The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  The day after tomorrow Wilder is traveling to the United States for a reading tour to promote his new book, See You Later. It’s about people who simply walked out of the door and never came back. He searched for people who had been abandoned in this way and listened to their heartrending tales about breaking up and starting all over again.

  A professor who slipped out without a word during a family dinner to go and live in the Canadian wilderness. A woman who was going on holiday announced that she needed to go to the toilet as the train entered a station and then simply got off the train instead. A golfer who left the fairway to search for his ball in the trees and just kept on walking away from his former life. A sick little girl who set out one night from the hospital to look for the sea.

  I’m relieved that Wilder will be away for a few weeks. I’ll be able to sleep at the Wellington and spend the nights with Henri. At long, long last. I don’t want to miss the moment he comes back, and yet I feel guilty about planning my time with Henri as if he were my secret lover.

  Sam

  Something is different. I notice it as soon as I step out of the lift on the fifth floor. It feels as if disquiet, concern, and frenetic activity have united to create a storm at the end of the corridor. As I get closer I see that three people are attending to Madelyn—Benny, Dmitry, and one of the doctors Dmitry calls the “gas men.”

  Nurse Marion is wearing a face mask and casts me a backward glance that suggests, Oh no, not him too. But all she actually says is, “Would you please wait outside, Sam?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Please wait outside.”

  “What’s wrong with Maddie? What’s wrong with her, Nurse Marion?”

  She doesn’t answer, and Dr. Benedicta and Dmitry the Russian nurse attach further machines to Maddie’s body with swift, precise movements. Intravenous catheters are inserted into the backs of her hands and below her collarbone, and catheters and drips are made ready. All of a sudden, like my father, she’s entwined by the machines’ antennae, at the center of a cobweb of total surveillance. One of the machines measuring the oxygen content of her blood is blinking in a way I have never seen my father’s machines do. There’s far too little oxygen in Maddie’s body. Dangerously little.

  Her eyes are closed, and she’s pale and sweaty.

  “Time since oxygen deterioration?” the doctor asks. I now recognize him as the anesthetist who is often on duty in the intensive care unit to monitor the level of the induced coma.

  “Twenty-five minutes,” the nurse replies. “Throat swabs and skin biopsies are under way. Central venous pressure still falling.”

  “We have one hour at most to administer the correct antibiotic and six to stabilize her blood pressure. If not—” Benedicta breaks off her sentence when she catches sight of me in the doorway. The tension in her body is palpable.

  Marion pushes me gently toward the wall of the corridor.

  “Let me see her!” I beg. “Please!”

  “Not now, Sam. You realize this is a crisis?”

  Yes, unfortunately I do. Crisis is an alternative word for catastrophe.

  The automatic lift doors slide open and Dr. Foss appears, followed by God. God’s presence is a very, very bad sign.

  He glances at me, only for the five seconds it takes for him to approach and pass me and enter Madelyn’s room, but in that time everything happens. In those five seconds that seem to stretch on for thousands of wordless years, life passes like a slow-motion video and my blood turns to ice. God’s message is that they don’t know what to do because they’ve never had to treat anyone like Maddie before.

  God tells his team, “We have very little margin for error in our choice of therapy. A broad-spectrum antibiotic, please; an antifungal drug. Ask the pharmacists to prepare fresh antimicrobiotics. Raise the head of her bed—I don’t want her lying flat. Crystalloid fluid therapy. Start with thirty mil. We have to get her arterial pressure up. How far have we got with the blood cultures?” he asks last, quietly and calmly.

  “Proceeding but not yet analyzed.”

  “Have you removed the blood from the catheters? I hate those things, they’re only good for cultivating bacteria.”

  “Yes, but the results are negative.”

  “Marion, signs of sugar?”

  She shakes her head. She’s in shock, her face as white as a sheet.

  “I suspect it’s a bladder infection,” Dr. Foss interjects.

  “The urine analysis doesn’t confirm that, Foss. How are her teeth?”

  “Fine. Ultrasound reveals no lesions in the jaw or any other clue as to the source of the sepsis,” Benedicta says.

  “And why the hell is it taking so long to do the blood cultures? Liquor, please!” God is raising his voice now.

  Nurse Marion rolls Maddie carefully onto her side and disinfects a spot on her coccyx, and Dr. Foss, who has pulled on some gloves, inserts a hypodermic needle into her lower back. He extracts something and fills three little tubes.

  God watches this very carefully and holds up the vial containing the spinal fluid to the light. “Crystal clear,” he says pensively. “Practically rules out meningitis.”

  “Should we do a CT—” Foss begins.

  “She’d fall apart on the way there,” God interrupts him. “And how could a foreign object have gotten into her system to cause this inflammation? She’s been here for over six months.”

  “A wandering fragment from the accident, perhaps.”

  God considers this and then nods. “But first we must get her blood pressure down and stabilize her condition. The pharmacists need to get a move on, but I’m going to administer the bolus myself. Please hurry up.”

  As God is leaving the room I call out, “Excuse me, sir!”

  He turns round. His face is deeply wrinkled, and his different-colored eyes are red and hard. “What do you want, Samuel?” he says quietly.

