The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  I know there’s a wonderful place beyond that door. There, nothing will ever end. We’ll know all the joys of this world. I will now pass through that door, and it will close behind me. Finally, I will be with my father and my grandfather again. The two poles that hold my world together, my up and my down, my breath and my pulse, my moon and my sea. My day and my night.

  Come back! two voices whisper inside my head. I ignore them.

  I quicken my pace. Beyond that door lies Ty Kerk, Malo’s house between the stars and the sea. On nights when the raging Iroise hurled its waters against the cliffs and the waves leaped higher and higher, the two-hundred-year-old granite house would wheeze and creak like a ship on heavy seas, but it always resisted.

  My father smiles and walks through the door.

  Grandpa Malo will be sitting at the small wooden table by the fireplace, reading, and intermittently quoting, poetry or Proust. My father, Yvan, is bound to be making something in the far corner of the room: driftwood picture frames or a lamp whose shade is made of Breton drinking bowls, with a gnarled walnut tree stump for the base. My father will be mocking Grandpa’s quotations or saying nothing, absorbed in converting an object into something different. My father understands things but has never understood people.

  The door opens, inviting me in. Everything will be consigned to the past—all hardship, all torment, fear, pain, sadness, longing, all humiliation and anxiety, all…

  Eddie’s smile. The way she observes me when she thinks I’m still asleep and I appear not to notice that she’s looking at me. Eddie, love of my unlived life, mother of my unborn children.

  “Henri?” my father asks kindly, poking out his head from behind the blue door. “Are you coming?”

  Come back! whispers the mild breeze, whose caress I suddenly feel on my skin. It’s coming from somewhere, from the landless sea, the same sea under whose gray-glass surface figures are floating upright with open eyes, as if they are asleep and dreaming and don’t realize where they are.

  Back—back to where?

  I stop and listen out.

  Sam. His little thumb tucked into his fist while he slept.

  A gust of wind pushes the door farther open, just a touch. Isn’t that the fireplace? Can’t I hear Grandpa Malo too, reading under his breath a marvailhoù, one of the old, occult Breton stories about the in-between world? Maybe he’s just reading my story. Maybe we’re all stories that someone is reading, and maybe that will save us before we ultimately expire?

  A momentary recollection of the Eternal Reader, a monk in the mountains on the border between Austria and Italy, who read all day every day, from dawn to dusk, because he wanted to keep the people in the stories alive.

  My father casts me a worried glance. “Henri, please. It’s not good to hesitate for too long. Doors never remain open forever.”

  What’s holding me back?

  “Henri, I beg you! It isn’t good. You shouldn’t linger in between for too long.”

  In between? What does that mean? In between what?

  My father stares at me as he used to do, as if to say, “Didn’t you ever listen? Didn’t you listen to Malo when he explained the sea’s character to you?”

  The sea is a woman. She knows every shore and protects the dead who sail out in their barks past the Île de Sein until they come to islands that feature on none of this world’s maps. The sea is time’s lover. Together, the sea and time gave birth to death, dreams, and humans; they are their offspring.

  “It’s easy to get lost at the crossing points. Come on, Henri! I beg you. I don’t want to lose you again.”

  He doesn’t want to lose me? What? I lost him.

  Unexpectedly, the door slams, opens again gently and crashes shut again, opens and then closes. The blows ring out like thunder. They’re threatening, a message that says, “You’d better hurry up!”

  Each time the door opens it’s a request, a lure, a sweet tug, an invitation to curl up in the coziest sun-warmed corner of Ty Kerk and enjoy the quiet shelter and safety, punctuated by my father’s occasional humming, Malo’s quiet laughter at what he’s reading, the dog’s wheezing, the cats’ purring, and the crackling of the fire. Everything would be fine forever more.

  And yet I don’t move. I don’t know where I find the strength to resist this temptation.

  My father says, “Oh, Henri, it’s all over. Look!” He gestures to me, and all at once I am hit by a wave of emotion so intense that it permeates every cell in my body. It’s overwhelming; it invades me and I’m flooded with images and feelings and knowledge. And then I see it. I see everything.

