Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  The faraway woman, however, was not fat, and though she moved slowly, she did not appear old. He therefore placed her in the same category as himself. The walking dead.

  He shook his head as if warding off conjectures. Thinking about people carried him dangerously close to memories of his parents, of his brother, of her. Shoving the handkerchief back in his parka, he started his laborious climbing. After several teeth-jarring hops, his view of Château Neuchâtel was hidden by a clump of firs.

  • • •

  The following morning more rain fell in sparse, cold drops from the thick clouds that shrouded the peaks. Jamming on a knit cap and shrugging on his ski jacket, he swung past the floor desk. The beet-faced German orderly shook his head. “Nein, nein, Herr Stevens. Not in this rain. It is difficult enough, the crutches. Last week is your first time on them. If you slip, who will find you?”

  He shrugged, continuing to the elevator, which was deep enough to accommodate a stretcher and wide enough for two wheelchairs.

  Emerging on the desolate terrace, where a few weeks ago others—not he—had sipped coffee or tea and eaten whipped-cream pastries, he shivered. In weather like this even the cows had enough sense to huddle near the barn.

  A large black Mercedes was winding cautiously down the road from Davos. If he hung around, he risked having to greet whoever was in it. He could not face strangers. Any conversational exchange, even one as minor as with the red-faced German, cost him unbelievable psychic energy.

  He made as rapidly as possible for the path. On the steep incline, he welcomed the slippery navigations downward.

  Within five minutes his knit hat, beard and Levi’s were drenched, and the freezing rain had penetrated beneath the collar of his waterproof parka.

  One of his crutches hit a pebble, which skittered. He lost control.

  He fell forward heavily, sprawling on his stomach.

  The light aluminum crutch bounced down the incline, coming to a halt five yards away in the tall, drenched grass. For a minute he lay unmoving, staring at the half-hidden metal. It’s only fifteen lousy feet, he told himself. Crawl there, buddy. Stripping off his muddy leather gloves, he folded them into his pockets, then reached for the nearby crutch, pressing it between his right bicep and rib cage. He began crawling. His hands were anesthetized by cold, yet jabs of discomfort told him the skin of the palms was torn. His dragging left leg shot with pain from his toes to his hip socket. Christ, two episodes of pricey surgical work shot to hell!

  Completely absorbed in the pain, his crawl, his grip on his remaining crutch, he didn’t realize anyone was on the path behind him until he had nearly attained his goal.

  Then he saw the flash of high-heeled boots and a flurry of loden cloth. A woman retrieved his crutch.

  His breath exploded in a gasp as he looked up at her.

  A strand of soaking black hair poked out of the loden hood to rest like a pen mark against her cheek; a trickle of rain was running between her nostrils, like snot. His soppy daydreams, his erotic night dreams, could not have invented those details.

  She was real. She was here.

  As they stared at each other, the color drained from her wet face and she swayed. Fearing she was about to collapse, he unthinkingly tried to catch her. Pressing both hands flat against the muddy path, he rose up on his knees. The bad one, the left, gave way. He felt and heard the tendons snap like too tightly pulled rubber bands. The agony he experienced was disassociated from the joy jumping around inside him.

  “You aren’t dead,” she whispered. “It is you.”

  Then he was flooded with the realization that he was steeped in mud, crawling like a crippled beggar, an object for either scorn or the profoundest pity. Hot embarrassment swept him. What right did she have to come here like this? For a moment he considered denying his old identity, telling her she had the wrong guy.

  “I’m called Adam Stevens now,” he said with the coolest politeness he could muster. Immediately he saw that he’d taken the only possible tack. During his escape from the so-called accident he had heard the name Lang repeated several times in urgent fear, so he accepted that Robert Lang had carried a vendetta to its ultimate conclusion. If the assassins hadn’t been more afraid of the night-shrouded forest than of their remote American employer, he wouldn’t be alive and sprawled in the mud this morning. He emphatically must not involve her in the danger.

