The Missing Link

by Erica Pensini

  The ride on the streetcar is long, and for a stretch of time we sit without speaking. Then Joshua looks at me, and I can tell from his face that he has been thinking all along, but that the thoughts struggle to translate themselves into words.

  I look back at him and wait for him to phrase his thoughts.

  “Your dream, the one you keep having. You always tell me the face you see resembles yours. But it’s not yours”, he starts

  “It’s not mine…no”, I say

  “So it’s your mom? Your real mom, I mean…”, he asks

  I think about it for a moment.

  “No…there’s a small face, a face as small as mine”, I continue

  “Small? Is the dream about your childhood?”, Joshua asks

  “There are two faces. Yes! Yes, there are two faces! The small one and another one, a big one”, I exclaim, my voice rising

  People eye me for a short instant, before going back to their business

  “You’re right, it’s a dream about my childhood!”, I exclaim again, my tone rising into a joyful pitch

  I’ve realized something which was always there in front of me and yet invisible.

  “Where are you in the dream?”, asks Joshua

  “I don’t know…”, I say

  “What do you see?”, he asks again

  “Colours. Bright colours”, I start to remember

  “Which colours?”

  “It’s like a mosaic. It’s a mosaic sprawled through my tears”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because they are taking me away”

  “From whom?”

  “From the faces”

  “Who are the faces?”

  “It’s a big face and a small face, like mine”, I repeat

  “Your mom and your sibling”

  I start crying

  “What do you see through your tears? The mosaic, what it is like?”, Joshua insists

  “It’s hot. The mosaic is hot when a big hands holds mine and I touch it”

  “It’s summer. What’s the mosaic like?”

  “Like a lizard”

  “You see a mosaic coated lizard?”

  “Yes”

  “Describe it”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Try”

  “It’s blue”

  “What else?”

  “It’s climbing”

  “On what?”

  “On a rock”

  “A big rock?”

  “I don’t know…”

  I grab my head and cover my ears

  “No!”, I scream and the crowd turns again

  Joshua hugs me as if I were a kid

  “Let’s paint when we go back”, he says

  We often do. I don’t paint in the place where I live, where my parents live. The flawed perfection of my family’s luxury is uninspiring. It inhibits me.

  But I didn’t expect him to come up with this now.

  “Paint?”, I ask, wiping off my tears

  “Yeah. Lizards are nice to paint”, he says, and I understand his plan.

  Chapter 5

  The tubes of colour are spread out all over the floor and a blank canvas is waiting for me, rested against the wall. Joshua never puts anything away, it kills the inspiration – he says – and I think he’s right.

  “I’ll be working at the night club tonight, I’ll get off at 5 a.m.”, Joshua tell me

  I nod.

  “In a week they’ll tell you something about your DNA…you never know what you’ll discover. But the real key is here”, he says, pointing at his forehead

  “You know what happened”, he continues

  I shrug

  “I am not sure…”, I say

  “Well, I’ve got to go now. Will I find you when I get back?”, he asks

  “I’ll be here”, I tell him

  Joshua smiles, blows a balloon with his bubble gum and pops it. I can tell he’s happy that I’ll stay.

  “Yeah good”, he says and walks out, still smiling

  The door clicks close and I am alone with the blank canvas.

  The image was clear in my head, but now that I am trying to get it out of me on the canvas it seems to fade away. When I close my eyes it comes back, but as soon as I try to define the details, the whole image becomes evanescent.

  The whiteness of the canvas is unnerving. I look at my watch, it’s 5.33. I close my eyes, I reopen them and it’s 5.35. I do this over and again.

  It’s 6 and the light in the room has gradually changed. The canvas is still blank and I start to panic.

  I close my eyes once more and when I open them I stop caring. The painting doesn’t have to be my dream. It can be anything. I just have to get the colour on there, the image that will form doesn’t matter.

  Dots of light blue. Dots of yellow. Other dots of blue, darker. The colours add up, and it doesn’t seem like I am controlling them. My hand moves from the palette to the canvas, it dips in the water, in the colour, in the rag to cleanse itself and get ready for the next tint. It simply happens. I am starting to see a lizard, its blue and yellow and white and there’s a bit of brown too in there. It’s a dotty lizard. Its skin is a mosaic. The dots add up, and now…

  …now I recognize it. Yes, I actually recognize it! It’s shiny and its gloss reflects the brightness of the day. Light blue. My hand fills the space around the lizard with it. That’s the sky, I remember this joyful sky.

  I am peaceful watching the lizard.

  My eyes close again.

  I see a face. Someone places a hand on me, it is a warm protecting hand that presses against my head. And there’s a face. That face is like mine, and when it cries I cry.

  When I open my eyes I see the lizard through my tears as if it were streaked, somehow deformed.

  The brush dips into the colours, still wet on the canvas, and drags them into long stripes. The sky is blurred too now.

  “No! No! Help, help!”. This is what the voice yells as I am being pulled away from the protecting hand.

  The face like mine disappears.

  I open my eyes and I am terrified, I gasp for air, I can’t breathe. I run to the bathroom and vomit, it is so painful to cry and vomit, I feel like I will suffocate and die.

