The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  How did I get here? Suddenly a memory looms before me, opening like an enormous door through which I could hurry back the way I’ve come.

  “I love you,” said Eddie. “I want you, forever and beyond, in this life and every other.”

  “I don’t want you,” I replied, shattering our relationship. I broke our relationship, as Eddie’s expression turned to ice.

  The black silence beneath is pulling at me, dragging me back down.

  “No,” I yell. “No!” I haven’t yet drunk my fill of this woman—nowhere near! I have to let her know that I was lying!

  My heart aches more and more with every beat. It’s the only part of me that continues to respond as I weep bitter tears of fear and horror and pain at this disembodied nightmare in which I’m trapped.

  “Here,” I call, straining every nerve. Someone must hear me, surely! “Please! I’m here!”

  But nobody comes. I weep tears that will not flow from eyes that no one sees. I hurl beseeching cries at the barrier, but they go unheard. Then I remember the girl who was bent on dying. I can feel her presence close by. She’s there on the other side, and yet she’s also in the depths below me. She’s putting up a fight, but her strength is waning. I haven’t combed the sea thoroughly enough; she’s still out there, lost among tides and dreams.

  Where is the girl? And where am I?

  Eddie

  My room is on the same floor but a different corridor. The guest room—or “family room,” as they call it here—is as plain and functional as one would imagine a monk’s cell to be: a narrow bed and a bedside table, a desk and chair, and two armchairs with a coffee table between them. The view makes up for the lack of comfort somewhat. I stare out across the roofs of the city at the setting sun painting fire on the graphite-gray clouds over London.

  I spot the winking lights of a plane taking off. Maybe it’s Wilder’s. Three hours ago, as he set off along the traffic-clogged roads leading west to Heathrow, he said to me, “I can understand why you’re doing this. I’d do the same. Exactly the same. The trouble is, I’m not you. I’m the man who wants you, who wants to live with you. And who cannot share you, Edwina, not with anyone, whether that person’s a man in a coma or someone else.” He set me an ultimatum.

  To be completely honest, I’d have done exactly the same in his position. Understanding, yes, but self-sacrifice? Only if I was number one. No question of being second choice.

  Wilder said, “When I get back, I want you to tell me if your heart is free for me.”

  I take the bottle of Talisker from the wheeled suitcase I’ve packed for the Wellington. There’s a sealed disposable plastic cup in the tiny shower cubicle–cum-bathroom. I tear off the wrapping and pour myself a large shot of whiskey.

  Wilder stretched out his arms to give me a hug and said, “I’m sorry, Eddie. That ultimatum was stupid. Forget I ever mentioned it, please?”

  I told him that I didn’t need an ultimatum. “My heart isn’t free,” I answered, but even as I spoke those words I wanted to beseech him to stay. I’d already gone too far, though, incapable of pausing, reaching for Wilder’s hands, holding on to him, and taking everything back. What else could I do but release him? He deserves to be loved exclusively.

  I drink. In the mirror I see a woman who’s weary of fighting. For the first time I notice I’ve aged. Wrinkles, a faded complexion, a lack of luster in my eyes. I’m losing touch with myself in this tug-of-war between Henri and Wilder, between my old life and my present one.

  After my answer Wilder kissed me, and his kiss had a bitter, shocked, bewildered taste.

  The hair on his head is blond. On his chest it is dark, almost black, and between his legs it’s light brown. Naked, he looks completely different from Henri. He is completely different—always in the here and now, never in the past or the future. He bears no grudges. He has no trouble saying “I love you” or “As you wish. So is this the end?”

  I nodded, noticing the moist gleam in his eyes as he brusquely turned to leave.

  Another sip, or more like a swig this time. I’m no beauty. I resemble a goblin in the wrong light and a relatively pretty Irish boy in the right conditions. But Wilder loved this nonbeauty.

  If I have even the slightest feelings for Henri, then I was obliged to let Wilder go. It’s only fair. I can’t keep him on the back burner.

  “Take care, my girl, and make sure you bring him back!”

  I’m touched by that expression “my girl” and also by the fact that he had a good word for Henri, his rival in a coma who beat him to the prize without even entering the contest. I regret never having dared to share the whole truth of my life with Wilder.

  I take the candles out of my suitcase, light them, and turn off the dazzling ceiling lamp. I go over to the window. The fire in the London sky has been extinguished, and the world is turning its face to night.

  In a film or a novel, I think, Wilder would be the willing victim who loves his girlfriend so much that he’s even prepared to accept that she cares for the comatose love of her life. The hearts of female viewers and readers would go out to him.

  But that’s not how it works in the real world. I know why I publish new future and dystopian novels rather than romances. Because in principle loving means repeatedly coping with despair and uncertainty and change. Love changes as we do. I don’t know if I could have loved the way I do now when I was in my midtwenties. Someone who wants to write truthfully about love would need to write a new novel about the same couple every year in order to tell the story of how their love evolves, how life comes between them, and the color their affection takes on as the days darken.

  I drink my Talisker, breathing in its notes of toffee, earth, and ether. How must they all feel, all the people whose beloved lies in a coma? Do they remain “faithful” in the most innocent sense of the word? Do they long for sex, the touch of skin, laughter, and shared moments when life is full and sweet? Or do they die, a little at a time, because they no longer dare to live? Do they abandon their lives completely and devote themselves entirely to caring and comforting? Or do they conserve some of their strength for themselves?

