Limetown

by Cote Smith

  When Lia was far enough away, when the man was a dot in the distance, she paused to catch her breath. Her brain was already cycling through the events of the day, the week, the facts and questions added to the unstable pile of facts and questions teetering in her head. There was a man named James. He’d been cured by strangers at a mystery facility. Now here was a facility, where mystery experiments once took place, or so said some strange older man. And she’d only found the facility because of the Moyer transcript, sent to her by a stranger, whose return address was Menninger.

  Lia felt a phantom vibration in her pocket, reminding her of the missed call, of the text message to her mother she’d never sent. She opened her voice mail. She pressed play and listened to the familiar tone of her mother’s troubled voice. Her mother apologized. She said she didn’t know why she was calling. She just had the strangest feeling.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Emile

  “Tell me about your dreams,” Emile said. “Tell me everything you remember.”

  It was his third month working for the Eldridge, his third month of listening. It turned out they wanted him to play scientist, not subject. His percipient was forthcoming, which meant his dreams were ordinary. Emile had noticed this about his percipients: the more unusual the dreams, the more reluctant they were to share. He would run through the rote questions in any case. It was important, he was told, to establish a baseline, so that when someone remarkable finally walked through the door, Emile could accurately measure how special they were. All this according to Max, who had left the Eldridge for college just two weeks after Emile started. “Don’t weep for me, Haddock,” he had said. “Come find me when you’re ready.”

  Emile had not heard from him since. Nor had he heard from his brother, other than a postcard a month after he left. Jacob had settled just outside of Salt Lake at the small university where he would run track. He’d barely graduated high school after missing out on all of his finals because of Emile, but the university still honored his partial scholarship, and the Eldridge, good to their word, had taken care of the rest. It’s great, he wrote. I can’t wait for you to visit.

  But then nothing. No more postcards. No letters or phone calls. Emile wrote and never heard back. The sensible thing would have been to leave the Eldridge, for Emile to act on his intuition that something was wrong. The problem was the percipients. More than once Emile packed his bags and planned to leave as soon as his lab shift was over, but couldn’t bring himself to go. He felt connected to them, the longer he worked with them, despite Max’s instructions to not get too close. But Emile couldn’t help it. Since taking over for Max, he had yet to meet a percipient who was truly gifted, whose dreams were verifiable visions of the future, but he still felt closer to them than any of his so-called genius coworkers at the hotel. He saw himself in their faces, heard himself in their voices, and every time he sat down with them for an interview, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was on the wrong side of the table.

  The man sitting before him rattled off his dream. It was the same as the night before last and the night before that. The man was wandering the halls of his old high school, at night. No one else was there. He was looking for his locker. He had forgotten something—something important. He had a big test the next day. Perhaps that was what was in the locker. His notes or a cheat sheet. When he finally found his locker, he couldn’t remember the combination. He could never remember. And so he woke up, filled with dread.

  The man leaned back in his chair, and Emile asked him the questions he already knew the answers to.

  Have you had this dream before?

  Tell me what is the same.

  Tell me what is new.

  If you had to choose, would you say the dream represents the past, the present, or the future?

  Below the questionnaire was a blank space saved for Emile’s assessment. In his estimation, was the percipient truthful and forthcoming? Were there any noticeable changes in behavior? How would you characterize the percipient’s dreams? Vague or specific? Recurring or isolated? Ordinary or extraordinary?

  Emile was responsible for seven percipients. He interviewed them first thing in the morning, before their dreams dissolved from their minds. As a result, he saw them at their worst, baggy-eyed and pale, dragged into the waking world. When Emile was finished, he tried to forget their faces. He left the laboratory, sped down the mountain, through town, and to the hotel. If he was lucky, he had half an hour to eat breakfast in the dining room before his shift at the hotel began. In the beginning, he ate with Max. After Max left, he ate alone, though he returned to the dining room each morning, in part hoping he would see the server who waved at him on his first day, the young woman who also worked as a valet. He’d only seen her a few times in passing, during his cleaning duties. Emile was a housekeeper, the same job his mother had worked in Lawrence, a fact that was not lost on him. He pushed his cleaning cart past the young woman, not noticing her until she spoke to him.

  “You changed your mind,” she said. “Or someone changed it for you.”

  She wasn’t in any of the work uniforms. Instead, she was dressed casually in blue jeans and a beige sweater she let hang off her bare shoulder. Emile tried not to stare.

  “So now you can tell me your name,” he said.

  “Yes. Now I can tell you my name. But I don’t think that I will.”

  Emile smiled.

  “My word is not my bond,” the young woman said. “Same goes for everyone else around here. You should know that, if you’re going to stay.”

  It was a weird thing to say, Emile thought, but everything at the Eldridge was weird.

  “You know my name,” Emile said.

  “That’s true.”

  “And probably a lot more.”

  “Also true.”

  “Hardly seems fair.”

  The young woman considered this. “How about this,” she said. “You last a month and I’ll tell you.”

