by Iddo Gefen
6/11/2019
7/16/2017
13/8/2020
7/4/2022
27/5/2020
13/9/2018
“We think these are dates.” She said they had never come across a patient who was aware of the dates in her dreams. “The notebooks always begin in 2015, and then leap between dates. In the first notebook, the earliest date was 11/6/2019. In last night’s notebook the date 7/4/2022 appeared.”
Nelly and I looked at each other and couldn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand. Dr. Mendelson explained that the dates never appeared in chronological order. That it was possible every dream was another moment on the time line, and the girl was bouncing back and forth from one dream to another.
“And Shira is the only girl in the world who’s experiencing this?” Nelly asked nervously.
Dr. Mendelson said it was unlikely. That in theory, a lot of people could be experiencing dreams that lasted years, the only difference being that Shira was the only person who remembered them all. “And also the only one whose functioning was severely impaired by this.”
I considered the stack of notebooks again. The words took on new meanings, from a bunch of free associations to possibilities. Every word was a possibility of who Shira could be. The infinity of her private future was laid out on every page, and I was afraid. Afraid that Shira was galloping toward that infinity, getting lost inside it. Dr. Mendelson said they’d carry on with the tests and start her on medication. She promised they’d try everything, and added that there was always the chance that just as her dreams had appeared out of nowhere, they’d eventually disappear. Said there was a lot we didn’t know about the brain, and any attempt to offer an accurate answer as to when and how her condition might change or improve—would be irresponsible.
* * *
Nelly reached out and grabbed my hand. She hung her head, mourning our child. Maybe mourning us. Dr. Mendelson said that while she knew it wasn’t much consolation, she had to remind us it could be a lot worse.
“Obviously it’s better than terminal cancer,” Nelly said with frustration and raised her head, squinting as if to hide the redness of her eyes.
“What I meant,” Dr. Mendelson carefully weighed her words, “is that there’s no evidence that the child is suffering.” She said there was almost no indication that she was even having nightmares, and no symptoms of emotional distress. “It may very well be that to a certain extent, she’s happy,” she said, and we remained silent, having forgotten that was even a possibility.
8.
WE RETURNED WITH Shira to the B&B. Nelly’s dad called that evening. Nelly said he hadn’t yelled at her like that in years. He had tried getting an update from Nabil, but the latter hung up on him, thinking it was a prank. “My dad said we had some nerve firing Nabil without even telling him. Got himself all worked up over having to deal with this mess while he was on a cruise.”
Nelly tried telling him it had simply slipped her mind. That with everything that was going on with the girl, her head wasn’t screwed on straight, but her dad replied that with all due respect, that was no reason to go do such a stupid thing. “He said Nabil was coming back to work. And that if we tried pulling another stunt like that we were welcome to rent an apartment in Mitzpe.”
“Did you explain that something felt off? That we felt that—”
“That was just hysterical nonsense,” she said, and lay on the bed. “You know we were dumping all our shit on him.”
I told her she was wrong even though I knew she was right. Then I sat there silently. I got up to brush my teeth, and Nelly gave up. When I came back to bed she was lying with her back to me. I tried thinking about something else. Not about Shira. I broke my rule and read that day’s newspaper, but it didn’t help. Even an article about a space probe landing on Mars made me think about Shira. “It’s crazy,” I said. “Human beings can send a spaceship to Mars but they have no idea what’s going on inside their own brains, it’s just absurd.”
Nelly didn’t respond. I wanted so badly to hear her voice that I decided to keep talking until she said something. “Every dream is a few years for her, can you even imagine that? It’s totally insane. She must be feeling so lonely inside that thing. Really, just thinking about her like that, shifting between dreams with no one beside her, she probably—”
“She’s right,” Nelly said.
“What?” I asked, just to keep her talking.
“Maybe she’s right.”
“Who? Who’s right?”
“The doctor,” Nelly said and turned onto her back. Her eyes were closed.
“Right about what? What are you talking about?”
“That maybe this whole shitty situation,” she said and sighed, “actually isn’t that bad.”
Now I was quiet and Nelly was doing the talking. “It’s not like she’s having nightmares. She’s dreaming. Dreaming all the time,” she said and opened her eyes, looking at me. “I mean really, Ofer, wouldn’t you jump at that opportunity if someone offered it to you?”
“What opportunity? What exactly are you talking about?”
“Think for a second,” she said. “Someone comes and offers you the opportunity to live inside your dreams, without nightmares. To jump from dream to dream every night, to feel as if the whole thing lasts for years. You want to tell me you wouldn’t go for it?”
“Not in a million years,” I replied.
“Really, Ofer? You’d really pass on it? To me it sounds even better than a cruise to the Caribbean,” she said, then hesitated for a moment. “You know what the first thing was that crossed my mind when that Mendelson said the girl wasn’t suffering?”
“What?” I asked.
“That maybe,” she said, and fell silent for a moment. “Maybe Shira chose this.”
“Chose what?” I replied, irritated. “You’re talking in code words, Nelly, I don’t understand.”
