Fever Dream

by Samanta Schweblin

  “She’s not a psychic. She always makes sure people understand that. But she can see people’s energy, she can read it.”

  “What do you mean, she can read it?”

  “She can tell if someone is sick, and where in the body the negative energy is coming from. She cures headaches, nausea, skin ulcers, and cases of vomiting blood. If you reach her in time, she can stop miscarriages.”

  “Are there that many miscarriages?”

  “She says that everything is energy.”

  “My grandmother always said that.”

  “What she does is detect it, block it if it’s negative, mobilize it if it’s positive. Here in town people consult her a lot, and sometimes people come from out of town to see her. Her children live in the house behind hers. She has seven kids, all boys. They take care of her and see to all her needs, but people say they never go into her house. Should we go over to the pool with Nina?”

  “No, don’t worry.”

  “Nina!” Carla calls out to her, and only then does Nina see us in the car.

  Nina smiles. She has a divine smile: her dimples show and her nose wrinkles a little. She stands up, picks up her mole from the beach chair, and runs toward us. Carla reaches to open the backseat door for her. She moves in the driver’s seat with such naturalness it’s hard to believe she got in this car for the first time today.

  “But I have to smoke, Amanda. I’m sorry about Nina, but I can’t finish this story without another smoke.”

  I make an unconcerned gesture and hand her the pack again.

  “Blow it out the window,” I say while Nina gets into the backseat.

  “Mommy.”

  “What, sweetie?” says Carla, but Nina ignores her and asks me:

  “Mommy, when are we going to open the box of lollipops?”

  Well trained by her father, Nina settles in and buckles her seat belt.

  “In a little while,” I tell her.

  “Okay,” says Nina.

  “Okay,” says Carla, and that’s when I notice there’s nothing left now of the drama from before she started to tell her story. She’s not crying anymore, she’s not leaning her head against the steering wheel. She is unbothered by the interruptions as she talks, as if she had all the time in the world and were enjoying this return to her past. I wonder, David, if you could really have changed that much, if for Carla telling it all over again brought her back, if only for a moment, to that other son she claims to miss so much.

  “As soon as the woman opened the door I thrust David into her arms. But people like her are sensible as well as esoteric. So she put David down on the floor, gave me a glass of water, and wouldn’t start talking until I’d calmed down some. The water brought a little of my soul back to my body and it’s true, for a moment I considered that my fears might all be a fit of madness, I thought of other possible reasons why the horse could be sick. The woman was staring at David while he played, arranging the decorative miniatures that were on the TV table into a single-file line. She went over to him and played with him a moment. She studied him attentively, discreetly, sometimes resting a hand on his shoulder, or holding his chin to look him straight in the eyes. ‘The horse is already dead,’ said the woman, and I swear I hadn’t said anything yet about the horse. She said David still had a few hours, maybe a day, but that soon he would need help breathing. ‘It’s poison,’ she said. ‘It’s going to attack his heart.’ I sat there looking at her. I don’t even remember how long I was like that, frozen and unable to say a word. Then the woman said something terrible. Something worse than announcing to you how your son is going to die.”

  “What did she say?” asks Nina.

  “Go on inside and open the lollipops,” I tell her.

  Nina takes off her seat belt, grabs her mole, and runs toward the house.

  “She said that David’s body couldn’t withstand the poisoning, that he would die, but that we could try a migration.”

  “A migration?”

  Carla puts out her unfinished cigarette and leaves her arm outstretched, almost hanging from her body, as if the whole exercise of smoking had left her completely exhausted.

  “If we could move David’s spirit to another body in time, then part of the poison would also go with him. Split into two bodies, there was the chance he could pull through. It wasn’t a sure thing, but sometimes it worked.”

  “What do you mean, sometimes? She’d done it before?”

  “It was the only way she knew to save David. The woman handed me a cup of tea, she said that drinking it slowly would calm me down, that it would help me make my decision, but I gulped it down in two sips. I couldn’t even put what I was hearing in order. My head was a tangled mess of guilt and terror and my whole body was shaking.”

  “But do you really believe in those things?”

  “Then David tripped, or it seemed to me he’d tripped, and then he didn’t get up. I saw him from behind, wearing his favorite shirt that had little soldiers on it, trying to coordinate his arms so he could stand up. It was a clumsy and futile movement that reminded me of the ones he’d made when he was still learning to stand on his own. It was an effort he didn’t need to make anymore, and I understood that the nightmare was starting. When he turned toward me he was frowning, and he made a strange gesture, like he was in pain. I ran to him and hugged him. I hugged him so hard, Amanda, so hard it seemed impossible that anyone or anything in the world could take him from my arms. I heard him breathing very close to my ear, a little fast. Then the woman separated us with a gentle but firm movement. David sat back against the sofa, and he started to rub his eyes and mouth. ‘We’ll have to do it soon,’ said the woman. I asked her where David, David’s soul, would go, if we could keep him close, if we could choose a good family for him.”

  “I don’t know if I understand, Carla.”

  “You do understand, Amanda, you understand perfectly.”

