EQMM, August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Somewhere down the street, a siren wailed—for a moment, Evan wasn't sure if it was coming toward him or fading away, but then it stopped abruptly, as if strangled. “Well, Dex, I appreciate your calling and letting me know, but everything's okay here, and I hope we can catch up again soon."

  The static continued to course and crinkle, but through it, Evan could hear a sudden, gnawing void. For a moment, he thought Dexter might have hung up, but then the other man's words—and his disappointment—came through clear:

  "Don't you want to hear the dream?"

  "I'm late for an appointment. I may have a client already waiting outside."

  "I'll be quick, I promise,” came the reply, and Dexter sketched out the contents of his nightmare: A car breaks down, Evan's car, Evan's wife and family aboard—a daughter perhaps, at least in the dream a daughter—a dead battery the cause; Dexter is there too, at the top of a hill, and he calls down to the family stranded at the bottom, then someone tosses a book down toward them. “I don't know the title of the book,” said Dexter. “And I don't know who threw it, but when I called down to you, you said that it was good to see me and that you'd changed your name to mine for some reason. Ha, ha! Imagine...” And then more people gather to try to help the family: people manning cell phones, calling from pay phones, trying to reach help; Dexter finds a gas station nearby, but instead of simply asking a mechanic for help, he tries to search on a computer for possible assistance. Suddenly, ads for pornographic Web sites begin popping up on the screen, and Dexter struggles to hide them, closing new windows as quickly as they open. “I know it's all fairly random,” Dexter said. “But still ... well, it was just unsettling, and I woke up feeling that something,” and here his voice grew more somber, “that something terrible, truly terrible might happen.” He laughed again, a hint of some nervousness, self-consciousness. “I wouldn't even know if you have a daughter—or a wife either for that matter—but still..."

  "No, you were on the money,” said Evan. “Wife and daughter both.” He looked at the photographs on his desk. A picture of his family taken the Christmas before: his wife Karen in a red knit sweater with a green Christmas tree across its front, five-year-old Heather wearing a pair of reindeer antlers and a red plastic nose, and Evan there too, beginning to gray. He hardly recognized himself. Another photograph of his daughter in a tire swing, from his own parents’ house, the rope above twisted tight and the photo caught in mid-spin, Heather's hair flying out in strands as the rope uncoiled itself. That's the kind of future you're investing in, he sometimes told clients, pointing to the picture. The only investment that counts. And it was true: His family was his greatest asset. “But you can rest assured, Dex, we're fine. Just a dream, I guess."

  "I'm glad to hear that,” said Dexter, and Evan thought he heard a sigh, the sound of some genuine relief. “Well, sorry to take your time,” he said, “but if the car breaks down, I guess you know who to call! But seriously, lemme give you my number in case you ever want to catch up again someday. I actually just moved back to the area—old haunts, even if not just like the old times, thank goodness. Trying to kick-start my business out here and...” Again, a fading in and out. “...I hate to say it, but given all that happened back then and all, I thought that maybe..."

  "Always a possibility,” Evan said, but he didn't write down the number, and he rushed with some relief through his goodbye.

  Evan's client had indeed already arrived but hadn't minded waiting. The two of them discussed investment options, short- and long-term strategies. The client completed a quick survey to determine his financial type—ultimately more conservative—and then concluded the meeting by purchasing just over twelve thousand dollars in Class A shares divided over the Growth Fund of America, the Capital World Growth and Income Fund, and the American Balanced Fund. The remainder of the day continued at a similar pace—a handful more clients and two midday meetings—and Evan didn't give his phone call with Dexter another thought until later that afternoon when his wife Karen called to say that she and their daughter were stuck in the parking lot at Crabtree Valley Mall, the battery dead on the Land Cruiser or perhaps something else wrong, she couldn't quite tell.

  * * * *

  "It's just eerie, that's all I'm saying,” Evan told his wife as they finished dinner that night—several hours after the Roadside Assistance crew had started the SUV once again. As they ate, Evan had related to Karen parts of the story, editing out parts for Heather's sake, and though he agreed that it was just coincidence ("a fluke,” she had said), his frustration deepened when she didn't show even the smallest evidence of some amazement—which prompted him to further overstate his case, even to raise his voice. “I mean, what are the chances? It's ... it's almost supernatural or something!"

