“You’ve been going back and forth. Between this world and the other one. Where you’re a Navy fighter pilot.”
He smiled and nodded.
“I see,” I said. I looked away from him. On one of the motivational posters on the wall, a great wave towered above a very tiny surfer. Don’t let your fears get in the way of your dreams, said the caption.
“So you’ve been waking up from your nightmare. From time to time.”
“Yes.”
On another wall, an explorer climbed a snow-covered glacier beneath the word DETERMINATION in big block letters.
His caption: Believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything.
“I’m curious about something,” I said. “Can you tell me why you’re here? If you’re a fighter pilot, why is it that you have nightmares about being a retarded boy in a care home in Burlington? I mean, why not have nightmares about…I don’t know…your jet disappearing and you falling into the ocean, where you get chewed up by sharks?”
Brandon smiled the kind of smile you see on people when they understand something and you don’t. An appreciation of the knowledge gradient. A wistful desire to return to a time when they, like you, lived in the dark. I never expected such expression from Brandon, whose paperwork said he had an IQ of below 65.
“Not real bad dream,” he said. “I mean something else. I mean it…”
“Figuratively?”
“Yes.”
Wow, I thought. A GAL client that understood the concept of figurative speech. A nineteen-year-old boy who couldn’t read and couldn’t pronounce the “r” sound but who had no problem slinging around a metaphor.
“So Brandon…this Brandon, the one you are now—he’s real.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But there’s another Brandon, and he’s real, too. He’s a fighter pilot. For the Navy. Like Maverick in Top Gun.”
“Uh-huh.”
Now I smiled at him. He smiled back.
“I used to want to be Maverick,” I said. “When I was a kid and that movie came out. I thought: I want to fly fighter planes when I grow up, that’s just what I want to do. Forget this doctor, lawyer, businessman garbage, give me an airplane and a sky to fly it in.”
His smile grew. I’d touched a nerve.
“I used to fantasize about it,” I said. True—I actually had fantasized about being the Tom Cruise character from Top Gun. “Flying, being up there in the clouds. A multi-million dollar fighter jet strapped to my back, loaded with enough firepower to destroy a small navy. Two miles above the world. And everything in it.”
His head bobbed. “In the sky,” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “In the sky.”
I swallowed.
Reality is overrated, Bobby echoed in my head. Don’t pick at the edges.
“But the thing about flying is,” I went on, “you have to land your plane at some point. You can fly around all you want, but the world is still down there. You know what I’m saying?”
His smile faltered. He did know what I was saying.
“There’s something down there on the ground, at sea level, and it’s called truth. It doesn’t go away. No matter how high you fly, no matter how fast you fly—it’s still down there. Waiting for you. And it might feel good up there in that plane of yours. But as long as you stay up there, all you’re really doing is running from it.”
Now the smile fell away completely.
“I have a truth of my own,” I said. I wasn’t smiling, either. “I don’t know what it is, and so it’s scary. I’ve been attacked by six different men in the past year, and none of them seem to have an identity. I’d like to stop asking questions, chalk it up to coincidence and go on about my merry way, but that’s not a good thing for me to do, you know?”
He blinked at me. My words sailed over his head and splattered all over the motivational poster on the other wall.
“Because the truth is the truth. In my case, I think someone is after me. And he’s going to continue coming after me whether I recognize his existence or not—and so I ask questions when I see things that don’t make sense. I investigate, I dig, I search for that truth so that I can protect myself from it.”
Blink. Blink.
“You’re hiding from something, Brandon. You can pretend you’re somebody else, but you’re not.”
Blink. Blink.
“You’re not a fighter pilot. You’re an abused kid with cognitive deficiencies. Think about it, man; if this is just a nightmare, why are you spending so much time in it?”
He blinked some more. He opened his mouth, and for a moment, nothing came out. He closed it, looked up at the ceiling and then said, “I’m in the hospital.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes you are, but…”
He shook his head rapidly. “No. There. In the hospital there.”
“In your…other world?”
“In reality.” Weeawity.
Now came my turn to blink in complete lack of understanding. Despite his cognitive deficiencies, Brandon must have recognized this, because he continued without prompt. “Tailhook broke. Plane went off the flight deck. I got saved. In the hospital now.”
“So you’re more or less knocked out right now. And this is all a bad dream going on in your head.”
He nodded.
“And I’m a figment of your imagination. I don’t actually exist, because you’re dreaming me. I didn’t eat breakfast this morning and I didn’t burn my tongue on my coffee on the way to work. I, like everything else you’re seeing right now, am malarkey.”
He shrugged. Yes, said the gesture. You are indeed malarkey.
“And at some point you’re going to wake up more or less for good, and you’re going to be out of here but I will remain. Because I’m part of your nightmare.”
A single nod of the head. Exactly.
“Brandon?”
“Uh-huh?”
I leaned forward.
“That is not true. You’re making all this up.”
Suddenly, his narrow face lit up with the brightest of smiles. “I can prove it!”