  A protecting hand starts to caress my head.

  “Iris, what happened to you?”, I hear Joshua say as he bends beside me

  “You’re back”, I whisper and realize that I can breathe after all.

  “Come”, he says, pulling me up and washing my face in the sink

  I rinse off my mouth

  “Joshua…I am sorry”, I say when I manage to speak

  “What happened?”

  I don’t know what happened.

  “I’m happy you’re back”, I reply instead

  “Have you been sick for long?”, he asks

  “I don’t know…”

  “Did you sleep at all? Let me bring you on the couch”, Joshua says, slipping an arm around me

  But as we head to the living room Joshua catches a sight of the canvas lying on the wall and stops short. He remains silent and his face tells me that he is stunned by what he is seeing

  “WOW!”, he exclaims

  “The dream is real…”, I tell Joshua

  He looks at me and nods

  “Do you know what you just painted?”, he asks me

  “My dream”

  “That lizard…I think it really exists. I’ve seen something in a picture that somehow reminds me of it”, Joshua says

  “Which picture?”

  “A picture of some place…it was on a website”

  “What was the place?”

  Joshua bugs his eyes, trying to fetch the memory.

  “I don’t remember”, he says at last

  “Oh come on! Yes you do!”, I exclaim

  “It was long ago…”

  “But can’t we find it again?”, I insist

  “We must try”, Joshua says

  “What t
ime is it?”, I ask

  “6 am”, he says, taking my arm and reading the time from my watch

  “I have to see the dream shrink at 8, you know?”

  “Well, let’s have a shower and some breakfast since you have some time”, Joshua tells me

  I love how easy life is with him.

  We slip under the shower together and I wish I never had to see Stephanie or step out of this place again.

  Chapter 6

  I’m getting out of the streetcar and heading to see Stephanie for our session. The shower with Joshua had cleansed the nausea and the anguish off me for a while, but now all of a sudden the lack of sleep and the turmoil of the lasts emotions weights on me.

  When I step in Stephanie’s office I feel tired beyond exhaustion and wish I were elsewhere. I simply don’t want to talk.

  The feeling must be stamped on my face, because Stephanie looks at me for a moment before asking me if I am all right.

  “I suppose I am”, I say

  “So do you feel ready for today’s session?”, she asks me and I say sure, we can do it.

  She seems to buy my answer, but once we reach the room where the session should take place she becomes inquisitive again.

  “Are you sure you’re fine? We can postpone the meeting if you want”, she insists

  “I’ve painted for the whole night and things have somehow come back to my mind”, I tell her and stop, not sure about how much I want to give away

  “What did you paint?”, she asks

  I delay the answer for a moment

  “A lizard”, I say at last

  “What’s the lizard to you?”, she asks

  “The lizard is about something that happened when I was a kid”, I say

  Stephanie waits for me to continue. It is too late to stop, I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place if I didn’t want her to know. So I tell her about whichever shreds of my past I could retrieve during tonight’s excursion into lost memories.

  “Did you see who dragged you away?”, Stephanie asks after I finish the story

  “No…all I know is that somebody was taking the face away from me”, I tell her

  “Do you have any other memories?”, she asks

  “No, not really…do you think we can just start the session? I'm tired, you know, so it won't be hard to sleep and dream for you to do whatever you need to do”, I say with unintended aggressiveness in my tone

  “Ok…so what we're going to do now is have you lie and sleep. We can give you some sedatives to help. We're going to hook up electrodes on you to get some indication of how strong your emotions are while you sleep. We will link whatever we can record to what you remember. You need to tell me what you see during the dream, it matters that you do not emit details because that will help us understand what was going on. During each session we will try to continue the episode you remembered the previous time, to add up another bit to it till the whole puzzle is complete”, Stephanie explains, repeating what she had already told me the day before

  The room is spinning and my head hurts. Perhaps it’s the fact that I am tired, but I am irritated at this place, at Stephanie, at her pretense of understanding who I am and of the freedom she is taking of nosing into my life. I am allowing her to, but that’s no matter.

  What can she know? Even I don’t know.

  But she’s intuitive, I give her that.

  “Oh…I forgot to ask”, Stephanie says suddenly, “Do you want to remember? And do you trust me to go through the process with you?”

  “What do you mean?”, I say

  “I have the impression that you want to keep some details to yourself, and that’s understandable. These sessions make sense only if you are willing to open up and tell me what you know, otherwise it will be very hard to progress”, she tells me.

  I don’t really know how much I want Stephanie to be with me on this, and I shrug.

  “Can we move on? At least give this a try?”, I decide at last

  “You’re the main actor in this. We can move on if you want to”

  I lay on the bed and I feel the sleep dribble on me a drop at a time.

  Blackness.

  There is somebody behind me, he is dragging the face similar to mine away from mine, I know it without seeing him. I know it’s a man.