  “Adam Stevens,” she murmured. They were so close he could see the tiny freckle to the left of her soft, full mouth, feel the warmth of her breath on his wet skin.

  “Yes. Now will you please give me my crutch?”

  “Here, let me help you.”

  He took the crutch. “Thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

  “But your leg—didn’t something just happen to your leg? You can’t stand by yourself, Hap.”

  “Adam,” he corrected. “And though you’ve been very kind, I manage best on my own.”

  “Use me to brace yourself—”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave.” This time his voice was deliberately damaging.

  A gust of wind shook the branches above them, and enormous drops pelted down. One fell on her hood, creeping onto her ashen face.

  But she was, of course, an actress. With a faint smile, she said, “Sorry to have intruded on you.”

  She stepped around him. He didn’t turn to watch her, but he knew from the slushy crunch of her boots that she was returning up the path. When the sound faded he began to cry in big, rasping sobs and the hot tears mingled with icy rain. After a couple of minutes he attempted to stand, but his left leg, which was at a peculiar angle, refused to cooperate, and he sank backward whimpering.

  Two orderlies came running down the path.

  Old Hans was waving his arms and moving his red face agitatedly. “Herr Stevens! Herr Stevens! It is not good to move!” he shouted.

  The tall Italian boy, who was new, darted back to the sanitorium for a stretcher.

  71

  After the surgery he slept until nearly midnight. When he awoke, a linen hand towel was safety-pinned around his bedside lamp. The impenetrable black shadows at the end of the narrow room reminded him of the rain forest on the night of his official death. He looked away. A strong smell of antiseptic ointment came from his hands, which were swathed in gauze bandaging. His leg, in a plaster cast that reached his hip and bared only his toes, hung suspended by a traction device.

  The delicate surgery on his hamstrung left knee, performed by the same Davos surgical team that had operated on him twice before, had lasted four and three quarter hours, and long before the final suturing his spine had ached intolerably in spite of the mixture of anesthetics dripping into the veins of his arm.

  Though he didn’t realize it, he was still stoned.

  A mind in its normal state recollects myriad impressions. His brain lagged over one detail at a time. Alyssia’s sudden appearance on the path. Her beauty. Her pallor—why that ashen pallor? He did not consider that she, believing him dead, might be shocked to find him alive. Instead, he decided it was his mud-soaked crawl that had shocked her.

  He was too drugged for his leg to hurt, but the suspension bothered him, and he decided a change of position might help. Raising his bandaged hands to the metal bar above his chest, he shifted his torso.

  The shadows surrounding the window came alive.

  “You’re awake,” Alyssia said, coming to lean over the railed bed. The dimmed light sparked gold in her eyes.

  Her presence soothed him and he smiled up at her.

  “Uncomfortable?” she asked.

  His mind lurched. It’s dangerous for her to be here, he informed himself. Get rid of her. “I need the orderly.”

  “Tell me where to find whatever you need.”

  “Thank you, but it’s the bedpan,” he lied, taking a melancholy pride that his words, though weak and faraway, were clipped in a manner that sounded vaguely British.

  She left to get the night orderly.
Long before help came, he was sleeping. He stirred restlessly, trapped in nightmares. They were amputating his leg—no, he was at Mount Sinai Hospital and it was Alyssia’s leg they were sawing off.

  • • •

  He opened his eyes to the drab strips of morning light coming through the shutters. Looking around for her, he saw only the familiar buff-colored walls with the three garish prints of the Engadine, the small, fumed-oak breakfast table where he took his solitary meals. (He had been encouraged to use the large, bright dining salon where local adolescents with red, bony wrists showing between their white cotton jackets and white cotton gloves served lunch and dinner. His invariable refusal, or so he believed, was accepted as a desire for solitude, a common enough wish at Château Neuchâtel.)

  His mouth felt packed with dry wool.