  I want to tell Carla that this is all a bunch of nonsense.

  That’s your opinion. It’s not important.

  It’s just that I can’t believe a story like that. But at what point in the story is it appropriate to get angry?

  “The woman said that she couldn’t choose the family he went to,” said Carla. “She wouldn’t know where he’d gone. She also said that the migration would have its consequences. There isn’t room in a body for two spirits, and there’s no body without a spirit. The transmigration would take David’s spirit to a healthy body, but it would also bring an unknown spirit to the sick body. Something of each of them would be left in the other. He wouldn’t be the same anymore, and I would have to be willing to accept his new being.”

  “His new being?”

  “To me it was so important to know where he would go, Amanda. But she said no, it was better not to know. She said the important thing was to free David from the sick body, and to understand that, even without David in that body, I would still be responsible for it, for the body, no matter what happened. I had to accept that compromise.”

  “But David . . .”

  “And while I was turning it all over in my mind, David came up to me again and hugged me. His eyes were swollen, his eyelids were red and taut, inflated like the horse’s. He wasn’t exactly crying—the tears were falling but he didn’t shout or blink. He was weak and terrified. I kissed his forehead and I realized he was burning with a high fever. Burning up, Amanda. At that moment my David must have already been seeing heaven.”

  Your mother grabs the steering wheel and sits looking at the gate at the end of my driveway. She is losing you all over again: the happy part of her story is over. When I met her some days before, I’d thought she was renting a summerhouse like I was, while her husband was working nearby.

  What made you think she was from out of town, too?

  Maybe because I saw her as so sophisticated, with her colored blouses
and her big bun, so nice, so different and foreign from everything around her. Now I feel uneasy because she starts crying again, and because she won’t let go of the wheel in my husband’s car, and because Nina is wandering around the house alone. I should have told Nina that when she got the lollipops she should come back to the car, but no, better for her to stay away, there’s no reason for Nina to hear this story.

  “Carla,” I said.

  “I told her yes. I told her to do it. I said we should do whatever we had to do. The woman wanted us to go into another room. I picked up David, who practically passed out on my shoulder. He was so hot and so swollen he felt strange to the touch. The woman opened the door to a room, the last one at the end of the hall. She gestured to me to wait in the doorway, and she went in. The room was dark, and from outside I could barely make out what she was doing. She put a large, low washbasin in the center of the room. I understood what it was when I heard the sound of the water, which she poured into a bucket first. She went out to the kitchen, looking focused as she passed us, and halfway there she turned and looked at David for a moment. She looked at his body as if she wanted to memorize his shape or maybe his measurements. She came back with a big spool of thin hemp rope and a handheld fan, and she went back into the room. David was boiling so much by then that when she took him from me my neck and chest were soaked with sweat. It was a quick movement, her hands darted out from the room’s darkness and then disappeared again with David. It was the last time I held him in my arms. The woman came out again, without David; she led me to the kitchen and poured me more tea. She said I’d have to wait right there. If I moved around the house, she said, I could shift other things by accident. In a migration, she said, only the things that are prepared to move should be in motion. And I clutched the teacup and leaned my head against the wall. She went back down the hall without another word. At no point did David call for me, nor did I hear him talk or cry. A few minutes later, I heard the door to the bedroom close. On a kitchen shelf across from me, the seven sons, now grown men, stared out at me the whole time from a large picture frame. Naked from the waist up, red beneath the sun, they were smiling and leaning on their rakes, and behind them was the big soy field, recently cut. And just like that, motionless, I waited for a long time. Maybe two hours, I’d say, without drinking the tea or ever taking my head from the wall.”

  “Did you hear anything, in all that time?”

  “Nothing. Just the door opening once it was all over. I straightened up, pushed the tea aside, my whole body alert, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. I didn’t know if I was still capable. I heard her footsteps, which by then I could recognize, but nothing else. The steps stopped halfway to the kitchen, before she came into view. And then she called to him. ‘Come on, David,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take you to your mother.’ I held on to the edge of my seat. I didn’t want to see him, Amanda, all I wanted was to escape. I wanted it desperately. I wondered if I could reach the front door before they got to the kitchen. But I couldn’t move. Then I heard his footsteps, very soft on the wood. Short and uncertain, so different from how my David walked. They stopped after every four or five steps; hers would stop as well while she waited for him. They were almost to the kitchen. His little hand, dirty now with dry mud or dust, fumbled over the wall as he leaned against it. Our eyes met, but I looked away immediately. She pushed him toward me and he took a few more steps, almost stumbling, and now he was leaning on the table. I think I’d stopped breathing for that entire time.When I started again, when he took another step toward me, this time of his own volition, I leaned away. He was very flushed, and sweating. His feet were wet; the damp prints he’d left behind him were already starting to dry.”

  “And you didn’t pick him up, Carla? You didn’t hug him?”

