Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  Mae’s hand sought out Dee-dee’s and clenched hold of it. “Doc, I’ll have me that operation.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll have me that operation. The one that’s supposed to make this tumor of mine go away. I’ll have it, even if my music and my memories go with it.”

  “You will. Why?”

  “Because I know why you been poking me and taking my blood. And I know why the Good Lord has kept me here for all this long time.”

  Noor Khan was waiting in the hallway when I stepped out of the room.

  “Ah, doctor,” I said. “How are things at Sunny Dale.”

  “Quiet,” she said. “Though the residents are all asking when you will be back.”

  I shrugged. “Old people dislike upsets to their routine. They grew used to having me around.”

  Khan said, “I never knew about your little girl. I heard it from Smythe. Why did you never tell me?”

  I shrugged again. “I never thought it was anyone’s business.”

  Khan accepted the statement. “After you told Wing and me of Mae’s remarkable longevity…I knew you were taking blood samples to that genetic engineering firm—”

  “Singer and Peeler.”

  “Yes. I thought you had…other reasons.”

  “What, that I would find the secret of the Tree of Life?” I shook my head. “I never thought to ask for so much. Mae has lived most her life as an old woman. I would not count that a blessing. But to live a normal life? To set right what had come out wrong? Yes, and I won’t apologize. Neither would you, if it were your daughter.”

  “Is Singer close? To a solution?”

  “I don’t know. Neither do they. We won’t know how close we are until we stumble right into it. But we’ve bought a little time now, thanks to you. Is that why you did it? Because you knew that meeting my daughter would convince Mae to accept the Culver-Blaese gene therapy?”

  Khan shook her head. “No. I never even thought of that.”

  “Then, why?”

  “Sometimes,” said Khan, looking back into the room where the young girl and the old girl taught each other songs. “Sometimes, there are other medicines, for other kinds of hurts.”

  I seek no more the fine and gay,

  For each does but remind me

  How swift the hours did pass away

  With the girl I left behind me.

  They are all gone now. All gone. Mae, Dee-dee, all of them. Consuela was first. Brenda’s partnership arrangement with FitzPatrick—telecommuting, they called it—left no place for her at the house. She came to visit Dee-dee, and she and Brenda often met for coffee—what they talked about I do not know—but she stopped coming after Dee-dee passed on and I have not seen her in years.

  Brenda, too. She lives in LA, now. I visit her when I’m on the Coast and we go out together, and catch dinner or a show. But she can’t look at me without thinking of her; and neither can I, and sometimes, that becomes too much.

  There was no bitterness in the divorce. There was no bitterness left in either of us. But Dee-dee’s illness had been a fault line splitting the earth. A chasm had run through our lives, and we jumped out of its way, but Brenda to one side and I, to the other. When Dee-dee was gone, there was no bridge across it and we found that we shared nothing between us but a void.

  The operation bought Mae six months. Six months of silence in her mind before the stroke took her. She complained a little, now and then, about her quickly evaporating memories; but sometimes I read to her from my notes, or played the tape recorder, and that made her feel a little better. When she heard about seeing Lincoln on the White House lawn, she just shook her head and said, “Isn’t that a wonder?” The last time I saw Mae Holloway, she was fumbling after some elusive memory of her Mister that kept slipping like water through the fingers of her mind, when she suddenly brightened, looked at me, and smiled. “They’re all a-waiting,” she whispered, and then all the lights went out.

  And Dee-dee.

  Dee-dee.

  Still, after all these years, I cannot talk about my little girl.

  They call it the Deirdre-Holloway treatment. I insisted on that. It came too late for her, but maybe there are a few thousand fewer children who die now each year because of it. Sometimes I think it was worth it. Sometimes I wonder selfishly why it could not have come earlier. I wonder if there wasn’t something I could have done differently that would have brought us home sooner.

  Singer found the key; or Peeler did, or they found it together. Three years later, thank God. Had the breakthrough followed too soon on Deirdre’s death, I could not have borne it. The income from the book funded it and it took every penny, but I feel no poorer for it.

