by Dilloway, PT
He didn’t know how much time went by. The sun went down and the moon rose while the young woman still floated in the water. He didn’t know how much longer she could hold out, but she was beginning to tire. Her eyes drooped and her breathing slowed. Before long she wouldn’t have the ability to stay afloat and would sink beneath the water.
She began to whisper her brother’s name, tears running down her cheeks again. She wasn’t going to make it; she was going to drown unless he did something. He scrambled to think of some way to keep her alive without interfering in a way that could turn deadly.
Then he imagined a piece of driftwood, large enough and strong enough for her to climb onto. He nudged the driftwood into her arm and she latched on. After three tries she managed to mount the driftwood, and then closed her eyes. She must not have lost consciousness, because the dream continued. She floated in the moonlight while Max hovered over her, keeping watch for any waves that might swamp the makeshift craft.
As she lay there, he imagined running his fingers through her hair and whispering to her that everything would turn out all right. He imagined the feel of her lips against his and their arms wrapped around each other. He could turn this piece of driftwood into a magic carpet and go anywhere. At least until she woke up and saw that her savior was a blind man just released from an institution.
She continued to mumble her brother’s name all through the night. She must have really loved him, he thought and conjured up the picture she’d lost in the ocean. His own graduation had occurred three weeks ago when he earned his GED. No one had gathered around him to take a picture. Dr. Lee shook his hand and praised himself for convincing Max to take the test.
Max wondered why he’d gone to the trouble of sitting for the test. He supposed they had kept pushing him to leave the hospital until he decided to humor them by giving it a try. Now here he was on an imaginary ocean with a strange woman who couldn’t see him, sitting on a piece of driftwood and waiting for her to wake up. Dr. Lee would say he was imagining the whole thing, that there was no girl, no ocean, and no driftwood. But Max knew this young woman was real and that’s why he would end up back in the hospital. He possessed a power too dangerous to live a normal life among normal people.
The young woman moaned her brother’s name again as the sun began to rise. Maybe she’ll never wake up. He couldn’t sit here on a raft with her for the rest of his life and he couldn’t just leave her out here for all eternity. With a flick of his finger, the current reversed direction, carrying the driftwood back towards land. Then he left the photograph next to the young woman so she would find it when she woke.
On the trip back, he considered what to do after they reached the shore. He wondered if he should show himself to her in the dream and in the real world. In the dream he had the advantage not only of being able to see, but to make himself as handsome or hideous as he wanted. Only one time had he used that ability, on his first night at Gull Island Psych. After that night, he told himself never to inject himself into someone else’s dream again.
In the real world he was blind and “gangly” as one of the nurses at Gull Island Psych had described him. A beautiful young woman like this would probably scream at the sight of him standing over her bed. If he tried to explain what he’d done, she’d only think of him as a creep.
The driftwood beached itself on the shore and Max picked up the unconscious girl to carry her onto a dune. She can’t weigh more than one-ten, he told himself. At five-nine, that made her almost anorexic. Maybe that’s why she was in the hospital.
After placing the family photograph next to her on the dune, Max lifted into the sky. The blue of the sky, white of the clouds, and yellow of the sun became a uniform darkness as he opened his eyes. He had made it back into the real world.
He listened to the beeping, humming, and hissing of machines as he crept towards the young woman’s bed. He touched the mattress and discovered her foot. Then, using his estimate of her height, he laid his hands on her shoulders. He shook her gently and then waited for her to wake up. Her breathing remained even. He shook her again with an identical result. He touched her face as he had with his parents and Dr. Perry, feeling a web of scars along the left side of her face. Everything became clear to him.
She had been injured and now lay in a coma. An IV stand jangled as he hurried out of the hospital room. Someone called for him to slow down as he ran, but he couldn’t stop. He had stayed too long already.
Chapter 3
On the bus ride back to Midway House, he wondered about her. What had happened to put her in the coma? Why was her face bandaged? How long had she been in that state? Then, more importantly, he considered what would happen in her unconscious world now that he’d guided her back to the shore.
It’s none of my business, he told himself. She would wake up at some point or she wouldn’t, at which time someone would pull the plug on her. Whatever happened, it had nothing to do with him. He’d only gone to the hospital to see Dr. Perry, not to meddle in a young woman’s dream.
He considered his possible new job at the church tomorrow to keep from thinking about her. They would want him to play hymns, none of which he knew. Dad had taught him the classics by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin, not anything religious. His parents had never taken him to a church; he didn’t know if his parents had belonged to any religion. Their closed-casket service had been held in the funeral home with only a few friends and loved ones, no clergy among them.
The driver announced his stop and Max heard the metal-on-metal screeching of the brakes as the bus came to a halt. Then Max found his way along the aisle and down the steps. He waited for the bus to drive away, the stench of rotten eggs left in its wake, before listening carefully for any traffic and crossing the street.
Midway House smelled of the dead fish brought in by boats in the harbor. As Max climbed up the front steps, the breeze carried the odor of dead fish from the harbor. The thought of water brought to mind the unconscious woman at the hospital.
