Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “…the nanny tries to restructure as well as repair.”

  She’s only a bag lady, after all; and an addict. It’s for her own good.

  “I suppose the greater the initial similarity, the better it would work…”

  She’ll just find her way back to the streets again. I can’t baby-sit her forever. She’ll find her connection again. An addict’s need never really dies.

  “…the time variable only specifies endogenous death…Exogenous death comes from outside the organism.…there are eleven dimensions to consider.”

  And what kind of life was it, living from a shopping bag on a heating grate? She’ll be much happier.

  When he felt calmer, he opened the bag and poured the three capsules into his hand. He looked at them and rolled them back and forth in his palm. They felt cold and heavy, like stones; but he knew that was only his imagination.

  Before he could think about it, he turned and climbed the stairs, two at a time. He stopped in the washroom and filled a glass of water and took it with him to the guestroom.

  Sadie the Lady was lying in the bed. She hadn’t bothered to take her clothes off. She seldom did. Henry still had to remind her to bathe about once a week. She was propped up on the pillows, but her eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow.

  “Sadie?” he asked. She had to be conscious to swallow pills.

  The bag lady opened her eyes and mumbled something incoherent.

  “It’s only an autumn cold,” he told her. “Here. Take these.” He thrust his hand out. The capsules seemed to have grown warmer. They were like small coals in his palm. “Take them,” he said again. And his voice trembled.

  Sadie reached out her arm and Henry saw the tracks of the needle marks lining the inside. Small red circles. Craters left from years of meteoric bombardment. “Here. Take these pills.” And the words came more easily this time; and the capsules had ceased to burn his skin.

  She plucked them from his outstretched hand and placed them one at a time in her mouth, following each one with a swallow of water. Her throat worked and they went down. She gave him back the glass. “T’anks.”

  The glass rattled when he set it on the end table. He waited. The minutes dragged out. Sadie’s breath came more and more slowly, until finally a light snore told Henry that she was asleep.

  For a few minutes he stood there, clenching and unclenching his hands. Finally, he nerved himself and reached down and lifted her in his arms. He was surprised to discover how light she was.

  He carried her to the master bedroom and laid her down on Barbara’s side of the bed. He pulled off her shoes, and adjusted the sheets around her. Then he went to the stereo in the wall unit and fumbled a cassette into the tape deck. He hit Play.

  The voice that issued from the speakers was his own. He turned the volume down low, so the words were barely audible. The speakers whispered. Memories of Barbara. Her family; her history; how they had met; her life with him. Henry listened for a few minutes, but after a while he couldn’t take any more, so he tip-toed out of the bedroom and eased the door shut. Behind him, memories played into sleeping ears.

  The next morning, he began calling her “Barbry.”

  The first couple times earned him curious glances, but the bag lady seemed just to shrug it off. She seemed to accept everything he did with an odd mixture of blank fatalism and a pathetic eagerness to please. Henry dug out the old photo albums and spent all day Saturday showing the pictures to her. The techniques for planting false memories were well known. This is Barbry when She was six. This is the house She grew up in; and those are Her parents. Sadie nodded and grinned her gap-tooth grin. Once, passing a photograph back and forth, their hands touched and Henry was caught between a sudden desire to clasp her hand and an equally sudden desire to pull away.

  She studied the pictures carefully, holding them close to her eyes, squinting, as if something had gone wrong with her vision. As if her eyes were not what they had been the previous night.

  Henry peered at her face. Did it already look a little different? Were the cheekbones a little higher? The hair a little lighter? The scar a little fainter?

  Or his imagination a little wilder?

  A human body was more complex than that of jellyfish; and the process should take a good deal longer. But Bill Canazetti’s tyling algorithm was wonderfully simple; and growing a Barnsleyformer from Barbara’s DNA had taken more time than brilliance. For three weeks, Henry had remained at work, after the others had gone for the day. Bill had given him some quizzical stares over the extra hours but seemed to assume that Henry was using the work as a way of dealing with his grief.

