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Sometimes, and especially around holidays, when the University is quiet and bereft of students, Hob tends the bar at The New Inn.
Dream sits and watches him, how he moves so easily from patron to patron; conversation comes to him as naturally as breathing. He does not think it of himself, but Hob Gadling is a born storyteller, a man whose mere presence evokes memory and description. A young woman with mascara smeared in runny lines beneath her eyes drinks shot after shot of tequila and tells the story of her now-ex-boyfriend while Hob leans across the bar, the rakish line of his spine and hips and buttocks at odds with his concerned expression. When she orders another drink, Hob touches her hand and murmurs something inaudible. She shakes her head, and he repeats it, insistent, and finally she relents. This story has a happy ending, Dream knows – she does not try to drive herself home. She avoids a car accident that would have left her sunk so deep in the Dreaming she would never wake.
Two men in their fifties order cosmopolitans – they knock their shoulders together, they laugh, they lean their heads close. Hob brings them their drinks, and one man raises his left hand to show off the ring on his finger. Hob is interested, lively, congratulatory; the man tells the story of how he and his new husband met, thirty years prior. It’s full of in-jokes and hidden, meaningful glances, of love sought in dark times, watching friends die, lovers die. Hob is sympathetic. “I remember,” he says, and both husbands laugh. “Really! I’m older than I look. I got my father’s good genes.”
This story also has a happy ending. These men are married. They have passed through dark shadows into bright sunlight, and will live the rest of their natural lives together. It is a story that might never have been told aloud but for The New Inn, a mixed drink, a friendly ear.
This place is a temple, Dream thinks. This place is a monument to human experience which Hob raised from dust and sorrow, shrouded the bones of his regrets in the living-skin of storytelling. He built this temple for Dream.
He sits at the bar and watches Hob go about his work. It has been several months since he set foot in this place for the first time, a warm summer day, a reunion, a friendship. “A hundred years, then?” Hob had asked, and Dream does not profess to truly read the minds of men, but even in that single sentence he had heard the trepidation.
“I have been told,” he’d said, “that friends meet more often than once a century.”
Once a year, he had thought. Perhaps more often, if Hob were amenable to visits in his dreams. How quickly that had changed – Hob is passionate, ebullient, he pours joy into every room in which he treads. Once a year had so quickly become once a month, had become twice, and then once a week. Come over for lunch, he’d said. Come over for tea. Do you like McVitie’s?
People dream of tea, of biscuits, the intimate ceremony of sharing a drink with a friend. Hob demonstrated for him how to dunk the chocolate digestives into his tea, and Dream did not tell him that he sees the long, unspooling thread of time stretching out before and behind them, that tea is a far more ancient thing than even Hob, that he has personally witnessed countless dreams of nearly this exact act performed by monarchs, celebrities, poets.
He watched Hob hold the biscuit in a delicate thumb and forefinger grip, and found it special because it was Hob.
If Dream be the Prince of Stories (and he is, and shall be, forever), then this, surely, is the happy ending: a bar built in his name, a tale uttered in his presence, a friend setting a drink before him and smiling. He has dwelt so long in the dark that even this simple kindness seems outrageous. More than once he has felt a too-familiar sting in his eyes.
Hob has never once begrudged him.
“All right, Dream?”
Hob is there when he looks up, his head ducked down to try and see under the fall of Dream’s hair, his eyes soft and concerned. It is nearly eleven o’clock, and Hob’s relief does not come until one; he looks tired, but no less friendly for it.
The thought sidles into Dream, a quiet thief, a cat at midnight: I want to kiss him. He wants to kiss the rough-stubbled cheek and the expressive lips, touch his tongue to the chapped spot on the lower where Hob has nipped himself raw, he wants to put his hands in soft clean hair and tilt his head back and drink all the gentle sounds he suspects Hob will make, sighs and groans and lustful exultations.
He takes the shot that is being offered. He sips it, because it is polite, and because it pleases Hob, whose expression is moved from concern to an aching soft fondness.
