All I Ever Dreamed

by Michael Blumlein

  The Kiss

  was something I considered for days. It seemed the obvious thing to do, called for in some intuitive way, but in the end I decided against it. I felt virtuous and admirably restrained, but also repressed and confused. It was a vexing situation, so much so that this is what I began calling her. Vexing. The closest I came to her lips was spreading them apart with my thumb and finger to pour the pills, which I dissolved in water, down her throat. I returned to the ditch, digging out the remainder of the dirt. When I got deep enough, I built the forms for the foundation, laid the rebar and poured the concrete. By then it was three weeks since our visit to the hospital. Vexing slept on. I started on the framing. Her hair was black as coal. Foot plates, joists, studs. Eyelids like butterflies. Headers, rafters. Skin, clothed in parchment, like milk.

  “Our Armamentarium

  is vast,” said Dr. Aymen, with the sweep of an arm that seemed to take in as potential allies not just the books and equipment that were in his office but all information and knowledge that lay beyond it as well. “If one pill doesn’t work, we try another. It’s what’s called an empirical approach.”

  I heard only two words in that. Armamentarium, which brought to mind epic battles on dusty, medieval plains, and empirical, which made me think this guy doesn’t have a clue. It was time to stand up for Vexing, who remained incapable of standing up for herself.

  “What’s this new drug?” I asked.

  There was an edge to my voice, and he shot me a glance. Then he leaned back in his chair and bridged his fingers. He appeared to be thinking. Maybe he was. At length he mumbled something to himself and unclipped his pen. Barely looking down, he scribbled out a prescription.

  “Start with two at night, go to three if no change in a week, four if no change in two. After that it’s up to you. You can split the dose, give two in the morning and three at night, or you can reverse that, give three in the am and two in the pm, but under no circumstance must you increase more than twenty milligrams in any four day period, unless you are prepared to watch assiduously for side effects, which of course you should do anyway. And call me.”

  “Call you?”

  “If there’s a problem.”

  I was reeling with his instructions. “What side effects?”

  “The usual. Nausea, GI upset, headache, dizziness, twitchy muscles, sudden death.” He let that sink in, then dismissed it with a bizarre smile. “Just kidding. But not really. I mention it only to assure you that it’s very rare.”

  “What’s the name of this drug?”

  “3,5 dihydroxy, gamma-endoperoxide PGD4. It goes by the trade name Resusinol.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Are you a doctor, sir? A pharmacist, perhaps?”

  “I work in a drug store.”

  “Indeed.”

  I didn’t tell him that the counter I worked was at the opposite end of the store from the pharmacy. It was not a piece of information, I felt, that would have helped my cause.

  “Do you have experience with it, Doctor? Have you used it before?”

  “It’s an excellent choice,” he said. “I have no doubt it will be equal to the task.”

  “That’s what you said about the first one.”

  He suffered me a look, then took a moment to compose himself.

  “I realize your impatience, but understand. All things take time. This is Nature’s decree, not ours. There are many conditions whose duration we can predict with great accuracy. Coma, unfortunately, is not one of them. An encephalopathic child may sleep for a day or a week. He may sleep for a year. Your young lady will awaken when she is ready. No sooner. No later.” He paused, then added, “with or without drugs, I suspect.”

  “Then why give any?”

  He smiled and stood up, indicating the end of the visit. “Because it’s our nature to try. Because you, like us, like everyone, want to be able to fix what’s hurt. Because sadly, we’re too old for band-aids.”

  A week passed, then another. The cabin took shape, and the smell of fresh wood banished the smell of rot. I framed in a window facing east and one on the opposite side facing west. I had views of English ivy, pine trees, my neighbors’ houses, my neighbors. From the roof I could see the bay. I roughed in the front door the third week of June. That Saturday Vexing woke up. It was Midsummer’s Day.

  She stretched. She yawned. Eventually, she sat up.

  “I feel wonderful,” she said. “I love naps.”

  Her voice was rough from disuse. It seemed to come from deep in her throat. The sound of it, and the sight of her awake, gave me goosebumps.

  “Naps? You’ve been asleep forever.”

  “Have I?” She took a few tentative steps. “Well, then I feel even better.”

  She spun around, arms outspread. Her hair fanned out. She laughed.

  “And I suppose I owe it all to you.”

  I ducked my head. “Shucks. All I did was dig you out.”

  “You’re a miner?”

  “Not really.”

  She frowned, as if this didn’t compute. Her forehead bunched into tiny furrows, a look that didn’t become her. It pained me to be the cause of such distress, so I reconsidered.

  “A miner? I guess you could say I am. Sure. Why not?”

  She brightened instantly. “That is so great. God, it’s perfect. I love miners.”

  She came to me then. She smelled of dry leaves. She wrapped her arms around my neck.

  “I guess that means I love you.”

  What can a man want in a woman? Good manners, good looks, good brains, good sex. Vexing had it all. To boot, she kept telling me how she’d never been so happy. When we made love, she said she forgot who she was.

