Get Out of My Dreams

by Fernando Trujillo Sanz

  “What does this have to do with my mother?”

  “Nothing. But I still don’t understand what’s going on with you.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. This is my father’s company. You are his lawyer. Now take me to him.”

  For a few seconds, he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me carefully, as if I were some kind of strange creature.

  “The doorman didn’t lie to you.” His voice had changed. He was choosing his words carefully, like he was afraid to say the wrong thing. “I want you to pay close attention to what I’m about to say, because apparently you’re not well. The owner of this company never comes to this building.”

  “Why would you say something like that to me? I’ve picked my father up at the front door lots of times.”

  “In the first place, your father is not the owner of this company.”

  I don’t know why, but I burst out laughing. And as I chortled uncontrollably, I suddenly saw that some details fit. Like the doorman’s disregard for my last name. He’d said only the first letter was the same.

  The lawyer waited patiently for my small hysterical outburst to pass.

  “So, then, who is the owner?”

  I had somehow accepted—and I had no idea how—that someone else owned the company. No one would lie about something like that.

  “It’s your mother.”

  The news surprised me so much that I suddenly felt dizzy. Moments later I didn’t even realize that I’d sat down and now, there I was, sitting with my head in my hands. The glass of cold water the lawyer gave me did me good—especially since, instead of drinking it, I threw it right in his face.

  “That can’t be. My mother . . .”

  Somehow unfazed, he sat down beside me. “Didn’t you know? I’ve come by your house many times to talk to her about business matters.”

  “I . . . I just thought you were bringing documents and she would put them aside for my father.”

  I tried to absorb the news with indifference, putting aside my feelings, but it just didn’t make sense. My mother didn’t know anything about economics. She was a simple woman, a home body, and madly in love with my father. It was impossible that she had the knowledge required to run a multinational corporation.

  “I don’t believe you . . . Something strange is going on here . . . It’s those twins.”

  “What twins?”

  “Can you prove it? Can you show me proof that my father doesn’t run this company?”

  There was still a glimmer of hope inside me that this was some kind of joke in horribly poor taste and I just wasn’t seeing the humor.

  “Of course, but I’m going to call an ambulance or a doctor or something. You really have me worried.”

  “No!” I bolted to my feet, grabbed the lawyer by the lapels of his suit jacket and yanked hard, pulling him to his feet. He didn’t resist; he just looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “Don’t call anyone! Just tell me! Tell me what’s going on!”

  “Calm down. I’ll tell you, but you have to calm yourself.”

  I broke into tears. All the pent-up tension came spilling out; I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Feeling lightheaded, I had to lean against the wall for support. The lawyer again waited patiently for me to get hold of myself.

  “I’m better now, thanks.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you have to listen carefully now. Your mother has always run this company, since the day she founded it. I know because she’s always done it through me. She never wanted to take part in person, except on a few limited occasions when it wasn’t possible to do it any other way—almost always when it was a matter of an important international acquisition that required her signature on the contract.”

  I listened to him, and I understood what he was saying, but it was still taking an indescribably difficult effort to imagine my mother working every morning while I was at school and keeping it from me. I recognized the fact that working through a lawyer to keep from having to go out in public fit with how she was. My mother was ashamed of her deformities from the fire and she did everything she could to avoid the world outside of our house.

  I wiped my cheek with the sleeve of my shirt, smearing my face with the tears.

  “Why would she lie to me? Why would she tell me it was my father who ran the business?”

  The lawyer placed his hand gently on my shoulder. His voice softened.

  “You must have imagined that. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I won’t be able to help you if you don’t accept that you have a problem. I’ve known you since you were born. I’ve taken care of all your legal proceedings and any other paperwork related to you.”

  “Why are you reminding me of that now?”

  “Because you don’t have a father. You were an orphan.”

  I walked aimlessly through the streets, wandering from one side to the other, lost in thought. I was vaguely aware that Ivan was waiting for me and needed me there, but I needed to clear my head.

  I was completely out of control. Each and every one of my emotions was screeching hysterically inside my head, mixing me up, exploding within me. My world was collapsing.

  My parents were apparently conspirators, liars, or something even worse. My life was a farce. I felt completely alone.

  And I was afraid of myself. I was so deeply upset I felt like I might do something foolish. A few hair-brained ideas had indeed crossed my mind, like running away and starting a new life in some other country without my family. At that moment, the only thing stopping me was the certainty that I couldn’t escape the twins unless I discovered some way to survive without sleeping.

  I still had the feeling they were tied to all of this. My bad luck had begun when I started dreaming about them and bringing their damn toys out of my dreams.

  I needed to understand why my father evidently wasn’t who he said he was. According to what the lawyer had told me, there wasn’t a single document with his signature, nor did he have a Social Security number . . . absolutely nothing. He’d been deceiving me since I was born, using work as an excuse for why he was absent from my life. It was a terribly hard truth that fit with disconcerting ease.

