Providence Read Free Page B

entirely ready to give up my life to be in the company of these creatures, who needed me and wanted to share their secrets with me. In far less time than it takes to tell, I turned and stepped off the sidewalk—and was instantly awake. Instantly awake—and utterly heartbroken, sobbing uncontrollably until my mother came in to find out what was wrong.
    “Did you have a bad dream?” she asked, taking me in her arms.
    “No, no,” I insisted. “It wasn’t
bad!”
    She smiled at this. “Then why are you crying.”
    “I’m crying because—” But I was crying too hard to explain.
    “Come on,” my mother said, “tell me why you’re crying.”
    “I’m crying because,” I finally managed to squeeze out between gasps and sobs, “because—because it was so
beautiful!
”
    I hadn’t realized till tonight that the basic story framework of
Ishmael
is clearly derived from this dream, a fact I find quite amazing. In dream and in
Ishmael
an obstacle is laid across the narrator’s path—in the one the trunk of a tree, in the other an ad in a newspaper (which of course arrives rolled up like the trunk of a tree). In dream and in
Ishmael
the narrator is confronted by a dark, threateningcreature who immediately sets out to reassure him with words spoken directly into his mind. Both creatures, bug and gorilla, are “not where they belong”—have thrust themselves into an urban habitat in order to encounter the narrator. Both creatures come to the narrator from a habitat that has been destroyed. Both speak to the narrator as representatives of a larger community, a community consisting of all nonhuman life. Both tell him this community is in need of help—and that this help can only come from someone privy to secrets unknown to his fellow humans. Both invite him to take a journey of discovery that will alienate him from his human family and friends.
    The purpose of the dream was to plant in me a lifelong yearning for its fulfillment.
    Having had it pointed out to you in this way, you would be forgiven for thinking that I must have deliberately patterned
Ishmael
on this dream—or must at least have been aware of the similarities between them. I assure you that neither is the case.
    What the similarities indicate, I think, is how deeply I accepted this six-year-old’s dream as a description of my destiny. From that age, I knew that, somehow or other, I would make the dream come true—or rather, that I would finish it. I hadn’t been allowed to finish it as a child—and this is exactly how I understood it at the time. I knew that its fulfillment was something that was to happen later. The purpose of the dream was to plant in me a lifelong yearning for its fulfillment. Someday I would be allowed to step off that sidewalk and enter another world.That someday finally arrived when the hero of my novel stepped off the sidewalk and entered the world of Ishmael.
    So you see that, even though I was unaware of it at the time, I endowed the narrator of
Ishmael
with a destiny that had been given to me in a dream half a century before.

T HREE
             
Of course
people don’t think about destinies all the time—especially not six-year-old boys. I forgot the dream. Forgot it and remembered it—forgot it, remembered it, forgot it, remembered it—never forgot it.
    Over the next ten years, the beetle’s words took on new meanings. Something was going on between my parents. I didn’t have any idea what it was and still don’t.
    On my birth certificate, my father, Herbert John Quinn—known as Bert and later as Q—listed his occupation as “Telegrapher” and his employer as E. J. Barrick, a successful Omaha roofer. Why would a roofer need a telegrapher? He needed a telegrapher because he had a curious sideline: He operated a sports book. This meant he needed a “line,” which was both a telegraphic line and anarray of sporting information of all kinds but principally the betting odds and point-spreads on offer for