by Alon Preiss
She drank a lot of vodka on the plane, trying to type some of her novel, then drinking some more vodka, returning again and again to the nearly blank hole right there in her manuscript where Derek should have been, images of Derek, transcendently beautiful images of her naked California rock star swimming along on the forceful currents of her prose. She stared at the screen until it burned her retina, and then she stared some more, and when she arrived back in New York she collapsed exhausted into the back of the car Rolling Stone had sent.
A while later, she was back in her own bed, unconscious, but not exactly asleep. In the middle of the night, a car horn blasted outside her window, then fell silent. She woke up, but she didn’t know what had awakened her. She wondered if she’d had a bad dream; then she wondered what it had been about. She wondered if it had been about Derek. Or maybe, even, about Alice. She thought of Alice, and Alice’s shocked, flustered face, and Eden blushed again; and she felt very embarrassed, all alone in her bed, the sheet pulled up to her chin.
“Did you ever have a dream that turned out not to be a dream?” Alice asked Grace.
“What do you mean?” Grace asked, sounding not even slightly interested; all her attention on Alice’s body, none on Alice’s mind.
“Just like what I said. You have a dream. Then it turns out not to be a dream.” Alice was just repeating herself. Grace’s fingers kneaded deep into Alice’s back, smoothing out a knot she didn’t know she had. Alice groaned, then felt better.
“I don’t get it,” Grace said.
“Never mind.”
“No, tell me.”
“It’s hard to explain. See, I was having a dream. Just like a dream. Then I woke up. But the dream kept going. It was sort of a dream. But then at a certain point, I was awake, really awake, and it was hard to tell what was a dream and what wasn’t. But looking back on it now, I know.”
“Funny,” Grace said. Nothing shook Grace, nothing shook her from this stolid apathy. Alice wondered whether this was why her husband had bolted out of their marriage. Or whether it was the other way around, that her husband’s desertion had left Grace emotionless. “I don’t get it,” Grace said, after a few moments of thought.
“Like in Rosemary’s Baby, when the Devil’s raping Mia Farrow, and everything’s hazy and weird, and suddenly she sits bolt upright and she says something like this isn’t a dream this is real.”
“I never saw Rosemary’s Baby,” Grace said. “How could that happen? A dream become not a dream. Either it’s a dream or it’s not a dream. What do you mean?”
“Just like I said. If you don’t understand it now, you won’t understand it.”
“Oh well,” Grace said. “Okay.” No disappointment in her voice. “You look terrible, Alice.”
Alice knew. Dark circles under both eyes, the skin on her face inelastic, tired and old. She looked too skinny and too fat, all at once. It had been creeping up on her for a few days, fell like a sledgehammer last night. “Just tired, maybe,” Alice suggested. “I haven’t slept, Grace, really, in days. It seems impossible, like I should be dead. I’m so tired, and I feel so awful, I almost feel great. “
“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s all there is,” Grace said absently. “You’re discombobulated, I think. Completely discombobulated.”
“Yeah,” Alice agreed. She liked that word, discombobulated. She thought that it would be a good title for a book, a good one-word title. DISCOMBOBULATED.
“Tell me about how you had a dream, and woke up, and the dream kept going,” Grace said.
“Okay,” Alice said. “It started right after Blake Maurow left to go on his trip.”
Grace moved Alice’s arm behind her back, held it with both hands, then muttered, “Tell me if this hurts.”
Alice told Grace most of the story, but not all of it. She didn’t tell Grace about her sister. She didn’t tell Grace about her baby. But she pretty much told her the rest of it. It didn’t sound so bad, as Alice told the story for the very first time.
Alice started freaking out after Maurow left. She started freaking out worse one night when she missed his telephone call. She was downstairs buying a magazine when he called. She immediately called him back, but the hotel said he wasn’t in his room. She got into bed, lay there for a long time. Not even surprised, not even expecting to sleep. She had missed his call, and he would not call her back, and where would she be then, without the love and attention and affection and support of the famously remarkable Blake Maurow?
She turned on the TV, just watched the pictures without the sound. Some old movie. Carroll was in the room with Alice, watching the movie, making little comments in their head. They made up their own black and white story, invented their own dialogue. The movie, the sisters decided, was about a man who ate frogs. He ate them alive, because he liked to feel them kick around in his mouth. This bothered all his friends. It bothered his girlfriend, a beautiful statuesque blonde with billows of hair that hung down over the left side of her face. Veronica Lake, or someone like that. Everyone spent the movie trying to convince him not to eat frogs. In the end, he gathered his friends together. All right, he said. I will stop eating frogs. His beautiful girlfriend kissed him. All his friends clapped and sang. Alice felt herself drift into sleep as the closing credits rolled, and Carroll fluttered away on a little breeze, out the window, laughing in the brown New York air.
And then Alice fell asleep, and her dream began. Outside in the middle of the night, she could hear a little girl laughing in her ear. When she spun about, she could see nothing. Then, on her other side, the laughter again — not friendly, really a caricature of a young girl’s laughter, more taunting than joyous, so close that Alice could feel her breath.