  I see the things we regret most when we die and the final seconds start to tick, during which there’s no possibility of catching up, no more making good. I see that, and it strikes me as logical. How stupid we humans are to forget it, death after death after death, and life after life! I also forgot. Worse: every time I had a chance to advance into the center of my life, I took a step back.

  “Time’s up, Henri. Let go!”

  Of course. That’s what I deserve from my time on earth—to be let go and forgotten, for it wasn’t a life. What wouldn’t I give not to have hesitated when I ought to have jumped, not to have run away when I ought to have stayed, not to have remained silent when I ought to have spoken out! Part of me is aghast at myself.

  I traipse slowly back to the small blue boat. My father stands motionless on the shore of the island, arms dangling by his sides, a boundless sadness in his wide, calm sea face. “Henri! It’s not so easy to get back. You’ll get lost in the middle. In the middle of everything, do you understand?”

  I don’t know what he means by “in the middle of everything.” I can’t feel the sand under my feet; I can no longer feel anything. Even as I’m pushing the boat out into the sea, it feels as if I’m not pushing it with the force of my muscles, but that it’s being moved by my will alone.

  My father slumps onto the sand, his eyes fixed on me. He wrings his hands.

  I climb uncertainly into the boat and take up the oars. The sea tries to knock them from my hands, so I clutch them more tightly.

  “Watch out! Don’t leave the boat, and avoid the storms!” my father calls after me. “And if you fall into the water and night comes…”

  I’m no longer listening to what he says because the sea of the dying has caught hold of the boat and is pushing it away from the shore fast. I lean on the oars. They tremble, they resist, but they obey my command as I pull them hard, again and again, through the frothing, rolling waves.

  I don’t know whom I should beseech to let me come back, even if it’s only to open my eyes and look at Eddie, whose face is the last thing I want to gaze upon in life before I close my eyes forever. Sam too, to tell him that I was on my way; I was on my way.

  The island with the open door is already slipping below the shimmering blue horizon. I scan the sea and glimpse a number of granite reefs jagging up out of the waves like dark claws. I think I can see a hunched figure on one of the many scattered rocks, a whale-shaped islet. It seems to be a girl with long blond hair, who’s merely sitting there, gazing out to sea.

  “Hello!” I cry.

  The girl doesn’t so much as glance around.

  I can’t see any coastline. In the direction from which I’ve come the sky is blue and benign, but behind me the darkness is gathering into towering mountains of cloud. There are claps of thunder and the longer I look, the more certain I become that something is splintering the water over there.

  There! I shade my eyes. Yes, over there! Invisible cliffs, against which the waves pound and crash, falling back as milky froth, subsiding, and being thrust against the bottom and the rocks and an invisible barrier. The sea’s roaring. A never-ending line of cliffs, a wall of glass, and inside it…Fog?

  I sit down on the rowing bench. I must rescue the girl, I think, but wh
en I peer at the whale rock where the child was sitting a second ago, the girl is gone.

  I feel the current straining at the blue boat’s bows. The tide is turning. It’s going out. The roaring grows louder, as if the sea has been transformed into a gigantic waterfall, cascading thousands and thousands of feet into a thundering, black chasm.

  I turn round in the blue boat. The waves loom like mountains, houses upon houses high, grinding, bursting, and shattering against the barrier. I can now see that it is a sort of pipe that is smashing the waves. Not a glass pipe, but one filled with fog and night. My fear tastes of blood.

  In winter the coast of the Iroise Sea suggested that the heavy, gray-blue, rolling sea was bent on taking a running start, leaping onto the land, and advancing over the waves of grassy hummocks to drag people from their beds. The waves hurl themselves against this tube of darkness and scudding shreds of fog every bit as brutally. I almost believe that I can see stars being sucked through it, treetops and mountain peaks and the shadows of cities appearing from it now and then, but so briefly that I can’t be sure if I’m seeing properly. The pipe stretches out left and right to the landless horizon. All along it, waves hurl themselves against this barrier and bounce back in a mass of seething foam. The sky has also peeled back, yellow as pus, gray as smoke, and toxic.