  Emile stuck out his hand, which she shook, and after she walked away, as Emile pushed his cart from room to room, he pretended that the buzzing he felt in his entire body was from the elevation. He would see her two more times, once when she was working the front desk, and again when she was giving a tour of the grounds. Neither occasion afforded them a chance to talk, and upon Emile’s one-month anniversary, though he actively sought her out, he could not find her anywhere in the hotel. Now, two months later, she was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  Bimonthly, they reviewed Emile’s work. Max conducted the first evaluation just before he left, and laughed when Emile complained that he had listened to over a hundred dreams at that point, none of which seemed out of the ordinary. They revealed nothing about the future, as Max once suggested, only the percipients’ deepest desires, and the crippling fears that got in their way.

  “It takes time, Haddock. You think you’re gonna get the good stuff first? I worked here a full year before I caught even a whiff of the extraordinary. You’re different, obviously, but you’re still the same.”

  “A year,” Emile said.

  “I know it seems like a long time. Mostly because it is. But you’re free to go at any moment. Isn’t that what they tell you?”

  Emile remembered the despair he felt after that first review, the feeling that not only was he alone, but that he had stayed for nothing, that he was wasting his time. He wrote to Jacob then, but he also wrote to Ginny. He wasn’t sure why exactly. He could think of no one else, perhaps. Or, he had started to wonder what his life would have been like if he’d stayed in Lawrence, if he hadn’t surrendered to his anger.

  Max had said that everything they sent was screened by someone higher up, in case someone had an inkling to leak hotel secrets, so Emile told Ginny what he could. That he was sorry he had left so abruptly. That he really enjoyed her class and thought of her lessons daily. At the end, he asked if Austin had returned to school, and if so, how was he? But he felt a slight shame after reading that final
question—as if he didn’t deserve to know what happened to the friend he had left behind—so he scratched it out before handing it over to the front desk.

  * * *

  It was not a year before something interesting happened, but it was over three months. One hundred and eighteen days, to be exact. Of cleaning rooms. Of listening to his percipients drone through their ordinary dreams. I have a big project due at work. The morning it’s due I realize I haven’t started it. I am walking with my childhood dog through an open field. The sun sets in front of us, and my dog, now dead, looks back at me, panting a smile. One hundred and eighteen days of Emile nodding, working, checking his empty mailbox, then returning to his dormitory, where he wrote, read, and slept alone.

  Until.

  He had just finished his eighth employee assessment. This time his reviewer was Vince, who gave Emile middling marks for his performance thus far. Emile protested. He was doing everything right. He was asking the questions, filling out the forms. He was cleaning up the garbage the guests left behind.

  Vince held a hand up. “You’re making my point for me,” he said. His lips were cracked even though it was the middle of August. “You were not brought here to think inside the box. Anyone can do what you’re doing, correct? So then, why are you doing it?”

  Emile knew the answer, though he would not say it out loud, not to Vince, whom he had seen little of since he agreed to stay here, and did not trust.

  “We want you to use your gift. We don’t want to tell you how, though of course we have some ideas you might be interested in.”

  Vince’s words rang in Emile’s ears the following morning as he sat in the interview room, waiting for the first percipient to shuffle in—Brenda, the woman he’d seen during his first visit to the facility with Max, all those months ago. According to her file, out of all the supposed percipients, Brenda (female, forties) had been there the longest, though Emile couldn’t understand why. She was never forthcoming with her dreams, and if she was, they were invented.

  “I can’t force them to tell the truth,” Emile said to Vince.

  “Of course you can.” Vince lifted his hand and put two fingers to his temple, like a fake gun. “Through here all things are possible.”

  Brenda slouched in her seat. She was still wearing her pajamas and a sleeping mask, which sat atop her nest of brown hair.

  “Tell me about your dreams, Brenda. Tell me everything you remember.” Brenda stared at the clipboard on the table in front of her. “If it helps, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Let the dream return to you.” Brenda played along. “Good. Now tell me what you see.”

  “Park,” Brenda said. “Sun. Clouds.”

  Emile sighed. “You’re naming things to name things.”

  Brenda shrugged. Emile picked up his clipboard, though by now he had the script memorized. He was supposed to ask her if she had had this dream before. Emile looked at the two-way mirrors surrounding him. He dropped the clipboard on the table with a loud clack. Brenda blinked.

  “Why are you here, Brenda?” he asked. “If you’re not willing to be truthful, what are any of us doing here? Didn’t you come here to be listened to?”

  Brenda looked at him, annoyed. “I am telling the truth. Park and stuff. That’s what I see.”

  “No, it isn’t. That’s not what you see at all.” Emile stood up from the table. Brenda shifted in her chair. Emile felt the resistance welling up inside of her, the waves retreating from the shore. Screw you, she thought. You’re just a kid.

  “Close your eyes, Brenda. Would you do that for me?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Now instead of recalling your dream, let me recall it for you. How about that?”

  Brenda scoffed. “Whatever you say.”

