All I Ever Dreamed

by Michael Blumlein

  He sounded so sad.

  “Don’t lose hope,” I said. “It could be out there. It probably is. Maybe in winter, when the plants die down. Maybe then you’ll find it.”

  “In winter you’ll be gone.”

  “I will. Yes. In winter I live my own life.”

  “Of course. You must.”

  “I’ll be back next summer.”

  This seemed to raise his spirits, or else for my sake he decided to raise them on his own. “What more could a man desire?”

  “Goodbye, Uncle Matthew.”

  He held out his arms to me. “Godspeed.”

  That afternoon, with Jack at the beach with the kids for a final swim, I stood on our dock for a parting glimpse of paradise. The tide was out, and the mist had lifted. My eyes were drawn to the path I’d taken the previous day.

  One last try, I thought, and this time when I reached the boulders, I headed toward the apple tree, away from the shore. Choked by bittersweet, the tree had little fruit, but I managed to find one small apple and was about to bite into it when I heard the sound of oars. A moment later, Emily and her friend Christopher came into view. He was rowing our rowboat, and she was perched at the bow, guiding him. They were headed my way, which seemed a miscalculation, until it became clear that they meant to beach the boat and come ashore. Christopher gave a furious last pull and they hit the mud, then slid a few inches before jumping out and pulling the boat onto the grass. I crept deeper into the tree.

  Christopher said something to Emily that made her smile, and they locked hands. She led him toward one of the boulders and with a gesture I had seen a thousand times brushed the hair out of her face. Then she paused, and for an instant I was certain she knew I was there. My heart was pounding. The two of them drew closer together. And closer still, until their lips were almost touching.

  I didn’t know what to do. The rock they were standing next to was the one that was covered with poison ivy. If Emily moved but a fraction of an inch back, she would touch the plant and within hours be in a terrible state. No one gets poison ivy worse than my daughter. It can lay her up for days. I wanted to shout out to her, to warn her and protect her. But at the same time my heart swelled with pride. There are dangers in the world, and evils far worse than a poisonous plant. My beautiful daughter, bless her, was oblivious to these. She wasn’t crippled with fear. She wasn’t frozen. She was doing just what she was meant to do, just in the way it was meant to be done.

  SNOW IN DIRT

  Once a Lifetime

  it can happen. Once a lifetime it should. I found the girl of my dreams in the garden. She was buried in dirt.

  I was digging a hole. Four feet down, three wide, a ditch for a foundation to prop up the falling shack at the back of the lot. Pine trees overhead. Bluest of skies. My ox-like shoulders, sweat running down my spine. She was hidden in soil, tucked between roots, still as a statue, beautiful. The shack, a ten by twenty foot post and beam redwood cabin, had been built after the Great Earthquake, and in its time had been shelter, wood shop, storage shed, chicken coop, teenage retreat, and hole-up for a drunk who beat his wife then cried all night in remorse. It had been falling down ever since I took the time to notice, pushed by the hill behind it, by gravity, clay and radiolarian chert. After watching passively for years, I finally decided to do something. I chased out the raccoons. I baited the mice. Took two weeks off work, cleared the calendar, jacked up the down hill side, cut a path through the fence to the back. I was thinking of making a career move. I was in between women. Hearing a mockingbird, catching my breath, smelling the pine sap.

  Very carefully, I dug her out.

  The Wheelbarrow

  was newly painted, glossy and red as lipstick. I lifted her over the front lip. She slid into the bed like satin. Her eyes were closed. She wore a sort of body suit the color of dead leaves. I picked a worm out of her hair. She had the face of a young woman. My neighbor appeared on his back porch, and I covered her with a tarpaulin.

  “Gardening?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “Looking good.” He meant me, not the garden. He was drunk, and when he was drunk, he flirted.

  “I like your roses,” I said, changing the subject.

  “Come on over. I’ll give you one.” He leered at me. “Come on. I’ll make sure to cut the thorns.”

