Do what you want

“Do what you want” recurs as both an intimate invitation and a phrase through which desire becomes uncertain: spoken in dreams by Jo and Mattie, it follows into waking life, where Mike wonders whether the words belong to the women, to his own imagination, or to a larger pattern. The phrase also turns back on Mike’s work, linking permission to act with his effort to write again.

The phrase in overlapping dreams

Mike experiences three scenes as happening at the same time: Jo on the float, Mattie in the north bedroom, and himself entering Jo’s studio. The scenes occupy different degrees of dreamlike unreality, but the repeated phrase binds them. On the float, Jo says, “Do what you want.” In the bedroom, Mattie says the same words. In the studio, by contrast, Mike needs no one to tell him what he wants. The parallel wording places the phrase between two women and a third scene centered on Mike’s own purpose, without resolving whether the scenes share a source.

The words are not simply a dialogue refrain. Their repetition makes the scenes echo one another even as Mike experiences them as distinct, overlapping strands. The studio is the least dreamlike scene; the encounter with Jo feels most like a dream, while Mattie’s presence falls between those poles. The phrase thus links desire to the unstable boundary between dream and waking perception, rather than supplying a clear explanation for what Mike experiences.

The waking echo and what remains unsaid

Afterward, Mattie says she has another thing to do that day: buy Kyra a large teddy bear at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart. She plans to present it as a reward for being good, because she cannot tell Kyra it is for walking into the road as Mike was coming the other way. Mike’s immediate response is that the bear should not be black, a thought that surprises him because it seems to have emerged before he consciously formed it.

Mattie encourages Mike to return to work, recognizing that writing is what he wants to do. He is startled by her perception. She begins to say something, stops, and Mike becomes certain both that he knows what she was about to say and that she will not say it: she dreamed about him, and about the two of them together, with “Do what you want” spoken by one or both of them. Her silence leaves the connection between their dreams suggestive rather than confirmed. Mike considers whether ghosts might be minds and desires separated from their bodies, but presents this as speculation, not as a settled account of what has happened.

A question of whose desire speaks

The phrase leads Mike to recall an essay on pornography that he had read while on Key Largo. As he remembers its argument, “Do what I want” represents a fantasy associated with women, while “Do what you want” represents a fantasy associated with men: in the latter, the speaker imagines the woman’s wishes and boundaries disappearing into his own desires. Mike recalls the essayist’s claim that this fantasy can make pornography an accomplice when real-world sex turns harmful or humiliating, because a man may treat imagined permission as proof that the other person wanted what happened.

Mike does not simply accept the essay’s generalization. He thinks its account reduces male sexual pleasure to turning women into instruments of fantasy, and rejects the idea that men are invariably beasts. He argues instead that when people are pushed to an extreme, the underlying issue is often territory rather than sex. The passage therefore makes the phrase carry an ethical tension: it can sound like permission, but the essay’s distinction asks who is speaking, whose wants count, and whether apparent permission erases the other person’s agency.

From erotic refrain to writing

The phrase’s final recurrence in these scenes turns from intimacy toward work. Mike wants to return to his office and write, even though he believes he has done enough for the day. The encouragement to do what he wants is therefore double-edged: it recalls the women’s words in his dreams and names the work he longs to resume. His desire to write meets the same frustration when the telephone rings and revives his anger at interruptions after four years of writing difficulty.

That ending does not settle the phrase’s source or promise that wanting something will make it possible. Instead, its repetitions place permission beside uncertainty: Jo and Mattie speak the same words in dreamlike scenes; Mattie may have shared a dream she does not voice; Mike interprets the phrase through an argument about sexual agency; and the writer’s wish to work remains vulnerable to interruption. Its force lies in these changing contexts, where the same sentence can suggest invitation, projection, withheld speech, or a claim to follow one’s own purpose.