  For the first month or two we made the basement room our bedroom, because Vexing preferred the damper, cooler air. Her body suit, which had slid off intact the day she woke up, remained in a corner, retaining its shape but growing progressively paler and more translucent, except for what I took to be its supporting structure, thin threads that looked like the veins of leaves. These grew darker, and the more I looked, the more they seemed to represent something beyond mere structure. The way they intertwined and repeated themselves looked man-made, refined. A language? I mentioned this to Vexing, who denied knowledge of such a thing, but one evening after work I found her hunched over the suit, puzzling it with great concentration. She acted as if I had caught her at something illicit, and the next day the suit was gone. When I asked her about it, she declined to discuss the matter further, begging my indulgence, which I gave freely. Shortly thereafter, we moved upstairs.

  The heat in the upper story seemed to do something to her metabolism. It revved her up and got her juices flowing. We were having sex day in and day out. Sometimes it got to the point that I couldn’t keep up with her. Not that I was old, but I was older than she was. Not that it bothered me. Not much.

  After a particularly grueling and exquisite week of little food and less sleep, I suggested she find an additional outlet for her boundless energy. She was aghast.

  “I don’t want someone else.”

  “Not a person,” I said with a choking little laugh. “God no. A hobby. A job.”

  “I’ve never had a job. I wouldn’t know what to do.” She scrunched up her forehead. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a miner,” I said. “I dig up riches.”

  She smiled.

  “I also work in a drug store. Talk to my Mom every day, take her out twice a week. Be with you every other moment I can.”

  She seemed daunted. “Maybe I should start out working for you.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. What do you need?”

  There were some chores. I listed a few.

  “No problem,” she said. “What else?”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “C’mon. You want to get your money’s worth. Use your imagination. What do you want me to do?”

  The
vastness of her invitation made me tremble. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Please.”

  “You’ll laugh at me. Either that, or you’ll be offended.”

  “I won’t,” she promised.

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

  As it turned out, I didn’t need more encouragement than that, and I unburdened my heart of its puerile little fantasy. What I asked would have made a schoolboy blush. Her response?

  She laughed.

  “There,” I said. “You’ve hurt me.”

  “No, no. I’m laughing only because you’re so silly. Of course I will. And anything else. And as much as you like. I was born to this. I feel it in my bones.”

  “You’re not vexing at all,” I said.

  She smiled. “You’re kind. With any luck I never will be.”

  So she worked for me, and hard. Swept and scrubbed the floors, cleaned the bathrooms, washed the clothes, changed the sheets, dusted, vacuumed and polished till her hands were sore. I had to help her with the shopping, because very little in the supermarket was familiar to her. But she had a flair for cooking and learned how to operate all the kitchen gadgets in a day or two. She was a great homemaker. It was a good life. Contentment reigned. For a while.

  One night we were lying in bed, and she was obviously troubled. I asked what was wrong.

  She faced me, as innocent and fetching as the day I found her. “Are you happy?”

  “Completely.”

  This seemed to baffle her. “Then why aren’t I?”

  I replied that I couldn’t imagine. Which made her even more puzzled.

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “You can’t depend on me for your happiness. You’ve got a mind of your own. A separate identity.”

  Her flawless forehead furrowed.

  “You need to get out. Meet people, do something besides housework. Volunteer somewhere. Maybe even try a part-time job.”

  “I could cook,” she said. “Be a housekeeper. A scrubber.”

  “You could do a lot more than that.”

  “Like what?”

  She was beautiful beyond belief. It came to me without thinking.

  “Be a model,” I told her. “You’ve got the looks. The style. You’re a natural. Let the world in on the secret. You’ll be a star, I swear. People will beat a path to your door.”

  The Look

  was all her own. Feminine, masculine, ingénue, queen. She liked to adorn herself with mirrors and other reflective objects, and this became something of a trademark. Sequins, foil, cut glass, polished stones. And mirrors themselves, appliquéd to her dresses or woven in the fabric, some large but most the size of dimes and quarters, catching the light and making her shine all the more brightly. She loved it when people stared, for like all models she craved attention. To be the center about which all else revolved was her constant desire. For all the world, you might have thought she felt unwanted and unloved.

  On the advice of her agent she shortened her name to Vex, which rhymed so fluently with Flex and Hex. Initially, she did ads for Macy’s and Target, but quickly graduated to the big time. Vogue, Elle, Redbook: you couldn’t pass a checkout counter without seeing her face. She modeled for Dior, St Laurent, Gaultier, Miyake; did the runways in Paris, Milan, New York, all the major shows. When Playboy, promising discretion, begged for a spread, her agent advised against it. But Vex went ahead, and a week after the issue hit the stands, she appeared on the cover of Good Housekeeping. After that it was Working Women, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes and Gardens: Vexing crossed over at will. She had the moves. She had the talent. She had the ambition. By the time either of us got around to noticing how this new world of hers was affecting and changing our life together, she was famous, and we were both dedicated to her career.