  The boat rises and falls, listing dangerously low on both sides. Spray flies over the gunwales.

  I lean forward to peer into the whirlpool forming directly in front of the barrier. What is behind this border at the edge of the sea of the dying? What is beyond the barrier…or inside it? The whirlpool gapes beneath me like a waterfall. It begins to tug my boat down into the deep and toward the pipe, and all I can think is, Yes, I want to find out. I want to find out what’s there! For an instant the boat teeters on the watery brink before plummeting down, end over end. I feel like I’m being torn apart, head, arms, and spine.

  Please. Please! PLEASE!

  Suddenly a great, flat, chill surface looms over me, and then the shadow comes crashing down on me like a giant hand, swiping me into the sea and into the pipe. I’m falling, I’m being washed away, lights and colors and voices wrap themselves around me. I’m sinking, I’m dissolving, I’m falling ever faster. I’m falling and…

  Sam

  I hear her heart beating close to my ear. I can smell her perfume and feel her fingertips resting lightly on my hair, as if my skull were made of fine glass. I can hear the crackle of her panic and her surge of hope, but there’s something else beneath those things. Something warm and good that enables me to breathe.

  I can hear her breath and then, with my soul snuggling against her heart, I hear her breath become a note. The note becomes a tune, a breeze, but it’s not like Madelyn’s piano music. This wind has been scouring the earth for a long time and is now slowly rising, growing brighter, as it continues its quest over the cool, silvery, frost-rimmed, icy coating of a long, broad, frozen river. It is changing into a warming ray of sunlight, which captures the sparkling silence and then alights on a motionless ice sculpture, inside which a heart is beating. My heart.

  Her singing warms the ice until the melody envelops my heart, and the mild breeze carries me away over thousands of mountains and dark woods, back to where all is bright and fine.

  * * *

  —

  Two heartbeats later, the chapel door opens. Dr. Saul comes over to us, sits down on the floor, leans his head against the wall, and shuts his eyes. Eddie stops singing.

  “Samuel,” Dr. Saul says. I know it’s not a good sign when God calls me by my first name.

  Eddie

  Dr. Saul turns the brain scan, the EEG, and a very complicated-looking sheet of paper with lots of little boxes and entries around on the table so that Sam and I can see them. I read the words “Innsbruck Scale” and “Edinburgh-2 Scale.” I read Henri’s score of six on the Glasgow Coma Scale, written in marker pen. Alongside this it says, “Medium-deep to deep coma.” If his score were three, he would be brain-dead. Fifteen, and he’d be the man I once knew.

  I glance at Sam. His expression is hard and far too grown-up. He’s fiddling with his thumbnail under the table, but otherwise he’s utterly still.

  “Following his eight-minute cardiac arrest, Mr. Skinner has slipped into a coma. A coma is not an illness—it’s the brain’s reaction when it needs to protect itself. The patient withdraws into himself, shutting himself off from the world that is causing him pain and anxiety.”

  In my mind’s eye, I picture Henri retreating from his life, raising his hands like a shield. Basically, a coma is therefore the logical extension of his general response to life: I’d better get out of here!

  I’d rather not entertain that thought, but I’m so angry with him. I’d love to smash something here and now. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cope with this on my own. I’d like to ring Wilder and beg him to come to the hospital, but Wilder doesn’t even know I’m here. He doesn’t even know that Henri was part of my life—and still is, in a very twisted, surreal way.

  Always the same. Always the bloody same. Henri, the man who’s never there and yet always there.

  Dr. Saul takes out a piece of paper and starts to draw circles on it. “I’ve already explained this model to Samuel.” He taps on the center point, which stands for Awake. A series of circles rippling outward from that point are marked Numb, Asleep/Dreaming, Unconscious, Coma—and Dead. Dr. Saul makes a first cross in the unconscious zone—“He was here”—then a second cross in the dead zone—“and here”—and then marks a third one in Coma. It’s too close to the edge, too close to Dead, for my liking. It’s right on the border.

