Backstage

[My Himalayan dreams. --The Producer]

It's one of those days when the light is so bright and unfiltered that everything seems unfamiliar. Rocks heretofore undiscovered now uncovered. There were no trees. Snow lay on the ground in patterns from outer space. Bits of burnt grass showed through like chiaroscuro in Rembrandt, but not like any painting you could place. This was beyond art. It was the essence beyond the shadows of snow. This was what things really looked like in another dimension, and it was too painful.

    That night, that dreadful night, I had a dream, a traumen-wirren, a revelation. Dreams are just thoughts by other means. Dreams backwards is smeared, almost. But this is irrelevant, I know, I know.

    I was talking to my friend the pinstriped, watch-fobbed impresario. "You are too articulate for words," he was saying. Of course it was my dream and I was putting words in his mouth. He had agreed to accept this inordinately erotic young person, in whom I had a taken a Platonic interest. This was, after all, a dream.

    Five years later, in dream time, I was at a series of toll booths just outside Glyndebourne, the British opera estate outside London, decorated with gaudy banners that proclaimed, "The Thinking Man's Bordello," and "Sopranos, 25 cents," very New Orleans Mardi Gras. But there were no lines at all, no customers or cars in sight. I asked a ticket woman why no one was going to the opera. Perhaps they were appalled by the kind of tone being set by the advertising.

    "Oh no," she said, "we have to do this. Otherwise no one would come at all. You see, every play in British theater and every opera stars the same person, and has for five years now. An absolutely dreadful, untalented apparition. So no one goes to theater anymore. British theater has been singlehandedly destroyed."

    This, of course, was my doing, and my undoing. I woke shaking. Was I doing it again?.

    I had another dream where Leontyne Price, the diva, was sixty feet tall (in life she was quite small), and as she was singing, she turned into a giant pizza. I would say this dream was quite meaningless.

    One final dream. A plain woman I knew was giving a concert. Well-known musicians lurked everywhere in indolent New Yorker poses, like enormous cigarette holders or human swizzle sticks. People so accomplished the popular press refused to acknowledge them. In fact, people no one could possibly recognize, so great were their accomplishments. They were immortal: they had no need of the present. No records, except a few pirated tapes, not available even at recondite record stores.

    But on everyone's tongues, the focus of everyone's whispers. A most ungraceful and ungrateful man, who acknowledged no one, looked at nothing but the walls and the floor, so great his artistic perceptions that they did not include ordinary people, even the famous around him. Occasionally someone would be presented to him. "Maestro, you remember Kurt?" "Oh, ja, Kurt." And the maestro would smile conspiratorially, grab his hand in a poor imitation of a handshake, and use the motion like a karate expert to pass him down the room and out of his sight. The musician's rush.

    The light is strange. It reminds me of Central Park on those cold, bright days in late winter when you almost feel New York is real. You can see yourself on those days almost living there, strolling across the field to the rowboat restaurant, ignoring chain link and seven hundred Svens rollerblading for the feel of absolute solitude that only cities offer.

    A thousand times in my youth I walked some part of the park on these preternaturally bright days and felt how much of the world I could suddenly see. You can feel the water around you, and you know it touches England, France. You can escape any time you want to.

    But you don't have to. You are touching it now, as you stand here, ringed with the azure dirt. Surrounded by skyscrapers, you are free. You don't need to travel. There are French movies, Italian restaurants. Greek garbage is on the grass. You can see your future reflected in the diamonds on the Plaza. Greatness hides in the gas lamps. Cary Grant strolls under the bridge over there in a dozen movies. This is the twilight zone of fame, of endless horizons, of infinite vision. Every dream of America is right here in Sheep Meadow, in the reflection pool, around the carousel.

    I step outside the tent. This was the tent that terrified me last night, when I knew the Yeti crouched behind it, just out of sight as I moved around it in the moonlight. Or the Yeti was behind those rocks above it, now reduced to the familiar scrabble of a giant scree moraine. The grass was almost tropical because it didn't belong to the valley anymore than the rocks belonged to the suburbs. At the head of the valley was, quite simply, Everest. You could see for thirty miles straight up this twisting glacial trough. Endless piles of rubble looked like children from outer space had used it as their sandbox. This is what a sandbox looks like to a speck of dust.

    Each pile of scree looked, even from a distance, about half a mile high. Like snakes made up entirely of immense pebbles, dozens of these moraines wound back towards Everest. You could follow the valley itself through their maze until you had to guess that it led eventually to a relatively low pass up about twenty miles. This looked like about an hour's walk, but as you walked it never changed its perspective, so you knew you were deluded. This was Amphu Lamtsu, we thought.

    Of course it wasn't. Our pass was over to the left around a hundred corners. This was actually the Sherpa pass, which led to wild areas of Tibet one could only guess at being devastated by wind and snows, thousands of years of loneliness and endless walking to no destination unless you had one of the maps people made of such places to give them a direction, to name them, to take away their strangeness, their outer space.