CAPTIVE DREAMS
Michael Flynn
Phoenix Pick Imprints
Captive Dreams copyright © 2012 by Michael Flynn.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means,
electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities
is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-61242-060-8
Published by Phoenix Pick
P. O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
INTRODUCTION
While writing the story “Remember’d Kisses” in 1988, I whimsically added a bit of color to one scene, in which the protagonist, Henry Norris Carter, looks out his back window.
The kitchen faced on a woods protected by “greenbelt” legislation from development. No danger of ticky-tacky working class homes depressing the property values. The canopy of the trees looked like a silhouette cut from black construction paper, the false dawn providing an eerie backlighting.
Now, that described the scene outside the back window of the house where I was then living and in which by no coincidence I was writing the story. Two roads in the township fish-hooked into each other to form a rough oval, and the houses around the inside of the oval enclosed this bit of woodland, making it undevelopable. Write what you know, right? The intent was to induce something of a melancholy mood: the black silhouettes of the trees in the eerie lighting of the false dawn. It was a throwaway detail, no more.
A year or so later, I was writing the story “Melodies of the Heart” and because of a passing reference, I wrote a scene in which the character Dr. Wilkes walks through those woods and visits briefly with Henry and Barbry Carter. So arose the idea that the two otherwise unconnected stories took place in the same neighborhood.
Dr. Wilkes also meets with Charles Singer of “Soul of the City” and “The Washer at the Ford,” but before he had become SingerLabs. In “Remember’d Kisses,” Henry Carter had been described as working at SingerLabs sometime after the death of Charles Singer. So both stories were imagined in the milieu of The Nanotech Chronicles.
Concurrently with “Melodies…,” I was working on the novelette “Captive Dreams” and had decided by then to place it too in the same neighborhood; and so little Ethan visits briefly with the now elderly Dr. Wilkes.
At this point I had the notion of writing stand-alone stories for each house in the neighborhood, with casual handshakes among them.
This was a curse. No further stories suggested themselves. Or more precisely, they wanted to be set elsewhere (or elsewhen) and I was disinclined to force a story into the neighborhood. I began to write Firestar, shorter fiction became less frequent, and eventually I dropped the idea.
Fast forward seventeen years. Shahid Mahmud of Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor, while producing an ebook of my collection The Forest of Time, asked me if I had any uncollected stories. Quite a few actually; but a rather eclectic mix. But one of them was “Captive Dreams,” and I recalled my earlier intention. Shahid was intrigued, but “Melodies of the Heart” had already appeared several times, including in the just re-issued The Forest of Time. “Remember’d Kisses” had not appeared recently, but had been included in The Nanotech Chronicles. And the total word count of the three stories was not quite enough.
“Why not write a couple of new stories to sweeten the pot for readers?” he asked.
And that was how “Places Where the Roads Don’t Go,” “Hopeful Monsters,” and “Buried Hopes” came into being during early-to-mid 2011. The three were pretty much written concurrently: When I got stuck on one story, I would flip over to one of the others. But if I had to give them an order, it would be the one just given, except that “Places…” received an extensive rewrite after the other two were finished.
And so we have here six stories: three old, three new; two novella-length, two novelettes, and two short stories.
The sequence used in this book is according to the implicit internal chronology of the story matter. However, some readers, interested for some reason in the development of my writing, may prefer to read them in the order of composition, which I have spelled out above.
A story should not need a spokesman, not even its author. It should speak for itself. But sometimes curious readers may be interested in the circumstances of the writing or in the speculative science involved. I have added a short afterword to each story, but you may prefer to skip those until you have read the entire set, or skip them entirely.
MELODIES OF THE HEART
I have never been to visit in the gardens of my youth. They are dim and faded memories, brittle with time: A small river town stretched across stony bluffs and hills. Cliffside stairs switchbacking to a downtown of marvels and magical stores. A little frame house nestled in a spot of green, with marigolds tracing its bounds. Men wore hats. Cars gleamed with chrome and sported tail-fins enough to take flight. Grown-ups were very tall and mysterious. Sometimes, if you were good, they gave you a nickel, which you could rush to the corner grocery and buy red hot dollars and jawbreakers and licorice whips.
I don’t remember the music, though. I know I should; but I don’t. I even know what the tunes must have been; I’ve heard them often enough on Classic Rock and Golden Oldy shows. But that is now; my memories are silent.
I don’t go back; I have never gone back. The town would all be all different—grimier and dirtier and twenty years more run down. The house I grew up in was sold, and then sold again. Strangers live there now. The cliffside stairs have fallen into disrepair, and half the downtown stores are boarded up and silent. The corner groceries are gone, and a nickel won’t buy you squat. Grown-ups are not so tall.
They are still a mystery, though. Some things never change.
The music is dreamy,
It’s peaches and creamy,
Oh! don’t let my feet touch the ground…
I remember her as I always remember her: sitting against the wall in the garden sunshine, eyes closed, humming to herself.