  It had been like this since his lover had died three years before. He never talked about it, just drank and watched sports on TV.

  I begged out and beat it into the basement, parking the wheelbarrow and getting the girl out and onto a sofa inside. Her hair was long and dark. Her lips were full and slightly parted. I called my brother Frank.

  “Yo,” his machine said. “Talk to me.”

  I left a message, then washed up and hurried out. Mom was waiting at the entrance of the nursing home when I arrived, freshly bathed and made up. Her attendant was putting the finishing touches on her hair.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  Mom smiled. “Hello, Frank.”

  “Martin,” I corrected, pecking her on the cheek. “So what’s your pleasure? You want to walk, drive, what?”

  “The pie is very good,” she said.

  “You had pie?”

  She smiled again but didn’t answer. The attendant had tied a pink bow in her hair, something my mother would never have done in her life. It made her look girlish and even more helpless than she was.

  I took her arm. “How ’bout we take a drive?”

  We drove to the beach, then back-tracked through the park and up Twin Peaks, which was socked in by fog. We couldn’t see a thing. My mother called it soup. She loved it.

  Afterwards, we swung by my place. The woman was where I had left her. My mother frowned when she saw her, then glanced uncertainly at me.

  “I found her in the garden,” I explained. “Just a few hours ago.”

  She strained to understand, looking back and forth between the girl and me. Suddenly, her face broke into a smile.

  “Marry?”

  “No no no.” I shook my finger. “We just met.”

  She smacked her lips. “Kissy kissy. Pussy pussy. Thing comes out.”

  “Thank you, Mother. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Thing,” she repeated, gesturing with her hands, struggling for the word. She became frustrated and started to pace, back and forth in forced little steps. This was always a bad sign.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I get it. Thing. I understand.” A lie of course, and it didn’t work. My mother halted in mid-stride and pointed an accusatory finger at the woman.

  “Bad girl. Bad bad bad.” She wheeled on me. “You.”

  I supplied my name. She frowned. Now she looked lost. Now she started to cry. I sighed, fighting back my own tears, and steered her out of the room. We had a cup of tea. I took the bow out of her hair and told her I loved her. Then I drove her home.

  Frank came over around nine. He was all dressed up, and I asked where he’d been.

  “With the Grizzly,” he said with a swagger. This was his newest flame, so named by him for her size and the ferocity of her embrace. “She has a friend, Marty. Someone you should meet.”

  He was always trying to set me up. For the thousandth time, I told him I was a one woman man.

  “Yeah?” He pretended to search the room. “There someone I don’t know about?”

  I took him downstairs. The girl was lying where I left her. Her eyelids were translucent and shaded ever so lightly blue. She had started to breathe.

  “Well goddamm. My baby brother.” He punched my arm. “What’s that brown stuff she’s got on?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of protective coating or something.”

  “Looks like old newspaper.” He sniffed at it. “Smells like dirt.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. I found her in dirt.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I explained.

  “Jesus,” he said. “So what are you going to do wi
th her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m taking suggestions.”

  He thought for a minute. “We could ask Shirley.”

  Shirley was his other girl, his steady one, ever tolerant (a requi­site with Frank) and loaded with common sense.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “we could keep the lid on for a few days. See what develops. Who knows? The lady wakes up, maybe she’s as nice as she looks. Maybe the two of you get it on a little. Pardon me for saying, but you could use the action.”

  “Your suggestion being?”

  “I’m just thinking of something a guy said to me today in the shop. We were making small talk, and I asked him how he was doing. He gave me a funny look and said, you know what the answer is to that, don’t you? And I said, no, what’s the answer? And he said, it’s how many toys you got when you die. They can have wheels, gears, buttons, skirts . . . it doesn’t matter. Just how many you got on the day you croak.”

  “You liked that, did you?”

  “The guy’s an asshole, but yeah. I did. How many toys. I can think of worse ways to measure.”

  “You got toys, Frank?”