“Chose her dreams. Chose to live inside them,” she said and sat up, looking at the door as if she was afraid Shira might be standing on the other side eavesdropping. “I know I sound completely crazy. I know, honestly. But maybe with all those fantasies of hers, she found a way to live inside her dreams. And maybe, just maybe, she’s choosing to live there, make an exit from this world.” She looked at me. “Think, Ofer. Years. Every night is years for her. No wonder she’s barely responsive, doesn’t even recognize us. What’s one day with us compared to years inside her own head?”
“What … what are you talking about?!” I barked at her. “You think she’s choosing to be like this? Completely unresponsive? You actually think anyone would want to live like that?”
I got angry at Nelly. There was no way our child would choose to leave us. “You would think we abused her or something, that she had to escape somewhere.”
“Maybe we didn’t truly see her,” Nelly said, and I knew that when she said “we” she meant “you.” “I don’t know, I’m starting to think we weren’t really there for her. That we were too busy with our own lives. You know what I’m saying?”
“What’s with the guilty conscience bullshit?” I hissed, getting even more annoyed. I told her I hated when she got like that. That once every few months she had those pseudo-pensive moments reflecting on her life and the very next day worked twelve hours straight again. “If tomorrow they call saying they want to appoint you CEO, all these questions would disappear in a flash,” I said, and added, just as a dig, “that’s what separates us from everyone else, remember?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
I thought she was being coy, but studying her expression, I realized she wasn’t. She honestly had no idea what I was talking about. I reminded her about that night in the Galilee. What she had said. That drive to push forward.
“You said that’s what separates us from the rest,” I said. “The unapologetic desire to succeed.”
She considered me for a moment with a serious gaze, and slowly her features began to soften.
She laughed.
“Sounds like something you heard on a reality show,” she said. “There’s no way I said that.”
I argued with her, reminded her of the details, that the sentence was said after we had gotten out of the Jacuzzi and into bed. She remained unconvinced. She flat out denied it, and I couldn’t understand why. Then she got annoyed with me. “Listen, I don’t remember saying it,” she said, “but even if I did,” she added with a hesitant tone, “it’s just the silly ramblings of a clueless twenty-three-year-old. Nothing more than that. And anyway, the whole CEO business is officially off the table,” she announced. She told me Hakimi had gotten the job two weeks ago. She said it as if it were some inconsequential anecdote, not something she’d been dreaming about for the past seven years. She couldn’t believe she’d been stupid enough to think the move south would give her extra points. Didn’t understand at the time that they were exiling her. I asked her when this had happened, and if she’d spoken with Zuzovsky, but Nelly said she was too tired to talk about it. Which was the last thing I’d expected her to say. I tried coming up with some comforting reply but couldn’t, so I stroked her back gently, tugging her body toward mine. “Enough, don’t turn this into an issue,” she said, but gave in to my touch all the same. “Why didn’t you tell me until now?” I asked, and she said I had enough on my mind and she didn’t want to saddle me with her failures too.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said tiredly, and admitted that maybe she was just upset about not getting the job and that everything she’d said just now about the girl and our lives was a bunch of nonsense. That in a day or two she’d get her act together and find her next goal. “And then I’ll just have the Shira business to deal with,” she added. “No biggie, right?”
I smiled. She placed her head on my knees, and I brushed my hand through her hair. She smiled too.
“I can’t believe how we laughed in her face,” she said. I told her that when Dr. Mendelson opened the notebook, I thought she was going to order us to write “We’re bad parents” forty times or something like that. Nelly laughed again.
“You know,” I said, “I can’t believe that in the twenty-first century they’re still asking people to write down their dreams to understand what’s going on with them.”
“Yup,” Nelly replied. “It’s a shame your guys at Lucid didn’t come up with some technology that would allow people to share their dreams. Because you know, watching someone’s dream is much more interesting than another cooking show on Channel 2.”
“Yup. You’re right. It is more interesting.” I continued to stroke her head. I suddenly had the vague memory of the research department actually exploring that option and ruling it out. How I would have loved to meet her there. Meet Shira in her dreams. One minute there could have solved this whole thing. “It is a shame,” I said.
Nelly turned onto her side, pressed her cheek against my chest, closed her eyes, and fell asleep.
9.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I saw Nabil wandering outside the B&B, tending to the sheep as if he had never left. Nelly came out and approached him. I stood behind her as she told him she wanted to apologize for everything that had happened, that it was an unfortunate misunderstanding, but the most important thing was that he was back. Nabil didn’t say a word.
“Have a cup of coffee with us?” she asked. He raised his thermos and shook his head. “I really am sorry,” I said. “I should never have fired you.”
“Stop bullshitting me,” he said without looking at me, and went back to work.
Nabil’s words weighed heavily on me, but I was glad he was back. It allowed me to spend more time with Shira. I felt that she needed me more than ever. The notebooks alone took hours out of my day. The doctors made it clear that Shira had to write down her dreams every morning, that it had to be the first order of business. Once I sat her down at the kitchen table, she started writing without my even having to ask. She sat there for two to three hours, until the notebook filled up with words. When she finished writing the last sentence she leaned back, dropped the pencil onto the table, and I put her back to bed, waking her up again in the afternoon.