  And, in a way, of course, he was right.

  Henry thought he had covered his tracks pretty thoroughly. The recorded weights of the specimens in the cell library would still tally. All the reagents and other supplies were properly accounted for. There was nothing out of place that they could trace to him. Not even the flu virus. Certainly not Barbara’s cell samples.

  “You must have loved her very much.”

  He emerged, startled, from his reverie. Sadie the Lady was holding out a snapshot. It was a picture of him and Barbara, taken during their vacation in the Rockies. There they stood, his arm around Her waist; both of them smiling foolishly, waving to the stranger who had held their camera. They were posing in front of their rented Bronco on the old railroad trestle on the Corona Pass Road. Behind them, the Devil’s Slide fell a thousand feet into the forest below. Barbry was pointing back toward the Needle’s Eye Tunnel that they had just negotiated. A frozen moment of happiness.

  Henry remembered every detail of that day. The bite of the insects. The sawtooth sound of their chirping. How the sun had beat down on them, and how, despite that, it had been chillingly cold at the summit. Corona Pass was not a real road, but the remains of a narrow-gage railroad bed that switchbacked up the sheer side of a mountain. It was one lane wide, which made for interesting decisions when upslope and downslope traffic met. The Needle’s Eye, a hole pierced through solid rock, had once been closed for several years by a rockslide, and the trestle over the Devil’s Slide did not inspire great confidence, despite its solid timbers. The ruins of the old train depot lay astride the Continental Divide, and Barbry and he had found a secluded spot off the nature trail there, and had necked up a storm as if they had been teenagers.

  “Yes. Very much,” he said. “I miss her.” More than anything else in the world, he wanted her back. “I love you very much, Barbry.” And he looked Sadie straight in the eye when he said that.

  Fear danced in her eyes, and then something else. “And I lo—”

  The snapshot flicked from her fingers and floated like an autumn leaf to the carpet. Sadie’s left cheek twitched and she stood and trembled like a fawn. “Don’t feel good,” she said.

  Henry caught her before she fell and carried her back to the bedroom. “You’re still sick, Barbry,” he told her. [Yes, her hair was definitely lighter now.] He laid her down on the bed. “Rest up. Everything will be all right in a little while. A couple of days, at the most.”

  The cheek was twitching constantly now. It tugged at the nose and the corners of the mouth and eyes. Henry could swear he saw the cheekbone beneath it flow. He pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat there rubbing first one hand then the other.

  Sadie began to pant, short gasps, bitten off. Her eyes bulged and sweat rolled off her forehead staining the pillowcase. She arched her back and her eyes rolled up in her head. Her hands clenched into fists that twisted and wrung the sheets. A scream trickled through her tightened throat.

  Henry saw a tremendous spasm run through her right thigh muscle. It jerked once, twice, three times. Then Sadie collapsed, her mouth hanging slack and her fingers curling and uncurling. Her breathing grew long and shallow, as if she had just finished a long race.

  Henry could not move. The nanny will try to restructure as well as repair. But he had never imagined that it would hurt. How long will this
go on, he wondered? He bit into his knuckles and drew blood.

  Her breathing began to quicken again, rasping like a saw through pine, and Henry saw the tension build in her muscles. It was like childbirth, almost. Worse than childbirth. She began moaning and the moaning increased in pitch and tempo and would have ended in a scream except her jaw was so tightly clamped that nothing but a whine escaped. Her whole body jerked this time and she rolled halfway onto her side.

  I can’t take this, Henry thought and he pushed himself from the chair to go.

  But her eyes snapped open and pinned him there, like a butterfly to a board. She spoke; and the timbre of the voice was more than Sadie, but not quite Barbara, and there was pain and hurt in it. “What are you doing to me?” she cried. And she spoke again; and again there was pain and hurt, but of a different kind. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  The scream, when it finally came, was Henry’s.

