Amy Letter Madison in Dreams by Amy Letter

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

“Madison in Dreams” by Amy Letter, 2009 First appeared in Louisiana Literature

Madison in Dreams

I am Madison, in dreams. In dreams I sit at a small desk in a clean room painted pleasant cream and green like rainless clouds in sun moving over the hills of early summer. A tall, affectionate woman rules the room. She is bony and wiry but strong, and she shows her short dark hair to children, both boys and girls. Her eyes are almond shaped and gray, like a

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

woman from my country, but her expressions and gestures are foreign, Western, like her clothes. In dreams she teaches me the Western alphabet, ABCs. She has me count drawings of apples in drawings of baskets, and my mouth waters. At 10am we sing songs praising America, and at 10:30am she gives us slices of apples and tiny boxes of cold, fresh milk, like a promise fulfilled. I count the slices and sips. Three slices. Twenty sips. When I need to relieve myself I raise my hand and she says, “Yes, Madison?” and I open my mouth and sing a soft and lilting song of gibberish. She smiles at my song and nods her ascent. I stand and watch my tiny feet, tucked into socks and protected by stiff leather shoes polished to a shine. They slide effortlessly over a floor of solid seamless

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

rug that does not end. I seem to be walking on vapor: my feet are soft and painless. I pass under an American flag hanging still in the cool, dry air. I walk through a doorway of wood and glass, newly made, smooth, undamaged. On the other side is a room of such pure white blinding cleanliness—it is as though the sun has melted quartz to perfect flatness, and it cooled in the shape of a small room, with perches to rest one’s bottom while nature goes on, unseen, below. I tend to myself with white tissue and press a button—my waste disappears in a wash of water. A twist of shining metal brings more water, cool and clear, and I cleanse myself with it, the purest ablution. The tall, glorious woman opens the door and checks on me. She seems to be scolding me, but she is amused by my splashing. She loves me, this great beast of a Western

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

woman. Or rather she loves Madison. I smile at her. She does not know that I am a grown man, that I could throw her to the earth with one hand and ruin her in a moment, despite her visible muscles under tanned skin. I do not hate this woman. In fact, I like her very much. But I always grow angry at this part of the dream, because I know it is ending soon. She leads me back into the classroom. Today, a man arrives with much celebration from the children. He carries an enormous white and yellow snake. I wake, and I am Majid. And I am hungry: the apples and milk have disappeared from my belly. I lift my finger and trace through the sand on the floor the letters, A, B, C. In several hours the sun will rise and I will begin looking for work again, winding through this great, filthy city, alone. But not alone. Madison will be with me.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

I know that Madison suffers in her dreams. After several weeks of dreaming Madison, I was led from the beautiful classroom to an even more beautiful office. I was presented to an elderly woman whose white hair curled around her head. She wore a blue suit, a suit as I think of men in Western countries wearing. She wished to talk to me of dreams. And though I could not discern the words as I heard them, I understood what Madison said: she described this slum near Istanbul, the rolling eyes of fearful dogs scrounging in the alleys. She described rats and biting ants and stinking streams of feces. She said she dreamed of pain, in her eyes, shoulders, teeth, legs. She said in dreams her hands hurt so she could not make a fist, that every step was agony, and that she was lost, alone, among strangers she could not understand, who looked

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

upon her with anger and disgust. Even in her strange foreign song I knew the sights and sounds and struggles of my life. And so I learned that while I am Madison in dreams, when Madison dreams, she is Majid. When Madison dreams, it is morning here. I am not Turkish, but I left my own country when the bombing began, and a cousin helped me get to Istanbul. After that, he made his way to France, to find better work. I have not been so lucky. Right now I am squatting in a closet of a crumbling building. It was once a workshop for textiles, but it was destroyed in an earthquake and reborn as a home to immigrants and poor, like me, refashioned for this new use with little more than sheets of cardboard. The residents are bitter and territorial. I must fight every day to keep my closet.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

