of those things? And if I were, you’d owe me. Two coins worth. What will your payment be?”
“I’ve nothing to give. So this is the way to Hades?”
“No matter where it goes, I’m taking you there. And you’d owe me passage.”
“I’ve nothing, like I said.”
“Give of what you have most — someone wise once told me that.”
“What do I have?”
“Tell me,” said Charon, “a joke.”
Matt smiled. He knew a joke or two. He took a deep breath and started.
“A man walked into a bar…” but when he got to the punchline — in his opinion, he had nailed it — nothing. No sound but the whoosh whoosh of the pole in an iced mocha river and rustle of a giant yellow poncho that, now that he looked, seemed to have nothing underneath it.
Charon said, “Tell me another.”
And so Matt did. He told him two more jokes about men in bars. Then the one about brothers in a bar. Then the one about a Scotsman in a Texas bar, and then in various other bars the ventriloquist, and the man with a talking octopus, and a man with an orange for a head, and the obscene pianist, and the drunken Irish twins.
He told him about the redhead, the brunette, and the blonde and all their adventures; and then the physicist, mathematician, and the engineer; the Frenchman, Spaniard, and German; the priest and the rabbi, the two priests, the two nuns, the two rabbis, and every other combination thereof. He told Charon about the pirates, the lawyers, the construction workers, the whales, the muffins, the ducks, the duck and the grapes, the cows, the wide-mouthed frog, the tomato, the skunk and the swan, the Polish submarine, the French tank, and the Japanese election.
Desperate and feeling his time running low, he told the longest jokes he knew: the one about the monk and the noise, the one about the snake and the lever, the one about the moth and the podiatrist, and the one about the punch in heaven. He told him the one about no soap radio, the one about the great clown Pagliacci, the one about the barber and the Pope, the one about the snail and the doorbell, the one about Ed Zachary disease. He went dirty: he told the one about the sandwich maker, the one about the leper, the one about the blonde in the jacuzzi, the one about the bulldog with a sore throat, the one about the crying horse.
Every time, every punchline: nothing. To bomb in a dream — what does that say about one’s self-image? Matt was afraid he was finally running out of jokes. He was at the bottom of the backpack of his mind, scraping around in the crumbs and receipts and half-pens. When finally it hit him and he knew he had only one joke left. He stood this time, the raft rocking gently, and performed — fully performed — his final joke. And on the punchline, delivered with every last ounce of voice and feeling he had left, there was a full five seconds of silence.
Then Charon laughed a laugh that sundered the sky. The river itself rippled and rebent through the rocks and huge chunks of gelato cliff-face calved off and sent iced mocha plumes miles into the air. Everything seemed to fall apart, but jollily so, and suddenly Matt found himself standing on the shore. Between his feet, wedged halfway into the mud, was a green glass soda bottle.
Charon was already poling away from him, poncho crinkling in the breeze, still chuckling softly, “I’ve decided not to take you to your destination. You can stay here, you can stay here as long as you want. And if you ever do want to finish the journey, take just a sip of that and you shall find yourself right back on this river with me. No coins necessary. And we can finish our little cruise.”
And there Matt stood, for hours or days or decades, he did not know which, until he woke up. He was not in his tent but on the riverbank.