The first time I saw Mae Holloway was my first day at Sunny Dale. On a tour of the grounds, before being shown to my office, the director pointed out a shrunken and bent old woman shrouded in a shapeless, pale-hued gown. “Our Oldest Resident.” I smiled and acted as if I cared. What was she to me? Nothing, then.
The resident doctor program was new then. A conservative looking for a penny to pinch and a liberal looking for a middle-class professional to kick had gotten drunk together one night and come up with the notion that, if you misunderstood the tax code, your professional services could be extorted by the state. My sentence was to provide on-site medical care at the Home three days a week. Dr. Khan, who kept an office five miles away, remained the “primary care provider.”
The Home had set aside a little room that I could use for a clinic. I had a metal desk, an old battered filing cabinet, a chair with a bad caster that caused the wheel to seize up—as if there were a Rule that the furniture there be as old and as worn as the inhabitants. For supplies, I had the usual medicines for aches and pains. Some digitalis. Ointments of one sort or another. Splints and bandages. Not much else. The residents were not ill, only old and tired. First aid and mortuaries covered most of their medical needs.
The second time I saw Mae Holloway was later that same first day. The knock on the door was so light and tentative that at first I was unsure I had heard it. I paused, glanced at the door, then bent again over my medical journal. A moment later, the knock came aga
in. Loud! As if someone had attacked the door with a hammer. I turned the journal down open to the page I had been reading and called out an invitation.
The door opened and I waited patiently while she shuffled across the room. Hobble, hobble, hobble. You would think old folks would move faster. It wasn’t as though they had a lot of time to waste.
When she had settled into the hard plastic seat opposite my desk, she leaned forward, cupping both her hands over the knob of an old blackthorn walking stick. Her face was as wrinkled as that East Tennessee hill country she had once called home. “You know,” she said—loudly, as the slightly deaf often do, “you oughtn’t leave your door shut like that. Folks see it, they think you have someone in here, so they jes’ mosey on.”
That notion had been in the back of my mind, too. I had thought to use this time to keep up with my professional reading. “What may I do for you, Mrs. Holloway?” I said.
She looked away momentarily. “I think—” Her jaw worked. She took a breath. “I think I am going insane.”
I stared at her for a moment. Just my luck. A nut case right off the bat. Then I nodded. “I see. And why do you say that?”
“I hear music. In my head.”
“Music?”
“Yes. You know. Like this.” And she hummed a few bars of a nondescript tune.
“I see—”
“That was One O’Clock Jump!” she said, nearly shouting now. “I used to listen to Benny Goodman’s band on Let’s Dance! Of course, I was younger then!”
“I’m sure you were.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I’m sure you were’!” I shouted at her across the desk.
“Oh. Yes,” she said in a slightly softer voice. “I’m sorry, but it’s sometimes hard for me to hear over the music. It grows loud, then soft.” The old woman puckered her face and her eyes drifted, becoming distanced. “Right now, it’s King Porter. A few minutes ago it was—”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. Old folks are slow and rambling and forgetful; a trial to talk with. I rose, hooking my stethoscope into my ears, and circled the desk. Might as well get it over with. Mrs. Holloway, recognizing the routine, unfastened the top buttons of her gown.
Old folks have a certain smell to them, like babies; only not so pleasant. It is a sour, dusty smell, like an attic in the summer heat. Their skin is dry, spotted parchment, repulsive to the touch. When I placed the diaphragm against her chest, she smiled nervously. “I don’t think you’ll hear my music that way,” she said.
“Of course not,” I told her. “Did you think I would?”
She rapped the floor with her walking stick. Once, very sharp. “I’m no child, Doctor Wilkes! I have not been a child for a long, long time; so, don’t treat me like one.” She waved her hand up and down her body. “How many children do you know who look like me?”
“Just one,” I snapped back. And instantly regretted the remark. There was no point in being rude; and it was none of her business anyway. “Tell me about your music,” I said, unhooking my stethoscope and stepping away.
She worked her lips and glared at me for a while before she made up her mind to cooperate. Finally, she looked down at the floor. “It was one, two nights ago,” she whispered. Her hands gripped her walking stick so tightly that the knuckles stood out large and white. She twisted it as if screwing it into the floor. “I dreamed I was dancing in the Roseland Ballroom, like I used to do years and years ago. Oh, I was once so light on my feet! I was dancing with Ben Wickham—he’s dead now, of course; but he was one smooth apple and sure knew how to pitch woo. The band was a swing band—I was a swinger, did you know?—and they were playing Goodman tunes. Sing, Sing, Sing. Stardust. But it was so loud, I woke up. I thought I was still dreaming for a while, because I could still hear the music. Then I got riled. I thought, who could be playing their radio so loud in the middle of the night? So I took myself down the hall, room by room, and listened at each door. But the music stayed the same, no matter where I went. That’s when I knowed…” She paused, swallowed hard, looked into the corner. “That’s when I knowed, knew, it was all in my head.”