  It’s a mutation, Peeler told me, located on the supposedly inactive Barr body. It codes for an enzyme that retards catabolism. There’s a sudden acceleration of fetal development in the last months of pregnancy that almost always kills the mother, and often the child, as well. Sweet Annie’s dear, dead child would have been programmed for the same future had she lived. After birth, aging slows quickly until it nearly stops at puberty. It only resumes after menopause. In males, the gene’s expression is suppressed by testosterone. Generations of gene-spliced lab mice lived and died to establish that.

  Is the line extinct now? Or does the gene linger out there, carried safely by males waiting unwittingly to kill their mates with daughters?

  I don’t know. I never found another like Mae, despite my years of practice in geriatrics.

  When I retired from the Home, the residents gave me a party, though none of them were of that original group. Jimmy, Rosie, Leo, Old Man Morton…By then I had seen them all through their final passage. When the residents began approaching my own age, I knew it was time to take down my shingle.

  I find myself thinking more and more about the past these days. About Mae and the Home; and Khan—I heard from my neighbor’s boy that she is still in practice, in pediatrics now. Sometimes, I think of my own parents and the old river town where I grew up. The old cliffside stairs. Hiking down along the creek. Hasbrouk’s grocery down on the corner.

  The memories are dim and faded, brittle with time.

  And I don’t remember the music, at all. My memories are silent, like an old Chaplin film. I’ve had my house wired, and tapes play continually, but it isn’t the same. The melodies do not come from within; they do not come from the heart.

  They tell me I have a tumor in my left temporal lobe, and it’s growing. It may be operable. It may not be. Wing wants to try Culver-Blaese, but I won’t let him. I keep hoping.

  I want to remember. I want to remember Mae. Yes, and Consuela and Brenda, too. And Dee-dee most of all. I want to remember them all. I want to hear them singing.

  AFTERWORD TO "MELODIES OF THE HEART"

  I had begun writing “Melodies of the Heart” in late 1990 and got stuck. I wasn’t certain whether to write the story omnisciently, from multiple third person, or from the singular first person of Dr. Wilkes. Each had its attractions. I composed different openings.

  In March of 1991, I was invited to attend Balticon 25 to accept the Compton Crook Award for In the Country of the Blind. The Guest of Honor was Nancy Kress, who gave an intriguing speech over the scarcity of children and families in SF. Since “Melodies…” involved precisely a child and her family, I shyly introduced myself and asked her opinion. Her comments helped considerably to make up my narrative mind, and marked the beginning of a long friendship.

  I’ve discussed the innards of the story before, so I won’t repeat that here. The story is set around the time of “Soul of the City,” in The Nanotech Chronicles. Singer and Peeler have not yet founded SingerLabs; and Henry and Barbara Carter from “Remember’d Kisses” are young newlyweds. The young boy from “Captive Dreams” is mentioned briefly toward the end, when Dr. Wilkes has become an old man.

  The immediate inspiration came from an essay by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in which he described
patients haunted by re-heard melodies and re-seen visions of their youth. These were not memories. In normal memory, we remember the past precisely as past. These are more like retrieving files from computer “memory,” by which the file becomes physically present in the now.

  The speculative science involves “mundane immortality,” that is, remarkably long life. Life spans follow a statistical distribution (actually three overlapping distributions) whose hazard rate in reliability engineering is called “the bathtub curve.” We know of people who have lived to 120 years old; and if you go out into the tail of the distribution, there is a minute-but-nonzero probability of people even longer-lived.

  So. The re-heard memories of an exceptionally old woman. I shudder to think how very nearly the story became a mere puzzle, as Dr. Wilkes pieced the memories together. The third (and key) element was to ask: “Who does this—re-heard memories evidencing a very prolonged life—hurt most?”

  Some final advice came from Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, who helped with the progeria angle and who stiffened my spine as regards the ending. On a technological note, while it was not the first story I ever wrote on a computer, it was the first story I ever wrote on my very own computer, a Mac Performa 400. Don’t laugh. It was finished in October 1992 and appeared in the January 1994 issue of Analog.

