Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Arte was jolted awake at 7:13 A.M. by a nightmare in which a sly-eyed, bloody hooded vulture swooped off its perch, clamped claws into his shoulder, and snickered in his ear: “Mr. Composte, you and your wife were thrown together by the gods as a practical joke. Ha ha ha!”

Elbowing his spare, trembling body up into a sitting position — shoulder stinging — he peered at the brackish hair pressed into the pillow beside his: Deme was snoring pleasurably as if dreaming she was lying in the brawny arms of Zeus himself. As he tried to make sense of what the vulture had told him, the years he and Deme had lurched through together flickered across his brain like a fast-forwarded DVD, beginning at Saranac Lake where they’d met nineteen years earlier. After stabilizing his rented canoe at dock’s edge, he’d caught the eye of a tallish woman in a satiny white halter who showed off her long front teeth as she asked if he’d take her picture. Immediately, he accepted the camera and snapped off three frames with the roiling lake in the background. Then, emboldened by his three-day growth of reddish fuzz and crisp new hiking shorts, he’d said: “How’d you like to paddle into the sunset with an Adirondack guide?” (More than wanting company, he’d felt it would be less perilous if he sliced into those choppy waters with someone built as sturdily as she.)

She’d shrugged her broad shoulders and replied: “You look more like a lone wolf than a wilderness guide, but I’m willing to try anything at least once.” This response had sounded promising, so he waved his paddle to welcome her aboard, and the pair of ersatz adventurers buoyed away in tandem, managing to churn the waters for an hour and hoist themselves out of the canoe without tipping it over.

That evening they’d devoured rib-eye steaks and twice-baked potatoes in Saranac Hotel’s Boat Lounge, downed three or four picturesque drinks apiece, and concluded their summer escapade by landing one on top of the other in her bed. Six months later they found themselves married to each other and occupying a split-level in a suburb north of White Plains. How that had happened so summarily neither could have explained, but their interminable squabbling forever after strongly suggested their stars had indeed been misaligned. And as the years swept by, instead of becoming easier on them via familiarity and acquiescence, the pain of their togetherness had only increased. Had their serendipitous encounter at Saranac Lake been solely responsible for leading them up life’s trail with the wrong partners, he wondered, or had some other more powerful force — like the gods mentioned by that vulture — been at work behind the scenes?

Anxious to share the vulture’s disorienting disclosure with Deme, Arte realized just in time it would have been hazardous to rouse his wife out of sleep: She hated to be jostled awake — especially on weekends; besides, hadn’t he read on the Internet there could be grave psychological consequences if a human being is startled out of sleep, especially if it should happen during a hot dream? Barely breathing, he reviewed the wider ramifications of his nightmare: It wasn’t merely that he and his wife had apparently been mismatched maliciously by the gods, but that each of them was probably living the life of an entirely different person, while some other couple somewhere on planet earth was living the lives intended for them.

To Arte, dreams (horrific or transcendent) had always seemed little more than soporific hallucinations that the sleeper feared would — or desired to — become reality upon waking. In Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the world’s first psychoanalyst insisted that virtually all the bizarre scenarios surfacing in people’s minds when asleep (during what we now call REM cycles) involved symbolic wish fulfillment. Freud’s theory suggested Arte was actually hoping he was living the wrong life — that he suspected there was a life somewhere out there much better suited to his temperament and predilections. To some extent, this was true. But since he’d also read that Freud had kept revising this book, Arte sensed the psych had never settled in his own brilliant mind the question of what dreams meant. Nevertheless, because that vulture had looked and smelled so stinking real, and had made that shocking claim with confident, if jocular, urgency, he couldn’t get around the notion that what he’d dreamed amounted to a somber truth.

Off the mattress he slid, gingerly, tiptoed in striped pajamas out the bedroom door, stepped noiselessly down carpeted stairs. At the kitchen’s portal he was stung by a sharp sense of displacement, so he stopped to inspect the space, entering only after he’d recognized the antique metal-flapped table, the GE toaster, the Silex coffee maker. Arte palmed the stainless-steel urn, and since it was still warm, he retrieved his Saranac Lake mug from the dishwasher and filled it with pungent ebony fluid. As he sat down shakily at the table, it occurred to him he hadn’t heard Elly and Ollie, nine and eleven, shrieking like Skittles-propelled ninjas upstairs. Could it possibly have been Friday rather than Saturday, with his children already at school? Not a chance, otherwise he would’ve been clacking along on the 7:13 toward New York City, where he was employed as an unappreciated market researcher. Or had he been pinned down on the mattress by that vulture’s claws longer than usual, knocked out of his daily routine?