Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  “I’ve been having some … memory problems.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forgetting where I put things, walking into a room and not remembering what I was doing there…”

  “Okay, but, like, you’re…” I searched for a not super rude way to say it. “I mean, you’re not exactly young anymore.”

  “No, I’m not.” He smiled sadly. “But this is a little more than just … senility. I forgot that you were at the AM this week, Rose.”

  “What?” That hurt. Knowing what I know now, I get that it was just a symptom of the disease, that it just eats away at things indiscriminately and randomly, but in that moment, it really felt like he was forgetting me. Like my family could just carry on fine—thrive even—with me out of sight and out of mind.

  “I spent most of the day yesterday at the AM, talking to doctors, getting tests and scans, and…”

  Something caught in his throat. My mom squeezed his hand harder.

  “I’m sick,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Aaron wince and when I turned to look at him fully, I saw a tear at the corner of his eye, begging to escape and go rolling down his face. The image made tears well up in my own eyes, like they’d been waiting there to rush forward since the moment I sat down. Like my body somehow knew that when I came downstairs this morning, my world would be changed forever and was preparing to expunge everything through tears.

  “What do you mean, sick?” I demanded, my hands floundering on the top of the table. I wanted to reach out to grab my parents’ joined hands, or grab Aaron’s hand, get some comfort from someone, but I didn’t want to be the baby, the youngest daughter who needed her hand held.

  “It’s Alzheimer’s,” he said, ripping the Band-Aid right off in the way only my dad could. Aaron flinched again. “Early onset.”

  “What?” I blinked, one of my as-of-yet unshed tears clinging to my eyelash. I don’t know what I’d expected but this wasn’t it. We’re Atypicals, we’re practically magical beings, if he was at the AM getting checked for something, it would be some kind of magical disease that has some magical cure, right? Not … this.

  “But…” I gasped for air. “You’re Atypical. So why—how—”

  “Being Atypical doesn’t protect me from disease,” he said. “In fact, it may have hurried it along.”

  “No, you—you have an ability, this shouldn’t be possible,” I insisted.

  But that’s not how anything works, apparently. All the telekinesis in the world, the mind reading, dreamdiving, future-predicting, every drop of unique ability and specialness that my family has can’t help us. Nothing can help us. Help him.

  The thing about Mr. Wiggles is that he would fall off every now and then. He would fall off the wheel, flop into his little bed of those soft wood chip things you line cages with, shake himself off, and get right back on the wheel.

  But what happens when you fall off the wheel, straight through the wood chips, the floor, and you just keep on falling, falling, f a l l i n g

  December 26th, 2016

  Dear Mark,

  I’m still mad at you, you know.

  You reached in, without me knowing, and you took my power away. You did it without meaning to, which frustrates and comforts me in equal measure. You didn’t mean to hurt me. You also didn’t mean to change my life so completely, and you did it effortlessly. Thoughtlessly.

  We were on a collision course from the start, but I never thought our abilities colliding would mean that I’d have my ability shunted back to some deep, dark place where I couldn’t access it. I think that was worse than this. Yeah, I’m still handcuffed to a bed, spending Christmas with slowly healing ribs, but at least I know it’s the drugs making my power feel far away. After what happened with you, it’s like I was pushed underwater. Do you know what that feels like? To have a fundamental part of you pushed down to somewhere you can’t reach?

  Of course you do. That’s exactly what got us into that mess in the first place. This place fucked you up so bad that you had to work for months to get your ability back. You were hitting against that wall so hard you broke all the way through and broke me too.

  I know I’m partly to blame too. I do know that. But you never came by to check in on me. After we got back, you just left me

  I can’t stay mad at you, that’s the problem. Well, no, the real problem—

  I wish I could be mad at you. I think that’d be easier.

  II

  FOG

  11-01-2016, morningwaffles, text post

  Winter is really coming in like a lion this year, earlier than it has any right to. I was not built for the cold climate, but I love this city in the snow. I grew up down in the Southwest, where the days are scorching and the nights are freezing and nothing ever changes very much. The days get longer, get shorter, shrink and stretch with the turn of the earth, but there’s always warm clay beneath your feet, soaking up the sunshine in the day and letting it off when the evening comes. There are always bugs buzzing, creatures scurrying, wind blowing literal tumbleweeds across your driveway. Even the stars feel loud in their shine.

  Now, here I am, in the middle of a college campus, in a big city, a direct diagonal shot northeast from my home, and I’m amazed by the hush of quiet. With each new snowfall, the city feels made anew. It feels like just yesterday I was making my way through a summer storm to get soup for my roommate, running into a rain-soaked girl with a sprained wrist, who didn’t smile easily, making me want to earn her smiles even more.

  That girl is now curled up on my bed, fast asleep, while snow falls gently outside, blanketing everything in beautiful white quiet.

  Okay, yes, I’ve been holding out on you all. A lot has happened in the past whirlwind of a month and I’ve been keeping my personal life close to my heart like the precious thing it is, but I’m just so over-the-moon happy that I need to shout about it to someone and all my irl friends are really sick of hearing about it. So, here I am, shouting about it to all of you.