  “I…I told Maddie that if she saw my father she should tell him…” I falter.

  Wearily God says, “What, Samuel? What should she tell him?”

  “That I knew he was on his way.”

  God nods. He runs one hand over his face and it remains hovering by his mouth. When people do that I know they’re trying to control what they actually feel like saying. “I like you, Samuel, but now you’re behaving like the boy you still are. You have nothing to do with this. Madelyn has blood poisoning. Sepsis. We don’t yet know what caused it.” He pats me on the shoulder. “And, Sam,” he adds in a low voice, “Madelyn and your father are each in their own universe, wherever they may be. Do you get that? However comforting you may find the idea, they are not somewhere they might be able to meet.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Of course not.” He turns away.

  I stare after him, my eyes tingling. I heard my father call me, and I can feel that Madelyn’s looking for something. She’s searching for something, and that’s why she has escaped from her solitude.

  I know this, but I’ll never be able to prove it. Perhaps I am crazy because I’ve been crazy from the very beginning. I know that synes-creeps like me can often go mad without any warning because of a sudden shock provoked by too much suffering, too many emotions, too many sensations.

  * * *

  —

  Shortly afterward, Maddie is pushed past me on a wheeled bed. Dmitry and Benedicta hurry almost at a run to the lift. I see the doors open and swallow them, and then the numbers light up one after the other down to 2. Intensive care.

  Nurse Marion appears by my side. “Go home, Samuel,” she says softly. “Your girl’s in good hands.”

  That’s right; she’s my girl.

  “What happens now?” I whisper.

  “They’re going to try to identify the cause of the blood poisoning. Bacteria, fungi, a foreign object, a virus, meningitis…Th
ere are many possible causes.” Her eyes dart anxiously to the large clock in the hallway. Too anxiously.

  “What’s wrong? Why do they have to hurry?” I ask, seized with red panic.

  Nurse Marion’s jaw clenches. “Sepsis contracted in a children’s hospital is worse than any you can get outside, Sam. There are too many germs here, too many resistant fungi and bacteria. You see, Dr. Saul has to decide within the next half an hour which treatment to give and which antibiotics to use to combat the pathogens without completely paralyzing Maddie’s immune system.”

  Half an hour? What if he makes the wrong decision? Oh please, please don’t!

  We learned in biology that antibiotics always kill off a whole load of healthy cells.

  “But he’s good at it, Sam. He really is.”

  “Is she going to die?”

  “Only the next six hours will tell. And tonight.”

  Only six hours and a night. I should have been home long ago by then. In six hours’ time my mother will have had her shower and be drinking her glass of sparkling wine. I can’t leave now!

  More to herself than to me, Nurse Marion says, “I always feared that one day it would come to this, and Maddie would make a decision.”

  “What decision?” I ask.

  “Which path to take, Sam. Whether to leave or to come back.”

  No, that’s not right! I want to say. She’s escaped from the place where she has been for weeks now, alone, surrounded by an impenetrable layer. She is now on the way to herself, only she isn’t taking the direct route but searching for something else first instead.

  But that might not be correct either. Maybe I simply wish to believe that Maddie’s disappearance is the beginning of a trajectory that will bring her to me, because I want to see the change in her eyes when she gets her first proper look at me. I’m scared that she won’t like me as much as I like her, but I’m even more terrified that she’ll never open her eyes again. I can’t go home now.

  * * *

  —

  Outside it’s getting dark. My mobile buzzes, but I ignore it. Scott sends me some WhatsApp messages. I send one back, asking him to lie that I’m staying at his house.

  My mobile buzzes again, and again I ignore it. My mother leaves me a voicemail message to say that she hopes Scott and I have a good time at the cinema.

  If Maddie goes, I’m going too. No one knows where I am. No one knows where Maddie is. She seems to be getting ready to swap sides.

  Henri

  The sinking has stopped. So have the flowing and roaring, the voices and colors.

  Never turn your back on the sea: the first and most important rule.

  I sit up. The sky arches overhead but has condensed into a black ball that completely encloses me. My chest hurts, covered with bruises that bear down on my ribs, my skin, and my clavicles. Breathing is painful. I feel as if I’ve slid down an endless pipe lined with a thousand sharp-edged welding seams.

  There’s no horizon: the sky and the sea have melted into one. In the darkness above, the motionless stars. In the darkness below, like heartbeats rising from the dank, deep darkness, stars move on the sea’s swell, giving the impression that they’re floating and twinkling on the water. I can tell that the tide is approaching by the way the water rushes and rocks around me in the dark.

  Then I figure it out. Everything. The realization drips into me with the searing burn of acid: I’m floating in the sea of the dead. Again.

  This sea again, this boat, this endlessness: I’ve been here before! I thrash the surface of the sea with the oars, and an icy chill seizes my painful, battered chest and tightens its grip on my heart.

  Maybe they haven’t noticed I’m not dead and they’re burying me?

  A flurry of thoughts, colliding with one another as they grope for the moment before the incident. Where was I before I was here? Where was I, and who was I? Or rather, was I still me?