“Listen,” he says. “I know you keep your secrets, and that’s fine. More than fine. Just knowing your name is more than I ever thought I’d get. But if you want to talk, about anything…I’m here. For you.”
Dream is not a god, but nevertheless, in this temple built in his honor, he has been a cruel god. His most earnest and honest worshiper has gone six-hundred years not even knowing to whom he has prayed. Again, he feels the wanting, to kiss Hob across this bar, to whisper ardent forgive mes into his pleasing mouth. I will be different, he could say. I am already different.
The drink is sweet, spicy, warming. He licks his lips and chases the taste of cinnamon and almond, is surprised to find the rest of the shot is already gone. Hob looks terribly smug.
“Cinnamon toasty,” he says, and Dream pages through a narrow sea of dreams, warming drinks had with friends, winter holidays, the clink of glasses. Schnapps and amaretto. “It’s simple, but lovely for this time of year.”
Inside, The New Inn is warmth and comfort. At some point he will return to the Dreaming, where memories of snow have made themselves at home in a thick blanket over the palace grounds. For now, he gazes up at Hob and thinks of supplication; his wanting covers him like a dense winter jacket. He would lay this man out on the altar he has built, and in full sight of all other adherents he would profess him holy. He would kiss the center of his forehead, he would anoint him in the oils of this temple: water, sugar, hops, words and words and words.
The front door opens, and Hob is staring at him, his eyes first squinting, and then widening. More than a hundred years of nothing but his own reflection, and Dream has fallen out of the practice of mimicking human expression. Something must show in his countenance, and it sends a pang through him like a bare foot on broken glass, sudden, sharp, unwanted.
A person sits beside him at the bar, and Hob blinks, and his gaze skirts aside. Dream forces himself to affect breathing, and finds it, absurdly, comforting. To hone on the simple mechanical action of lungs and throat and nostrils.
“No,” Hob says. Dream refocuses, watches Hob sway back from the bartop, affront creeping across his face, disdain stealing through his mouth. He is not looking at Dream, but at the man who has sat beside him. “Get out.”
“Hey, I’m not doing anything. I’m a paying customer.”
“Don’t care. I said out, now.” There is thunder in his voice. There is an old and scarred-over hatred. There is anger. Hob reaches for a baseball bat that leans against the wall behind the bar, and Dream has never considered its use before, but now he understands.
In ancient dreams he has watched the destruction of a temple, a Bishop stood apart, waiting to pass judgment. He has watched this man committed to the fire by the very pagans he sought to subjugate. He has felt their fervent belief, he knows the shape of what they would do to defend their temple, their gods, their holy words.
Hob lifts the bat an inch higher, and the man gets up from his seat. His arms are lifted in defiance; Hob is broad-shouldered, straight-backed, his forearms are corded in muscle and there is the white line of a scar on his cheek from a longsword that has long since crumbled to dust, and yet Hob still remains. His hair is tied back in a small bun; he is filled with righteous fury.
“Fuck you,” the man is shouting. The two husbands have huddled together at the other end of the bar. The girl who will live tonight, and tomorrow night, and hundreds of nights after, has gotten up and moved closer to the door. “Everywhere else is closed, I just wanted a drink. Fucking fag lover bar. Not worth my money. Fuck you.”
“Get the fuck out,” Hob says, and the bat comes up, and he starts to step around the bar. He crackles with an energy that only Dream sees, but is easily felt by all who’ve set foot in this holy place. It is restrained violence, devout intensity, it’s faith.
The man leaves, shouting and swearing. His dreams are petty, arrogant things for a petty and arrogant man – tonight he will visit Dream’s kingdom and find nothing waiting for him but nightmares. So it goes.
Hob leans the bat against the wall. He pushes back a lock of hair that has fallen into his eyes, his bun come just a bit undone, messy and loose when he slides back in front of Dream.