  Karen edged a nod toward Heather and widened her eyes at him—the same expression she gave when someone on TV said a “grown-up word” and she wanted Evan to change the channel. He hadn't noticed how rapt his daughter's attention had become. She held her fork upright in her little fist and stared at him, her mouth just slightly parted.

  "Finished, honey?” Evan asked, and when Heather nodded yes, he turned back to Karen and cocked his head into a question.

  "How ‘bout you go put your plate in the sink?” Karen said. “Go play in your room while Daddy and I clean up."

  "Find a good book,” Evan called after her, but he knew that when he went back later, she'd be watching Finding Nemo for the umpteenth time or taking another trip under the sea with the Little Mermaid CD-ROM that she'd begged them to buy her. At least the latter was educational.

  They cleared the table in silence, then stood together at the sink, Karen rinsing the plates, sending a few scraps down the garbage disposal before handing them to Evan to load into the dishwasher. She turned to the pots next.

  "I just don't want you scaring her,” she said finally. “Eerie? Okay, sure. I understand. But maybe she doesn't, you know, Evan? And after all, it was just a dead battery, and it's running fine now. Just let it go."

  "But why'd the battery die?” he asked, the same as he'd asked earlier. He'd checked the Toyota himself once he got home: opened and closed the doors to watch the interior lights come on and go out; started the engine not once but twice, sitting in the driver's seat the first time and then stepping outside the second, just to listen to it run.

  Karen set down the sponge. “I don't know, Evan, and I'll admit that I think there's something weird about it.” She glanced toward the doorway of the kitchen, as if to make sure Heather hadn't returned, and then, elbows propped on the sink's edge, turned to face him head-on. “And you know what I'm thinking?” she said, her voice softer, more somber. She leaned in closer, and for a moment he felt a shiver at how steady her gaze was. “I'm thinking—” her voice almost a whisper now—"that it's gremlins.” And with that, she finally winked and then gave him a quick kiss on the nose. She picked up the sponge again and the pan she'd been scouring. “I'll tell you what,” she said, a quick nudge with her elbow, “if you can't get it off your mind, why not give the guy a call back, and talk to him about it. Talk it out a little bit, laugh over old times. It'll ... demystify the whole thing, maybe."

  "I don't even remember him. He was a few years behind me.” Not abnormal, Evan knew. He'd been required to memorize the names of old boys during his own Rat year, all of them looming like titans over his freshman activities: Curtis Bartlett and Dick Oglethorpe yelling at a group of first-years to “cheer harder” at a football game, and then having them run laps around the football field when the team fell 14-10. School spirit or else. Or Crispin Smith, who'd made Evan eat a half-dozen peaches when he'd grabbed one at dinner without offering the bowl to the Old Boys first. Years later, he'd run into Smith at a cocktail party and had gone over to tell him that he still couldn't stomach the taste of peaches, but the other man couldn't recall the incident—or Evan either, he eventually admitted.

  "Hard to laugh over old times,” Evan said now, “since the two of us
didn't really share any times."

  Karen shrugged, then handed him the pan to add to the dishwasher. “Then let's just get back to normal, okay ?"

  As soon as they'd finished in the kitchen, he headed back to his daughter's bedroom, stopping along the way to skim through an old yearbook from a bookcase in the living room. Dexter's picture was bland enough—he wore a tangle of blond hair and that awkwardly boyish look, thick eyebrows over dull eyes, broad lips pulled into a slim grin, a slightly jutting lower jaw—and nothing in the brief description yielded much either: straightforward information about Dexter's hometown, an address in Alabama, perhaps still his parents’ address; and extracurricular listings that showed him running cross-country in the fall, going out for track and field in the spring, computing club all year. As he returned the book to its shelf, Evan regretted that none of it jogged his memory any further.

