It's dark, but I don't have any trouble seeing my way through the house. I'm by a door, a coat rack, and a small side table, with just a hat sitting on it. The shape against my leg is the suitcase. The necklace is here, I know that much, but I can't see it anywhere. I close my eyes and try to remember what it looks like, but every time I get to the point of seeing it, everything dissolves into vague colored splotches. Instead I feel my pockets to make sure the box I took from the cabinet in the foyer is still there. It is. I pull it out and weigh it in my hand. It's impossibly heavy, and for some reason I'm terrified of opening it, but I finally get up the nerve and spring the small lock mechanism. Suddenly, I'm outside in the dark, peering down into the box, looking not at the necklace, but at a pile of teeth that I uneasily realize are mine. It's cold as hell, and that's how it always ends.
The name he swears he was born with is Wesley Raymond Wynne, the eldest son of a prosperous family of bankers from Schenectady, New York, but that is an outright lie. Although he does have the dress and manners of a gentleman, it is wise to remember that this is also a man who will go on to earn his living affecting the manners of a Scottish king, and a Danish prince. His talent is mimicry, learned early, not as part of a prosperous family named Wynne, but in the kitchen of the Wynne mansion, where his mother, a German immigrant, works as a scullery maid.
In the beginning of the same dream, or another similar one, I find myself in a house that looks exactly like the house I grew up in, except its proportions are wrong somehow. I'm a kid again, but I'm wearing my adult clothes—they hang off me and make it hard to get around. I'm carrying a tray that has some teacups on it. I walk into the living room.
The unnamed boy is a dreamer, possessing a vivid imagination hampered only by circumstance, which is how his talent for mimicry is born. He hopes to rise by aping his betters. He practices in the shadows, following the Wynnes while remaining securely at the edges of their lives, hiding behind trees, watching as they drink tea on a broad verandah, spying as they come and go, as a butler helps them on and off with their coats, noting how they nod politely at servants and coo intimately at one another; their self-approbation, their swirling politesse, bearing fraught with belonging, as if their dazzling lives will continue to dazzle indefinitely.
I never remember hearing any words, but I always understand there to be ongoing polite chatter that continues as I walk over to my father: a man in his early 50s, wearing an ornate shirt and suit jacket combo that almost looks like a costume, and who (moreover) doesn't look much of anything like my dad. The older gentleman sits in the opposite corner of the room in a high-backed leather chair. I brush the back of the chair as I come over to him, and it's always right around that moment that the dream shifts, and I realize that while he still feels intensely familiar, he's not my father, he's my boss.
Mr. Henry Wynne, the patriarch, rules his family stiffly and recognizes the boy's eager intelligence, often encouraging him to "Dream big, my boy. Ours is a big country in need of big dreams." And when he is old enough, to earn extra money to stay in high school, the young man is paid a pittance to serve them their meals, careful to flatter them because they love being flattered. In return, they offer him their cast-off clothes and shoes and books. As Mr. Wynne is fond of telling him, "A gentleman is known primarily by three attributes, his accent, his shoes and the condition of his nails, which must never be chewed or ragged."
I look down at some pile of wealth on the table next to him. I'm shaking like a spy about to be exposed. He looks at me expectantly; his face is like a dog and I'm frozen in shock and awe. Then for a moment I become a dog and he's my geriatric master yelling orders at me in human speech, which I can no longer understand. Then he clears his throat theatrically and explains "REAL dog!", and again, "em... see... DOG! er... real?"
The unnamed boy assumes that Wynne will continue to help him advance, he is, after all, self-taught and ambitious, but he is wrong; it is as if the Wynnes maintain their place in society by denying him his, because if he can rise as high and quickly as they then how good does that make them?
I tell him that I'd like to go to college, and ask him for the abacus I'll need for it. He stands up, and goes and lies down on top of a fractured maple leaf. He shakes his head at me, and seems to fall asleep; his head is so dense that it sinks right into the floor.
And when, after high school, he asks for tuition to attend college, he says that after graduation he will pay it back by becoming a clerk in Wynne's bank, his request is rudely dismissed. Old Mr. Wynne offers what he considers more suitable employment as an under-butler.
Then it's night, time has passed, I'm all learned helplessness, alone in the dining room. I'm in the process of ineptly stuffing the heirloom orange oil and the family sconces in my pockets. I'm in another part of the house. I'm trying to find the exit but not getting anywhere, all the while filling my pockets and a leather suitcase with the contents of cabinets and drawers.
Stung by Wynne's insensitivity, his inability to see the boy's true nature, the unnamed liar becomes the unnamed thief. Fleeing to New York City, pawning the family's Georgian silver for enough money to set himself up as a gentleman, becoming Wesley Raymond Wynne, a graduate of Princeton, the eldest son of the banking Wynne's of Schenectady.
Then I find myself standing in front of a defensive coat rack, and I feel a brilliant light coming from something very close by. It trivializes my eyes, and even though I can't see where it's coming from, I know it's the necklace.
"[to interpret dreams correctly] is certainly not an easy task, but with a little attention it must always be possible to the dreamer. You ask why it is generally impossible? In your case there seems to be something veiled in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and exalted fashion, a certain secrecy in your nature, which it is difficult to fathom; and that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning, or even nonsensical. But in the profoundest sense, this is by no means the case; indeed it cannot be, for a man is always the same person, whether he wakes or dreams."
---Traumen wie Wachen, from Phantasien eines Realisten, by Lynkeus
---Daniel Libbe, probably just flattering himself