Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

the unrelieved cows that brought in a neighbor passing on the road), he had killed his father in the barn, using a pitchfork and the flat of a shovel, then his mother in the kitchen, using the same shovel which he must have carried from the barn for the purpose.
    These were the facts. The dream, as far as he could tell, contained but did not reveal them. Awake he had all this information about the murder, double murder, in his memory, though he could not think when or how it was given to him. In the dream he never understood clearly what all the urgency and commotion were about, he knew only that he had to find his boots and hurry out with his father and brother (if he hurried, in the dream, he would not be left behind). He did not know where he was going and it would not dawn on him until he had gone along for a while that there was something they were going to find. Their progress might be easy and cheerful at the start, but often it would be slowed by confusing and deflecting invisible forces, so that Mr. Lougheed would find himself separated, doing things such as mixing a prescription in his drugstore or eating supper with his wife. Then with such too-late desperate regret, through reproachful, unhelpful neighborhoods, and always some kind of gray weather, not disclosing much, he would be trying to get back to where he ought to have been. He never dreamed the dream through to the end. Or he never remembered. That was it, more likely. When the dream first came to him his parents and sister were dead but his brother was still alive, in Winnipeg, and he had thought of writing to him, asking him about Frank McArter, and if they had actually found him that night or not. There was a hole in his memory at that point. But he never did write—or when he did write, he did not ask this question, because he forgot, and if he had remembered he might have felt foolish anyway—and then his brother died.
    This dream always left some weight on his mind. He supposed it was because he was still carrying around, for part of the day, the presences of dead people, father and mother, brother and sister, whose faces he could not clearly remember when he was awake. How to convey the solidity, complexity, reality, of those presences—even if he had anybody to convey this to? It almost seemed to him there must be a place where they moved with independence, undiminished authority, outside his own mind; it was hard to believe he had authored them himself. A commonplace experience. He remembered his own mother, sitting down at the breakfast table, saying in a voice of astonishment that was almost complaint, “I’ve been having a dream about your grandma! Oh, it was
her
!”
    Another thing he was made to think about was the difference between that time and now. It was too much. Nobody could get from one such time to another, and how had he done it? How could one man know Mr. Lougheed’s father and mother, and now know Rex and Calla? It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.
    The dream had brought him in touch with a world of which the world he lived in now seemed the most casual imitation—in texture, you might say, in sharpness, in authority. It was true, of course, that his senses had dimmed. Nevertheless. The weight of life, the importance of it, had some way disappeared. Events took place now in a diminished landscape, and were of equal, or no, importance. Mr. Lougheed riding on a bus through city streets or even through the countryside would not have been much amazed to see anything you could name—a mosque, for instance, or a white bear. Whatever it looked to be, it would turn out to besomething else. Girls at the supermarket wore grass skirts to sell pineapples and he had seen a gas station attendant, wiping windshields, wearing on his head a fool’s hat with bells. Less and less was surprising.
    Sometimes in the records they played downstairs he would hear an absolutely clear, and familiar, unmolested line of music. And he knew what would happen, how this would be mocked and twisted around, blown up, blasted out of all recognition. There were similar jokes everywhere, and it must be considered