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You know you’re dreaming because you’re sitting in a classroom, and it’s been years since you’ve been in school.
Or has it? Are you a student now? You can’t remember, but that doesn’t disturb you. Maybe, you decide, you know you’re dreaming because of the views from the classroom windows.
One is dark, so dark that if you stood within it you wouldn’t be able to see your hand come up to touch your face. You shouldn’t be able to see anything, and you don’t. But when you peer into the blackness, you know that it is a labyrinth of rough stone tunnels, miles underground, and that a red thread runs taut through the part you’re looking at.
One is a mirror. You look into it and hate your own face. But the real problem is what’s inside, isn’t it? never good enough no one’s ever really loved me what’s the point
One shows a swirling mass of colors and jolting images and obsessive patterns, and watching it makes you feel like screaming. Or maybe laughing. Maybe they’re the same thing, behind that window where Broken is a color and the patterns are in everything and you must decode them or die.
One shows a kind of half-assed artist’s studio, with an unfinished oil painting of a green hill. You’re no art critic, but even you can tell that it isn’t very good.
One shows a crystal heart. When you lean in close, you get a whiff of scent that isn’t perfume, it’s the smell of a person’s skin when you’re close enough to kiss and lick and you don’t want to do anything else ever, and you’d give everything you have for just one more moment.
One shows a library. You spot a book by your favorite author, whose books you’ve read over and over, but you’ve never read or even heard of this one. You’d reach for it, but the glass is in the way.
One shows a blue sky and a wheeling flock of pigeons.
“I like that one,” says the young woman sitting atop the desk beside you.
She’s pale and pretty, a goth girl dressed in black with an ankh around her throat and some playful kohl drawings around her eyes. You know her, you’re sure, though you can’t place her name. She must be another student. Or a teaching assistant, though she seems very casually dressed for that.
“So do I,” you say. You want to ask her what the class is, but you ought to already know that since you’re signed up for it. Splitting the difference, you say, “I must’ve dozed off. What was the lecture on?”
“The Judgment of Paris,” says a big broad man with a big booming voice. You really hope he’s not the professor. “A popular subject for paintings, since it shows three beautiful goddesses with very little on!”
You’re vaguely familiar with the story, but you still haven’t figured out what the class is. Art? Art history? Greek mythology?
“Tell me more,” you say, hoping for a clue.
A tall pale man begins to speak. His black robe suggests that today was his graduation, but he speaks as if he was there when it all happened. “The story is that Hera, the goddess of marriage, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, fought over a golden apple. Paris, who was famed for his impartial judgment, was asked to award the apple to the fairest of them all.”
Starlight glimmers in the shadows of his eyes. You remember suddenly that you are dreaming, and it doesn’t matter that you enrolled in a class without knowing what it was. But you don’t interrupt. You could listen to him forever.
“They resorted to bribery,” he goes on. “Hera offered him an empire. Athena offered him wisdom. And Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“That’s not how it happened,” interrupts a raggedy girl with mismatched eyes. “I was there. Well, not me. The other me. But it was you—” She points to the big boisterous man. “And you—” She points to a man who surely must be the professor, who holds a book wrapped in chains. “And you!” She spins to point at a woman who is more beautiful than the most beautiful woman in the world.
“You won,” you say. “Aphrodite.”
“Oh, I’m not her.” The beautiful woman tilts her head, and the shift in angle makes you realize that in fact, he is a beautiful man. Then you can’t decide. Maybe they’re both, or neither, or something else entirely. “She was a goddess of desire, so when the story got mapped to local gods, they mapped her to me.”
“Desire,” you whisper. “I know you.”
“And I got remembered as the marriage goddess!” Destruction, for that is he and you know them now, know them all, laughs his boisterous laugh.
“And I as Athena,” says Destiny. “I offered wisdom. Paris chose otherwise.”
“And I won,” says Desire, sharp teeth showing. Their nails are sharp, too. They could cut your wrists with those razor edges, and you’d do nothing but offer up your throat as well. “I always win.”
