Charlie was always a bird, though not in the sense he is now. Now, Charlie is a bird in the sense of flying, loving, and being one with music. Before he walks in the Dreamlands of Old, Charlie could only be a bird in two senses. Now he is the full bird. He sees his old self as angels eat his flesh, flying away as a bird does to its shell. The King of New Desires beckons Charlie into the new world of dreams and changes. He arrives as that world dies a cruel and unjust fate.
Charlie, in dreams, shows people the way to their future. A gambler looked for the right table to play at. A thief escaped through the wrong door. A murderer killed all the right people. A dog ate out of his master’s bowl and defecated upon his grave. The waking world was a land of the past. The Dreamlands of Old are of the present. What then of the land the King of New Desires promises Charlie? Charlie does not know.
Charlie screams as the sky burns bright blue. His arm is consuming itself by the second. There is no arm at all. No flesh. No being. Nothingness becomes Charlie. His eyes are consuming. His legs are consuming. His teeth are consuming. All is consuming into nothingness. Nothingness itself is consuming nothingness into nothingness. Dreamland is consuming. The angels are consuming Charlie as Charlie watches far away. He was always Charlie, even as he watches Charlie.
The King of Nightmares has a request for Charlie. She wants a song he never plays, though he knows it quite well. All things are known in the Dreamlands of Old. Questions are for other lands in other times. Will Charlie walk in those lands? In those times? This is not what the King of Nightmares wants. What she wants is a song about the lands he was born in. Not of the Dreamlands he walks in, but of the world that declares war on them that night. She wants to know their world.
Are there going to be wars in the world to come? Were there broken futures that cannot be asked about? Will there ever be a utopia that works without problem? Can people be free of the cruelties of the world, of the dreams created by butterflies? Or is the world forever trapped in a dance macabre of incomprehensible design? Is there even a design to such cruelty? Will Charlie or anyone else ask questions such as this in the worlds to come?
As Charlie plays his song, out of nothingness, out of his old self, out of his new self, out of all his selves, another man joins him. In many ways, the man is his opposite. Where Charlie has dark skin, the man has light. Where Charlie has a round new face, the man has a rectangular, broken, beautifully ugly face. Where Charlie is a bird, the man is a man. He is here as a favor to an angel. The angel saves his life by showing him the Dreamlands of Old. The man plays the trumpet.
A woman joins them. She is not like the man and the bird. She is a cat. Her eyes are those of a cat. Her smile has a cat’s desire to kill. Her tears are a cat’s sadness. And, like all cats, she is here because she wants to be here. She plays the violin like she plays with a mouse. She keeps with the tone of the song, but there’s something mercurial about her violin. It is not of herself, all herself, nor is it fully not of herself. She makes the violin from the trees of forgotten, long dead memories. She fine tunes the strings out of the imagination of unicorn hair. She carves ancient words onto her violin like a member of the waking world did his guitar. The words are the same, but the language is not.
Lastly, the Shapeless One joins their quartet. They are here to play with the quartet. When they lived in the waking world, they were born wrong. Or, at the very least, the conception of wrongness held by the waking world in the past. In the dreamlands of old, they have no shape. Will they understand in the next world? How could one with such multitudes be restrained by just one shape? They sing the song for the King of Nightmares. She is brought to tears by their voice.
“I went doooooooooooowwwwwwwn.
To St. Jaaaaaaaaaaaames.
Infirm-Maryyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
Saw my baby therrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre.
She was stretched.
Out on a
Long
White
Taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaablllllllllllllllllle.
So cold.
So sweet.
So faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiir….
Let her go!
Let.
Her.
Gooooooooooooooooo!
God bless her (wherever she may be).
She can look
This wild world over.
But she’ll never
Find
A sweet man like me.”
At this point in the song, Charlie took over and played a chaotic saxophone like sound with his self, his being, his all. The music tap dances across all of the Dreamlands of Old with gusto and charm. The man joins in with trumpet of infinite implications. The soulful music fills the air with melancholy and necessity. The cat does not play while they play. She only plays as the Shapeless one sings. Her music is soft, sharp, and completely her own.
The King of Nightmares thinks of a word they never use. One that means a kind of pain that happens when one returns home. She is always at home, even when she is not. And yet, the song she hears gives her this kind of pain, though perhaps not for the first time in her life. It reminds her of the days when she is eating with the Cat and singing their secret song of love and loss. She never shares the meaning or words of that song with anyone else. Not even when the Cat sings their song for the first time, without ever saying a word.