He leaned against the front porch railing, imagining her still lying there on the beach, alone and helpless. She was trapped within her own mind, unable to wake up. How long would she stay on that beach? Months or even years he supposed. Until she woke up, died, or maybe sunk deeper into unconsciousness. If only he could do something to help.
“Mr. Caldwell! I hadn’t realized you’d come back yet!” Mrs. Garnett said everything like a mother praising a toddler for learning to use the potty. Max wished for a pair of earplugs to dampen the volume of her talking. “You’re just in time to help with dinner!”
Mrs. Garnett—like Drs. Lee and Perry—seemed to think Max only needed a job to find happiness. She guided him through the living room with its incessantly loud television and into the kitchen. “I really don’t want to tonight,” he said. “I’m kind of tired from going to the hospital. I’d rather just go to bed if you don’t mind.”
“Now, Max, everyone is supposed to pitch in around here! You can help set the table! Just put one bundle of silverware at each seat!” She jammed a basket into his stomach, which he took with his free hand. He went out to the table and used his cane to find each chair, and then put a rolled-up cloth napkin on the table in the vicinity of the chair. Before he finished, Mrs. Garnett gave him another basket that smelled like ashes.
On Mrs. Garnett’s insistence, the residents of Midway House helped cook the dinner too, but none of them knew how to cook. Tonight they made undercooked roast, burnt dinner rolls, and a tossed salad, the only idiot-proof dish. Max took an extra helping of the salad and gnawed politely on a piece of beef.
Around him sat Sheila with anorexia, Leslie with agoraphobia, Dave with kleptomania, Annie with clinical depression, and Jerry with alcoholism. While the others ate in silence, Jerry couldn’t stop talking. His voice rivaled Mrs. Garnett’s in volume. “I haven’t eaten this well in five years. I’ll have to let out my belt another notch after this. Annie, where did you learn to cook?”
Anni
e sat next to Max. She responded to Jerry’s question by pushing away from the table and running up the steps. After her door slammed, Jerry said, “What did I say?”
“Nothing Jerry! Annie is just a little sensitive today! I’ll go talk to her!” Mrs. Garnett left the table and Max heard her call up the stairs, “Annie, honey, please come down!”
“She’s such a drama queen,” Sheila said.
“At least she didn’t wake up the whole house last night,” Leslie said.
“Guys, guys, guys, let’s not fight. This isn’t The Real World. There aren’t any cameras going,” Jerry said.
“I’m going to bed,” Sheila said.
“Make sure you put a gag on tonight,” Leslie said.
“Why don’t I put a gag up your ass. You—”
Max seized the opportunity to go upstairs to his room. At first Mrs. Garnett had insisted he take a room downstairs, but he didn’t want preferential treatment because he couldn’t see.
“You can do anything people with 20/20 vision can,” Mom told him in the car after the doctor said he would lose his vision completely by second grade.
“I can’t play centerfield for the Mariners,” he said.
“Well, a lot of people can’t do that either, honey. Even people with perfect vision. There are still lots of things you can do. No matter what anyone says, you never forget that.”
His room smelled musty, but opening the window would only bring in the manure odor from the fields. He searched the wall for his shelf of records and pulled each down to feel the Braille label. He found the one he wanted: Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” as conducted by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Dad had met the legendary conductor backstage after a recital. Bernstein touched him on the shoulder and said, “You have a great future ahead of you.”
Max placed the well-worn record onto his father’s player and waited for the first strains of music before collapsing onto the bed. Barber’s melody had become his favorite in the days after his parents died. There was something so haunting and yet soothing about how the music rose incrementally until the soaring crescendo before drifting back into silence. The flow of a river had inspired Barber to write the music, but to Max it seemed more like life. The way people’s lives grew and grew until they reached the crescendo at death, and then silence.
Some, like his parents, reached the end too soon. It was his fault. He never should have gone into their bedroom, but he wanted to punish them for keeping him from Alicia Hauptmann. He wanted to make them suffer a little bit. But only a little bit. He hadn’t meant for things to get out of hand.
By the time the record finished, his face was wet from tears. No one understood. Even this Dr. Perry who wanted to be his friend wouldn’t understand if he explained. She would think it was all in his head. A defense mechanism. Maybe that was the punishment he deserved.
In his own dreams he had no power over events. In tonight’s dream, he saw a piece of driftwood floating at sea. Instead of the beautiful young woman, he saw his parents. They waved their arms and called to him, but he was stranded on the shore. He could only watch as a wave built up behind their raft, and then swamped them.
When he woke, his throat felt too dry to scream. Sweat stained his clothes and sheets, the moisture a grim reminder of the dream. He pressed both hands to his face and leaned back against the wall. He couldn’t go to sleep again now without the risk of finding himself back in the same dream.
He went over to the record player and put on Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata. His fingers involuntarily pounded imaginary keys in time with the music. After Max went blind, Dad force-fed him endless hours of Beethoven. “He went deaf and still wrote beautiful music. He didn’t let a handicap impede him.”
Max sat back down on the bed and thought about the dream. In the case of his dream, the message was obvious. Abandoning the young woman in the coma was no different than abandoning his parents. He hadn’t caused the woman’s coma, but leaving her to the hands of fate wouldn’t be any better. At least he could go back and make sure she was all right. Then he wouldn’t have anything to worry about.