  “You know I do.” He winked at me, pulled out his wallet and handed me a foil-covered package nestled between two bills. “Safety first, Marty boy. You find her in the dirt, who knows? Maybe she’s dirty.”

  So that was Frank’s advice. After he left, I called my sister Carol to complete the family poll. She was on her way to bed, a ritual to be disturbed only on pain of death. She promised to stop by in the morning, which she did, arriving on the dot at seven, dressed for work in a snappy, tailored suit. She took one look at the girl and pulled a phone out of her purse, which she pushed at me.

  “Call 911, you jerk.”

  To my credit, the thought had occurred to me, but the truth was I didn’t want to. No doubt this is why I’d called Frank first.

  “She’s breathing,” I said defensively. “How bad can it be?”

  “She’s breathing. Terrific. Jesus, Marty.”

  I decided not to mention that she hadn’t been breathing before.

  “Does she have a pulse?”

  “Sure she has a pulse,” I said, thinking I don’t even know if she has a heart. “She’s sleeping.”

  “Have you tried to wake her up?”

  “Carol. Please. I would never wake a sleeping lady. You yourself taught me that.”

  “Get off it, Martin.” She took the girl’s wrist and felt for a pulse, then slapped the back of her hand a few times. She called to her loudly. She slapped her cheek.

  “Get her to a doctor, Marty. If you aren’t willing to call an ambulance, then take her yourself.”

  I suppose, at heart, this is what I wanted to hear. Sheepishly, I asked Carol to come with me.

  “Can’t. Got a meeting at eight.” She checked her watch, pecked me on the cheek and hurried out the basement door. A minute later she was back. Irritated but stalwart. My sister. Loyal to the core.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  We hefted her back into the wheelbarrow. Then I told Carol to go, I could handle the rest.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. “I got the family behind me. Check it out: you say I should get help, Mom says I should marry her, Frank says I should fuck her. I can’t lose. Anything I do is bound to be right.”

  The Problem of Concealment

  I solved with a blanket, wrapping her loosely, then sliding her in the back of my pickup and securing her with some bungie cords. At the hospital I swiped a gurney without being seen, hoisted her on top, unwrapped her and wheeled her inside. Because she had no ID and therefore no insurance, the intake clerk didn’t want to take her. He smirked when I said I’d vouch for her, and when I said that she was homeless (a tactical mistake), he looked at me with dried up pity and rolled his eyes. The clerk beside him had more sympathy and asked if she happened to be a city resident. A native, I replied. Tenth generation (it was a wild guess). Deeply rooted in our illustrious past.

  This claim met with suspicion, but the line behind me was growing. No clerk on earth likes the sight of a long line, and mine was no exception. With a rebuke and a promise not to be so lenient the next time, he filled out the necessary forms and waved us in.

  We spent a total of six hours in the emergency room, complicated by the fact they couldn’t get that brownish covering of hers off. Someone suggested it might be part of her skin, which prompted a call to the dermatologist, who came and discoursed at length on epidermal proliferation, psoriasis, ichthyosis and generalized melasma, none of which, in his opinion, this was. Blood was taken from a vein in her foot, and all the tests came back normal. A chest x-ray and electrocardiogram showed nothing out of the ordinary. A scan of her brain showed brain. Because they could not find an opening in her body suit, they could not get urine, but they sent hair to screen for heavy metal poisoning. They tested everything they could, and then they called a neurologist­.

  His name was Dr. Aymen. He had short, salt and pepper hair parted on the side, a deeply tanned face, a prominent jaw. He wore a blue bowtie, and his knee-length lab coat was stiffly starched. His manner, by contrast, was smooth as butter. The other doctors treated him with deference, clumping around the gurney and observing in silence as he poked and prodded the patient. When he was done, he took a half step back, slid his hands deep in the pockets of his lab coat and struck a professorial pose.

  “Thoughts?” he asked.

  There was a flurry of them. Encephalopathy, involutional melancholy, prolonged atonic epilepsy, drug overdose: I jotted down what I could, but I missed more than I got. All at once, Dr. Aymen seemed to notice me. He introduced himself, absorbed my name, asked if I was any relation to the subject, then politely asked me to leave.

