The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  Dr. Saul stands there like a stocky blond tree at the head of Henri’s bed, a brain scan in his left hand. He rolls his eyes in irritation at the head of the intensive care unit. “Oh for God’s sake, Fozzie. Do stop butchering metaphors in my presence. The brain is not a machine, or else we’d have some idea of how it works. It’s like leavened dough: we knead it this way and that until we run out of ideas. In this particular case, we don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going to happen. Got that?”

  I know Dr. Saul’s right, but I dearly wish he weren’t.

  Dr. Foss smiles at me, and his smile says, Yeah, well, that’s what he thinks, but after all, he is the best.

  The fearful creeper shoots out its tendrils into all my muscles at once. Into my tummy, shoulders, and neck. Every strand of my being is as taut as a drum, and I hold my breath, as if I want to bring time to a standstill so the worst cannot happen. Time pays no attention to me and catapults me back ten years into the past.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t let me die in the hospital,” my father whispered as the paramedics carried him past me on a stretcher following the heart attack that had struck him down as he dined alone at the kitchen table. A steak, rare, with mustard and a salad containing fresh watercress. The piece of gorgonzola he’d planned to have for dessert with cherry jam was standing on the sideboard.

  More and more often my father would eat alone in the kitchen. My mother had long since given up even liking him, but at seventy she was too tired to leave. My father still loved her, after all this time, throughout their fifty years together. He loved the doors and walls that separated them from each other in their home because he knew that she was in the next room, on the other side of the wallpaper and the thick, muggy silence. That was enough for him, and the affection with which he gazed at the walls behind which she sat, somewhere, never failed to break my heart.

  Following his panicked call—“Eddie, my girl, I think something bad is happening to me”—I made it back from my publishing house almost at the same time as the paramedics arrived, and as I held his strong, rough, increasingly dry hand all the way from the kitchen table to the ambulance’s wide-open doors, he begged me not to let him die in the hospital. I promised him that I wouldn’t.

  I followed the ambulance to the hospital on my motorbike and then tailed the ambulance men all the way into the green-tiled casualty department with its aluminum doors. I ignored the doctor, whose job was to pummel hearts back to life with his electric-shock machine and his pride, as he tried to prevent me from entering this cramped corridor of misery, fatigue, and human suffering. I ignored him as he tried to explain to me that other rules applied at the end of a person’s life than during it, that love no longer had anything to do with it, only adrenaline and oxygen, and that I’d get in the doctors’ way.

  I stayed, even though I’d have much preferred to run away, screaming. I stayed with my father as they cut open his trousers and shirt, as they fixed needles and catheters to him, as they talked to him but actually looked at him less and less. The classic, robotic triage you’d find in any casualty department on a Friday night: drunks with injuries from broken glass; battered women; lonely little grandmothers; ironic, cynical police officers; the odd distraught relative, propelled this way and that like a lost pinball, surrounded by cynicism and frenzied activity. In the midst of it all lay my father on a thin turquoise sheet and a hard stretcher, apologizing to every doctor or nurse who examined him: “Sorry for the inconvenience. You must have more important things to do.” As if a heart attack were just an embarrassing mishap.

  Once they left us alone in the green-tiled room for a while. What if he died now? How was I supposed to stop him?

  He gave me a labored smile. His face seemed so foreign. His features had aged on the way from home to the hospital. He took my hand. I placed my other hand on top of his and he put his other one on mine—a stack of four hands—while his pulse lurched up and down, and his heartbeat scratched a jagged electric landscape on the monitor. I didn’t know at the time that we were already saying our last goodbyes.

  * * *

  —

  Now the same beeping, red LED mountains decorate Henri’s screen as they did my father’s. Signs that he is alive. Signals from his desperately battling heart. A heart monitor, a breathing monitor, a blood pressure gauge, a pulse gauge, an oxygen density sensor, a lung machine, a pulmonary bypass that makes a soggy, chugging sound like a ship’s engine, an electroencephalogram. The CT scans of his fractured skull are projected onto the wall.

  “Should he stop breathing spontaneously before we remove the tracheal cannula from his throat, you can go and get yourself a coffee, Tomlin.”

  “And you can behave yourself.”

  Dr. Saul raises his eyebrows. “Let’s get started,” he says.

  Sam

  I join two doctors in the lift. One of them presses three, the other five. I’m not brave enough to push past them and press two. It’s embarrassing, but I really can’t do it. Scott would say that I’m one of those people who deliberately walk the wrong way to avoid hurting the feelings of the person I asked for directions. He’s right.

  “Going to the veg compartment?” Floor Three asks Floor Five cheerfully.

  “Yeah. I’ve got one with about as much brain activity as a can of beans.”

  “Are we still playing squash this evening?”

  “Sure. Eight o’clock.”

  Floor Three gets out, but Veg Floor stays and starts whistling through his teeth. “After you,” the doctor says when the lift reaches the fifth floor—the veg compartment.

  “Thank you, sir,” I mumble. Fantastic, Valentiner. Damn.