In this dream, Alice split into two people, two Alices. The first Alice was lost on a dark, cloudy night, wondering why this girl was taunting her. The second Alice was omniscient, and she knew that the lost Alice would soon enough realize that she was being haunted by the ghost of her own little child.
Alice ran through dark side streets, in some city that could have been New York or Marrakech or Baghdad or anywhere, and just beyond the next dark alleyway, she saw sunshine, she saw herself walking hand-in-hand with a little girl in some sun-washed plaza, the little girl in a white dress. Alice could tell that she had brought this girl there with the money that she’d once earned for herself, quadrupled and quintupled and bazillioned many times over, and she was telling her all sorts of things, about being independent-minded, about having a successful life, doing the things she’d always dreamed, about being young and happy and rich in the sunshine. A man was sitting in a café, tall and too lanky but with a certain joie or savoir faire or some other French word that perhaps Alice had never learned and which could be translated as something uniquely Continental, good but indescribable. He was sipping coffee out of one of those little cups people drink coffee out of in Europe. He smiled and waved. The Alice running through the alley hated the man in the café, but she couldn’t think why, couldn’t even remember how she recognized him; the Alice holding the hand of the little girl in the sunshine loved him, and she and the little girl waved back, both of them smiling. Alice kept running toward this scene, but the more she ran, the farther away it got, until it was just a little bright dot on the far horizon.
Alice at the very top of a building, up on the roof, looking down at a trash-filled street. Beside her on the roof, the little girl, looking at her sadly. Alice tried to explain herself to the little girl, a curiously fresh-faced, blond little girl, with big blue eyes. “I tried to create a better mother for you,” she said. “I had all sorts of things I was going to teach you, important lessons. I was going to be one of those independent women of the world.” She continued, describing her perfect image of herself, from many years ago, details and images from a life that never happened.
The little girl didn’t smile; sat there, almost hovering on gusts of wind, nodding dubiously.
Then, a twenty-year-old woman, who lo
oked like the little girl, beside Alice on the roof, put her arm around Alice, patted her on the back, a pat that was a little too rough.
Then she sank into middle-age.
Then she was eighty.
Alice walked all the way to the edge, balancing on the very edge, twenty stories above the dark empty street. She was in a long white dress, and the dress fluttered in the wind.
The old woman was crying at Alice’s side. Then she was gone.
It all turned out the same, Alice thought, in the end.
Alice found herself next running through a forest, the little girl’s laughter so close behind her, angry taunting laughter. A little shadow in the sky far above her, flying above her, then swooping down close, whispering in Alice’s ear, little childish taunts.
She stopped running, out of breath, and spun round. The laughter stopped. The sky was dark blue-black, and the lanterns glowed through the mist — the entire scene beautiful and peaceful and romantic and inviting, like a painting from the 19th century. Beautiful, and too quiet. In the shadows, Alice thought she saw a figure move about; she turned, and there was nothing.
This was all rather frightening, but it was the detached, numbing fear one feels deep in a dream; a fear Alice didn’t really believe.
Then a strange thing happened. Alice woke up. She really did wake up. And nothing changed. It was just as she would later explain it to Grace. One moment she was asleep, dreaming that she was in the forest. The next moment she was awake, really awake, but she was still in the forest, and it was still a chilly, moonless summer night. She awoke in mid stride, her left leg in the air, the wind in her face, adrenaline jolting her heart and her brain.
Real, wide-awake fear hit her like a knife in her chest. This was how Carrie felt, coming to, after one of her spells. Alice knew that this was exactly how Carrie always felt. Just popping back into reality, and having to deal. They were both from the same single cell, after all.
Alice was dressed in a black sweat-jacket and black sweat-pants, perspiration streaming down her face. Her feet were bare, and they ached.
Alice started running again, no thoughts in her mind. She didn’t know exactly where she was, but she figured if she just ran straight, eventually she’d get somewhere. To her left, someone laughing in the bushes; on her right, a figure standing beside a tall tree, casting a shadow in front of her. She didn’t look, didn’t think, her heart pounding in her ears. A few minutes later, a man stood in the middle of the path, just standing there drinking from some sort of bottle of booze. No place to hide, so Alice just kept going. The man stepped clumsily to one side and let Alice pass. After ten minutes, or fifteen, her ankles cracking underneath her, she reached a chain link fence. She quickly scaled it, flipped over the top, and landed on the sidewalk, her limbs making a little snap. She limped to the corner, and she waved down a cab.
The taxi driver was smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. His cigarette hung off his lower lip, cocked to the right. Every minute he loudly sipped his coffee on the left side of his mouth, and his cigarette jiggled slightly but otherwise stayed in place, as though glued to the spot.
“Do you know what time it is?” Alice asked.
He shrugged. He was a skinny young man, with two days’ growth of beard. His sharp eyes glared at Alice in the rear view mirror.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “I asked if you know what time it is.”
“You’re lucky that I picked you up at all,” he said, as though that were an answer.
“So you won’t tell me what time it is?”
“You should be quiet and thankful that I bothered to pick you up,” he repeated. “You’re bleeding all over my cab. I’ll have to clean my cab after you get out.”