I opened the sphygmomanometer on my desk. Mae Holloway was over a hundred years old, according to the Home’s director; well past her time to shuffle off. If her mind was playing tricks on her in her last years, well, that’s what old minds did. Yet, I had read of similar cases of “head” music. “There are several possibilities, Mrs. Holloway,” I said, speaking loudly and distinctly while I fastened the pressure cuff to her arm, “but the best bet is that the music really is all in your head.”
I smiled at the bon mot, but all the wire went out of her and she sagged shapelessly in her chair. Her right hand went to her forehead and squeezed. Her eyes twisted tight shut. “Oh, no,” she muttered. “Oh, dear God, no. It’s finally happened.”
Mossbacks have no sense of humor. “Please, Mrs. Holloway! I didn’t mean ‘in your head’ like that. I meant the fillings in your teeth. A pun. Fillings sometimes act like crystal radios and pick up broadcast signals, vibrating the small bones of the middle ear. You are most likely picking up a local radio station. Perhaps a dentist could…”
She looked up at me and her eyes burned. “That was a wicked joke to pull, boy. It was cruel.”
“I didn’t mean it that way—”
“And I know all about fillings and radios and such,” she snapped. “Will Hickey had that problem here five years ago. But that can’t be why I hear music.” And she extruded a ghastly set of false teeth.
“Well, then—”
“And what sort of radio station could it be? Swing tunes all the time, and only those that I know? Over and over, all night long, with no interruptions. No commercials. No announcements of song titles or performers.” She raised her free hand to block her ear, a futile gesture, because the music was on the other side.
On the other side of the ear…? I recalled certain case studies from medical school. Odd cases. “There are other possibilities,” I said. “Neurological problems…” I pumped the bulb and she winced as the cuff tightened. She lowered her hand slowly and looked at me.
“Neuro…?” Her voice trembled.
“Fossil memories,” I said.
She shook her head. “I ain’t—I’m not rememberin’. I’m hearin’. I know the difference.”
I let the air out of the cuff and unfastened it. “I will explain as simply as I can. Hearing occurs in the brain, not the ear. Sound waves vibrate certain bones in your middle ear. These vibrations are converted into neural impulses and conveyed to the auditory cortex by the eighth cranial nerve. It is the auditory cortex that creates ‘sound.’ If the nerve were connected to the brain’s olfactory region, instead, you would ‘smell’ music.”
She grunted. “Quite a bit of it smells, these days.”
Hah, hah. “The point is that the sensory cortices can be stimulated without external input. Severe migraines, for example, often cause people to ‘see’ visions or ‘hear’ voices. And sometimes the stimulus reactivates so-called ‘fossil’ memories, which your mind interprets as contemporary. That may be what you are experiencing.”
She looked a little to the side, not saying anything. I listened to her wheezy breath. Then she gave me a glance, quick, almost shy. “Then, you don’t think I’m…You know…Crazy?” Have you ever heard hope and fear fused into a single question? I don’t know. At her age, I think I might prefer a pleasant fantasy world over the dingy real one.
“It’s unlikely,” I told her. “Such people usually hear voices, not music. If you were going insane, you wouldn’t hear Benny Goodman tunes; you would hear Benny Goodman—probably giving you important instructions.”
A smile twitched her lips and she seemed calmer, though still uneasy. “It’s always been a bother to me,” she said quietly, looking past me, “the notion that I might be—well, you know. All my life, it seems, as far back as I can remember.”
Which was not that far, the director ha
d told me that morning. “All your life. Why is that?”
She looked away and did not speak for a moment. When she did, she said, “I haven’t had no, any, headaches, doc. And I don’t have any now. If that’s what did it, how come I can still hear the music?”
If she did not want to talk about her fears, that was fine with me. I was no psychiatrist, anyway. “I can’t be sure without further tests, but a trigger event—possibly even a mild stroke—could have initiated the process.” I had been carefully observing her motor functions, but I could detect none of the slackness or slurring of the voice typical of severe hemiplegia. “Dr. Wing is the resident neurologist at the hospital,” I said. “I’ll consult with him.”
She looked suddenly alarmed, and shook her head. “No hospitals,” she said firmly. “Folks go to hospitals, they die.”
At her age, that was largely true. I sighed. “Perhaps at Khan’s clinic, then. There really are some tests we should run.”
That seemed to calm her somewhat, for she closed her eyes and her lips moved slightly.
“Have you experienced any loss of appetite, or episodes of drowsiness?” I asked. “Have you become irritable, forgetful, less alert?” Useless questions. What geezer did not have those symptoms? I would have to inquire among the staff to find out if there had been a recent change in her behavior.
And she wasn’t listening anymore. At least, not to me. “Thank you, Doctor Wilkes. I was so afraid…That music…But only a stroke, only a stroke. It’s such a relief. Thank you. Such a relief.”
A relief? Compared to madness, I suppose it was. She struggled to her feet, still babbling. When she left my office, hobbling once more over her walking stick, she was humming to herself again. I didn’t know the tune.
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