  “Good. Here’s what I want you to do. I’m going to give you a word. One word. And all I need from you is to listen with an open mind.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it, though it’s not as easy as it might sound. When you’re listening, don’t hold your thoughts back. Just let them go. Many subjects struggle with this,” Emile said, as if he had done this before. “Their thoughts bump into something they want to avoid, something troubling they’d rather not confront, and so their mind takes them somewhere else. Somewhere more comfortable. Like a park.”

  Brenda frowned. “That’s not what I was doing.”

  “Of course not,” Emile said. He sat back down at the table. “Are you ready?” Brenda straightened in her chair. “Good,” he said again. “Here we go.”

  But before Emile said anything more, he took a quick peek inside her mind. He knew she was hiding something. If he could just catch a glimpse of what she didn’t want him to see, a corner of a thought, a sharp edge, something to hold on to.

  “I’m waiting,” Brenda said. She painted over her worry with bravado. But then Emile saw it, through the thin layer of confidence. A spot she missed.

  Emile sat in his chair. “Debt,” he said. Clearly, pointedly. Immediately Brenda’s face changed. So did her thoughts. Emile thought unlocking her mind would be like solving a puzzle; he just needed to find the missing piece. But it wasn’t like that. In Kansas, in the guardians’ living room, high on the wall opposite the TV, there was that cuckoo clock, a complicated and annoying contraption that stopped ticking every other week. Emile remembered Mrs. Sinnard standing on a chair to take the clock down, carefully laying it on the kitchen table, facedown, so she could remove the back with a tiny screwdriver. One time, and only one time, she waved Emile closer as she worked and showed him what was inside. She named each part she tinkered with: the pipes and weights, the pendulum and chains. All were part of an impossible machine, Mrs. Sinnard said. Such a grand design. The key was to not let it overwhelm you. Don’t look at all the moving parts at the same time. Start with one. Figure out its function, and then, when you’re ready, move on to the next. But never forget the parts that came before, the role they play, and how they all come together to make the bird sing.

  Emile examined Brenda’s thoughts part by part.

  “You had a dream, years ago. When you were a young mother. By this time you already knew about your husband’s gambling. You knew the path he was heading down, but you didn’t know how to stop it.”

  “No.”

  “In the dream two men visit your house. It’s the middle of summer. Humid, sweltering, eighty degrees before the sun rises. And yet the men are in suits. They tell you to have a seat. They tell you they have a little problem with your husband. He owes them a favor. The men are smart, even in the dream. They don’t threaten you directly. They casually mention things about your house, your daughter. Things they shouldn’t know. They talk about the importance of insurance policies, about a cousin of theirs who didn’t have anything, and then bang, without warning, disaster struck, and everything was taken away.”

  “No,” Brenda said again, but it was too late. The parts were already ticking.

  “His debt was substantial. The men let you know that. They give you a week, a deadline you know you can’t meet. When you woke up, it wasn’t summer, like in the dream. It was winter, which meant you had time. You checked on your daughter, sleeping in her bed. You sat next to her, combed her hair with your hand, and you made a plan. Starting that day, you would save your money. You would pick up extra shifts and work overtime. And when that wasn’t enough, you would sell everything you had. Your jewelry, your furniture, the house, everything you loved. You would hock every last bit of it if you had to, so that when the men came, you would be ready.”

  Brenda scratched the inside of her arms, raking her skin red just above the wrists. She refused to look at Emile. “Why would I do that? It was just a dream.”

  “Because this dream came true.”

  Brenda stopped scratching. She stared at her hands, the fingernails she’d used to bite her skin. She finally looked up at Emile, her eyes as red as the inside of her arms. “It wasn’t right,” she said. “My dream. It
was so much worse.”

  In the end, it was the bank that took everything away. Emile saw different men in different suits who made different, legal threats, and forced Brenda and her husband to sign papers as their daughter looked on.

  “They took everything,” Brenda said. “Everything I saved, it didn’t matter.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Emile said.

  “Of course it is. I knew it was going to happen.”

  Brenda put her head on the table. Emile looked away. There was more to see, of course. After the foreclosure on Brenda’s house, there was her pleading with her parents for money, them turning a blind eye, saying they warned her about him. There was her move into a trailer. The trailer had room for only one bed, which Brenda gave to her daughter, while she and her husband took turns on the couch and floor. Until, eventually, because her husband never learned to stop, even that was taken away.

  Emile turned to the mirrored wall, and was surprised to see a face half-smiling back at him. It was his own. He was proud of what he had done, even if it meant forcing Brenda to relive losing her family, her house—everything. She would be better for it, he told himself, in the long run. It was no small thing, after all, to be listened to and understood.

  “Why didn’t you leave him?” Emile asked.

  Brenda lifted her head. “I had to stay,” she said.

  “Because of the dream?”

  “No,” Brenda said. “For her. I did what I thought was best for her.”

  * * *

  Emile thought about Brenda as he cleaned rooms that day. His first month at the Eldridge, he worked diligently, moving swiftly from one room to the next. Lately, though, he’d started to take his time. After he cleaned a room, he’d shut the door and lie on the bed, or sit in one of the chairs by the window, as he did now. There was no rush, it seemed. His performance evals never mentioned his cleaning duties, and so why couldn’t he close his eyes for a minute?