A Dream Of A Better World

By Noel Hansen

The studio apartment was at the top of the building, in the corner. The elevator in the building seemed like it was always in need of repair, so one had to walk up all 5 stories to get to it. The stairs were very cold, no matter the weather outside. Nobody had been able to figure out why, it seemed like something that just wasn’t possible. There were a lot of little things like that about Agnes’s life. Little strange tragedies, small weirdnesses. One would be tempted to call her cursed with supernaturally bad luck. Agnes didn’t believe in luck, and neither did I. But the human mind loves explanations, regardless of how rational they are, and so the thought was always tempting to me.

I climbed the stairs that day in a jacket and a pair of cheap knit gloves to protect my hands from the cold metal railings. Agnes had called me in a hurry, asking that I come over as soon as I was able. And so I went, braving the cold of those slightly impossible stairs to check in on her, thinking as I did about what could possibly be the matter.

Agnes was an artist by profession, and made her way selling commissions to the high-paid executives that infest this city like cockroaches. They loved her work; love the grit of it, the trauma just beneath the surface. They would take her pieces and hang them up in their dining room or living room, she told me, just to start conversations with out-of-town guests. She received some acclaim, some gallery placements, and very little money from all this. It was enough, however, to afford a studio apartment in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the city. The space was small, but she covered it in the art she really cared about, the stuff that was just for her. It was like a small gallery, and always wowed those lucky enough to visit. The local arts and entertainment weekly had certainly liked it. That was when I met her, photographing her apartment for that story. 

We liked each other immediately, but weren’t initially sure in what way. We went on a few dates; we kissed twice, fucked once, but pretty quickly slipped more into a more comfortable, conventional friendship. We talked on the phone about once a week for a half hour, and spent time together about once a month. From these conversations, I gathered I had become one of her closest friends.

As I turned out of the stairway and into the hallway leading to her room, I was smacked in the face by the warmth and moisture of the air. Walking down the hall, my shoes made sounds on the wood floor like I was tap-dancing. I walked at a steady, even clip, listening to the various sounds coming from behind the various doors. A fight here, sounds of gunshots from a television there. Behind one door a couple was making dinner, I could tell from the sound of the food processor; from behind another, a couple was making love, I could tell from the sound of the moans. And then I came up to Agnes’s door, and I could tell she was crying.

I knocked on the door softly. The crying stopped, and I heard a muffled “Who is it?” from the other side.

“It’s Sam. You called for me?”, I replied.

“Oh. Yeah. I did”. There was a ten-second pause. For a second, I thought she was going to ignore me. “Come in”, she said.

I opened the door and walked into her room. The floor was covered with paper towels used to dab at paint, broken brushes, and empty paint tubes of the same few shades of blue and gray. Turning from the mess, I looked up at Agnes. She was sitting in front of her easel, heavy bags under her eyes, her hair matted and clumped together like a rat king, cheeks wet with sobbing. She had a brush in one hand, palette in the other, and she was gripping both so tight that her knuckles were white. She looked like she had seen combat, and was staring at the painting she had been working on in the minutes before I had entered. 

The painting was hideous. A modern, shining city dwarfed by a gigantic wave of dark gray water, the sky blocked out by fat black clouds that were dumping rain on the city. The skyline of the city looked exactly like ours. The wave contained debris of broken buildings, and was streaked with blood from the broken bodies riding in its wake. In a few spots, there were figures falling from the various sky-scrapers, as if they would rather throw themselves off then get swept away in the monstrosity that was coming for them. It was a vision of the end.

“I can’t stop”, Agnes muttered.

“Can’t stop what?”, I asked quietly, entranced by the scene on the canvas before me.

“Can’t stop painting it. I tried and I tried, but this is the only thing that comes out. I painted over it and tried to start fresh at least 5 times now. I just get variations on the same theme. There is always the city, always the wave. Always the destruction and the bodies.”

I turned to Agnes. “Its just a painting”

“It is why I called you here.”

“For a painting? It is morbid, yes, and certainly not in your usual style, but I am not sure why it warrants a call.”

“I told you. I am not able to paint anything else. I have been unable to paint anything else for the last few days. And when I start, I can’t stop until I finish; it is like a trance comes over me. Like something is using my body to create this.”

I kneeled down next to her and hugged her. She seemed startled by my action, but then dropped the brush and palette and hugged me back. I could feel her ribs through her shirt and knew from that that she had not eaten for a while.

“When did it start?”, I asked as I hugged her.