  There's some noise, I hear the movements rather than seeing them, and there are hurried voices. Somebody tells me to be quiet, that everything will be ok. The voice is odd, the words are pronounced in a way that is foreign to me, but still I understand their meaning. I feel the person does not care about me, and yet it keeps telling me that I will be fine, and to be quiet. I sense that if I cry something will happen, I perceive that the man is scared. Then suddenly I hear cries, they are familiar cries and I understand that it's the face that has been taken away from me that it is crying. I know the face is somewhere close although I cannot see it, I can just hear the cries and the voice telling it to be quiet. I can hear the noise of the street and the noise of the car’s engine, and then there's blackness again.

  And there light’s again.

  I am back in Stephanie’s room.

  I figure there are tears rolling down my eyes, my face is moist and I'm sweaty.

  I'm incredibly sad.

  Stephanie is right, do I want to remember?

  It seems like memories are not helping me at all, maybe I should stop. All of a sudden the void that was with in me seems to be elated indefinitely. Now that this window on the past has opened and I can’t say who I am, I don't know what to do with myself anymore. Not that I really did before, and now it’s too late to turn back anyways.

  “Are you ok?”, Stephanie asks me.

  I don’t reply. I do not want Stephanie to know about my pain, about my emptiness. She feels me, and gives me a moment of quiet.

  “If you want we can stop here”, she tells me

  “No I want to go on…”, I say

  “When you were dreaming I recorded the signals. They were intense, very intense. You cried and at a point you were screaming”, Stephanie told me

  “In the car…it wasn’t me screaming…”, I say and all of a sudden the realization dawns on me

  “It was my sister…my mother was with us, outside, somewhere, and there was that lizard…and we must have been kidnapped. But why?”, I say, talking to myself

  “My mom…my real mom…they took us away from her…mama…”, I whisper

  The wonder at the absurd idea that my mother can perceive me somehow, somewhere, wherever she is. She must be somewhere…

  And I want my sister back.

  I don’t know how long I have been abstracted in my memories, and only now I realize that Stephanie is there, listening to me.

  She keeps quiet, she doesn't say a word and just wants to let me speak but I stop, because this is really all I can recollect, because I am exhausted.

  I stay on my bed for a moment longer, not really sure about what I want to say or do next. But then I decide, suddenly, that I need my DNA results now. I will go and ask if they can rush the analyses. I will pay anything, anything. I’ll beg, cry. Anything. If my sister is there, if my mother is there and they have thought of playing the same card, then there is no time to lose.

  “I have to go, right away”, I say

  A question mark appears on Stephanie’s face, but she doesn’t ask.

  “I went to a place to have my DNA tested because I suspected that my mother, or well, the person who calls herself my mother, wasn't my mother…”, I start, the disarrayed wording mirroring my state of mind

  “And so you’re trying to find you real mother”, Stephanie says, concluding my sentence

  “I don’t know what I’ll find…knowledge could be worse than ignorance, but I can’t stop just now”

  Stephanie nods.

  “Once you start telling the truth, there is no ending (1)…I read this somewhere, I can’t remember anymore”, Stephanie tells me, pensively

  “Next t
ime we should have you take a nap”, I say, and I giggle for the first time I have stepped in here

  Stephanie laughs too, but then her laugher dims into a smile and I notice a shade of sadness in her.

  “Sorry…”, I say

  “Why?”, she asks and then adds, before I can answer the first question, “do you want to come back tomorrow? Always at 8?”

  (1)Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

  I feel I might make a bit more time for self-indulgence tomorrow morning since my parents are not even around. There has been a sudden emergency in the Korean subsidiary of my father’s firm and I have the whole place to myself. My father had to pack in great rush, and my hyper-loyal mother followed. That’s why they missed out on my graduation ceremony. This is why they are not around now. Crap hit the fan when I need to get rid of my adoptive parents the most – right on, I think.

  “Can we see each other at 10?”, I propose

  “Sure, why not”

  “Right, why not?”, I say, getting up from the bed

  “So long”, I add, raising my hand in a last theatrical farewell before leaving the room

  Chapter 7

  I’ve taken some decisions – the DNA, the sessions with Stephanie – and I should perhaps feel reassured by the fact that at least I have set my mind on what to do. And yet, as I walk out of Stephanie’s office, I feel lost and lonely beyond remedy.

  I head towards the DNA center at first walking fast, then running, unable to control my anxiousness. At some point I realize I should give up the idea of making it there by foot because the place is way too far from here, but nonetheless I run till all the energy has drained away from me.

  When I can run no more I slow down, pressing against my aching spleen. There’s a bench, and I let myself drop on it.

  I pull out my cell phone and call Joshua. The phone rings and rings, but on the other end nobody picks up. I am tempted to call again, but then I drop the idea. It’s a matter of style, not calling people twice. If you got the wrong moment you should pull back, no matter what. No matter how much you need someone.

  I end the call and stand there for a moment holding the cell in my hand, when I see a streetcar heading where I want to go. I jump in and drop on a seat so heavily that people turn around and stare at me.

  I ride for a while, and finally I'm in front of the DNA center.

  When I step in it’s about lunchtime, and the guy at the front desk is engrossed in his book while nibbling on a sandwich. The guy hasn’t even raised his eyes and for some reason I like him already. Just like that.

  He notices my presence and looks up.

  “Hey hi”, I say, trying to put up an easy smile