  A set of double doors swings open in front of us with a gentle thud. I’m just planning to get back into the lift as soon as the doctor is out of sight and go back down to the second floor when a nurse comes through the doors.

  “You can go straight in, love.”

  “Thank you.” Damn, damn, DAMN!

  I’ve now gone too far to admit that I’m in completely the wrong place, so I walk decisively along the wide corridor—and she follows me! This unit is completely unlike the warehouse downstairs. The corridor is carpeted. The air is pleasantly cool and it’s very, very quiet. There’s none of the tension you feel in the intensive care unit with all the bright lights and alarms and the constant vigilance and injections and incisions to ward off approaching death. This floor is like the forgotten attic of an old house.

  What do I do if the nurse follows me to the very end of the corridor? What do I say? “Oops, wrong building. I meant to go to the intestine department, actually.”

  There are photos on the doors here. Laughing, friendly faces, and under each one, a name.

  On the first door: “Leonard.” The photo shows a man wearing blue overalls and a Manchester United scarf and sitting on an excavator. I can hear someone sobbing quietly on the other side of the door.

  The second door: “Elisabeth.” The photos show her holding up a tart. Behind the door I hear a man’s voice saying, “Now breathe out. I’m turning your wrist to the left…Yes, nice and relaxed, as if you were whipping cream…good…to go with scones.”

  After two or three more doors—“Amanda” and “William” and “Yamashiro”—I’ve understood the principle: the pictures are of the people who live on the other side of those doors. In the veg compartment. I’m willing to bet they no longer look like they do in the photos.

  “Then again, frozen vegetables don’t resemble the pictures on the packaging either, mon ami.” I hear Scott inside my head making comments that I would never allow to cross my mind.

  The nurse is still tailing me. I continue along the corridor, calculating that I’ll probably have to walk straight into the end wall because I can’t think of anything else to do. I’m coming to the last door, which is ajar. The sign on
it reads “Madelyn.”

  Soft piano music flows from the room. The gentle sounds are so at odds with the surroundings that I wonder if this isn’t a dream—a long, bad dream in which I’m waiting for my father outside school and he never turns up because he’s dead. I stop and close my eyes. That’s how you wake up: by screwing up your eyes in your dream. When this has no effect, I raise my hands. Stare at your hands while dreaming and you’ll wake up. Still nothing changes. This must be reality. When I lower my hands again, the corridor is empty. There’s only me, the music, and the half-open door.

  Then three things happen all at once. I notice that although I’ve felt cold for the past two weeks, suddenly I don’t—the music is like a mild breeze, thawing my bones. Also, the lights flicker. And time starts to thin. I get the feeling that a single tiny movement would be enough to change my life forever. I reach the end of the corridor and, with it, the end of my old life.

  I’m going to walk back, get into the lift, and take it down to the second floor. Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. But no, I don’t do any of those things. I stay where I am and a feeling takes shape inside me that I’m about to find something I didn’t expect to find.

  Instead of going back to the lift, I watch my hand, as if of its own volition, take hold of the door handle and push the last door in the corridor a little farther open.

  A low white bookshelf with a blue teapot full of red tulips on top of it. Curtains by the window. Paintings and photos on the walls—landscapes, faces, mountains from above, and underwater scenes. And on the very edge of the bed, her legs covered by an ankle-length nightie, sits a blond girl surrounded by music. The girl looks straight at me. She doesn’t blink. She simply stares at me, and I completely forget not to meet her eye.

  Standing in front of her, with her back to me, is a small woman with curly red hair in a nurse’s uniform. She’s combing the girl’s hair. “…and in the evening, when drops of dew cling to the tips of the blades of grass, my two little tubby tots emerge from their sofa cave and lick the grass, and their catlike eyes watch the stars breathing.”

  I think the nightie has unicorns on it, but they may be ducks. I’m not sure. The girl stares at me, and something in her blue gaze pierces my skin, perhaps reaching places you see only if you can look through people. The music washes up the walls, converges in the middle of the ceiling, and sprinkles down onto my head.

  “Did you know that stars could breathe, Maddie?”

  For a split second I can sense some movement in Madelyn’s glassy gaze, like a fish swimming from one hiding place to another at the bottom of a deep lake. No, it isn’t a lake—it’s the wind in her eyes, a gust of music, and the movement was a raven taking off and spreading its wings. Madelyn has ravens in her eyes, and I tumble into this sky full of ravens.

  “The world is so beautiful when you’re a star looking down on us all,” the nurse continues. “On the cats in the grass, on girls sleeping with open eyes, and on boys standing in the doorway with their jaws on the floor.” With these last words, the nurse turns to face me. She has a face like a leprechaun’s, with laughter lines arcing from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth. The name on the badge pinned to her dark-purple blouse is Marion.

  Nurse Marion says, “Hello. Have you come to visit Maddie?”

  So what does this smart-ass sidekick do next? I slam the door and run away, even though part of me is left standing there by the door, because at the end of the corridor is a girl who can see through me into other worlds, as if I were made of crystal and all of reality is no more than a glass bubble with her floating inside.