  Yes, things have been going well with “Daisy.” Like, really, really well. We’re still in the getting-to-know-you phase of things, but I really like who I’m getting to know. She’s still quiet a lot of the time, and doesn’t smile easily, but she’s got this razor-sharp wit that comes out of nowhere and this deep, deep curiosity that lights up her eyes whenever she gets a whiff of something she doesn’t know about. This doesn’t feel like something that’s light or casual. Which would scare me except … I’m just excited. Like I’ve woken up to a massive snowfall and my surroundings are no longer familiar but all the more interesting because of that.

  Anyway, that’s enough poetical writing about weather and girls for one day. Maybe if y’all are nice about this post, I’ll share a teeny-tiny portion of poetry. But for now, I’m going to go curl up with my girlfriend and take a nap.

  NOVEMBER 1ST, 2016

  This afternoon I went rollerblading.

  I’m not even sure what I had been dreaming about before I realized I was dreaming. The act of recalling a lucid dream is a bit like trying to perfectly pinpoint your earliest memory. I don’t know when I arrived at consciousness in my life, couldn’t mark the year, the moment when I started forming the long-term memories that have built upon one another to make me the person I am. We don’t remember the moment of our birth, just like we don’t remember the instant we slip from waking into sleep.

  I woke up spinning inside my dream. Spinning without my muscles tensing, spinning without getting nauseous. Spinning with uncomplicated joy. Then I realized I was dreaming. I spun faster, sticking out my arms, the speed just fast enough to feel exhilarating, to make the wind whip through my hair, but not fast enough to make my neck ache.

  And then, suddenly, there was that second waking. That sharp, cool wind that blows to tell me I’m walking somewhere else. That I’m in someone else’s head. I opened my eyes, stopped spinning, to see Emily, beautiful, free, lovely Emily, spinning and spinning. I grabbed her hand and w
e spun together.

  That was when I realized—we were flying. Finally, finally flying. Not just on solid ground among the clouds, not hurtling through a dark and terrifying nightmare, not floating bodiless through the woods, but flying of my own volition, in my own control. I gripped Emily’s hand tighter and stopped us spinning, propelled us higher and higher. We floated up into the air, breathless with joy, and Emily’s beauty was almost too bright to look at.

  She was wearing a necklace I’ve never seen before, a gold conch shell that glittered against her skin, and her smile made me feel more beautiful. Like I didn’t have to pretend with her, like I could be fully me and it would be okay. I reached out, wanting to make the conch shell glitter even more, make the sparkles light up her eyes, but it grew too big under my touch, the dreamworld screeching against my own head as I tried to control it, the shell starting to weigh us down.

  I woke up too soon. Too suddenly. Before I could fix it, there was a click of a door opening and shutting somewhere, like it was inside of me and outside of me and before I could figure out which it really was, my body was twitching, my hands grasping around someone else’s. When I opened my eyes, I saw Emily blearily rubbing her eyes, the ghost of a smile on her face, not as big as the one she had in her dream, but, impossibly, with the same amount of joy lining her face. I blinked and looked around her dorm, reacquainting myself with the waking world and the fact that I was in Emily’s dorm and her roommate, Mary, was walking through the door. She and Emily exchanged some vague words about schedules before Mary had disappeared into the bathroom and Emily turned her soft smile onto me.

  “Hey there, sleepyhead.”

  “Hey,” I croaked, feeling a heady mix of self-consciousness at falling asleep and self-assured confidence that going back to the dreamland we’d been sharing would be far preferable to being awake.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, and it was so kind, so full of compassion that I wanted to run away as fast as my stubby legs could take me. It had been like this in the past month we’d been dating—I try my best to charm Emily, to be someone she could like and then, inevitably, something gets in the way and she still treats me like a beautiful thing. On our fourth date, a few weeks after I got out of the AM, a few weeks after … everything, we were taking a walk around the Common again, holding hands, more at ease with each other than we’d been the first time we took that walk, but still with the jittery nervousness of people who had only kissed a few times, and I fell asleep. Apparently it was pretty spooky—I started to stumble and thankfully Emily had caught me just in time to sort of … spin me onto a park bench we were walking past. I was only out for a minute or so I guess, because when I woke up, her face was pale and clammy and her phone was clutched in her hand, emergency services up but not yet dialed.

  So that’s how I told the girl I’m dating I have … drumroll … narcolepsy! Yeah, I lied. Kind of. I do still fall asleep randomly, obviously, so it’s not a lie as much as it is not … the whole truth. And it’s not like I’ve made a habit of going into her dreams—this was only the second time I’d ended up in her dreams and both times it was something sweet and innocuous. I’m not spying. If there was something genuinely revealing in them, I’d force myself to wake up. I know I would.

  I wish I could just wake up from this whole

  Never mind.

  Stupid pen. All my pencils are in my work locker, because now that my wrist is healed I’m spending as much time as I possibly can there, just observing and helping where I can, even though I’m not officially back because they can’t have someone on the line who might fall asleep at any moment, but it’s the best way for me to ensure that between sleeping, work, and Emily, I don’t have to—

  Anyway. I’m home now. Just like my parents want. For me to be spending more time at home. And it’s not that I don’t want that too it’s that …

  Well, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to just go about normal life, just pretend like we’re back in July and I’m sleeping great and my dad is healthy and Aaron is being his annoying self instead of weirdly doting and considerate and my mom is demanding the best from everyone instead of skulking around the house with fear in her eyes?

