Page 22 of Man of His Dreams

“Huh.” Miss Amelie leaned back in her chair and scrunched up her lips. “Seems to me that if nobody’s in prison or dead, those ain’t so bad. Sometimes you gotta ride over a lotta potholes to get somewhere good.”

That was more of a maxim than good advice, but Flip acknowledged it was all he was going to get. He stood and looked down at her. “I’ll see you around, Miss Amelie.”

She cackled. “You sure will. Oh, and boy? Sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to make a journey if you ain’t dragging all your baggage with you.”

“My baggage is gone.”

“Not yet it ain’t.”

Flip wrote long into the night, until he could no longer see the words before him. If he had any dreams, he didn’t remember them. He wrote the next day too, and went for a walk, and did some laundry, and bought a few groceries. He waved at Miss Amelie every time he saw her but didn’t stop for a chat; she was busy most of the day anyway. Scratch didn’t come to him that night. Or the night after, or the night after that. Flip even caught himself consciously widening his Clear Eye, and although he did catch glimpses of a few spectral figures, none of them were Scratch.

A raw sense of loss tore at Flip’s gut—for both of the Bergerons he’d met and, apparently, lost.

But the writing… ah. The writing flowed like the Mississippi River, powerful and unstoppable. There had been times in the past when words came easily to him, but they were nothing compared to the present. As soon as he sat at his keyboard, entire scenes opened as easily as unfolding a kitchen towel, and when he wasn’t in front of his computer, the characters clamored eagerly to be set free again.

Less than two weeks after he’d arrived in New Orleans, his book had grown from thirty thousand to nearly a hundred thousand words, and two days after that, he typed The End. Then he backed up the completed manuscript, walked to a dive bar on Royal Street, and got incredibly drunk.

Well, he tried to anyway. It was a ritual for him, and one of the few exceptions to his usual abstinence: when a first draft was completed, he celebrated with booze. He couldn’t remember why he’d started this tradition, but once he had, it seemed unlucky to change it. So tonight he rapidly downed four Sazeracs—the specific cocktail chosen in honor of his current city—which should have been more than enough to put him under the table. He waited for the fuzziness to descend. He’d always loved that fuzziness, which was another reason why he almost never allowed himself to drink. It would be all too easy to slip into that state permanently. Tonight, however, his head remained stubbornly clear. He ordered a fifth and then a sixth drink, more than he’d ever consumed at once and enough to make the lanky bartender stare at him with concern.

But he stayed sober.

Swearing under his breath, he slid off the bar stool and walked out into the night. The air was warm and still, making him think about mosquitoes and yellow fever, although as far as he could tell, nothing actually bit him. His feet led him out of the Quarter to Frenchmen Street, where music streamed out of open doors, but he didn’t enter any of the buildings. He stood on a street corner, imagining a handsome man playing a piano.

All the way home he saw ghosts, but none were familiar. They weren’t frightening, just ordinary people going about their business despite being dead. A spectral mother and child sat on a front porch peacefully shelling peas; the child smiled and waved at Flip as he passed, and he waved back. An old man leaned against a wall and drank from a brown glass bottle, swaying slightly to a tune that Flip couldn’t hear. A young man walked by with a heavy-looking bag settled on one shoulder. Flip strolled among the ghosts and the living, feeling as if he didn’t entirely fit with either category.

He was nearly back to St. Philip Street when he recognized the emotion that clung to all of the ghosts: melancholy. None of them were truly despairing, at least as far as he could tell, but sadness hung on all of them like a shawl. That made sense, he supposed, given that they were dead.

But Flip was alive, so why did he share this emotion as well? He’d finished the manuscript and had the gut sense that he’d written a damn good book. He had a nice place to stay for now and all the basic things he needed to survive. Nobody was trying to murder him for sleeping with the wrong person.

A realization floated just out of reach. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t grasp it, which was so fucking frustrating that he nearly walked into another bar. Surely a couple more drinks would finally get him wasted.

Instead he turned onto St. Philip, glanced at the empty spot that Miss Amelie would occupy in the morning, and keyed in the code to enter his building.

His suitcase waited at the foot of the stairs.

Chapter

Ten

Flip carried the suitcase into his apartment and left it, unopened, in the living room. He puttered around the kitchen, preparing a favorite comfort food: pasta, creamy with shredded asiago and gruyere. Although the boxed stuff had been a mainstay during his youth, it was pleasant to now stand on his gallery and gaze at quiet streets while spooning the adult version into his mouth.

When he fell asleep soon afterward, his dreams were wispy, insubstantial things that melted away immediately.

He hadn’t gone to bed especially late, but he slept until nearly noon and woke up groggy. No headache or other hangover symptoms, however, and his head cleared after he brewed some coffee and reheated the leftover mac and cheese.

Usually he let the first drafts of his writing sit for a while, like seeds tucked into damp soil. That allowed him a fresher eye when he revised them. He could have waited with this one too, since his agent wasn’t expecting it for a couple of weeks, but an inexplicable sense of urgency gnawed at him. He sat down at his laptop and dove directly into the second draft. He was delighted—but not surprised—to discover that the manuscript didn’t really need much tinkering.

“This is really good,” he kept saying, because there was no reason to be falsely modest if ghosts were his only audience. As was often the case once a book was finished, he had a sense of distance from it, as if it had been written by someone else. Maybe that didn’t make him entirely objective about it, but in this case he was certain that his perception of quality wasn’t skewed.

He stayed up all night reading over the manuscript, fixing typos and tweaking a few minor details, mainlining coffee but barely eating. Dawn had already broken by the time he finished. His muscles were cramped, his eyes gritty, his belly hollow. But it was all worth it for the supreme satisfaction he experienced when he wrote a quick email to his agent, attached the document, and hit Send.

After which he immediately stumbled off to the bedroom and climbed onto the mattress, still fully clothed.

When Flip opened his eyes again, it was nearly five p.m. and his stomach was staging a protest over being ignored. A nice dinner out felt justified, so he showered, dressed, and ventured out of his apartment.

Miss Amelie was just packing up for the day. She glanced up from the cart she used to transport her setup. “Congratulations, boy. Told you that all you had to do was open your Eye.”

“It’s wide open.” He paused a moment. “But, um, I haven’t seen Scratch for a long time.”

---