Alice looked down at her feet, at the blood on her bare feet. Her arm was also bleeding rather heavily. She wondered if her face were bleeding. She looked up into the rear view mirror, and she could see a gash across her forehead.
“You see?” the driver said. “So you are lucky that I’m a nice man.”
“All right,” Alice said, not quite mad at him, actually feeling rather thankful. “Fine.”
He drove her back to her apartment building in silence.
“You live here?”
“Yes.” Her building rose up before her, like Jesus or something.
“This here? This your building?”
“I said yes.”
“Fifteen dollars. This isn’t your building.”
Alice smiled. “Let me just get the money from the doorman.”
She reached for the door handle, but before she could escape from the cab, all the locks clicked shut.
“This isn’t your building. That doorman doesn’t know you.”
“Please, let me out. I’ll be right back. You can watch me. I won’t even go into the building.”
“Fifteen dollars first, then you get out.”
“I don’t have the money now,” she said, “but the doorman will give me the money.”
“No, little lady,” he said. His body was twisted around, and he was staring straight into Alice’s eyes. “You have the order mixed up. First you give me the money. Then you get out of my cab. Not the other way around.”
“I have no money,” Alice said again.
“Give me the money you were going to spend on crack,” he said.
Alice told him that she wasn’t a homeless person. She was a rich girl who’d had a bad night.
The driver laughed at this. He turned away from her and leaned back into his seat. “I can wait as long as you,” he said. He took a puff on his cigarette and the smoke drifted into the back seat. “Give me the money that you earned fucking junkies,” he said. “The money you were going to spend on crack.”
She sighed. “Just let me talk to the doorman,” she said.
“You know the doorman, do you?”
“Yes.” She ignored the incredulity in his voice.
“If I let you out of this cab, you will run away. I’ll have to chase you. You’ll scream.” He spoke wearily. He’d been through all this before. Every time he picked up a crackhead whore, it was the same thing. “You’ll scream and it will take a lot of explaining.” He thought. “I’m keeping the door locked.”
“My husband owns a condo duplex in that building,” Alice said. “I’m very rich. I’ve just had a bad night.”
Alice could see the driver’s bitter eyes in the mirror. Smoke drifted out of his nostrils. He smiled a little bit. Alice tried to smile back, to make eye contact in the mirror. She thought she saw his steely gaze soften.
“Please?” she said. “Please let me out of the cab?”
His eyes were widening a little; did she see some pity there, some human kindness? For a moment, she was sure that he saw her side, that he believed her story, that he liked her and pitied her and respected her, and that he trusted her, and that her problems were over.
“Poor little lady,” he said gently. He turned around and peered into the back seat.
She smiled sadly into his eyes, and Alice thought a moment of understanding passed between them, a moment in which he shared something with her, some moment of pain and sadness and trauma, and she listened. They understood each other, she thought, during that moment. She liked him, suddenly, and she was grateful for the help she believed that he was about to give her.
“Come on,” he said, much more gently now, persuasive and cajoling and so quiet she could barely hear his voice. “Give me the money you were going to spend on crack. The money you earned fucking junkies. Okay? Please?”
“This stuff in the cab,” Grace asked. “Was it a dream?”
“No,” Alice sighed. “I woke up in the forest. After that, nothing was a dream. The cabbie was a real man. A real nasty man.”
“How did you get to the forest?”
“I guess I was running in my sleep.”
“I never heard of anyone going running in her sleep.”
“Neither have I,” Alice said. “But, you kn
ow. Why not?”
“I guess,” Grace agreed uncertainly. “How did you escape from the cab?”
“Oh,” Alice replied. “There was a lot of screaming. A lot of unpleasantness. But ultimately I got away. He got paid, but no tip.”
When Grace left, Alice felt tingles all over her skin. Some sort of drug was kicking in from her lack of sleep: caffeine mixed with endorphins mixed with a rush of something else that she didn’t recognize. Somehow, she felt good, from the pounding of this unfamiliar combination of natural and unnatural drugs in her blood, from Grace’s hands all over her body. She loved and hated the hysteria that was still building inside of her — she almost wanted never to sleep again, if it meant that this feeling would keep growing, and flooding her veins, and tingling on her skin.
She went upstairs to her study, turned on the computer, and finished her first draft of her newest Andrea book. Words spinning past her eyes; typing as fast as her fingers could move. All the way to the bloody conclusion on a rocky cliff, Jake in his Volvo headed straight towards Andrea, Andrea jumping up, bouncing off the windshield, grabbing onto a tree branch, dangling over the edge watching drops of blood fly off the deep gash on her forehead and float away in the wind over the ravine and up into the sky, Jake popping out of his car on the driver’s side, catching hold of some shrubs growing out of the side of the granite wall, and the look on his face tells his wife that he knows that this is just a brief respite from death, his grip gradually slipping, looking up at Andrea, his lips mouth the words: I will always love you.... and then he is no more. What does Andrea think? Andrea doesn’t know what to think. For the first time in the history of the Andrea adventures, Andrea is blank.