We wait for hours, but the Shrooms don’t fall. Joy and Charlie insist on not letting go of the Shrooms’ stems in all that time. Joy is holding on to the stem of Justin’s dream, and Charlie holds on to the stem of his dream.
At some point I decide to sit down on the small surface of the Shroom. I still hold Master Mind’s hand. I am still afraid I might fall when the Shroom collapses.
They spend the time talking to each other by yelling from Shroom to Shroom.
First, they wait it out, yelling expectantly at each other that it’s happening at any moment. Then they start talking about their lives.
Joy tells Charlie about her adventure with a nuclear bomb once. Charlie is, as always, impressed by Joy and her adventures. Then he tells her how his life is normal and how he never held a nuclear bomb.
He tells her about life in the Hopi reserve in Arizona. He tells her about his father, Eddie, which Joy seems to have met, and how they used to play together, and how he misses him. He tells her about his mother, Catori, and how sad she is now that Eddie is dead. He tells Joy about how Catori decided to start a new life after Eddie’s father died, about how they moved to New Jersey, about how he hated it and hated the school. And lastly he told her about how he is so frustrated that he can’t help his mother when she feels bad about all of this. Whenever he tries to help her, she says she’s alright, and refuses to talk about it.
Joy wonders if she can be a Hopi too and Charlie tells her she can’t.
Joy wonders if he’ll ever show her his mother again and Charlie says he’s afraid to do it because it might mean she’ll stay forever if Joy touches her. Which means she might die in the dream and he’ll never be able to dream about her again.
Joy wants to know what it’s like to have a mother and Charlie begins to tell her about the little things she does. And then, suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he disappears.
They have waited for hours and now Charlie had woken up.
“Oh, nooooo…” Joy says. “He’s going to miss it!”
Now silent, she continues to hug the stem. She does not let go.
We may be here for hours yet.
—Told by Grampa Walt