“Sorry,” he says, “you had to see that. I swear, there’s more and more of them every year.”
“Them?”
Hob tilts his head towards the door. “Dunno if you saw his vest. Iron crosses, sig runes. Just a load of nazi shit. Hate that I have to devote part of my brain to remembering all their stupid little secret symbols.”
The husbands are bent close together again, talking quietly. The girl with the mascara has stepped outside; she is calling a cab. Hob is once again focused on him, wholly, irrefutably.
“You have to kick them out right away,” he says, musing. “It’s always a nice one at first, and you don’t want to cause a scene. And if you let them become a regular, then they bring a friend who isn’t so bad. At first. Then the friend brings friends, and they bring friends. And suddenly you’re a nazi bar, and they outnumber you.”
He rocks back on the balls of his feet, tucking his thumbs into the band of his jeans. Soft blue denim. A shirt for a football team that Dream does not care to recognize. He has gone sweet and soft once more, no hint of the reddened anger, the offense at the liberties that man had dared to take.
“You would defend this place so ardently?” Dream asks. He feels his voice like the rumble of a volcano. There is a fire in him, stoking higher and higher; he yearns, he wants, he turns towards Hob as mankind once turned towards the divine. “At the risk of injury to yourself?”
Hob tugs at his ear, a familiar gesture. His cheeks are flushed, Dream notes. He feels the edges of a daydream creep along the edges of himself – soft hair as black as midnight, a pale mouth opened in a gasp, a voice in his ear: You need not have come to my defense.
“Can’t die, remember?” Hob’s hand falls back to his side. He looks, suddenly, nervous. “Besides. Can’t have you visiting me in a bar full of nazis. Last thing I wanted when I built this place for you.”
And there it is, so plainly spoken that it hurts to think about. This place for you. This temple of stories, this pagan tribute, this venerated hall.
“Hob,” he says, and the man leans forward, his nervousness becoming concern at the shake in Dream’s voice, the resonating burr.
He reaches across the bar and grabs a fistful of Hob’s shirt. It is an easy thing to drag him forward, to stand up on the tips of his toes to give himself the best leverage, and Dream leans over the empty shotglass and finds the mouth that blesses him. He wants to climb atop this bar and drag Hob down onto him, wants to feel the heavy figure ground him in earthly delight. He wants to have Hob kneeling in front of him, he wants to kneel, he wants to take Hob inside his body, he wants to consecrate this place with the severity of his longing.
He settles for a kiss, for slotting his mouth to Hob’s mouth, the rough chapped patch, the warm scent of his breath, a hand cupped to Hob’s cheek against day-old stubble. He sweeps his tongue through and tastes devotion – it tastes like almonds, sweet and subtle.
At the other end of the bar the husbands erupt in claps and whistles, and Hob draws away, his eyes wide and dark, his lips reddened.
“I’m,” he starts to say and his voice croaks. He tries again. “I am so sorry, everyone, but we’ve got to close early. Maintenance reasons. Right.”
“Looks like the maintenance has been a long time coming,” one of the husbands says. They’re finishing their drinks, they are standing to leave, they are looking at each other with unconcealed affection and no small amount of lust. Tonight, they will dream of each other. Tomorrow, they will tell the story of two young men in a bar, the flush of new love, of one coming to the defense of the other. He feels it like a pleasant bruise, a story about him.
“Dream,” Hob says. The name is benediction in his mouth. Traversing around the bar will take far too much time. Dream hoists himself up onto the bartop, sending the shotglass spinning away, and Hob is laughing, “You lunatic, I haven’t wiped it down yet, it’s sticky.”
He doesn’t care. In this hallowed place, this blessed temple of song, Dream pulls Hob closer and finds his mouth once more, wraps his arms around the strong shoulders, gets his hands into the remains of the messy bun and pulls it into loose silk over his fingers.
Hob tells the story of them with mouth and tongue and fingers tripping over bare skin, and Dream, worshiped, worshiping, listens.