  He was surprised to find Heather neither watching a video on the TV in her room nor playing Little Mermaid on the small Dell that her grandfather had passed along to her. Instead, she had gathered a half-dozen animals in a semicircle around her and was reading to them from one of her Little Bear books—not able really to read the words but repeating the story from memory as she turned the pages. Evan sat down Indian-style beside her and joined in the group of quiet listeners, then read another story himself to the assembled audience. Afterwards, he and Heather sat together at the computer and checked her e-mail for the daily message from her grandfather ("Just keeping in touch,” he always said, “write back soon,” the real reason for his generous gift), and then she clicked open one of the games, moving the mouse with glee as she helped Ariel dive deep into the ocean to gather precious treasure. Soon, Karen peeked in to check on them, leaned her hip against the doorway, smiled. Evan remembered an early beach vacation with Karen, the two of them swaying in a hammock and the moon over the water, and another night, years later, with Karen rocking Heather to sleep when she was just an infant, and then more recently, the three of them reading stories together. These were the moments that Evan treasured—a sense of peace and togetherness, each thing in its place, all somehow right with the world.

  When he and Karen finally pulled the covers over themselves for bed, neither of them had mentioned the incident again. But after Karen had drifted off, Evan still found himself nagged by restless thoughts about the day's coincidence.

  Irrational, he told himself finally, thinking of both his own overreaction and Dexter's overeager phone call. “Something terrible, truly terrible,” he'd said—and over what? A dream? It was more than irrational. It was absurd.

  Wasn't it?

  * * * *

  Despite himself, Evan called the alumni office between prospects at work the next day. He was on the school's board of directors now, and he asked the board liaison for some information about Dexter Hollinger. “Haven't talked to ol’ Dex in a while,” he told her, “and don't remember seeing his name in the alumni mag. Do you all have any idea what he's up to these days?"

  "Looks like it's been recently updated,” she said. “And you're in luck. He lives right here in town.” He could hear her smile on the phone as she gave out his addresses, both physical and e-mail, and a phone number—very likely the same number Evan had failed to write down the day before.

  A quick Google search yielded little more, except for the name of Dexter's wife, Pam, cross-listed with an address in Seattle—proving that part of the story was true as well. He also discovered the name of Dexter's business: Spectrum Security. A sunburst image at the top of the homepage touted “For the Full Spectrum of Security, Always Go With Spectrum Security,” and a list below sketched out their specialties: home, business, car. Evan paused at the word car. Wouldn't it be easy for a man who knew car security to bypass one himself?

  That led him to call the mechanic about the Land Cruiser. Was there any chance it had been tampered with? Any chance at all? He could almost hear the mechanic's confusion and distraction over the phone.

  "Dead battery's a dead battery, I reckon,” he said. “Was there a problem with the way I jumped it off, sir? Is it giving you more trouble? They'd probably replace it for you, but you might need to speak to my manager...."

  It was a dead battery, he told himself. A fluke. Put it out of your mind.

  He did manage that for a while, and at the end of the afternoon, he had garnered three new clients and nearly sixty-two thousand dollars in investments. At home, all seemed positive as well: meat loaf for dinner, and afterwards Heather went to play while Karen took a quick trip to Crabtree Valley Mall.

  But then Evan returned to his study and pulled out the old yearbook again to stare at the picture. When nothing came to him, he called Neil Copley, his boarding-school roommate, now living in Georgia.

  "Hollinger, you say?” asked Neil. “Vaguely. Somebody from down here?"

  "From school. He was a Rat the year we graduated."

  "Dexter Hollinger,” repeated Neil. “Wait. Blond kid? Pointy chin?” and when Evan told him yes, Neil chuckled. “Sure, how could I forget him? He was on my hall his first year. Stretch Flex Dex—don't you remember?"

  "Nickname like that, you'd think I would."

  "He got it running soap races,” said Neil, and Evan pictured the game: new boys lined up two at a time on the dorm's coarse industrial carpet, racing to push bars of soap from one end to the other of long hallways—pushing the soap with their noses only. “Dex was like a spider, legs spread out and that skinny ass up in the air, elbows at these wild angles and his head down on its side. Never won a race; always ended up with these huge rug burns on his nose, down the side of his face. Then we started calling him Carpet Flecks Dex. How's he doing, anyway? You run into him up there?"