“Can you, now.”
Bobbing head. “Uh-huh. Been going home here and there. Mostly at night. Kenny knows.”
“Who’s Kenny?” I asked.
“He’s Kenny.”
I thought for a moment, and the image of the hopelessly retarded young man who shared a room with Brandon popped into my head. “Your roommate?”
An enthusiastic nod.
“Kenny knows I go! Come on!”
He stood and motioned for me to follow him. I picked up my briefcase—I had nothing particularly valuable in there, but the inmates of Magnolia Plantation would have probably loved to get their hands on some pens and paper—and trailed him to his room, where he marched over to the television and cut it off. His roommate continued to stare through him.
“Kenny,” he said, grabbing the man’s tiny head and tilting it up to force eye contact. “Tell Kevin I go away. At night.”
Kenny turned his head to look at me, his face a round collection of features smashed together in a very small space. Although his age was impossible to determine, I pegged him at about forty. If Brandon’s mental retardation qualified as moderate, this guy’s hit severe.
Kenny opened his mouth, revealing an oversized tongue. At first, I wondered if maybe he couldn’t talk, but then he said, “Him go away at night.”
“Tell him I disappear.” Dissapeew.
“Him disappear.”
Brandon smiled, satisfied that he had just nailed his case with the direct examination of this particular witness. He turned the TV back on and stepped out of the way. Kenny’s eyes locked back on Dr. Oz and remained there.
“See?” Said Brandon. “He knows!”
For my cross-examination, I stood up and walked over to Kenny’s bed. I moved Brandon out of the way, turned off the TV, and bent my knees to face Kenny eye-to-eye.
“Kenny,” I asked, “Tell Brandon that cows can fl
y.”
“Cows can fly.”
I turned the TV back on and returned to the chair beside Brandon’s bed. “I wouldn’t count on what this guy says if I were you,” I said. “He’s not exactly the world’s most reliable witness.”
Lips pursed, Brandon groaned in frustration just like Allie groaned when Abby copped an attitude about her math homework and pretended she didn’t understand it. He came over and sat on the edge of his bed, head held in both hands. He groaned again. “Sucks,” he said. “Being retarded sucks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Can’t talk right. Can’t…” He straightened his spine and looked up at the ceiling as if asking God to give him the right word.
“Explain,” he said at last.
I laced my hands across my stomach.
“This my nightmare,” he said. “Not real.”
“That’s interesting, Brandon, because it’s my reality and I feel very, very real right now. I believe if you really examine this logically, you’re going to see a fundamental impossibility…”
“You real,” Brandon said, stabbing at me with his right index finger. “Nightmare for you, too.”
I closed my mouth and took a ki breath through my nose.
“I help you,” he said. “Help you get out.”
“Okay, enlighten me. Tell me how to get out of this nightmare.”
“Picture where you want be,” he said, tapping his oblong skull. “And go there.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “I just imagine it and I can punch out of here?”
He smiled, nodding excitedly. “Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless!”
I looked over his shoulder. There, above the television, hung another of the same motivational posters I saw in the lounge. The photo centered on the black background showed what appeared to be a man in a helmet and rock climbing gear scaling the face of a cliff. He had no legs. I squinted at the caption.
Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless.
No wonder Brandon persisted in delusional thinking. These people spent all day surrounded by absolute bullshit.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw the clock on the wall and realized I had screwed around here for over an hour. What would have been a billable hour, now lost forever.
“I need to go back,” I said. “We’ll have to continue this later.”
Brandon nodded.
“Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless,” he said.
“Right. Bye, Brandon. Bye, Kenny.”
“Bye,” Brandon said, still smiling.
Kenny didn’t say anything. That didn’t surprise me.
But then he followed me, and that did surprise me. Briefcase in hand, I walked down the hall outside Brandon’s room and waved goodbye to a black woman on a computer on my way past the nurse’s station. When I reached the door to the lobby, I of course couldn’t get the door open—this was the lockdown hall—so I turned to ask the nurse to buzz me out.
And there was Kenny, right on my ass. Little head bobbing up and down in agreement with every word that had ever been said in human history.
“Him go away,” Kenny said. “Him disappear.”
I blinked. “No, Kenny,” I said. “He doesn’t.”
“Him disappear. Him go poof! Him come back in morning. Scary.”
He stood so close to me, I could smell the remains of lunch on his breath. Something with a lot of garlic. I tried to back away, but the door only let me go so far.
“You go poof too?”
“No,” I said. Suddenly, my mouth turned dry; when I swallowed, it was like choking on a tumbleweed. “I’m stuck here.”
“Him disappear. Him go poof!”
“That’s…uh…that’s great, man.”
“Kenny!” The woman at the computer called out. “Don’t you go around bothering people!”
Kenny grinned. I noticed then that he was missing about half his teeth. He turned around and hobbled back in the direction he’d come.
The door buzzed and I let myself out like the place was about to blow. And when I got to my car, I realized my hands were shaking.
30.