  I assured him I wouldn’t make a peep. I wasn’t there to interfere.

  But he remained firm in his request. “Our suppositions are far-flung,” he explained. “And strictly conjectural. They’re easy to misinterpret. It would be a grave disservice to you if your hopes were falsely raised, or, worse, prematurely dashed. So please. Allow us a few minutes alone to ponder this fascinating case.”

  He seemed a nice enough fellow, earnest if somewhat pompous, but I had no intention of leaving. Again, I promised to stay out of the way.

  He regarded me sternly, then inclined his head. “As you wish.”

  Turning his back to me, he swept out of the room, followed immediately by his retinue of admirers. Twenty minutes later he returned.

  “Speculation is inherent in medicine,” he continued, as if no time at all had passed. “The possibilities of cause are, in nearly every case, manifold. This can be both a challenge and a thrill to the diagnostician, but to others, family for example, it can be unnerving. Not to mention cast us in an unflattering light. Our scientific musings can make us seem cold and hard of heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. Please accept my apologies if such was the case.”

  No apologies, I said, were necessary. Whatever it took to get to the bottom of things was okay by me.

  “So what does she have? Do you know?”

  “Possibly.” He glanced at her, then fixed his attention on me. “Are you sure you’ve left nothing out?”

  The implication was clear, and simply by asking, he made it a fact that I had. I thought back. The dirt? The worm in her hair? Family advice?

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  He waited, giving me time to reconsider. I didn’t need time.

  “What’s going on, Doctor?”

  The Theory,

  he said, “is hard to explain. Suffice it to say, there’s definitely a literature on this. It seems that intact bodies are turning up all the time. There’s actually a registry somewhere. I suggest we send a specimen of the patient’s DNA for fingerprinting. Perhaps there’s someone on file who’s been lost. Or who’s missing. Perhaps in this way we could identify her.”

  “Okay. Sure. But what does she have?”

  He gav
e me a patronizing look. “What you really want to know is, what can be done.”

  “I want to know if you’ve ever seen anything like this.”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “Someone buried in dirt?”

  “Young man. In forty years I’ve seen diseases and afflictions beyond your wildest dreams. The range of human pathology, not to mention survivability, is nothing short of miraculous. Our ability to downregulate vital functions, to enter at need into vegetative states, prolonged metaphases if you will . . .”

  He was interrupted by one of the other doctors, who handed him some papers held together by a clip. He perused them, mumbling to himself and nodding.

  “Yes,” he said. “Good. Just as I recalled. You made copies for the others?”

  “Yes,” the underling replied.

  “Excellent.” Dr. Aymen addressed me. “This is an article . . .” He halted a moment, then resumed with an air of gravity and subtle condescension. “A scientific article comparing the efficacy of three regimens for the revival of found bodies. Cohort study, two year follow-up, morbidity, mortality, proposed mechanisms . . . all of it. You see, young man, we are not living in the dark ages. We are not charlatans, nor do we operate by sleight of hand. No, no.” He wagged a finger. “We adhere to science. The language we speak is strictly the language of reproducible results.”

  So saying, he pulled a pad from his pocket and scribbled out a prescription. “Give her two in the morning, two at bedtime. In a week increase it to three.”

  “What is it?”

  He said a name so rapidly I didn’t get it, handed me his business card with instructions to call for a follow-up appointment, and started out of the room. This put me in something of a panic.

  “When’s bedtime?” I asked. “She hasn’t woken up yet.”

  He dismissed this with a flip of his hand. “Bedtime, nighttime, it doesn’t matter. Just get it in her. The young lady should perk right up.”

  As it turned out, he was wrong. She did not perk right up. On the other hand, she didn’t get any worse. Carol was satisfied a doctor was involved. Frank suggested I try something more direct, more, as he put it, “physically stimulating”. My mother, bless her heart, had forgotten everything.