We migrants collect on the corner closest to the road into the city. Men come by with offers of work. The work is difficult or dangerous. The pay is always low. Often they cheat us, offering one payment, giving us much less. Some men have been beaten and robbed instead of paid. I have been lucky so far. I have only been cheated. Several times I have been hired by a shopkeeper named Erol, an honest man who respects my honesty and treats me well. I have been very lucky. The best work is moving and lifting: it does not require skill or instruction, so there is little chance you will anger them. They will ask you to load or unload a truck, very simple. I have been picked up and asked to seal the roof of a house—but I do not understand Turkish well and did not follow the instructions exactly. That man spit on

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

me when he paid me half what he had promised. I cannot blame him, though I screamed foul words and chased after his truck when he drove away. I cannot blame him, but I still feel rage. The money I earn is enough to buy me food, though I have become even thinner since arriving in Turkey. In a year I have once earned enough to pay for a phone call to my brother, now in Egypt. As often as possible I save enough to have a bath. I despise being so filthy. I stink of the streets and the work and the unhealthiness of my own body. My dreams of Madison are precious to me. Each evening I settle down in the dust and cover my mouth and nose and pray to myself in the din of hurting people yelling their pain at one another. I pray that for one more night I will escape to her world.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

I remember Madison’s complaints—my eyes are always irritated by the grit in the air, and my ears have long been infected. My teeth ache and stink, and will soon fall out of my head. My back and arms are always convulsed, stiff from the injuries of strain and tension, from sleeping on this concrete floor. My hips, knees, and ankles grind from abuse. And always, always my stomach burns with hunger. When I cannot bathe my skin chafes and burns where the sweat and dirt rubs between my clothes and my body. I am nineteen years old, a man, and I have seen one brother killed in the madness of murder that spreads when strangers somewhere declare “war.” I have lost my father to a foreign army’s prison, I do not know where. I have been forced to relocate my mother and sister to a place where they are not safe. I have fled in search of work only to find

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

there is none. I cannot imagine how hard it is for Madison, a little girl accustomed to such comforts, to suffer through hours of my life. But I do not care. If her nightmares are the price of my escape each night, my brief escape to a world comfort-filled and clean and safe for little girls and grown men and stupidly smiling teachers, I demand she pay it. I would demand she pay worse. Madison is a pretty girl. Her skin is white, her hair is black, her eyes are blue and striking. She is neither thin nor plump, a healthy girl. I do not know if she is richer or poorer than her classmates, and I do not know if her classroom is a rich or poor one in her world. I only know that the school I went to as a child was crumbling, always a target of bombing, never repaired. The teacher would beat learning into us, when he could. Then the fighting would

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

begin again, and we would hide in our homes. The weeks would pass, weeks of fear and then the strain of staying indoors day and night, quiet, staying close to the floors, never lighting a candle, eating little, father afraid to let mother cook. Eventually we wore the blank expressions of lizards who have hidden too long under a cold rock and stiffened, immobile. We would emerge as creatures who had forgotten how to be children, how to speak to other children, how to play. We walked to school to see who had survived and who had not. Always one or two children gone. Often their whole families were gone. Classmates turned to memories. The teacher grew angrier, his job more desperate, the task more dire. We memorized and memorized. Our sisters stayed at home. Madison’s school is nothing like school to me.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

I spend the last hour of night thinking of fresh, sweet apple, and milk, and I spell these words in English in the sand, for I have learned them. At dawn I roll up my few possessions and walk to the roadside. A few other men are there before me. I ignore them. I look at my feet. A man is calling, “you, skinny boy—you!” I look up. An old man in a van is pointing at me. He says he has an apartment he wishes to rent, but it is dirty. He will pay me enough for a bath just to clean it. I think: cleaning is woman’s work, but I am weak, and how hard can it be? The house is not far, and the morning is still cold when he leads me inside and turns on the work lights. The floor and walls are soaked in blood. My heart begins to pound and I think he has trapped me in his slaughterhouse for foreign boys—I nearly scream. But from behind the