  The Thing Is

  she got more desirable with each passing year. She had a way of capturing a person’s attention, pinning it like a butterfly, then extracting it as if it were some precious elixir. Sometimes the extract was envy, sometimes admiration. To her it didn’t matter which. She was greedy for praise and took what she got. To all appearance she inhabited a different world from her public. A better, more desirable, one. It was funny, then, to hear her worry and complain.

  Her weight was a constant anxiety, but this was true of all the models. Vexing also had a thing about height, not so much hers as that of the male models she sometimes worked with. Simply put, she hated short men. I was five-six (the same as her), no giant but no midget either, and it had never before been an issue. But one day after a long shoot with a circus motif, she came home in a rage, mouthing off against clowns and freaks and especially “stubbies,” as she called them.

  I should have kept my mouth shut but didn’t, asking her what was wrong with short men, making sure at the time that I was standing as tall and erect as I could.

  She had the broom in hand, a vestige from her erstwhile housekeeping days, work that had long since passed to others. She wrung the handle as though it were a neck.

  “They’re bossy and domineering. They’re like old women. Or else they act like children. I’ve had it.”

  “Who exactly are we talking about here?”

  “Short men,” she said sharply. “Don’t you listen.”

  I cringed. “How short is short?”

  She snapped the broom in two over her knee and held the shorter fragment up. It was the height of a dwarf, which, it turned out, was no coincidence.

  “Hairy little buggers,” she muttered. “I need a bath.”

  She had other anxieties too, chiefly involving her looks. She was paid, I suppose, to be fastidious in this regard; in a sense, it was an occupational hazard. Like most of the models, she took stimulants, along with massive doses of vitamins. When she was high, she was magnanimous, charming and full of fun. When she was strung out, she turned petty and vicious. At work she got away with this rollercoaster personality because she was, quite simply, the best. At home she got away with it because I, like the rest of the world, was in her thrall.

  The tabloids dubbed her “The Queen,” and if not omnipotent, she was certainly ubiquitous: magazines, TV, newspapers, the internet—her name and face were impossible to miss. At home she was also the queen, my queen, and I quit my job at the drug store to be by her side. It was a switch for us: now I worked for her, fending off the sycophants and boot-lickers, doing my best to keep her from going insane. Typically, this involved making sure she had what she wanted when she wanted it, a short list of necessities that included food, drugs, praise, privacy and sleep. To my knowledge, I was the only one ever to hear her confess to jealousy or self-doubt, the only one ever to see her cry. I was also the only one she ever truly loved, this from her own lips. In the beginning of our relationship she said this often, but as the years passed and her fame grew, it was a sentiment she rarely expressed. This made the times she did all the more memorable.

  There was one: it was early winter, and we were in a hut on a mountain above a lake somewhere in Switzerland, at the tail end of an exhausting day for her, modeling swimwear in the snow. In the hut were a cot, a wood-burning stove and little else. Outside, the production crew was setting up for a final shot, and we had a few minutes alone.

  Vexing was wearing a quilted cape over a lamé bikini. Her toes were blue from the cold, her face chafed by the wind. She was past the point of giving orders but bravely trying to keep up appearances. I helped her onto the cot, massaging her legs and blowing on her toes (and even going so far as to put them in my mouth) to warm them. She gave a sigh and closed her eyes. Moments later she was asleep.

  The hut was small and cozy. It reminded me of the cottage in our yard, which, since completion, I had barely set foot in. The wind rattled the door, and Vexing opened her eyes. Her hair at this time was short, her face rather gaunt and undernourished. It was a look the models aspired to, suggestive of hunger, to be interpreted in so many ways. It was nothing like the face of the woman I had dug
up in the garden. What was, though, was the way she seemed to be asleep, even now, with her eyes open. They moved without seeing, in jerky rhythms, as though she were following the flight of some insect, though it was far too cold in the hut for insects. Suddenly, she fixated on something invisible to me and uttered a sound. My father had suffered from epilepsy, but this was unlike any seizure I had ever seen. I thought to yell for help, but then she started to speak.

  At first the words were too garbled to be intelligible. Then it came to me that she was speaking a different language, one I’d never heard, or, for that matter, could imagine hearing, a combination of clicks, grunts, gurgles, groans and hisses. Except for her throat and lips, her body was rigid. It was terrifying. At the same time it struck me how little I really knew of this woman. True, I had dug her up. I had given her a name and a career, had set her on the path to success and glory. In a way she was my creation, or at least (to my discredit), I thought of her as such. I shook her, gently at first, then harder. The wind howled. I was frightened, and I cried out to her, using the name I’d christened her with, feeling foolish and ashamed of myself for knowing no other. I begged her to snap out of it.

  Eventually, she did. The strange, primeval sounds she was uttering subsided. The tension left her body. She sat up.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “What happened? Did I fall asleep?”

  “Something like that.”

  She clutched the cape across her chest. “I’m exhausted. I need something to get me going. I need to wake up.”

  “What you need is real sleep.”

  “Don’t say that. Sleep is death. I’m done with sleep.”

  “You used to love naps.”

  “No more.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Now I choose to be awake. As much as humanly possible. Awake and on my toes.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t be.”

  I swallowed down a lump. “I liked you better before.”