  He pressed the buzzer. The wizened nurse with the girlish smile came. Opening the shutters before pouring him water, she held the tumbler while he sucked at the glass straw.

  “So, Mr. Stevens, you are a friend of a famous Hollywood movie star.”

  No longer under the influence, he got a quick mental purchase on the situation. “She does look a bit like Alyssia del Mar, doesn’t she?” he said. “But she’s called Hollister.”

  “Yes, this is the name she says. Hollister.” At the corroboration, the wrinkled mouth formed a disappointed grimace. “She’s very beautiful. You know, oftimes we have here theater folk and politicians who make pretend with other names.”

  “Come on, you know sailors like me don’t meet movie stars.”

  In Kinshasa, Art had found a woman who specialized in fake IDs—she was the Rembrandt of forged papers. And for months now he had been Adam Stevens, American, second officer on the Argo Pride, an oil tanker that sailed under the Liberian flag. During a Mediterranean storm, the vessel had caught fire. Battling the blaze, Stevens had been badly injured.

  “Would you like more water?” asked the nurse.

  “No thanks. Did she leave?”

  “She is in the lounge, resting.”

  “I’m not up to visitors yet.”

  A thermometer was thrust into his mouth, and thin, wrinkled fingers grasped his wrist. “The patients who have the family, the friends, the letters, yah? They recover quickest,” the nurse said in her softly guttural English. “The ones who make no outside contact, ya? They make slow progression. It is a good thing to have visitors.” The thermometer was removed.

  “A long operation yesterday,” he said. “What I need is rest.” While his face was washed, his beard and hair combed, he reiterated that he would recuperate more rapidly if left in solitude.

  The nurse’s sole comment was, “For today the doctors have ordered the liquids.”

  After he drank the juice of blood oranges—the bright crimson color had never seemed natural to him—and finished his lukewarm chocolate, he drowsed.

  • • •

  He awoke at the creak of the door.

  As Alyssia entered, he felt an involuntary surge of relief that she was still on the premises. In less than a second he was planning ways to get rid of her.

  “You’re looking more human.” She smiled and touched her jawline. “I like it, the beard, but it’s a lot darker than I imagined it’d be. The stubble was so fair—I never saw it, just got scratched.”

  At this revival of intimacy, he covered his mouth, pretending to yawn. “I was sleeping. Didn’t the nurse tell you I’m not up to visitors?”

  “No, she told me the staff have been worried that you stick to yourself. They’re sending up flares that finally you have somebody.”

  “Complete privacy is meant to be one of the features of Château Neuchâtel, or so I was given to believe.”

  “Given to believe,” she repeated with the mischievous, gamine grin that invariably melted him. “You’re fuming.”

  “No, simply tired.”

  “That ultracourteous tone means you’re ready to explode.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear?”

  “Oh, you’re very clear.” The smile was gone, and he felt a sense of deprivation. “You don’t want me around. But how’s about if you’d be better off shouting at me than taking a nap?”

  “That might be a possibility,” he said.

  “The name’s different, but you haven’t changed. You still fight by being politer and politer.”

  With an effort that stabbed through his upraised leg, he lifted up on his elbow. “Why can’t you stay the hell out of my life?”

  In the past she would have snapped back at him. Now, though, her mouth trembled and she sank into the chair sidewise. Her hair shadowed her face as she bent forward, weeping. The muffled sobs cut into him, and he called on reserves of control in order not to cry, too. His leg pulsed and throbbed beneath the cast.

  She dried her eyes and blew her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice had lost its musical undertone: she sounded older—and defeated.

  “I didn’t mean to shout at you,” he said quietly. “But I really would prefer to be alone.”

  She nodded. “I can understand that. I’ve screwed things up for you all the way round. Your life, your career. And since I got here, I’ve made you reinjure your leg so you needed another operation.”

  “I take credit for screwing up my life and my so-called career. And as for the leg, hamstrung men shouldn’t go hiking in the rain.” He paused, gathering his strength of will. “But this is my chance to start over again. A new life.”