  The advice from Nancy and Stan helped immeasurably. “Melodies…” placed first for novellas in AnLab, Analog’s annual reader poll. It was a Hugo nominee for best novella at Intersection (Glasgow, 1995) and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction of the year. Gardner Dozois reprinted it in his 12th annual Year’s Best Science Fiction and David Hartwell selected it for my own collection The Forest of Time and Other Stories. Altogether, it has been one of my most successful stories.

  But the best recognition it received was from readers who wrote me or have commented on message boards that they wept uncontrollably when they finished it.

  Thank you.

  CAPTIVE DREAMS

  Soft and warm. Looking here, there. Duckies, Lambie-pie, pretty red Ball. I love Lambie-pie. Reaching for it. White fluffy-looking Lambie-pie soft smooth and round and Ball slipslides between the always-bars. Ethan-voice calling, “Lambie-pie.” Falling bouncing, slowly, slowly, slowly. Catch Ball, he runs away. Ow! Bang the fingers on the always-bars.

  Closing the eyes and waiting for the dark. See Ball resting against lamp. Hear bouncy sounds: Boing-boing-boing. Blackness! Catch the hard rod always-bars. Up, up, and swing around; and down. On the floor; hard against the feet! Quiet, quiet. Hear crib springs squeaking; duckies rattle. Open eyes and wait for light.

  Brightlighthurtheyes. Clumpthud. Hello, lamp. Hello, Ball. Reach for it. Reach for it. Too fast! Too fast! Leg caught; snakey tangle. Spinning tumble up down. Ow! Lamp totters. Catch it, catch it, catch it. Frozen falling lamp standing still. Noise. Clump. Clumpclump. Brightyellowflash.

  Shat[CRASH]ter.

  She turned at the sound of the crash and, shoving her fist to her mouth, ran for his bedroom. Heart thudding. Fearing what she might find. “Ethan!” He was out of his crib, smiling blankly, windmilling his arms as he staggered around the room. His left ankle was tangled in the cord for the floor lamp, which had toppled, smashing the shade and shattering the bulb. Tiny, sparkling shards of glass glistened in the carpet.

  “Ethan!” She swept him up in her arms, untwisting the cord with a practiced movement. Anger fighting relief, she held him tight. “Oh, Ethan. Naughty boy. You could have been hurt.”

  “Baaall,” said Ethan in his typically slurred voice. He held onto her neck and planted a wet smack of a kiss on her cheek. “Lamm. Me. Pie.” She squeezed her arms and eyelids tight. Her cheek was cool where wetness lingered. He didn’t even know her. He was off into his own personal universe where she couldn’t follow.

  “Is there anything I can do, Alma?” The gruff baritone voice behind her reminded her that she had left the front door open when she had run for the bedroom. She turned and faced him, cradling Ethan against her hip. Soon the boy would be too big to pick up; too big to handle. What then? What then? She would find a way. Something. She would cope.

  “I’m sorry, Mick. You see how it is. I can’t leave him alone for a second.”

  Mick reached out and tousled the lad’s hair. “Hi, there, boy. Do you remember Uncle Mick?” Alma stiffened at the familiarity of the gesture.

  “He has his good spells,” she told him. “Some days he can follow simple directions. He can even speak a complete sentence. But most of the time…” She hesitated and caught her lip to keep it from trembling. “Most of the time he doesn’t make sense at all.”

  “Mamma,” said Ethan, smiling into Mick’s face.

  Mick gave the boy a shadowed look and an uncertain smile played across his mouth. He doesn’t understand, either, she thought. None of them did. None of that procession of men that had passed through her life since Nate had run out on her. They all stumbled over Ethan, sooner or later. They all yearned for her undivided attention, and they couldn’t have it. Not while Ethan needed her. Someday soon Mick would utter those hateful, selfish words. Why don’t you put him in a home?

  Mick could see the entire evening laid out before him as he rubbed the hand vacuum back and forth across the rug. The tiny shards of glass tinkled as they were sucked into its maw. From the kitchen he could hear Alma’s voice canceling the baby sitter. Silly. She’d have to pay anyway. The agency supplied RNs to baby-sit special children. You couldn’t book them and then cancel at the last minute. He shook his head and rubbed his hand through the carpet nap searching for uncollected fragments. He’d tried telling her that just one time; and, Jesus, you’d’ve thought he’d suggested dumping the kid on a country road.