  He was never there for my birthdays. My mother always took care of getting me around, or rather she had the chauffeur do it. It was also always my mother or the lawyer who attended parent-teacher conferences or who enrolled me in all my schools. I’d grown up thinking, at least for as long as I remembered, that my father was a very busy and important man with precious little time for me. What a revolting lie!

  And everyone seemed to know about it but me. That’s why the math teacher had blown up at me the way she did when I told her I was going to go see my father. My school records would show that I was an orphan, and she surely thought I was mocking her. And so on and so forth with every other detail I was reviewing in my mind.

  It’s surprising how easily a lie is accepted as the truth when it’s always been asserted as such. Does any kid ever wonder if his father really is his father?

  “Uaaac . . . Jerk.”

  The parrot appeared out of nowhere in front of me, greeting me with a nod of his beak.

  “Hey, bird.”

  I slowly held out my hand and the parrot landed on my forearm. I petted him and felt a bit better having some company—even if he was just a pile of feathers brought out of a dream.

  “Uaaa—”

  “I missed you.” I cut him off before he could insult me. “That’s how desperate I am . . . I’m talking to you now.”

  A man who was leaning on the bus stop shelter waiting for a bus looked at me strangely. I wasn’t fazed in the least.

  “Uaaac . . . Moron,” said the parrot, changing his voice and hopping onto my shoulder. “I don’t much like you . . . Uaaac . . .”

  “He wasn’t talking about you,” I said to the man waiting for the bus. “He’s just—”

  “What in the hell are you talking about, boy?”

  �
��About the parrot. He wasn’t insulting you.”

  “Parrot? Are you crazy?”

  I was as surprised by the look on his face as I was by his response. What was he—

  “Look who we have here.”

  Someone grabbed me by the shoulder and forced me to turn around. It was Eloy. Of all the morons I could have run into at that moment, it had to be him.

  “Leave me alone, Eloy.”

  “But I just wanted to say hi and ask how your head is.”

  “That’s interesting. I was going to ask you the same thing. I hear our goalie got a pretty good shot in on you.”

  He didn’t like my response. What he didn’t know was that I had quite a stockpile of rage built up inside me just waiting to be unleashed on him.

  “Very funny, loser. Your team sucks. You haven’t won a single game.”

  “Uaaac . . .”

  The parrot, still on my shoulder, had just reminded me that I had more important matters to attend to than to waste time with this douche.

  “What are you looking at, stupid?”

  “Later, Eloy. I don’t have time for your crap.”

  I started walking away without bothering to wait for his reply.

  “You’re leaving? No big surprise. I’ve always said you’re a moron. I don’t much like you.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Eloy had just said the exact same words as the parrot had said when the man at the bus stop had looked at me strangely. I now recognized the voice the parrot had used was an imitation of Eloy. He was trying to warn me that this was going to happen by repeating the words Eloy had apparently already said to one of his friends about me.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I think you heard me loud and clear. Got a problem with that?”

  I walked toward Eloy with my fists clenched, then stopped just a short distance away and stared at him defiantly. I was burning with rage from everything that was happening to me. But the bird was still on my shoulder and I didn’t want him to get hurt just in case he’d tell me something else important or let some clue slip out that could help me with the twins. So I swiped him off my shoulder and he flew off.

  “What are you doing? Why are you wiping your shoulder?”

  “I was getting rid of the parrot. Got a problem with that?”

  Eloy scrunched up his face. “Are you screwing with me? What parrot are you talking about? You think I’m an idiot or something?”

  Then it dawned on me. The look on his face was the same as the one on the face of the man at the bus stop when I’d mentioned the parrot, which meant . . .

  Eloy shoved me with both hands, forcefully enough to make me take a step backward. My fury was unleashed. I took advantage of having one foot back to gather momentum. The blow I delivered must have landed right in the pit of his stomach because Eloy doubled over, gasping for breath.

  “That’s for thumping me with the ball during the match.” I looked at him curled up in a ball on the ground, and knew that still wasn’t enough for me. I kicked him in the ribs. “And that’s for being such a dick.”

  I’m probably a horrible person but it felt really good, kicking that idiot. I actually had to hold myself back from going at him a third time. And if I didn’t, it was only because Eloy unwittingly had helped me understand a really important detail that was as simple as it was astounding: I was the only one who could see and hear the parrot.

  By the time I got home I was determined to discover the reason for all the lies centered around my father. I was glad my mother wasn’t there since my image of her had deteriorated and I just didn’t feel like facing her yet. I now saw her as a liar who’d teamed up with my supposed father to deceive me.

  She’d left a note telling me she had to go to the doctor and that she’d left me something to eat in the refrigerator. I realized then I hadn’t eaten a thing all day, but I still wasn’t hungry.

  I went straight to my father’s office. It was locked, as always. They never let me go in there because it was his work space, where he kept very important documents. And I had always respected that. Not because I was obedient, but because I wasn’t interested in those papers—until now. As I was picking the lock on the door I wondered if I’d been too naïve, if any other kid in my situation would have figured it all out sooner. I didn’t think that was likely. No one I knew was singularly devoted to snooping through their parents’ official documents. Knowing where they kept their wallets so we could occasionally borrow money was good enough.