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

door he pulls out a bucket with cleanser and scrubbers stuffed inside and hands it to me. He tells me it does not need to be perfect, just good enough to rent. He says if I do good work, he will keep me on and pay more to have me re-paint. When I touch the edge of the dried puddle of blood with the sponge, the skin breaks and curls up, revealing a wet inner core. It is now a rubbery mat filled with blood, bonded to the floor. It clings like its rightful possessor no doubt clung to life, but he failed, and the stain would fail too. I scrub, my fingernails blackened with a stranger’s blood. My knees open on the floor and my blood intermingles with this stranger’s. My hand passes the sweat from my brow and paints my face with blood. When I finish, the man praises my work and gives me water to

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

wash my body. The water quickly turns red. The man goads me, “I will let you paint, but you must be clean. I do not want blood in the fresh paint.” I dump the bloody water in the street and the man gives me more. I paint. The man pays me almost as much as he promised. I thank him. I might have debated eating instead of bathing, but not this day. I walk straight to the bath-house and pay the fee. Hunger turns my belly, but I do not care. I steam and scrub and soak and sit on a bench until I am dry. I pick up my clothing: it is foul-smelling and stained with filth and now blood. It is caked with dust and stiff with sweat. Why did I spend all my money on a bath when I would only become filthy again as soon as I dressed? But I had not been thinking. I was a sleepwalker blind to

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

everything but her own immediate horror, by the nightmare of herself as a blood-streaked ghoul—Madison was me, was controlling me, in the throes of her terrible dream. That night, again, after the fruit and milk, I am brought to the same old woman with the white hair, the blue suit. She tells Madison that her mother found her in her bathtub last night, crying and screaming, but asleep. Madison says she had a horrible dream: she was surrounded by blood, blood everywhere, thick blood, deep and sticky, covering her, sticking to her, and in her dream she scrubbed and scrubbed and could not get clean, no matter what she did she could not get clean! The old woman looks very serious. She asks Madison if there are certain little tasks she cannot stand to leave

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

undone. Madison says no. She asks Madison how long she has been so concerned with cleanliness. Madison tells her “only in dreams.” She asks Madison if anyone ever touches her in ways she dislikes. Madison says no. A lie. Madison lies. Madison knows I am here, and she dislikes it.

It was Daoud who sold my father to the Americans. He told them father was Taliban, which was a lie. Then Daoud took over my father’s shop and the city block that held our house, and most of his sons now work as guides for visiting Westerners, at very good pay. My father is only a memory, now. I have one keepsake to recall him: it is a large disk of gold, pierced and fixed with a loop to be worn as a pendant. My father gave it to me the night he was arrested. It would

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

buy me new clothes and a week in a cheap hotel, here in Turkey. But how could I sell the symbol of my father’s memory? No, I keep it close to my body. In the morning cold, I remember my father. In the heat of the sun, I remember my mother. We left her and my sister with cousins in the distant countryside. They will be treated as servants. The house is unprotected from the fighting, the village is along the road to Pakistan, but leaving them alone in Kabul was impossible. They would have starved. Whether she is alive or dead, I think of my mother as dead. Perhaps you must be Afghan to understand this, what sounds so hard-hearted, like cruelty. There are so many people you never hear from again. Anyone out of sight you mourn.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

I get work outside the port, dividing a shipment among three small trucks with two other men. It is brief work, paying little, but we are paid in full. With my afternoon, I find a woman poor enough to loan me her eldest son’s clothes while she washes mine. Her son stands over me and guards me as I sit in his tee-shirt and sweatpants emblazoned with “U-S-A.” His expression is fierce, as though he believes I will run. When I put my clothes back on, they are wet, but clean. I walk in the sun. The air is cold and dry. I have money left to buy fresh fruit from a street vendor. I eat a sweet, ripe banana with the sun on my face, and carry the rest home. I hope that Madison feels this happiness. I want this for her. But I do not feel her with me today.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