  “I sat there looking at his dirty hands. He was using them to hold on to the table like a railing as he walked, and then I saw his wrists. He had marks on his skin, lines like bracelets around his wrists, and a little above them, too, maybe left by the rope. ‘It seems cruel,’ said the woman as she approached, watching my reaction and David’s next step, ‘but we have to make sure that only the spirit leaves.’ She caressed his wrists, and as if forgiving herself she said, ‘The body has to stay.’ She yawned, I realized she had been yawning since she returned to the kitchen. She said it was the effect of the transmigration, and that it would happen to him, too, as soon as he finished waking up. It was important to get it all out, to yawn with the mouth wide open, to ‘let it go.’”

  “What did David do?” I asked.

  “The woman pulled out the chair next to me for him to sit down.”

  “And you? You didn’t even touch him, poor thing?”

  “Then the woman poured more tea, keeping an eye on us while she did, watchful over our meeting. David had trouble climbing into the chair, but I couldn’t bring myself to help him. Then he sat there looking at his hands. ‘He has to yawn soon,’ said the woman, yawning deeply, covering her mouth. She sat down at the table too, with her tea, and she looked at him attentively. I asked her how it had gone. ‘Better than I expected,’ she said. The transmigration had taken part of the poison away, and now, split between two bodies, it would lose the battle.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That David would survive. David’s body, and also David in his new body.”

  I look at Carla and Carla looks at me. She’s wearing an openly false smile, like a clown’s, which for a moment confuses me and makes me think that this is all a long joke in bad taste. But she says:

  “So this one is my new David. This monster.”

  “Carla, don’t get mad, but I need to see what Nina’s up to.”

  She nods and looks back at her hands on the steering wheel. I shift, preparing to get out of the car, but she makes no move to follow me. I hesitate for a moment but now I really am worried about Nina. How can I measure my rescue distance if I don’t know where she is? I get out and walk toward the house. There’s a bit of a breeze, I can feel it on my back and on my legs, sweaty from the seat. Then I see Nina through the window. She’s moving a chair from the living room to the kitchen, dragging it behind her. Everything’s in order, I think, but I keep walking toward the house. Everything in order. I go up the three steps to the deck, open the screen door, go in, and close it behind me. I slide the lock because that’s what I always do, instinctively, and with my forehead against the screen I stand looking at the car, alert to any movement, watching the red bun above the driver’s-seat headrest.

  She called you a monster, and I keep thinking about that. It must be very sad to be whatever it is you are now, and on top of that your mother calls you a monster.

  You’re confused, and that’s not good for this story. I’m a normal boy.

  This isn’t normal, David. There’s only darkness, and you’re talking into my ear. I don’t even know if this is really happening.

  It’s happening, Amanda. I’m kneeling at the edge of your bed, in one of the rooms at the emergency clinic. We don’t have much time, and before time runs out we have to find the exact moment.

  And Nina? If all of this is really happening, where is Nina? My God, where is Nina?

  That doesn’t matter.

  It’s the only thing that matters.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Enough, David, I don’t want to keep going.

  If we don’t go on, there’s no reason for me to stay here with you. I’m going to leave, and you’ll be left alone.

  No, please.

  What happens now, in the yard? You’re in the doorway, you have your forehead against the screen.

  Yes.

  And then?

  Carla’s bun moves a little over the seat, as if she were looking to either side.

  What else? What else is happening in that very moment?

  I shift the weight of my body from one leg to the other.<
br />
  Why?

  Because it’s a relief; because lately I feel like staying on my feet requires a huge effort. I told my husband about that feeling once, and he said maybe I was depressed. That was before Nina was born. The feeling is still there, but it’s not the most important thing now. I’m just tired, that’s what I tell myself, and sometimes I’m afraid when I think that everyday problems might be a little more terrible for me than for other people.

  And what happens then?

  Nina comes up to me and hugs my legs.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “Shhh.”

  She lets go of me and leans against the screen door too. Then the car door opens. One of Carla’s legs emerges, then the other. Nina gives me her hand. Carla stands, picks up of her purse, and adjusts her bikini. I’m afraid she’s going to turn toward us and see us, but she doesn’t; she doesn’t even cross the yard to pick up her sandals. She walks directly to the gate with her purse under her arm. Upright and in a straight line, as if she were wearing a long dress that required a lot of concentration when she walked. Only when your mother reaches the street and disappears behind the privet does Nina let go of me. Where is Nina now, David? I need to know.

  Tell me more about the rescue distance.

  It changes depending on the situation. For example, in the first hours we spent in the vacation house, I wanted Nina close by at all times. I needed to know how many exits the house had, find the areas of the floor with the most splinters, see if the creaky stairs posed any kind of danger. I showed these things to Nina, who isn’t fearful but is obedient, and on the second day the invisible thread that ties us together unspooled again. It was there, but it was more permissive, it gave us independence, on and off. So, the rescue distance is important?

  Very important.

  I go into the kitchen and Nina follows me. I sit her on a bench and then I make a little salad with tuna. Nina asks me if the woman is gone, if I’m sure, and when I tell her yes she gets down from the bench and goes running outside through the door leading to the yard, and she runs all the way around the house, shouting and laughing, and then she comes back inside. It takes her less than a minute. I call her in and sit her down in front of her plate, she eats a little and then goes out to take another lap around the house.