  It’s the worst when I come home to an empty house. Like I did tonight. I opened the door, put my keys on the front hall table, and heard the clink of metal on wood echo through the house. I didn’t call out—wasn’t sure if I actually wanted anyone to know that I was home, didn’t know what I would possibly say to any of them to fix things. I’m not even sure what’s broken, I just know something is.

  Since that horrible morning around the breakfast table, we’ve all been circling around one another like one wrong move will send something shattering. We’ve been polite and courteous and quiet and measured and that’s not the family I know AT ALL. That’s been my job, to make myself smaller so they could all be larger than life. And just when finally, finally I was starting to feel like I belong, like I was going to come back from the AM and understand exactly what it was like to be an Atypical Atkinson, slot in right next to Mom, Dad, and Aaron as one of them, take up space, belong, our entire family dynamic gets shifted off its axis. My entire world gets shifted off its axis.

  I haven’t stopped falling since that morning and I don’t know what’s going to happen when I hit the ground. I will do anything to not find out.

  NOVEMBER 3RD, 2016

  I’ll admit to being pretty skeptical about this whole therapy thing—even though I liked talking to Dr. Loving, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of making it part of my routine. But I guess I have … stuff I need to talk about. And Dr. Bright, a therapist the AM had referred me to but who didn’t seem to actually work for them, was pretty good at getting me to talk. Even if I don’t always tell her the truth.

  Again though: a half-truth. A lie of omission. Same thing as telling Emily that I have narcolepsy when in fact I have a superpower. Not telling Dr. Bright about my dad is just like that. It’s not relevant to what we’re doing anyway. She was assigned to me by the AM; I’m supposed to be continuing the work I did with them. Meditating, talking about the particulars of my ability, all of which I’ve found to be surprisingly easy to do with her. She’s a petite Asian American woman with a hard mouth but warm eyes, like she wants to be soft and vulnerable, but is always watching what she says. I can relate. At least she has the excuse of being a therapist.

  Everything she’s told me about dreamdivers—that they can occupy other people’s minds, even when they’re awake, that some of them can build entire dreams, entire worlds, whole cloth, that some don’t even go into others’ dreams at all, but places of their own making—she says like it’s completely normal. And I guess maybe it is for her. She’s probably got dozens of clients like me, has been working with Atypicals for her whole career, maybe she’s even Atypical herself.

  I want that, what she describes. I want to be able to control this thing perfectly, to not have sleep be this weird prison where it just happens whenever it happens and then I’m stuck. I want to be able to get out of this city and to go to culinary school and to not have to worry about money or my future or my family—

  I want to be able to have a girlfriend without panicking about whether I’m lying to her. Making up a story to explain why I was gone when I was at the AM was awkward enough and now I’m just … constantly wondering when I’m going to slip up and reveal something and give her a reason to call me crazy and delete my number. I’m really starting to like her—I feel comfortable falling asleep around her, I love the feeling of her dreams, even when I send them spinning out of my control, and I love the way she kisses and how she laughs and how her hands are always moving, but I don’t see a future for us if she doesn’t know, like, the biggest, most important thing about me.

  “What do your patients do usually?” I asked Dr. Bright when the topic came up.

  “That’s not a choice anyone can make for you, Rose,” Dr. Bright said. “Most of the people I know choose
to only tell those closest to them—their immediate family, best friends, spouses, partners. It’s true that the AM doesn’t want Aypicals to go around broadcasting it—”

  “Yeah, they made that very clear.” I snorted, thinking of the brochure that Owen had handed me during our exit interview called Your Ability and You! which detailed all the ways to make up excuses for the weird things that might happen around Atypicals and how best to hide different types of powers. Not the most encouraging piece of material I’ve ever read.

  “But it’s your decision to make,” Dr. Bright said, the warmth of her voice making my shoulders relax a little. “I would suggest caution. Not everyone reacts well and it is a very personal thing to share. Make sure you trust the person first. But other than that, it’s really up to you.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, considering. “I don’t think I’ll tell her just yet but, I don’t know, I really feel like we could be something and this isn’t a part of my life I’m willing to hide from a serious girlfriend.”

  “See?” Dr. Bright smiled and that time it felt real. “You already know your boundaries. Trust your instincts.”

  Dr. Bright was full of those things: “trust the process,” “trust your instincts,” “listen to what your body is telling you,” et cetera, et cetera. I want to be annoyed by those platitudes, but they don’t feel like platitudes when she says them, somehow. She seems to really have the whole therapist role nailed—even when the session was over, she rose in this calm and fluid manner that I’d noticed she did every movement with—like even her own physical actions could be a way to soothe a patient.

  “Call me if you have any concerns,” she said as she gently ushered me to her door, and then something happened that I don’t think is supposed to happen when you’re in a therapist’s office midsession—the door opened before we could get there.