When she is not at school, Madison plays. She has a room for herself, a solid-seeming chamber, quiet and still. Her bed is large enough for a grown man; it feels endless luxury with Madison’s tiny body. The walls are the faintest shade of pink, and they are decorated with pictures from equine mythology: horses with wings, horses with horns, horses running along rainbows, horses with coats of many colors. I am holding a horse both winged and horned, purple and plastic, soft and warm from the sunbeam I sit in. I set it down and rise and walk to the window—I gasp, surprised again at the feel of clean air filling Madison’s easy lungs. Never have I seen such a beautiful street: big houses on green plots of land covered by shady trees. Small birds are chirping. The morning sun gleams off wide windows, glitters in the fine ground silicate

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

of bricks, shimmers as the dewy surfaces of leaves shake in a gentle breeze. I have never seen so much unbroken glass, so much visible moisture in sunlight. In the countries where I have lived, the sun is a despot who whips and curses—here the sun is father who kisses and pets. Madison lives within the sanctum of the sun. He calls me: a great, manly, booming voice: “Madison, breakfast!” echoing up from below. I walk towards him, towards the sound of sizzling and the murmur of a radio voice. My nostrils fill with the smell of food, rich food: salty and buttery and meaty. Within a palatially open kitchen a grown man dances in an apron, sipping a mug—seeing him, I ask myself would a man like this murder my father? No, I think. And I smile. If this man, this chipper, ridiculous man, is an American, Americans are no

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

murderers. He is soft and treats the world with softness. The Americans, however easily fooled, would not murder my father. They will feed him and care for him, even if they do swallow Daoud’s lies and imprison him. It is as good as being told he lives. And I believe: I believe my father lives. And then I smell coffee, American coffee, now the scent of hope. “Good morning, sweetheart,” the man says, and kisses my forehead. He passes a small plastic plate across the counter, then scoops me up and sets me on the stool before it. He has given me a wallet-sized hunk of hardcooked scrambled egg, a slice of warm white bread toasted and buttered, and a single strip of meat, cooked hard. I know it is pork, but I eat it anyway. Madison’s body is defiled, not mine. And I taste its richness. I feel the bread and eggs fill my hungry stomach. I ask if I can have more.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

He seems surprised, but happy: “you’re getting your appetite back! That’s good! One more piece of toast?” I ask for the pork, too. He refreshes my plate with another strip of meat and another toasted slice of bread, limpid with butter. I eat it all, reveling in the ache of Madison’s too-full belly. I cannot remember ever feeling too full, not even when I was a very small child, when my father’s business was thriving and Kabul was a city of fruits and promises. Madison’s father goes to the radio to change the station, and I reach over and steal a gulp of his coffee. It is rich and dark, smooth and sweet. Madison is my paradise. I will learn the next day in a hail of shouts that Madison was too young for coffee, that she vomited her breakfast for overeating, and spent the day misbehaving. I will learn this while her father and mother quarrel: the

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

mother accusing the father of not caring for the child well enough—such a strange conversation. But the most shocking thing I will learn about Madison is that she has not been sleeping, that she will not go to sleep, has not slept for nearly two days. Am I so terrible to live with, dear child? Fall asleep and see! Majid is clean now, and well-fed. Majid’s body has been blessed with beautiful restful sleep, thanks to his precious Madison. Majid is walking taller, seeing farther. Majid has found room to hope. Majid believes his father lives. Majid thinks his mother lives, too. Majid will find a way to send her his love, as a message, through relatives. Majid has already begun to save small money. Come, girl, what more do you want?