  “Are you worried about Lang?”

  He had been pulling on the metal bar in an effort to shift his leg. At her question, his grip slackened and he fell back into the tough Swiss bolster.

  She said, “He honestly believes you’re buried at the relief center.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes, he’s positive you’re dead.”

  “I knew he tried to have me blown away, but how can you know it?”

  “He told us.”

  “Us?”

  “Barry, Beth, PD, Maxim. And me.”

  “You’re saying that Robert Lang sat down with the five of you and conversationally mentioned he’d set hit men on me?”

  “It wasn’t exactly like that.” She looked down at the wadded tissue she held. “I’d had a—well, a sort of sight of you at the memorial—did you know they had a memorial for you on Stage Eight, then showed Baobab?”

  “I read something. What do you mean, a sight of me?”

  “Don’t laugh, but I saw you there. Looking the way you do now. The beard. Wearing that white ski parka. I mean, it was so real that I hired a detective. That’s when Lang called us together. He knew there was an investigation, but he wasn’t positive who was paying for it. He’d narrowed the choices down to us. He wanted it stopped.”

  “None of this makes sense.”

  “Lang was already furious at going over budget—he put the entire blame on you, especially after you knocked him down. But PD says it was the article that Barry did for The New Yorker that really set him off. You never saw it, did you? Well, it read as if you were throwing Lang’s money away with both hands. Lang felt you’d made him into a public jackass.”

  “I have no problem buying that Lang would try to dispose of me. What I don’t understand is why he’d let all of you in on it.”

  “It was a warning. Telling us exactly how you’d died was his way of saying that if any of us made waves, one or all would get the same treatment.”

  “So that’s how you found me? A detective?”

  “I was at the villa in Bellagio,” she said, as if this answered his question.

  “Maxim. And the others. What did they do after they’d heard?”

  She shrugged.

  “Nothing?” he asked.

  “They thought you were dead.”

  “Christ!” He grimaced bitterly. “I get swatted like a fly and that’s the end of it?”

  “They had no reason not to believe you were dead. And Lang is very dangerous.”

&n
bsp; “How about giving justice a try?”

  “Hap, they were broken up. Especially Maxim. He’s been a mess since it happened.”

  Desolation swept him. He pressed deeper into the mattress, breathing shallowly until he could pull himself together. “I read about your little girl,” he said awkwardly. “It was a rotten break.”

  The small muscles below her cheeks worked, and for a moment he feared she would start to cry again. “The baby’s not dead, either,” she said in a controlled voice. “It was a little boy and he’s with Beth and Irving.”

  “Your baby?”

  “They’ve adopted him.”

  “You gave up your baby?” he asked incredulously.

  “This way he has a better life.”

  “Because of the divorce?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “But you wanted her—him—so much. It doesn’t make sense—”

  She cut him off by going to the door. “It was wrong of me to come here,” she said. “I’m truly sorry for making things worse for you. But that’s me all over. I never did know when to give up on people. But I’m learning, I’m learning.” She smiled.

  Long after the door closed, he was haunted by that despairing little smile.

  He went over the entire conversation, accepting that she had been fully honest with him. She had confessed that she had cared for him enough to search for him even when it had appeared impossible that she’d find a living man—even when his own brother and the cousins once as close as siblings to him had been frightened off by the danger—she had persevered.

  Why can’t you stay the hell out of my life?

  How could he have shouted that at her? He deserved those unrewarding stints with bitches like Whitney; he deserved his marriage to Madeleine—blonde, smiling, ultrasociable Madeleine.

  He thought about Lang and wondered what the odds were that top purveyors of the hard stuff—busy men—continued their vendettas beyond the grave. Probably negligible. That is, if the deceased keeps a low profile.

  Moving his butt an inch, it occurred to him that he hadn’t told Alyssia how he had escaped from the “accident.” This lapse in her knowledge seemed to hold a promise of return.