  For the next three days, Henry avoided the room except to bring meals, which she did not touch; and pain-killer, which she did; and to reset and play the tapes that he had made. Through the door, he would hear cries; cries that were now weeping as often as they were screaming. They were muffled and Henry knew that that was because she would thrust her face into the pillows to stifle the sound of it.

  Barbara had been like that. She hated to cry and always tried to hide it.

  He did not linger when he heard the crying, but fled instead to the quiet of the kitchen and, once, to the solitude of the greenbelt behind the house.

  He got no sleep that weekend and when Monday came, he called in sick. Bill Canazetti took the call and Henry wanted to tell him that Barbry wasn’t feeling well so he was staying home to take care of her. But he said nothing, because Bill might not have understood.

  Or perhaps, he might have understood too well.

  Late Monday afternoon a hammering sound brought him running up the stairs. He burst into the room and found Barbara/Sadie banging her head against the headboard of the bed. She would lean forward and then throw her head back hard against the carved wood. There were dark stains there.

  His heart dropped like a stone. He bounded to her side and wrapped his arms around her to hold her back. “What are you doing?” he cried.

  She grabbed her head in both her hands. “Make it stop!” she sobbed. “It hurts so much! Please make it stop!”

  The brain, he thought. The nannies have reached the brain and are restructuring it to look more like Barbara’s brain. Synapses and neurons were being rewired. Network configuration was changing. It shouldn’t hurt, he told himself. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. He held on to her more tightly and she buried her face in his shoulder, making small, animal sounds.

  And what will happen now? Wasn’t memory stored in the arrangement of synapses? In the network? No one really knew. No one understood how the brain worked. And there were always those seven “ghost” dimensions in Barbara’s DNA.

  He tried giving her headache medicine; but that didn’t seem to work; so he tried a sedative and that at least stopped the whimpering, although in her sleep she continued to moan and toss.

  And then, after a very long while, it was Tuesday.

  He was in the kitchen, drinking breakfast. Bourbon, neat. An anesthetic to dull his own pain. He had not showered nor changed his clothes since Friday and they were stained at the collar, at the armpits, at the small of the back, in the crotch; and smelled of sweat and fear. Four days of stubble had made sandpaper of his face. His eyes were rimmed with red. He had not slept since Sunday.

  And he heard a footstep in the hall.

  He jerked his head up. She stood there, unsteady, leaning against the doorpost from the hallway, her jeans and blouse as filthy and disarrayed as his. More so, since she had been unable to visit the bathroom during her ordeal. Her hair, dirty from sweat and oil, was ratted and tangled. It was as if she had never left the heating grate in Hell’s Kitchen.

  He put his shot glass down so hard that the amber liquid splashed onto his hand. He half-rose from his chair. “Barbara?”

  She stared at him vacantly. After a few moments, she shook her head. “No, I—Henry?”

  He stood and walked around the table to her. “You’ve had a bad accident,” he told her. “Amnesia.”

  As he got closer to her he began to see more clearly that she was not quite Barbara. The facial scar was gone; but a faint line remained. The missing incisor was still missing. There were other, more subtle differences that thirteen years of marriage had made plain.

  He took her hands in his but stopped short of embracing her.

  “How do you feel.”

  “Bad as you look,” she replied. “I—” A pause. A grimace. “Twinges, time to time.” Her face tightened and she looked at him hard. “Y’gimme somethin’, dincha? Some kinda pill.”

  “It was medicine. You were sick.”

  “I never been sick.”

  Henry swallowed. “Yes, you were. Five years ago. We took you to St. Barnabas. Don’t you remember?”

  She pulled her hands away. “Don’t! Yer crazy, you.” She turned, took one step, and stopped. Three heartbeats went by; then she looked back over her right shoulder. “Bright pastels,” she said. “The room was painted in bright pastels. The TV set was broken and you made them replace it.”

  “Yes.”