“We shall see,” says Dream.
And they look at you. All of them, these eternal beings, look at you.
For the first time, Despair speaks. Her voice is the voice in your own head when you can’t stop thinking. “The first contest wasn’t fair. There were only three of us. So we’ve made another bet.”
You blurt out, “I’m supposed to choose the fairest of you?”
Destruction and Desire laugh, the former not unkindly.
“A later addition,” comes Destiny’s dry, precise voice. “Like the apple. Like the goddesses. The actual bet was over which gift Paris would choose—over which of us had the most precious thing to offer.”
“Power,” says Destruction.
“Wisdom,” says Destiny.
“Passion,” says Desire.
“Boooooring,” sings out Delirium. Her mismatched eyes regard you with a gaze you could lose yourself in. That intense green, like jungles where flowers sing you to sleep and monkeys teach you language and rainbows bat you between them like cats playing with a mouse. That clear blue with its moving silver flecks that see you, see you specifically, they have singled you out so you must spend your life on the edge evading them, filling notebooks and walls and your own skin with the intricate patterns that ward them off, you who are so quick and clever to escape the silver flecks that swim in the blue of Delirium’s right eye.
You return to yourself, shaken and gasping. So that was madness. It was terrifying. It was vivid. It was—and now you know something about yourself that you can never un-know—tempting.
Delirium lays a small hand over yours, confiding as a child. Her nails are bitten to the quick. “I could give you that. Sometimes it hurts and you have to scream and scream, but sometimes it’s fishies and pretty mushrooms that mostly aren’t poisonous after dark and raspberry panda cottage ice cream.”
She flicks her hand, and you taste raspberry panda cottage ice cream. It seems worth almost any amount of screaming.
Destiny, Delirium’s polar opposite, lifts his book. “I would let you read this.”
You lean forward, intrigued, as he cracks it open. There, within those pages, are the solutions to every mystery. You now know the truth about the Marie Celeste, Taman Shud, and the Voynich Manuscript. You know everything there is to know about the life-cycles of stars and trilobites and the fiery creatures that swim in the lava seas of a planet orbiting Antares. And you gain not merely information, but wisdom: how to win a war, how to defuse a quarrel, how to approach a deer without frightening it away.
That was what you learned, in a single glimpse of a single page, before Destiny closes the book and it’s gone.
“Choose my gift,” he says, “and I would let you remember.”
“I’m sure all that would be very intellectually satisfying,” says Desire, making that sound about as appealing as a naked roll in a nettle patch. “If all you care about is the mind.”
What happens next is nothing that can be put into words. It’s longing and love, passion and satisfaction, orgasm and the moment just before it, pining and the moment when you learn they’ve been pining for you too, skin to skin and heart to heart and all the glorious ecstasy of being a human being with a body and heart.
You return to yourself sweating and damp in embarrassing places, with everyone staring at you. Desire, you think, is not very nice.
That doesn’t make you want them any less. Summoning up all your courage, you ask, “Could I have you?”
Desire’s elegant eyebrows lift. “Well, well. You’re more interesting than I thought. Yes. Yes, if you choose me, you can have me. For a while.”
“I would not recommend that,” says Dream. You turn reluctantly, gratefully, to his starlight eyes. And in those eyes you see…
The land you imagined as a child, cobbled together from your favorite books and favorite things and everything that struck you as pretty or cool: rings like Saturn rising in the sky, talking animals, two moons, the weather always pleasantly sunny except when you were inside with a fire and then it rained or snowed, fields of wildflowers, your beloved telepathic winged unicorn, trees that grew lunch boxes, ointment you rubbed on the soles of your feet that let you walk on water, a pair of perfectly fitting, perfectly soft, perfectly beautiful blue shoes with buckles shaped like butterflies…
There it is, your land, but real. You can smell the flowers. Your winged unicorn looks at you with great dark eyes and you can feel how she recognizes and loves you. It’s a dream made real.
