11



Is This Shovel a Real Shovel?
(What Happened in the Night: 2)

*


After he fell into his deep sleep, the boy had a vivid dream. He knew it was a dream,
though, which came as some comfort to him. I know this is a dream, so what happened before
was not a dream. It really, really happened. I can tell the difference between the two.
In his dream, the boy had gone out to the garden. It was still the middle of the night, and
he was alone. He picked up the shovel and started digging out the hole that the tall man had
filled in. The man had left the shovel leaning against the trunk of the tree. Freshly filled in, the
hole was not that hard to dig, but just picking up the heavy shovel was enough to take the
boy's breath away. And he had no shoes on. The soles of his feet were freezing cold. Even so,
he went on panting and digging until he had uncovered the cloth bundle that the man had
buried.
The wind-up bird no longer cried. The man who had climbed the tree never came down.
The night was so silent it almost hurt the boy's ears. The man had just disappeared, it seemed.
But finally, this is a dream, the boy thought. It was not a dream that the wind-up bird had
cried and the man who looked like his father had climbed the tree. Those things had really
happened. So there must not be any connection between this and that. Strange, though: here
he was, in a dream, digging out the real hole. So how was he to distinguish between what was
a dream and what was not a dream? Was this shovel a real shovel? Or was it a dream shovel?
The more he thought, the less he understood. And so the boy stopped thinking and put all
his energy into digging the hole. Finally, the shovel came up against the cloth bundle.
The boy took great care after that to remove the surrounding dirt so as not to damage the
cloth bundle. Then he went down on his knees and lifted the bundle from the hole. There was
not a cloud in the sky, and there was no one there to block the moist light of the full moon that


poured down on the ground. In the dream, he was strangely free of fear. Curiosity was the
feeling that dominated him with its power. He opened the bundle, to find a human heart
inside. He recognized its shape and color from the picture he had seen in his encyclopedia.
The heart was still fresh and alive and moving, like a newly abandoned infant. True, it was
sending no blood out through its severed artery, but it continued to beat with a strong pulse.
The boy heard a loud throbbing in his ears, but it was the sound of his own heart. The buried
heart and the boy's own heart went on pounding in perfect unison, as if communicating with
each other.
The boy steadied his breathing and told himself firmly, "You are not afraid of this. This is
just a human heart, that's all. Just like in the encyclopedia. Everybody has one of these. I have
one." With steady hands, the boy wrapped the beating heart in the cloth again, returned it to
the bottom of the hole, and covered it over with earth. He smoothed the earth with his bare
foot so that no one could tell a hole had been dug there, and he stood the shovel against the
tree as he had found it. The ground at night was like ice. Climbing over the sill of his window,
the boy returned to his own warm, friendly room. He brushed the mud from his feet into his
wastebasket so as not to dirty his sheets, and he started to crawl into bed. But then he realized
that someone was already lying there. Someone was sleeping in his bed, under the covers, in
his place.
Angry now, the boy stripped the covers back. "Hey, you, get out of there! This is my bed!"
he wanted to shout at the person. But his voice would not come out, because the one he found
in the bed was himself. He was already in his bed, asleep, breathing peacefully. The boy stood
frozen in place, at a loss for words. If I am already sleeping here, then where should this me
sleep? Now, for the first time, the boy felt afraid, with a. fear that seemed as if it would chill
him to the core. The boy wanted to shout. He wanted to scream as loud as he could to wake
up his sleeping self and everyone else in the house. But his voice would not come. He strained
with all his might, but he could produce no sound.
Nothing at all. So he put his hand on the shoulder of his sleeping self and shook it as hard
as he could. But the sleeping boy would not wake up.
There was nothing more he could do. The boy stripped off his cardigan and flung it on the
floor. Then he pushed his other, sleeping self as hard as he could from the center of the bed
and crammed himself into the small space that was left for him at the edge. He had to secure a
spot for himself here. Otherwise, he might be pushed out of this world where he belonged.
Cramped and without a pillow, the boy nevertheless felt incredibly sleepy as soon as he lay
down. He could not think anymore. In the next moment, he was sound asleep.



When he woke up in the morning, the boy was in the middle of the bed, alone. His pillow
was under his head, as always. He raised himself slowly and looked around the room. At first
glance, the room seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet,
the same floor lamp. The hands of the wall clock pointed to six-twenty. But the boy knew
something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same place where he
had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the sounds, the smells, were all just a
little bit different from before. Other people might not notice, but the boy knew. He stripped
off the covers and looked at himself. He held his hands up and moved each of his fingers in
turn. They moved as they should. And his legs moved. He felt no pain or itching. He slipped
out of bed and went to the toilet. When he was through peeing, he stood at the sink and
looked at his face in the mirror. He pulled off his pajama top, stood on a chair, and looked at
the reflection of his fair-skinned little body. He found nothing unusual.
Yet something was different. He felt as if his self had been put into a new container. He
knew that he was still not fully accustomed to this new body of his. There was something


about this one, he felt, that just didn't match his original self. A sudden feeling of helplessness
overtook him, and he tried to call for his mother, but the word would not emerge from his
throat. His vocal cords were unable to stir the air, as if the very word "mother" had
disappeared from the world. Before long, the boy realized that the word was not what had
disappeared.