  And then I realize everything. I’ve lived so many lives. I’m caught in an endless loop of being trapped in between. I didn’t want to acknowledge that my father was right from the very start: it’s dangerous to wander in between, along the boundary between life and death. As a man, a ghost, a demon, or as nothing. I should have stepped straight through that door.

  Maybe this is hell. Yes, this must be hell. To live over and over again, through countless variations, repeatedly starting from scratch and committing the same mistakes and new mistakes, and then back to the start. And not to recognize any of the fresh repetitions as things that you’re experiencing for the second or fourth or thousandth time.

  Which life have I just lived? In which goddamn fucking real world?

  The no-Sam world, in which Sam was never conceived?

  The Eddie-dies world, in which my wife’s life is snuffed out on her forty-fourth birthday because we argued and she drove along the coast road drunk? She often drank because I made her unhappy. She drank Talisker. She was sitting in a car that accelerated over a cliff, arcing outward through the air before tumbling down and down and smashing on the rocks.

  Was it the best of all possible worlds, in which my father was still alive, holding his granddaughter Madeleine Winifred Skinner in his arms? Winifred after Eddie’s grandmother.

  Was it the world in which I told Eddie I didn’t love her and in which I never saw my son?

  How could I fritter away my life in such fear and on so many refusals, saying “no” at the wrong forks in the road and “I don’t know” at the important ones? If only I’d recognized the vital, significant moments! I scream in desperation because I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong this time. I fall to my knees and curl up in a ball.

  Thirst. I need to drink, an Orangina, water, an ice-cold Coke. Such terrible thirst.

  If I were asleep I could wake myself up by staring at my hands. I lift my trembling hands, although I know they don’t actually exist, that they’re merely motionless claws and maybe even those are no longer there. They fade into the darkness and become invisible.

  Waves close in on the small blue boat, growling like large, disgruntled dogs. May it capsize! May it tip us out! Let’s play with it! The sea can drown me, for all I care!

  But it doesn’t. Instead, it seems as though the sea brightens, so to speak, where my eyes pierce it, and there I see them again, their arms and legs sticking out in strange positions as if they were sleeping upright. Floating figures that have risen from distant depths, pulled up by fine yet firm threads. Some are naked, while others have fluttering shirts and smocks. Their eyes are closed.

  Who are they? The dead, those who remained behind over the centuries when their ships went down.

  “No, they’re the dreamers,” the girl says.

  She’s sitting on a black rock that rears up behind me like a stone whale. Low tide has uncovered the outcrop, whose sides, submerged twice a day, are overgrown with shells. In a few hours the waters will have risen again.

  The girl has crystal-blue eyes and fine blond hair. She looks about eleven, and my heart tightens at the sadness in her eyes.

  “How did you get here, my child?”

  “I’m dying,” the little girl replies. “Like you.”

  “No,” I say quickly, “you’re not dying. Neither of us is. We can go back, you know. As long as we stay on the surface, we can go back.”

  “You know the way?” The way she asks this suggests that she knows I have no idea where I’ve come from or how to get back there.

  I shake my head. I feel a spasm in my heart, fear creeping into its every nook and cranny along with despair at the thought that, as with the previous child, I am unable to protect her.

  “Come on, I’ll help you off that rock,” I say to the child. I stand up and stretch out my arms toward the girl. The boat sways.

  She doesn’t move but merely stares down at me. “Have you ever b
een touched by a ghost?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I reply. “Come on, jump! I’ll catch you.”

  She turns to face the sea again. “My mother touched me,” she says, “when she died. Shortly after her death, she reached for me. Her ghost did. Here.” The girl points to her cheek. “I felt her dissolve, turn to air, wind, and sea. She was transformed into the pages of the books I read and the music to which I danced. That’s what happens when you die: you become the things you love.”

  “You’re not dying,” I helplessly reply. “Come on! We’ll find the way.”

  Now she smiles, and even her smile is lonely and sad. “What do you love?” she asks.

  I was never very good at loving, but now I love life so dearly. How I miss it!

  “The dead don’t know whether they’re living among the living or among the dead, and ultimately there’s no difference. Being dead is like dreaming without realizing you’re dreaming,” she whispers.

  “Come,” I beseech her once more, stretching out my arms. “Come with me, please. You don’t have to die.”

  She gazes at me with her beautiful, bright eyes and in a quivering voice calls, “I do want to, but it’s so hard. Did you know that it’s hard? I’m not capable of it. I don’t know how.”

  And now she claps her hands to her lovely, small face and weeps. Sobs shake her delicate frame. I can’t even touch her feet to comfort her, and the whale rock is high and slippery. I can do nothing but stand there in my tiny, swaying boat below the weeping child who wants to die.

  She sobs through her fingers, “I was a dancer all my life. I danced Marie in the Nutcracker Suite.” Another fit of sobbing convulses her body. “And once when my father didn’t take the motorway but drove along country roads, I broke my ankle by stumbling into a ditch after a picnic and I couldn’t dance Marie. That was such a wonderful summer because my father carried me all the time, everywhere. In a different life, I lived to be old, very old, and I had children and a husband called Sam. Samuel.”