“I went doooooooooooown,” continued the Shapeless One in a deep baratone.
“To St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there.
She was stretched on a long white table.
So cold…
So cold…
So cold.”
The cat plays her music alone. They do not join in with her. She is an artist crafting a tragedy out of words she cannot speak aloud. She is born in the Dreamlands of Old, never knowing what the last world was like. She is the child of angels, the child of dreams, the child of stories. She is fictional, and she is real. She sings without ever saying a word.
“Let her go!” she sings with her music. She knows the feeling of being in a cage. She knows the pain of being alone. She knows what it is to lose, lose, and lose again. She knows sadness and the cruelty of losing someone to the next world. Does she know the joys of the world to come? Does she know where she is in that world? Does she know where sheis? She knows that she is of the Dreamlands of Old. And that these lands are being washed away.
The song ends as all songs do. The King of Nightmares is pleased with the song and gives the waking world a reward. She knows of all the worlds that are, were, and might be. She dances in all of them like a ballerina on a chain of memories. She has seen cruelty and pain and joy and Hope. She knows where all things lie. And so, she sends that world a gift. The only one she can: a nightmare.
It’s not a bad nightmare per say. Not all nightmares are bad. But they are strange, unknowable things full of multitudes and implications vast and monstrous. It’s easy to mistake such nightmares as having a cruelness to them. Nightmares aren’t cruel any more than dreams are kind or stories were false. But the nightmare was enough to draw the waking world in the direction of war against its dreams.
The Dreamlands of Old suffered most from the war. The King of Red and Blue changes into a sullen, broken man with his hopes for a better world dripping away into dust and amber. The ruler of Fairyland has hir throne lost to the usurper, a cruel dog with teeth that can’t help but consume all it smells. The angels turn feral and carnivorous. The man is among their first victims. He died in his sleep in the waking world. Will he be happy? The Shapeless One explodes into a cascading carnival of color and cruelty. They were drowned by their father for not being his daughter. Will they find more than just happiness? The cat merely escapes into the next world without incident. Does she find her?
Charlie Parker walks in the ruins of the Dreamlands of Old. He sees himself dancing with the kings and gods of the land of fiction. He is quite happy with these strange, new beings created from nothingness and decay. As he walks, Charlie can’t help but sing a little song to himself. Not the full song, but a small part of it.
“When I diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee,
Bury me in straight lace shooooooooooooooooooes.
I want a.
Box-black coat!
And a Stetson haaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my waaaatch chaaaaaaaaaiiiiiinnnn…
So the boys
The boys will know I died standin’ pat.”
When he finishes his little song, he sees a man lost in the world. He knows this man from a childhood past in the waking world, though not his childhood. They used to dance together in between dates and chases. Now Charlie is of the Dreamlands of Old, awaiting new worlds to consume him. The man only knew Charlie’s Dreamland self. Charlie left the waking world long before the man was born. His once child friend is old now. Maybe he was always old. Maybe they both were. The man looks like he could use some help. So Charlie shows the man his future.
So Charlie says, “The world’s a cruel and awful place. One where hands are used more often for killing than for washing other people’s hands. We can’t see from our eyes the similarities of the other to us. We need to change ourselves before we can change the world. But we can’t change ourselves yet. We need to change the world. Changing the world is the same thing as changing a self. All it needs is someone to give instead of get. Enough someones, and the world stops working. The system cannot hold. The house finally loses and we can all wake up.” It was something like that. Words from the Dreamlands of Old (and the words spoken in higher worlds) tend to get lost when the dream ends.
As he talks, a familiar figure approaches them. Charlie can’t quite see who the man is, though he can tell he’s a young one. Probably hasn’t met any of the strange, wonderful people of the Dreamlands of Old. He’s probably lost in the ruins, looking for the other nicer worlds. The ruins have always been here, as has all of Dreamland. Dreams are eternal, that means they’re always happening. Eternity starts at the beginning all things are happening at once. The young man who is far away waves at Charlie, recognizing him even from that distance. Charlie gives the man a smile one makes when they can’t remember someone’s name. The friend fades away, returned to the waking world while Charlie watches the sky as angels descend upon him.
Charlie Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City, while watching The Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on television. The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Charlie also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had suffered a heart attack. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Charlie's 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.
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