Another dream. I knew this because I remembered taking an Ambien to help me get to sleep and lying down in my bed, but in my next conscious thought, I was in my basement. I couldn’t move. But I could see. And I could hear.
Flesh smacking flesh. Sick, stomach-twisting grunts. The rhythmic creak of the pool table groaning against itself at its joints.
A very, very, familiar woman’s voice, crying over and over again:
“Please don’t hurt my baby.”
There was someone
Abby
crying to my right, but I didn’t look there. I couldn’t look there, wouldn’t look there—because my eyes were transfixed on the man raping my wife on the pool table. I could see his calves, his legs, his hairy butt cheeks. The back of his head.
Bald.
“Say it,” he said breathlessly over the satanic percussion of hips slapping against buttocks and the backs of legs. “Say it!”
Head hung low over the green velvet, she didn’t say anything, and when she didn’t he thrust harder. She cried out in pain, a sound as sharp and thin as a razor blade yet somehow managing to concentrate all the agony, rage and shame of the moment on its filed edge. When he grunted again, his voice was barely human.
“Say it!”
“Kevin!” She screamed.
“Say it, bitch!”
“Kevin!”
And in that moment I jolted awake. A world away from the Hell of that basement, I opened my eyes first to nothingness, then to the lumps and shadows of the furniture in my master bedroom.
“Kevin, wake up!”
Allie’s hand on my shoulder. Not the green velvet covering of the pool table—my fish belly skin. My cold skin, cold even though my forehead ran with sweat. I shook my head and wiped my face with the edge of the sheet.
I gasped.
“Lay back down. Come on. It’s okay.”
And I did. I laid down and buried my face in her chest, and I stayed that way as my heart rate slowly returned to normal and the rest of my body woke up from the nightmare. Only then did I talk.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Bad dream.”
“I guess so.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Not really.”
Silence ensued. A click sounded from the thermostat in the hallway and brought the furnace to life to fill it.
The Bald Man. The Bald Man had been raping Allie in my dream.
Are you sure it’s a dream? Asked Dr. Koenig.
“You were getting raped again,” I said. “And all I could do was watch.”
She lay quiet for a moment. She ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair and let them stop at the back of my head. Her hand on my skull was gentle and comforting. The mindless terror of my dream withdrew towards the outer edges of the bedroom.
“I suppose it makes sense,” she said.
“What does?”
“Dreams like that. It’s your brain’s way of training itself to deal with the what ifs. An evolutionary was of preparing yourself to deal with all contingencies. That’s’ what nightmares are. Training sessions.”
“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “I mean, it’s done! We won. Why do I have to keep…what…training for it?”
“Simple psychology,” she murmured.
I fell silent. I thought for a moment, debated keeping my next thought to myself, then decided against it.
“What if it’s not?” I asked.
“What if it’s not what?”
“What if it’s not a training session? What if it’s a memory?”
Her body stiffened.
I propped myself up on my elbow. “What if it actually happened?”
“We’ve been over this already. It couldn’t have happened.”
“Why not?”
She
rolled her eyes and flipped over on her back. “Do we have to go through this again? Well, Kevin, it just seems like I’d remember getting attacked like that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that would be a pretty memorable experience. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m wrong about that. Say I’m really good at repression. Better than you.”
She paused. I listened.
“It’s still impossible,” she said. “You shot and killed two men. You keep the rifle in the gun cabinet in the basement. If we accept the proposition that this assailant is raping me on the pool table, what are the chances that he’s going to let you creep away and open the gun cabinet? And then, who did you shoot in the hallway downstairs?”
She shook her head.
“You’re under a lot of stress,” she said, “and you’ve been through…well, you’ve been through a lot. And you’re not exactly made for things like this.”
“I seem to have done okay,” I protested. “6-0 in favor of the good guys at this point.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “That’s true. Which is all the more reason to believe a man like you would never just sit there and watch somebody hurt me. Or our baby.”
She sat up long enough to kiss me on the cheek, not a romantic kiss, but a punctuation kiss—marking as it did the end of a conversation and sending a clear message that she’d finished discussing such things and that I should finish, too. She laid back down and covered her shoulders with the sheet and comforter.
“Now go back to sleep,” she ordered. “You have to work in the morning.”
I laid back down, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, trying every little mind trick in the book to calm down enough to where I actually could sleep. I found myself thinking about Brandon Cross disappeawing right in front of Kenny. Brandon disliked his present reality so strongly that he had invented a way of escaping it and going to a place where nothing that plagued him here existed—where everything that bothered him and made his life intolerable wasn’t real at all, but a nightmare. I pictured another Brandon then, the face and skull a little wider and less pinched, more normal-looking. Hair cut short in the military style, skin clear, manly angles chiseled into the kind of face that you would expect to see on a fighter pilot. A handful of men in a locker room, donning flight suits. Brandon grinned, and he said, you guys would not believe the fucked-up dream I had last night. I dreamed I was a retarded kid in a care home in North Carolina.
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