Shira’s dreams became longer and longer. Every morning the girl wrote more and more words, but the doctors couldn’t explain it. The only thing they cautiously dared to suggest was that the tests indicated the possibility that Shira’s brain could no longer differentiate between wakefulness and sleep. Her sight and hearing were deteriorating sharply, and her sense of smell, taste, and touch was even worse. Her senses were barely functioning, which is exactly what happens to people while dreaming. They explained that might be what was making her so inert.
“That makes no sense,” I protested, telling the doctors it didn’t add up, because there were moments of absolute clarity in which Shira was fully aware of her surroundings. They, on their part, explained that it was like when people experienced a lucid dream—the person knows he’s dreaming. They said it was possible that every now and then Shira’s brain reset itself and understood the difference between a dream and reality, but before she managed to process the situation in full, she would revert back to her hazy existence.
We continued to take Shira to the hospital and the sleep lab, but by that point I had begun to feel that we were doing it more for the doctors than for Shira. They treated her like a math riddle you knew didn’t have an answer but kept trying to solve just for the challenge. I was already exhausted from tending to her 24-7. The revelation regarding Shira’s long dreams should have encouraged us, but in fact did just the opposite. Nelly and I felt as though we had managed to scale the high wall built around the child, only to discover an even higher wall waiting behind it. I tried hinting to Nelly that maybe it was time to start thinking about some kind of treatment facility, just to look into the possibility, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said there would be nowhere to put her because not a single person in the whole world suffered from the same problem. Said she wouldn’t let her child rot in some loony bin. I started to think maybe she was right. That maybe the girl actually was choosing to remain in her state, and we needed to let go. At least a bit. But I didn’t have the guts to say it out loud, so I kept quiet. I kept quiet and continued to tend to her, but a little less. I gave up on the veggies at breakfast. And on the ten minutes I’d sit beside her after she fell asleep. Sometimes even on the daily stroll to the hilltop, even though I knew she liked it.
Nor was I up to dealing with the app. It wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t schedule any meetings in Tel Aviv, and even phone calls with potential business partners couldn’t last more than ten minutes because I had to check on Shira.
I sat in the kitchen every night holding the yellow marker, sifting through the notebooks for clues. At a certain point I stopped trying to decipher the meaning of the words and started to gauge the quantity. I’d sit there with a calculator and try to work out how long every dream lasted. The numbers made no sense. If Shira dreamed every night the duration of approximately three years, that meant that since this all began Shira had dreamed a hundred and twenty years. At least.
* * *
One night, Nelly got back from work, approached me from behind, and placed her hand on my shoulder. She looked at the calculator in front of me and said there was no point trying to measure the time inside her dreams. That it was a different kind of time, one which we couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. She sat down beside me and took the pencil out of my hand.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said, sketching a delicate line on one of the blank pages. She tried to explain that if we likened time to a straight line that moves forward at a steady pace, Shira experienced time as something entirely different. “If anything, I’m starting to think that Shira’s time looks like a bunch of dots,” she said, filling the page with tiny circles. Her theory was that every dream was a dot, and Shira bounced from one dot to the next with no particular order or logic. “One momen
t she’s at her wedding to that Robert, the next she’s back at Edna’s kindergarten, and then suddenly she’s a goalkeeper in the middle of a soccer game.” She said that explained the fragmented sentences and why the dates were never in chronological order.
“Did you get a master’s in quantum physics and forget to tell me about it?”
“Use that as a pickup line and you can get any woman you want,” she teased and placed her hand on mine.
I looked at the page again, picked up the calculator, and continued to punch in digits. “I’m not sure I agree with you,” I said, and added that even if I did, I wouldn’t quit the calculations. If there was one thing that gave me any kind of comfort in this whole situation with Shira, it was the thought that the girl might live forever in her dreams.
After Shira and Nelly fell asleep, I went out for a stroll by the farm. I walked up to the road and stood on the curb. It was cold. Not a single car drove by. I couldn’t get over what Nelly had said. That the girl consciously chose to live inside her dreams. It made zero sense, but on the other hand, everything that had gone on with Shira in the past month and a half defied the rules of logic. So let’s say, for a moment, that Nelly was right. That Shira actually did find a bug in the system; that she discovered a way to live inside her dreams. Why would she want something like that? That kind of escape? I couldn’t understand it.
There was a time when Shira was little that she liked playing pranks on us. Nelly or I would put her to bed, and she’d pretend to be sleeping, and the moment we walked out of her room she’d burst into laughter. Nelly could play that game with her for maybe an hour, acting as if it was the funniest thing in the world, but I didn’t always have the patience for it. After a few times, I told Shira to quit fooling around. And she really did quit it but only with me, and continued playing with Nelly. After two days I got jealous of Nelly for getting to spend another hour with the girl, who would barely talk to me. During that same period, I’d put her to bed and stand outside her door, waiting to hear her laugh again. But I didn’t hear a thing. It was the first time I realized Shira and I were on different wavelengths. That I simply couldn’t understand her, no matter how hard I tried. Much like today.