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

But Madison ignores my coaxing. And after three days without sleep, the paradise of Madison’s body is hell to me. Even her young bones ache, her fresh ears ring, her clear blue eyes grow unfocused and hazed. Her parents speak to her now only in shouts, amplified by her tender head, inflamed from waking. But her father lifts her and takes her to bed, tucks her into its softness. I feel her muscles begin to unclench, begin to embrace the loveliness of rest, but then alarm runs through Madison’s tiny body, and no sooner is her father out the door than she is on her feet, pacing the room in circles. Our body burns. Our head spins. You need sleep, child. Why do you fight? I want her to go to bed. I want her to rest, but she resists me too. I remember the day she drove my body like her very own automobile to the bathhouse, how helpless I was to her

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

will, the will of a child. Why can I not do the same to her, and force her to sleep? I realize now Madison is stronger than me. But of course she is. For six years she has breakfasted on protein and rested in feathers, and for what? To prepare for waking hours of politeness and pampering. She has had every cold and minor infection cured by good medicines. She has suffered no losses, bears no stabbing memories: no home of hers lost, no family lost, no city lost, no country. Madison walks to a mirror. Her blue eyes sag in their sockets like the eyes of the dead. Her skin looks dusty, though she lives in filtered air. Her ears and nose are bright red. She looks into her own eyes, deep. She examines. She calculates. “I see you,” she says, and smiles

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

wryly. She sits on the floor and leans back. Like that, she is asleep. She is asleep and I am still here. It is as though I am seeing through her eyelids, the world merely veiled by their whiteness. Towering above me stands the terrifying specter of my body. It is stinking and deprived, full of hollows and shadows. For the first time I see how hard my eyes are, gray as fog, they reflect no light. I want to cry for this thing I see, myself. I watch my mouth open and my own voice say to me, “get out of my body!” It is Madison, speaking perfect Pashto. I look down at myself. I am Madison, tiny and golden. “Please, Madison,” I say in her pretty voice, my English perfect, “this time I spend with you is my only peace. The rest of my life is very hard—you’ve seen!”

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

“It hurts me, you’re hurting me!” my body and my voice scream at me. Oh, Madison, how I want you to understand. How I want you to be changed. I know we will not share our dreams forever, but I have gained so much from being you. Can you not gain something from being me? But you are a child. You are selfish and spoiled. I am frustrated with you. I do not know what to do. And this wakes me. The moment I wake, I know she is with me. She raises my hands and strikes me twice, then stops. Of course she is striking both of us. I remember being six. That was the year I tried to stop a horse at gallop running loose through the streets. I did not know how strong it was, nor how large compared to me. I had, at that age, no sense of proportion, no sense of priority. I’ve worn the scars for thirteen years.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

I’ve carried the aches, the memory. Suddenly I am terrified. I am at her mercy. The terrible child controls me. Can I fight her? What if she decides to walk me into the sea? The sun is still low. I think of the shopkeeper, Erol. I have worked for him no fewer than nine times. He knows me. At first I find myself pacing helplessly through the dust of my small closet, but after a moment, she tires, and I am in control. I walk us to Erol’s shop, about a mile. I feel her inside me, grumbling, but quietly unhappy. We step into the shop—it is air conditioned and bright. Erol greets me curiously. “Majid,” he says, “have your circumstances improved?” “A little bit,” I reply, smiling. “I am here to sell and buy.” I reach under my shirt, to the slim string that holds

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

my father’s memory: I pull out the gold coin. I would never sell it, were he dead. Were he dead, it would be my last keepsake of my beloved father. But I believe I will see him again. I believe he is alive and well, and that soon he will be released, and he will fetch my mother and sister, both still alive and well, and my brother in Egypt and I will earn money enough to send home to our father, and our family will have a future again. I believe. “I would like to sell this pendant—a family keepsake, and purchase something more pleasing to a girl.” “Ah, his circumstances have improved indeed,” Erol says, smiling. He pats me on the back, welcoming me to a brotherhood from which I am and may always be excluded. He fingers the gold a moment, then sets it on the table. He weighs it and tests it. He declares a worthy price.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