  "Got a call from him yesterday.” Evan stared at Dexter's picture in the yearbook and tried to imagine carpet burns along the nose, down the side of that jaw. “He'd had some kind of nightmare about me, if you can imagine.” Evan told Neil parts of the dream, explained about the dead battery on the Toyota.

  "Little freaky, huh?” Neil said when the story was over.

  "I didn't even remember the name, remember him at all. But I guess if I'd been there for the soap races on your hall, it might have stuck in my memory a little more."

  "Well, you oughta remember him, too,” Neil said, in a voice that struck Evan as somehow accusatory. “Dex got sent up a couple of times. You were there at least once."

  "Sent up?” said Evan—another phrase he hadn't heard in nearly two decades—but before he could respond any further, he felt a tugging at his sleeve. Heather in her Strawberry Shortcake pajamas.

  "Daddy, how long are you gonna be on the phone?"

  "Just a few more minutes, honey. Go play in your room, and I'll come in and read you a story soon, okay?"

  "But I want to show you something now.” Her eyes widened with impatience. She wiggled her hands at her sides, the fingers tensed.

  "I'll see it in a minute, okay? Just set it all up for Daddy and I'll be there in a minute."

  Heather left the room pouting. Evan returned to his call.

  "So Dexter got sent up?” Evan pictured the midnight runs, the senior monitors pulling some wayward new boy out of his bunk, standing in a circle to sling curses at him or making him run naked laps around the football field, whatever it took to straighten him out.

  "More than once,” said Neil. “A complete screw-up. Fifteen years old and already on the way to being about half alcoholic. Caught him the first time sneaking off campus, coming back drunk. ‘A hundred demerits, if you get caught.’ That's what I told him. ‘Can you even count that high, Stretch Flex?’ He didn't need it. I didn't need it. That was the first send-up."

  "And what was the next one?” Evan asked, but as soon as Neil told him about the uproar over the pint bottle of Jim Beam they'd found in Dexter's room, Evan had already begun to remember Dexter on his own: a cold night in early December, snow in the air, some of it just barely beginning to stick. A group gathered out bey
ond the new soccer fields, behind the squash courts, several of the other hall monitors standing in a circle, the formal ceremony done, the cursing and shouting begun, and then the circle parting for Evan, the head monitor, to enter the ranks. The grass had crunched under his feet. A dumb Rat—Evan hadn't even known his name, only his offense—down on the ground doing push-ups, his head over a puddle of bourbon one of the other boys had poured onto the dirt. The empty pint bottle lay nearby. “Put your nose in it,” Neil had said as the other boys counted: 51, 52, 53. “Sniff it up now, because you won't be smelling it again.” A chuckle all around, and then another of the monitors had called out, “I'll give him a smell he won't forget.” That monitor—Jim Moring, had it been? Evan thought he could still see that mischievous grin, remember the swagger that he walked with. Yes, it must have been Jim who'd asked that question, and then had paused just briefly as he unzipped his pants, turning toward Evan, the ranking Old Boy: “If you approve, sir,” he said, half mocking. And with a grin, Evan had assented: “It'll be a lesson he won't forget. Carry on, good man.” Evan had watched it happen, the hoots and high-fives of the other Old Boys. “Bravo, good sir,” Evan had said then. “Excellent aim.” And he had walked off after that, leaving it to the rest of them. An exam to study for? Just tired and ready for bed? He couldn't remember those details any more than he had recalled the boy's name. And he hadn't even seen his face that night, hadn't asked the next day for any of the monitors to point out the offender. But now it came back to him: the pant and wheeze of the blond-haired Rat struggling to keep his face held just high enough, the dull spattering of urine against the already moist ground.

  "Daddy,” said Heather, tugging at his arm again. “I need to show you something."

  "Not now, honey,” said Evan as he listened to Neil tell the story. “In a few, I told you."

  "But there are people on my computer,” she said, pouting, and then whispering, red-faced: “People without their clothes on. And I don't know how to make them go away."