I felt her go limp at my question. I let go and stepped back. She rubbed her eyes and appeared to be trying to collect herself. “About 5 days ago. I was walking back from the train station. I was passing the spot where my friend Mark lived in his tent. The cops were in front of his tent, they had it blocked off. There was a dump truck there. They were threatening him. 

“One just reached in and pulled him out of the tent, threw him on the ground. He was shivering, dopesick I think. The cop kicked up as he lay there, told him to go away. Called him filth. The other cops laughed. 3 city workers moved over and started tearing apart his tent, throwing it in the trash compactor of their dump truck. They threw out his collection of colored pens, the photo album his parents had left him. He crawled away. I called after him, but he didn’t seem to recognize my voice. It was cold and raining, and he didn’t have a shirt.

“I ran up to him, tried to talk to him. Asked him what he would do, where he would go. He told me he would just restart somewhere else. This wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, wouldn’t be the last. Then he wandered off. The cops were still standing around as his tent and clothes and sleeping bag and things got crushed in the trash compactor of the dump truck. They talked about how it smelled like urine and laughed again.

“I was so angry then. I went home, slammed the door shut, then started walking around my apartment.” Agnes balled her hands into fists. Her grip was so tight her knuckles turned white as milk. “Then I sat down and started painting. I found I couldn’t stop.”

She sat there, shivering. I stood there, not sure what to say. Everything I wanted to say to her felt cheap. I went to her kitchen, left her there. I took out some pots and pans and began to make some food using leftovers in her fridge. I brought out two bowls when I was done, and handed one to her. We ate silently together for a while.

When she was done, I took her bowl back to the kitchen and put the kettle on for some tea. She came in and started doing the dishes as I was getting out the mugs. I joined her once I was finished pouring the hot water. She washed, I dried. We took the mugs out to the living room and sat. Neither of us said a word; I was looking at her, she was looking at her painting.

“What do you think it all means?”, I finally said, tired of the emptiness in the air.

“I think something bad is going to happen. I think it is inevitable.”

“The wave?”

“That or something like that. I think something is going to happen to this city.” She took a sip of her tea, her grip even and unwavering. She didn’t seem to react to how hot the water was. “Honestly, I wouldn’t feel bad if it did. I am sick of it. When I am not bitterly sad, I feel nothing but a white hot hatred. I feel completely helpless, like I cannot change anything even if I tried. I am sick of scraping and starving, and I am sick of watching my friends get hurt. It would be an appropriate end. It would make sense. It would feel right”

I looked away, out the window, and took a sip of my tea. It was raining and the city outside the window was gray.

Agnes got the rest of the painting out of her system a few days after that meeting. When she did, there was a turn in her mental state. From then on, during our conversations she seemed like something had drained out of her. In everything she did, she was just going through the motions. She reminded me of the few moments in my life when I had arrived for a flight too early, and had to kill a few hours at the airport. 

She sold that vision that so haunted her to a small but prestigious art gallery, where it was tucked into a corner of a room. It was included in a collection on the theme of dreams. Critics loved it, comparing its haunting qualities to that of “Ivan The Terrible And His Son” by the Russian realist Ilya Repin. They compared the eyes of Ivan to those on the figures leaping from the buildings. They loved its “ironic” title. All the reviews included words like “provocative” and “transgressive”. She had titled it “A Dream Of A Better World”. The amount it sold for was enough to pay for 3 months of her rent. I congratulated her, then quickly forgot about the incident and assumed she did as well.

It wasn’t until a few months after the close of the exhibition that the wave hit. It was pouring rain in the city at the time; the papers had told everyone to prepare for an “extreme atmospheric river”. It happened suddenly, in the early afternoon, starting with an earthquake under the sea. The tsunami formed immediately and moved inland faster than a car on the highway. There was no warning; the rising wall of water was visible from far enough away that people knew what was approaching, but the 10 minutes from it being spotted to it hitting was not enough time to do anything besides pray. 

The wave hit the waterfront like a nuclear bomb, sweeping up pieces of the various tourist traps and billboards that lined the normally calm, cool waters of the bay the city sat on. It shredded the buildings, filling the wave with the resulting shrapnel. It smashed cars and buses like a child smashing slugs. It ate restaurants, knocked over toy stores, and smashed liquor shops.