  My feet pound the carpet. Her name is Madelyn. Ma-de-lyn. I’m simultaneously happier and sadder than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

  Eddie

  They work like a team of Formula 1 mechanics. Dr. Foss raises the head of the bed and dabs Henri’s eyelids with a cotton swab, while Dr. Saul taps his patient’s knee, a nurse draws the blue curtains around the bed, and an anesthetist removes the sedative drip from the catheter in the side of Henri’s neck.

  I know there’s going to be no “awakening” like in the movies. He’s not going to open his eyes and say, “Hey, Ed, got any decent whiskey in this joint?”

  First, his reflexes will return. Spontaneous breathing. Blinking. Swallowing. Then there’ll be pain. Pain will permeate every corner of his being before swelling into a torrent of dread.

  For days he will be enveloped in hallucinations like thick smoke, although Dr. Foss claims that they use a mild sedative and tranquilizer at the Wellington, leading to fewer delirious visions. As if that were reassuring: two nightmares instead of three.

  I believed Dr. Saul when he said, “We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the inside of our own heads. That’s a fact. We have no idea what goes on in the brain when it releases a rush of interleukin-2 in the event of serious inflammation. Nor do we know which harmless sensory perceptions manifest themselves as panic and nightmares for Mr. Skinner, or turn Dr. Foss here into a singing pumpkin.”

  Dr. Foss added indignantly, “We do, however, presume that Mr. Skinner doesn’t dream. Narcosis completely stifles a person’s ability to dream.”

  “We? I don’t. Is that invisible friend still with you, Fozzie?” asked Dr. Saul.

  My creeping fear grows and grows. Each of us is like an archive of themselves. Demons start to crawl from the drawers, compartments, and safes of my memory.

  * * *

  —

  Ten years ago in that casualty department, I felt anxiety on a scale I’d never previously known. That’s when it was born. It grew inside me like an invasive plant, quickly and greedily, wrapping itself around my organs and gradually crushing them. The thought that my father might die, just like that, in his prime, filled me with panic.

  His eyes shone like fjords in the shortest midsummer night. I stayed by his side until they took him away to intensive care and put in the first of three stents. No doctor came to see me after the operation, as they do in those TV hospital series, to say, “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Tomlin. We’re treating your father and four weeks from now he’ll be back outside, mowing the lawn.” There was no one in charge—only stressed, impatient nurses. No doctor, no one to take responsibility.

  I stayed with my father. Once he asked, “Is your mother coming?” and I lied, saying, “Yes, tomorrow.” She didn’t pay him a single visit in his last three days.

  At the end of those three days my father died on the hospital floor on his way back from the toilet. According to the man in the next bed, his last words were, “At long last I enjoyed a really good night’s sleep,” before he collapsed in “convulsions,” as my mother would later refer to them. “He was in convulsions, Edwina. There was no point in fetching him back a second time, you know. There was no more oxygen in his brain. He wouldn’t have been the same. Like a child…or worse.” I hated her for the relief in her voice—amazement too, but above all relief—and for her impatience, her acute impatience, when I burst into tears.

  * * *

  —

  On the evening it happened, I was sitting in the office of my publishing house, Realitycrash, because I’d nipped in to pick up the manuscript I was editing, an incredible book that was to be my next lead title. I was longing to tell my dad about it.

  I publish novels of magical realism. Not fantasy: there are no elves, no orcs, no vampires. Utopias and dystopias, stories about alternate realities, other planets, one world where there are no men and another devoid of adults—anything that’s potentially only three steps from our own reality and represents a scientifically plausible form of the miraculous.

  I’d only left my father alone for a couple of hours in that hospital, which smelled, like this one, of antiseptic and anxiety. His room had a view of a canal and the golden roofs of London, and we would watch people playing with their
dogs on the towpath.

  A nurse declared that my father’s prognosis was positive; his collapse had been merely a shot across his bows. The doctors, who were incredibly young, would never look you in the eye or say a word as they hurried along the corridors, their white coats fluttering behind them as a symbol of their importance.

  Dad’s bows were obviously less sturdy than everyone had assumed, for two hours later he was gone. I stood in his room, the manuscript in one hand and my motorbike helmet in the other, and his bed was empty.

  Suddenly there was a doctor in charge. He led me to my father, whose eyes no longer shone like fjords but were now empty blue discs. His body was still warm, or at least slightly warm, and I sat down beside him in the empty farewell room, took his rapidly cooling hand in mine, and read the book to him. I didn’t know what else to do.

  A nurse came to tell me that she was going home. I continued to read to him. Another nurse came to tell me that she was starting her shift. She came back later and said that she was going home now too. For a night and a day I held a vigil for my departed father. I whispered, “Good night, moon. Good night, room. Good night, Dad,” and in the early hours it felt as if he were standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders and telling me, “Now you’ll always know where I am.”

  The worst thing imaginable had happened. My best friend was dead. My childhood was dead. There was no one left to love me.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t get your hopes up even a jot,” says Dr. Saul. “There’s only a very slim chance that a person who wakes up after such a serious accident will be able to think in a logical fashion. We’re talking less than a nine percent chance. Do you understand that, Mrs. Tomlin?”