  He glanced up at the crib, where Ethan lay strapped on his back, staring at the mobile dancing inches before his face. Little wooden ducks with wings that beat mechanically as they circled. Up, down, around and around. Forever flying south for winter. The kid was too big to be in a crib anyway. And—a quick, almost furtive glance at the larger bed—too big to sleep in his mommy’s bedroom.

  Oh, yes. Alma and he would spend a Quiet Evening at Home. She would cook for him; and they would watch something halfway decent on the tube. The movie they’d planned on would be out on video eventually. And as for the restaurant…Well, Alma was a decent cook. Later, they would philander on the sofa; but always, always with one ear on the bedroom. And then she would take him by the hand and lead him in here softly tip-toeing. And half the time they would find Ethan still wide-eyed awake staring at them; and half the time Alma would stop half-aching-way and ask what if he did wake up; and half the time he couldn’t do it himself because what kind of a pervert did it in front of a kid? And that made three-halves, which pretty much summed it up.

  When he turned off the hand vacuum he could hear Alma’s muffled sobs from the kitchen. He squatted on his heels, listening. Yeah. She wanted the freedom as much as he did; but the kid was an anchor around her neck dragging her down, down, down. She was killing herself and the kid didn’t even know it. So far, once—exactly once—they had made it out of the house. And it was the grace of God that the restaurant and the movie theater had had public phones so she could check with the nurse-sitter every half hour.

  “Kid,” he muttered, “sometimes you’re a real pain in the butt.”

  “Ethan bad. Ba’boy.”

  Mick jerked his head up. The kid had abandoned his mobile and was staring at him between the bars of his prison. He began to jerk his body, so that the crib shook rhythmically back and forth. “Mick!” Ethan beamed. “Uncamick!”

  Ah, hell, you had to love the kid, didn’t you?

  She raced back to the bedroom with the tissue crumpled in her hand. “What is it?” she asked. “What was that noise?” Mick was squatting by the crib with his face half-stuffed between the bars. “What’s wrong?”

  He turned a silly smile on her. “R
elax, Alma. Ethan and I were just making faces at each other, that’s all.”

  “Did you get all the glass vacuumed up?” She dropped to her hands and knees and rubbed the carpet. “No. Here’s a piece you missed. Christ, Mick, can’t you finish a job? Those tiny reflections. He notices things like that. Things you and I would pass right over. What if he picked it up and swallowed it? Here, give me that vacuum.” She snatched it from his hands. Mick stood up and stepped back. The motor hummed and she rubbed it back and forth through the nap of the rug.

  His shoes moved at the edge of her vision, shifting his weight from side to side. “Make yourself useful,” she said. “Start the meal. You can boil a pot of water, can’t you? Start the spaghetti. Do something.”

  “Alma—”

  “Leave me alone!”

  She saw the feet shuffle and move away. A few moments later, she heard the front door close. She rocked back on her heels and turned off the vacuum, and hugged herself tight. I won’t cry. I won’t cry. I won’t cry. He would have dropped me anyway. You could see it coming. Men liked divorcées: They were experienced, saddle-broken. But men didn’t like them with children in tow; and they doubly didn’t like them with retarded children in tow.

  “Uncamick,” said Ethan.

  “Shut up!”

  The boy’s face crumpled and his mouth twisted into a knot. Alma sprang up, unstrapped him, and hugged him to her. “Oh, Mommy’s sorry.” She rocked him back and forth in her aching arms. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

  Knifesharpsmell tickles nose. See white dress nurse close door. Soft-comfy-springy touch on heiney. Hum-hum. Hear door close. Sit on sofa next to Momma. Flash. Gentle breezes tickle arms and face. GreatBIGface! BabblebabbleEthanbabble. Deep voice not-Mick. Flicker! Bright spinning colors. Ghost hands reach for it; reach for it Hum-hum-hum. Nothing. Hands held tight and soft. Spinning colors move and turn and reach and. Got it!