From the waterfront it traveled into the rest of the city, hitting the expensive high-rises built near the water to take advantage of the view. Giant beams of concrete and hunks of metal were thrown through the buildings. A few collapsed at this. There was one incident where a party on a rooftop patio was thrown from the building just as the wave hit, making it look like they leapt. The photos were splashed all over the nighttime news for the next week. The photographer who took them won the Pulitzer. 

The wave dissipated about a few miles in, after reducing the waterfront to rubble and blasting through downtown with the resulting slurry. The rest of the city simply had to deal with catastrophic flooding. There was no outside contact for several days as the government decided on how to respond. Eventually, the national guard was sent in to re-establish order and get the major highways that ran through the city back into operation.

I was lucky enough to live on a third floor walkup nearer to the edge of the city. My first floor neighbors had their place ruined, but I was fine. Everyone in the 2nd and third floor apartments helped our less fortunate neighbors shelter as we figured out what to do. Most wanted to stay in place. I wanted to help out where I could. After the flood waters went down, I talked to the neighbors in the building next to us, and organized a group to go downtown and help dig people out of rubble.

There were many others there helping when I arrived. Among them was Agnes. We worked, side by side. Hours crept by as we worked. We helped who we could and saved what was possible to save. We figured out which skills we all had, split up tasks, took inventory. We got organized and focused on survivors, supplies, and shelter.

Agnes and I started singing to each other to pass the time. First we sang songs we remembered well, like we were at karaoke. Then songs we half remembered. For the songs we half remembered, we made the lyrics when we hit a verse we didn’t recall. Eventually we ran out of songs we remembered or half remembered and started making up our own song, singing verse after verse back and forth for hours. 

The others with us joined in as they were able, all adding their own verses as inspiration came to them. It gave us strength to do what needed to be done. It was like we were sharing strength with each other, every one of us linked in a grand spirit of unity. We had tapped into a power that we didn’t have access to before, and it flowed through us into our limbs and minds.

We worked for a while like that, eventually taking some time to drink some water, eat, and rest before we returned to the work. Breaking away from the others, the two of us sat together on the hood of a sports car we had found lodged in the third story of a hotel by the wave, sharing a pack of protein bars salvaged from a convenience store. I was silent for a while, content to share the moment, but eventually a question formed in my mind.

“Do you think you predicted this somehow?”, I said. “With the painting.”

Agnes replied, after a few moments of silence. “I know I did. When I finished that piece, I felt this great sense of dread. Like I had done something terrible. Like by finishing this painting, putting it out there, I was delivering a message from somewhere else. Like I had become a prophet. And now that it was out there, whatever happened next was…” She looked out the window. “Fair game.”

We sat in silence, and neither of us looked at each other. Agnes clenched and unclenched her hands before she continued.

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I had communicated. I just knew an end was quickly approaching.”

“Well, you aren’t wrong there. I look at this and I am not sure what other term you could use to describe this besides ‘the end’”, I said

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when I completed the painting, I knew something was approaching. But I didn’t expect to survive. And once the wave hit and the water rose and rubble was raining down around me, I almost wanted to die. Because if I didn’t die, I wouldn’t know what I would do. And then I didn’t die. And I didn’t know what to do. I sat in my apartment. I shivered and I wept.”

“What changed?”

“You know that man I had mentioned to you, months ago? The one I saw the cops harassing, my friend Mark. I looked out my window, and I saw him struggling to pull a woman from her car. Her face was covered in blood, her nose broken, but she was alive. Mark was limping; it was obvious his ankle was sprained, or worse. He tried to pull her out of the car, but that didn’t work; she was wedged in too tight. So he looked around for something and upon finding a piece of rebar, he used it to pry the door open. But he was having trouble. So I went downstairs, and I helped him open the door. It turns out, two people putting all their weight on a piece of rebar is much more useful than one!” She laughed at this. I wasn’t sure what was funny. “And when we helped her out, I gave her one of my towels to clean the blood off her face. And the three of us went over and helped lift a beam that had fallen on top of a man. We then helped him uncover his husband from the other side of the beam. We just kept working like that.”

Her face fell to the floor and she took another bite of a protein bar, washing it down with some flat soda we had gotten from a broken vending machine. I looked at her, admiring the curve of her nose and the shape of her jaw. At that moment, I was struck with an overwhelming love for her.

“I am glad you survived”, I said to her.

“I am glad I survived too. Not sure what I would have done otherwise”, she replied, a small smirk starting at the edge of her lips. At this, I couldn’t help but laugh. She laughed too. We laughed together at that lame joke until tears streamed from our eyes.