  “They’re places, not states,” whispers Sam.

  I say the first thing to detach itself from the swirling tangle of thoughts in my head. “Will he come back from that place?”

  Dr. Saul takes only a second to answer this question. One second. The length of an adult’s heartbeat when that person isn’t scared; the time it takes for light to travel 186,282 miles; the time it takes for it to dawn on you that you don’t want to live without someone. But how heavy a second of fear is!

  Why wasn’t Dr. Saul quicker? Was he weighing up whether to lie to us? No. I don’t like him, but he isn’t a liar.

  Slowly and deliberately he says, “We don’t know.”

  At least there’s some hope. He doesn’t say yes. But he doesn’t say no either.

  “But now he’s almost dead?” Sam asks with the shrill voice of a teenage boy whose voice is breaking, pointing to the small, lonely cross on the outer edge of the concentric circles.

  Dr. Saul nods. “Yes, Sam. But he is alive, only differently. Do you understand that? In a coma you’re still alive. You’re merely in a particular state. It’s a borderline condition—a crisis, of course, but that doesn’t make that life any less important than the one you or I or Mrs. Tomlin leads. That’s why here we say that someone is living in a coma rather than lying in a coma.”

  “But two days. This isn’t the beginning of forever, is it?”

  Dr. Saul once again takes too long to answer my question. Far too long. Please say that Henri could potentially wake up tonight or tomorrow or one day. The pain has returned—the pain of never again hearing my father’s voice outside my own body, but only inside me. Only in my memories. Memories like slowly dying stars.

  Thinking of Sam tears my heart apart. Losing your father before you’ve even gotten to know him—it’s too soon. Such loss never heals. I’d love to take the boy’s hand, but it’s as if he’s clinging to himself. How like his father.

  Once again, I’ve caught my breath, and Dr. Saul interprets my involuntary release of air as a sign of skepticism.

  “Comas are a severely under-researched phenomenon, Mrs. Tomlin. We don’t know enough about them and grope our way through the dark using statistics that tell us very little about why an
d how they occur. The figures suggest that two days is generally the beginning of forever, but not always.”

  “Is he scared?” Sam asks. His thumb is now bloody from scratching. He bites his lip.

  “We don’t know how a coma patient feels either, Sam. We can presume that he feels something, and that’s what the scans show too.” Dr. Saul points to the printouts. “Some of my colleagues believe that in a coma the brain is assailed by all the same words and images and emotions that flood it when the person is awake and completely relaxed. One group is convinced that the limbic system and the reptilian brain take over, safeguarding a minimal amount of stand-in brain function. Then there are the engineers. They regard everything we feel and think—love, hate, worry, songs by the Rolling Stones—as electronic chatter between our synapses and think that the soul is nothing but a fairy tale. For them, a coma is like a power cut to the system.”

  Sam taps his trembling forefinger on the cross again. “Can he see the dead from there?”

  Dr. Saul doesn’t hesitate for a second this time. “No,” he replies. “Your father was clinically dead, Sam. Patients who have been reanimated often tell me that they’ve seen what awaits them on the other side, and their accounts are all pretty similar: tunnels of light, a floating sensation, voices, waiting relatives, relaxation…But…”—here Dr. Saul screws up his eyes—“…we have explanations for the majority of those sensations and experiences. The lights at the end of the tunnel can be explained by loss of vision during a physical collapse. The feeling of flying or floating above one’s own body is a typical symptom when the brain area responsible for equilibrium and balance fails. The dissolution of the boundary with one’s own body is also due to the failure of—”

  “I think we’ve got the message,” I say, interrupting him. Sam dug his nails into his chair while Dr. Saul was overwhelming us with this torrent of specialist knowledge. The information is of no use to Samuel. He wants something else, hope maybe, and knowledge doesn’t bring hope. “You believe in your statistics and you reject everything else.”