The next morning, instead of taking the bus to Holy Redeemer Church to see Dr. Perry’s pastor, he went back to the hospital. Since he didn’t know the young woman’s exact location, he went to the gift shop to buy some flowers. He felt the petals of different bouquets, deciding on a grouping of what smelled like daisies. At the counter, he asked the clerk where he could find a coma patient. The man directed him to a nurse’s station at the end of the hall, through a set of double-doors. He made his way down the corridor and stopped after a set of doors opened automatically at his approach.
“Can I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
“I’m looking for a patient. She’s in a coma.”
“Name?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“You don’t know who you’re looking for?”
“She’s sort of a friend of a friend. I live next to one of her co-workers.” He held up the flowers and hoped she believed the lie.
“Ah, so you’re here to see Sarah.”
“Sarah? That sounds right.”
“Well, you’re the first visitor she’s had in a month.”
“You mean her parents haven’t come? Or a brother or sister?” Or a husband? he added to himself.
“She doesn’t have any. It’s so sad, for someone to be alone like that. Let me take those flowers and I’ll find something to put them in.” The nurse took the flowers with one hand and with the other led him to Sarah’s room.
“What happened to her?” he asked.
“House fire. Second- and third-degree burns over sixty percent of her body.” The nurse led Max to a chair next to the bed and then sighed. “There’s not much hope for her, but maybe a visitor will help. I’ll put the flowers right next to her bed where she can smell them and let you talk. Take all the time you need.”
He waited until he heard the click of the door and then allowed her mind to pull him back into her world.
Chapter 4
He found himself inside a house scaled for giants. The front door stood fifty feet high. The stairs leading to the second floor were each the size of a station wagon. The hallway leading to the rest of the ground floor stretched over the horizon.
He felt like a mouse in a cartoon, expecting a cat to pounce at any moment as he started down the hallway. Sarah must be in one of these rooms. Was she trapped? He considered calling out her name, but he didn’t want to reveal himself yet.
At the first door, he twisted a knob the size of a car’s tire and stuck his head into the room. He found a study with endless bookshelves devoid of books and a desk as tall as him. No one sat behind the desk, nor did Max see any signs that someone had recently used the room. On the desk he did find a photograph inflated to billboard proportions.
He recognized the pigtailed girl in the center of the photo as Sarah. She stood against a tropical sunset in a one-piece bathing suit with a ruffled skirt still dripping water. She smiled in the picture, showing off two missing front teeth and a dimple on each cheek. How old was she? Six, maybe seven at most, he guessed. Where were her parents and brother?
He turned the photograph facedown on the desk and tried to pry open one of the desk drawers, but it was locked. He swallowed and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before deleting the lock. When he slid the drawer open, he saw nothing. The other drawers produced identical results.
The next door took him to the dining room, which gave way to a living room. A layer of dust glazed the chairs and table in the dining room, while the recliner and sofa in the living room were wrapped in plastic. He couldn’t find so much as a magazine on the coffee table. Was someone moving into the house or moving out?
From the living room he stepped onto a deck overlooking the ocean. He recognized the shore from the last time he’d visited Sarah. He wondered why he hadn’t seen the house then. Her mind must have blocked it out f
or some reason. Almost as if she didn’t want to see the place.
He levitated up the staircase to the second floor. The first room he stuck his head into belonged to a boy. There were baseball pennants on the walls and a Star Wars bedspread draped over a twin-size mattress. Toys lay neatly piled in a box at the foot of the bed, giving the room an abandoned feeling.
The next room he ventured into was the master bedroom. A painting of a lighthouse hung over a bed made with military precision. Make-up and perfume bottles lined the vanity, but he found no clothes in the dresser drawers. Empty wire hangers jangled when he opened the closet.
In the hallway, he stopped as he heard a clap of thunder so loud it made the house shake. He went back into the master bedroom and looked out the window. Outside, the sky had turned dark as night. Streaks of lightning showed waves as high as the ones from Sarah’s earlier dream crashing onto the shore. The wind sounded like a jet engine, rattling the window until Max backed away.
Where was she? Sarah had to be in this house somewhere. At any moment the whole place could crumble, burying her in rubble. He saw a room at the opposite end of the hallway and ran towards it. He’d looked through every other room in the house; she had to be inside.
He opened the door and found himself in a world of pink. The walls, the curtains, and even the carpet were all a uniform light pink. Stuffed toys lay scattered about the floor and he saw a Fun with Dick and Jane on the vanity. Then another clap of thunder shook the room, knocking a box of apple juice onto the floor.
He heard a whimper come from the bed and saw a head of sandy hair appear from beneath the pink bedspread. He took a step back at the sight of the little girl from the photograph in the den. Only now her cheeks were red and lined with tears.
She pulled the covers up beneath her chin and then wiped snot from her nose. He waited a moment for a sign of recognition before deciding she couldn’t see him. He took a step towards the bed, thought better of it, and then moved to the door. When a bolt of lightning exploded outside, she screamed and ducked beneath the blankets again.