The Improbable Errol Spice

The question is, why did Jessi evade Walter’s question? And why is she never at work?

Jessi had been adopted several years ago by a rich old hatter named Errol Spice. He was a thousand years old and bedridden, but he proclaimed not to mind because the only place he wanted to be was in his dreams anyway. At first he had only commissioned her to do one painting for him, but he fell madly in love with it, so he began to commission her to do others, and then other things, until finally she had no need or time to look for another job. His pay was sporadic but robust enough to keep her interested in the beginning, and by now, she had grown used to random bursts of money interrupting long periods of poverty, and was totally indifferent to money.

His dreams, which he described to her while she took careful notes, sometimes on paper, reflected a life of flamboyant and erratic travel, so it was a surprise when she discovered he had never left the city. That did account for the vast geographical and cultural discrepancies, which she had originally attributed to the fact that they were dreams--but when she learned everything he told her came from his own mind, she took his requests, and consequently her painting, much more seriously.
She had recently begun a line of mock advertisements for him, each one carefully modeled after a dream of particular importance. So far she had completely a poster announcing a Spoken Word performance in Reykjavik, a fictional band called the Cataclysmic Foxtrot appearance in Manila, and ballroom dancing lessons in Toledo, each in their respective city’s native language. The projects required moderate research, mostly translating the wording into the proper dialect; little time was spent on learning the region’s artistic style or cultural norms, so they preserved something of Errol’s dreaminess and seemed to make the far-reaching cities of the world more similar to home. Errol Spice loved them.

He had recently developed an all-consuming preoccupation with a dream in which he had sailed to Greece:
“…which by the time I got there turned out to be only the street I grew up on…my mother alive and waiting for me to finish something for her. She wouldn’t let me come inside because she wasn’t finished cleaning yet and everything was very definitely purple for a time. And so I went to find a, a phone to call my father who was upstairs but the phones only worked in Greek so I couldn’t use them, and somehow I knew that I needed to find him, and so I went to the other houses on the street, but there were big yellow columns in the way, sort of like trees, only they were called Absolutes, and I couldn’t see around them, and so I had to climb over them. And then I was in the city of Athens with a very beautiful woman who told me she had a phone but on our way to get it we ended up in a fountain, very naked and wet…” And he proceeded to illustrate a very graphic sex scene with a woman who had promised him a phone, and the detail was overwhelming.

“What do you mean when you say everything was purple,” asked Jessi.
“Well--only in the beginning. And not visually. ‘Purple’ seemed to be very present, as if the time itself were purple, I don’t mean my house was purple or anything.”
“Okay. And the trees were called Absolutes?”
“Yes. They weren’t trees. I don’t know how I know that. But I think it’s very relevant that I could not see around them, but they were excessively tall. Excessively tall.”
“And the woman?”
“Not as tall.”
“Uh huh. What about her, though?”
“Ah, Greek, I suppose. And she had a phone somewhere, and things weren’t as purple then, instead they were…full.”
“Full?”
“Yes, things were full. Each moment seemed very…heavy. And I distinctly remember moments passing the way they do awake, but usually dream moments all happen at once. But that’s not important.”
“Of course it is. Can you tell me any more about the woman?”
“Yes, she was very…meaningful.”
“How so?”
“Ahh--yes.”
In answer to the question, Jessi herself thought she had hit jackpot in terms of landing a well-paying, interesting, flexible, and incredibly cool job. She truly liked Errol and thought she understood his vibrant and pathetic desire to give form to his dreams, or to see the world (she wasn’t sure which); she pitied him, a little, and sometimes envied him, and was glad she could help him. So why wouldn’t she tell anyone?