  The door finally gave up the fight and I dove into the folders that were sitting on top of the desk. I rifled through them with trembling hands, nervous beyond belief.

  It was all true. I understood nothing of what was written in those documents but they were all on the company letterhead and the signature at the bottom of every one of them was my mother’s. She was the sole owner. A couple of times there was another signature next to hers . . . the lawyer’s.

  I scoured the whole office until I found my birth certificate. The tiny glimmer of hope I was still clinging to that the lawyer’s story was a barefaced lie died when I read two words that instantaneously froze my heart: “Father unknown.”

  But I did know my father—or at least the man that had been passing himself off as him . . .

  I threw the folders and documents on the floor and screamed out in anger. I took my rage out on a framed photo of me that was hanging on the wall, smashing it to bits, and then I kicked the chair. I ended up on the floor, gasping for breath.

  Why had they deceived me? What reason could there possibly be to put your child through something like that? My mother was too good a person; it couldn’t have been her idea. But there must have been a very compelling motive for her to have kept the truth from me. And only one possibility occurred to me: she’d done it for my own good because she believed it was the best thing for me. My father was the guilty one in all this. He always made the decisions, like the ones about my schooling, and I hated him for it. I also hated that my mother was so submissive; she constantly gave in to him. Either they’d both been putting on the best show of their lives or my father had planned everything on his own.

  One possibility of why my mother would have to take part in his plan popped into my head. I was his insurance. All he’d have to do was threaten to hurt me for my mother to carry out all his orders. Imagining her living in fear was horrifying to me. And whatever my father wanted to get out of this was tied to my dreams, to the twins, and to my future sisters. Maybe he’d been trying to get my mother pregnant this whole time. The question was, why?

  I decided to avoid my mother so she wouldn’t guess I suspected something—just in case my father would pump her for information or the twins were spying on her dreams. So I left her a saccharine-sweet note saying I was going to sleep over at Ivan’s house, and then I left. On the way to Ivan’s I stopped to pick up a few things—a yellow canary was one of them.

  “Dude, I thought you weren’t coming back,” said Ivan as he opened the door. “ What did you bring?” He was pointing at the backpack slung over my back.

  “The only things I could think of,” I said. “Let’s go to your room.”

  “Don’t worry, my father’s not here.”

  Good to know, but that didn’t change anything—except to maybe eliminate any possible interruptions.

  “Just the same, let’s go to your room. We need the bed.”

  Ivan looked at me blankly, his eyes dulled by fatigue. The lack of sleep was really hitting him hard now. Twice on the way to his room he steadied himself on the wall. I was afraid I’d have to carry him if he collapsed, and all the possible consequences of him passing out raced through my mind. The twins had made contact with me when I was out cold after Eloy had blasted me in the head with the ball on the soccer field . . .

  There was a fork on the bed, the tines stained red. Ivan looked away when he saw me pick it up.

  “What’s this?”

  “I . . . It’s nothing.”
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  “This is blood. What did you do, Ivan?”

  “I was falling asleep,” he said, collapsing into a chair. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I pushed back his shirt sleeve despite his protests. He was just too weak to fight me. The fork had three tines, and Ivan’s arm revealed nine round wounds, red with dried blood.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Dude, I’m really, really sorry. I tried.”

  “I have to clean up those puncture wounds for you.”

  I washed them off with soap and water. Then I poured on some hydrogen peroxide and bandaged his arm.

  “I don’t think I fell asleep,” lamented Ivan, “but I can’t be sure. I was desperate. I’m sorry, ma—”

  “No! I’m the one who should be apologizing. This is all my fault. Those girls who are harassing you in your dreams are after me. They’re torturing you to blackmail me.”

  He nodded, but I couldn’t tell whether he hated me or forgave me.

  “What do they want from you?”

  “I still don’t know. They’ve been playing a really bizarre game with me. What I do know is that they’re up to no good.”

  “And what are we going to do?” There was a touch of desperation in his worn-out voice.

  Ivan was suffering, and I was impressed by the strength he’d demonstrated when he’d managed to stay awake. The images those twins were planting in his dreams must have been terrifying.

  “I have a plan,” I assured him, trying to sound confident.

  “From the look on your face, it must not be good.”

  Ivan could read me like a book.

  “But it might work.” I paused for a moment to gather my nerve before continuing. “Pay attention. You know I can’t tell you all the details in case you . . . fall asleep. But I want you to know I tried.” Ivan made a move to speak, but I cut him off. “Don’t interrupt me! I have to say this. Nothing about this is normal, so I have no way of knowing if what I’m going to try makes any sense. After giving it a lot of thought, it’s the only idea I came up with that I think can work. At any rate, I’m going to put a stop to your problem in the next one or two hours.”