He returns with a stack of four slim black boxes and invites me to sit while he opens each in turn. Madison is intrigued. She has never seen such pretty things before, and I feel her wonder welling up in me. There are stones of many colors, arranged in lovely mosaic bouquets, lively and twinkling in Erol’s bright lights. One bracelet in particular holds every color in the rainbow, and I feel her excitement as she makes me grasp for it. “I want this,” I say, helpless to her. “That is worth just a little bit more than your coin,” Erol says, “but perhaps we can work something out. You have done good work for me. Perhaps you might do more regular work, here in the shop, and some of your earnings can make up the difference?” He’s smiling at me, warmly. It has been a long time since someone smiled at me—not at

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

Madison, but at me. Is success the mere illusion of having already done well? Why do people only wish to help those who do not seem to need it? I do not question him, I merely agree—but not too eagerly. “Yes,” I tell him. “Perhaps just a couple of days a week, some side work.” We make the arrangements while Madison uses my hands to play with the bracelet, delighted by its color, its light. I walk the mile back to my home. Madison wants to play with her new jewels, but that would be deadly. I have asserted myself. She pouts quietly in my head. I purchased the bracelet to bribe her, to make her time in my body more bearable for her. She is a simple, greedy creature. Jewels, I believed, would be enough. Now, I don’t care: I have a regular job. And Erol, the honest man who so

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

admired my honesty, believes I have another job and a fiancée. Madison, what have you made of me? I return to my closet and see another man sleeping there. “Get up, this is my place,” I say. He insists the closet is his, during the day. I watch his eyes. I believe him. I had no idea I had been sharing. The man is scrawny and pathetic, a mere boy. He is filthy. I do not pity him, though I should. I am suddenly conscious of the fact that, at the moment, I am clean and rested and strong. I tell him the closet is mine. He doesn’t fight me. He just goes. I lie on the floor of my closet. What a moral man: I have found gain by lying about my life, after trying to bribe a child to live my pain in dreams. I hold the bracelet over my face. It swings back and forth, shining in the sunlight that falls through the holes in my door. I close my eyes.

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

“Madison, I am sorry. I was wrong.” I am looking down at my body, stretched long on the dusty floor. The closet is cast through the same ghostly white that captured Madison’s bedroom, before. “I just don’t like it. I just don’t like it,” my voice cries from my body. “Madison,” I start, and I think a thousand things I want to say. I want to talk about injustice, opportunity, nature. I want to talk about big questions. I want to puzzle out the answers. She and I have traveled a magical road together. She and I have so much to learn. But she is crying. “I just want to sleep and be at home,” she says. And I become angry. “Of course you do. Your home is wonderful. Not everyone’s home is wonderful.”

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

“I don’t care!” she screams with my voice and my body. She is made angrier by my anger, it seems. Perhaps anger does nothing to calm a child. “But I bought you a bracelet, and that makes you happy?” I watch my body sniffle on the floor, hear my voice shrink with guilt and stubbornness. “Yes. It’s pretty.” Something horrible wells up in me. Finally I ask her, through clenched teeth, “Madison, do you hate me?” She looks up and sees her own body, talking to her with her own voice. She says, “No! No! You’re very nice! I like you!” And now I understand the things I cannot tell Madison. We have taken the journey together, but only I have gained. Madison suffered and got nothing for it. She

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

cannot get anything for it. She is just a child. My pity for her knows no bounds. Finally I say to her. “Madison, I would like to stop this sharing of dreams.” “Okay!” she watches me expectantly. “What do we do?” “I do not know.” Her eagerness brings light to my eyes: “If we both dream we’re dreaming we’ll be ourselves in dreams.” “How do we do this?” “Lay down here beside me,” my body tells me. I look down at Madison’s little girl frame and use it to step delicately around my body. I find a patch of ground beside it. I feel myself put my arm around me—and think how odd, for Madison feels like she is hugging herself. “Now

Amy Letter, “Madison in Dreams”

close your eyes and go to sleep,” my voice tells me, as my arm gives me a final, affectionate squeeze. And I obey.