  “No!” She put her hands to her head. “Never happened. I’se in Rochester, me. Five years ’go I’se’n Rochester!” Her hands dropped slowly. “I think I was. I—” She began to cry. “’M confused. So confused. Henry? Help me.”

  He led her back upstairs to the shower and gave her Barbry’s favorite baby doll pajamas. While she washed up, he stripped the bedsheets and replaced them with fresh linens. He took the soiled sheets to the laundry in the basement, but he remembered in time not to start the load while the shower was running.

  While he waited for the water to stop he gradually became aware of his own condition. He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw and caught a good whiff of his own odor. I need a shower, too, he thought. And a shave.

  The shower felt good, and it relaxed him to the point where his lost sleep caught up with him. He decided to take a nap, so he wrapped himself in a towel and went to the master bedroom to find a pair of pajamas.

  And Sadie was in the bed, asleep.

  Henry stopped short and wondered why that should surprise him. After all, he had been putting her there himself. But, this was the first time she had gone there on her own. She had finished showering and then come to this bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  His mouth twitched and he tiptoed to his dresser, where he reached around the bottom drawer for a pair of pajamas. Her breathing behind him was soft and regular. Relaxed, even; although a slight nasal blockage made a clicking sound whenever she breathed in.

  He straightened and turned and looked at her. She was lying atop the sheets, her back to him. The rust-colored camisole top had ridden up to reveal her matching panties and a small, dark mole on the lower right side of her back.

  He stared at the mole for a long time. He knew that mole. Even in the dark, he could have pointed to its exact location. It was not possible for two people to have that same mole.

  He dropped the pajamas, and the towel, and crept gently into the bed. When he put his arms around her from the back, he felt her stiffen; but he stroked her gently, along the flank, and up and down the back—with a light touch, the way She always liked it—and, after a little while she relaxed and began making contented sounds in her throat.

  Gradually, his hand widened its area of search. Up. Around. Here. There. Her breathing quickened and she twisted to face him. Her eyes were still closed, as if she were still asleep; but her mouth sought his and they embraced.

  A quiet and desperate urgency followed, with quickly breathed assurances of love and pleasure. The baby dolls joined his towel.

  “Barbry,” he said. “Oh, Barbry.”

  And she stiffened
again; but only for a moment. “Oh, Henry. I’ve missed you.”

  In the morning, he and Barbry lay contentedly side-by-side. The remnants of some bad dream nibbled at the edges of his mind; but he could not remember what it was. Something terrible. Something too distressing to be borne. He felt like a swimmer who had been sucked under by a sinking ship; who had kicked desperately toward the shining surface above until, lungs bursting, he had broken through into the cool, pure air.

  Everything was going to be all right now.

  Barbry was still asleep and Henry watched her silently for a while, admiring the smoothness of her body, the peacefulness of her face, the way her breasts rose and fell. He kept thinking that there was something he was supposed to do for her. Something important that he had forgotten. Well, it would come to him.

  He eased out of bed and put his housecoat on. Then he slipped out of the room to the kitchen, where her made breakfast for the two of them. He felt like he was on his honeymoon; but that was ridiculous. Barbry and he had been married for donkey’s years. He put the breakfasts on a tray and carried them back to the bedroom.

  Barbry was awake when he entered, just beginning to get out of bed. She saw he was bringing her breakfast and laughed. “Breakfast in bed? Oh, Henry. No one ever done that for me.” She put herself back under the covers, sitting up against the pillows.

  Henry knew that the accident had given her partial amnesia, so he didn’t make an issue of how often they had done this in the past. He opened the legs of the tray and set it across her, then he crawled in next to her.

  She explored her breakfast with her fork. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Poached eggs. Just the way you like them.”

  “Just the way…Course. Forgot.”

  While they ate, Henry noticed her giving him sidelong glances out of the corners of her eyes. She was watching him. Waiting for him, to do what? Henry took a bite of his toast and chewed. When he glanced back at her, he noticed a tear had worked its way down the side of her right cheek.