“It is real,” says Dream. “It has always been real. You have a vivid imagination. It is a realm of the Dreaming. I could let you visit it, in dream or reality, whichever you prefer and whenever you wish.”
“Or you could blow everything up,” Destruction breaks in with a cheery ruthlessness. “I know you’re furious about injustice, and the people who ruin everything for everyone, and you want the world to be better. Your own world, not the Dreaming. You say you want a revolution? I can give you one.”
You see it. People rise up, across the world, demanding peace and justice and all the good things that would be possible if only they’d unite. You’re not their leader. There is no leader. You’re one of many, creating change through choosing to do so. And some windows are broken and some buildings burn and some people die, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. There is destruction, and there is brutal battle and hard work, and at the end of it, there is a better world that you helped create.
“So exhausting,” comes the voice of Despair. “All that shouting and pursuing and trying. Run, run, run. Fight, fight, fight. And when you get it, does it make you happy? Do you even deserve it?”
Her voice is your voice. It’s the voice in the back of your mind, the voice you don’t like to listen to, the voice you hear sometimes whether you like it or not. I’m so tired, it says. What’s the point?
You could stop trying, says Despair, or maybe you’re saying it to yourself. It would be such a relief. No expectations. Only the bare honesty of the terrible truth about yourself and the world. You’re worthless. It’s all hopeless. There’s no point in fighting. Wouldn't it feel so good to give up and give in?
You hate yourself for being tempted. But you are.
“All those fancy things,” says Death, and you turn to her like a flower to the sun. “A world of your own and infinite knowledge and winning the good fight and never fighting again and Desire and raspberry panda cottage ice cream.”
She pushes back her wild mass of hair and smiles. “They’re great. Especially the ice cream. But they’re not what it’s really about. Think about the moments in your life when you’ve been happiest.”
You think, and the memories come to you, quick and bright. Some you haven’t recalled for years, and you suspect Death is helping. Idly picking up the library book you checked out because you liked the cover, and discovering your now-favorite author. Getting a big hug from your best friend. Watching white curls of snow fall in utter silence while you sit by a crackling fire. Stroking the softer-than-soft fur at a black cat’s shoulders. Afternoon light turning dry grass to pure gold.
“Simple things,” says Death. “Small things. Hot dogs and dance clubs and feeding pigeons. You have so little time for them. But I could give you more. If you so choose, I won’t take you until you ask me to. It’ll be an ordinary life, not like what you’d get from my siblings. An ordinary, painful, wonderful life that won’t get cut short.”
Your voice sounds very small as you ask, “Why me?”
“Why not?” Death asks, and you find you have no answer.
There they stand, the Endless, offering you your heart’s desire. The desire of any facet of your fragmented heart. Then you remember the ending of the story. Paris got what he wanted, but he died in the war that it started.
Soap bubbles float from the tips of Delirium’s fingers, shimmering in infrared and ultraviolet and other colors your eyes weren’t made to see. “I think once I would have said that just because something seems good doesn’t mean it can’t be true.” The colors shift, becoming the orange of traffic cones and the blue of heavily chlorinated swimming pools and the pink of toys marketed to little girls. “I think I wouldn’t say that now. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
As you try to puzzle that out, Death says, “She means the gifts don’t come with a curse automatically attached. They might turn out to have one, depending on what you choose and what you do with it. But that’s up to you.”
You believe her. You believe all of them. What they offer is real. But you have a feeling that something was left out, and after a moment’s thought, you find it.
“Can I choose not to choose? To go back to my life, and live it however it would go without any of your gifts?”
The Endless seem not to have expected this, with the exception of Destiny, who doesn’t stir but only goes on gazing at you with unseen, unseeing eyes.
Destruction’s laugh shakes the rafters. “Of course! You can always choose to walk away.”
You take a deep breath, letting your mind skim along all the possibilities. You see a formal garden of branching paths, hear the cry of a baby being born, taste a flake of melting snow on your tongue. Life and death, hope and despair, fighting and giving up, madness and knowledge and imagination and change. These were always your choices, writ small or large. You have been choosing all along.
You choose.