  I drain my glass. The whiskey burns my throat. Then I brush my hair, go to the small chapel to gather my courage and tenderness, and set off to see my oblivious husband.

  * * *

  —

  “How’s Maddie?” i ask Dr. Foss, who’s standing on the low dais in the center of the intensive care unit and peering at a monitor over another doctor’s shoulder.

  He turns to face me and purses his lips. “I’m afraid there are no grounds for optimism,” he says quietly, his eyes scanning the space behind me, as if he’s worried that Sam might be there. “She’s still running a high temperature, and we haven’t been able to locate its cause. One of her kidneys has stopped working and her left lung is infected. Things don’t look good.”

  I utter a silent prayer for her. Not the girl, please.

  Henri and Maddie are now lying side by side in intensive care. C6 and C7.

  “What about Henri?”

  “No change, Mrs. Tomlin. His body appears to be stable, but he’s showing no signs of consciousness beyond that.”

  He studies my face carefully, and I worry that he can smell the whiskey on my breath. I go over to the two beds, which the nurses have arranged so that Sam can sit with both of them at once. They’ve also granted him permission to stay overnight at the hospital. He’s been given the smallest room in the “family section.” Nobody’s informed the health insurance because there’s no budget for accommodation if there are no surviving relatives. Dr. Saul has ignored the rules in Sam and Maddie’s case. I felt a momentary flash of love for the doctor for this show of kindness.

  “Don’t go thinking I’m a good person, Mrs. Tomlin,” he said. “I cannot stand good people.”

  “It didn’t even cross m
y mind, I assure you.”

  He flashed me a quick grin, and to my surprise I returned it. I’m afraid that we might actually grow to like each other.

  Unlike Henri, Maddie is a ward of the state, and the state doesn’t sit on her bed for half the day, whispering words of encouragement to her as Sam does. The state doesn’t bring her light and beauty and cake as Sam does.

  She seems so tiny and vulnerable. Around her bed they’ve placed a transparent protective box, equipped with a filter to purify the air. I’ve read up on sepsis. Blood poisoning is one of the most common and fatal diseases. I stare down at the girl with her drawn features, the tube in her mouth, and her frail, sunken frame. Her sudden illness is a mystery, but her struggle for life has galvanized everyone. Her small body is increasingly tense, her head and her calves bent back almost into a C-shape. Nothing moves and torments the entire intensive care staff more than the sight of Sam, swaddled in overalls, face mask, and plastic gloves, sitting at the foot of Maddie’s bed, quietly reading aloud to her or recounting an anecdote or simply being there and holding her hand for hours on end.

  I turn to Henri and give a stunned gasp. He’s opened his eyes!

  “Henri!” I whisper. “Oh, Henri!” But those are the only words I can utter as laughter comes bubbling up inside me. It soon dies in my throat, though, because his gaze passes straight through me. He’s completely lifeless.

  “Dr. Foss!” I call, or try to, but the only sound that comes out is a high-pitched squeak. I automatically feel for Henri’s pulse. He’s there: his skin is warm.

  Dr. Saul joins me at the bedside. He pulls out his light pen and shines it into Henri’s eyes, causing me to wince in spite of myself. Standing up straight again, the doctor announces, “His pupils don’t react. He can’t see us.”

  I lean down close to Henri’s face. It’s been such a long time since I saw him—and now he’s ignoring me. I feel distraught.

  “Look at me!” I beseech him. “I’m here. I’m not leaving, so don’t you go either, Henri, my heart, my darling.”

  “He can’t hear you either.”

  “How do you know?”

  Dr. Saul gives Dr. Foss a signal. They’re so bloody used to this life shorn of miracles.

  “The spontaneous fluctuation of activity in his auditory cortex alternates between internal and external stimuli approximately every twenty seconds,” he says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That we try not to miss the moments when Mr. Skinner regains consciousness. We monitor him continuously. It’s almost out of the question that we’d fail to notice if he were to hear, see, or try to establish contact with us.”

  “ ‘Almost’ isn’t good enough.”

  Dr. Saul sighs. The two doctors bend over Henri, speak to him, touch him, and examine him. I loathe the almost imperceptible shakes of their heads and acquiescent glances with which they increasingly exclude me from their deliberations. It’s obvious, though: Dr. Foss and Dr. Saul are beginning to give up on Henri.

  My thoughts fly back to that moment in the past when he and I were sitting facing each other across my kitchen table. He never wore shoes in my flat and would always sit on the same chair with his bare feet on the wooden floor. Even all these years later, I still don’t like anyone else sitting there. Occasionally I’ll sit opposite his empty chair and stare at it for minutes on end.

  “Henri,” I say, clasping his lovely, kind, warm hands. Feeling how tense they have become, I start to massage and move them the way Liz the physiotherapist taught me so that the tendons and the ligaments remain lithe.

  Dr. Saul and Dr. Foss, the cynic and his gentleman companion, continue their visits.

  I can’t get into my routine today. As always, I breathe in and prepare to tell Henri who he is, why he’s here, and why I’m here. Except today it seems like mumbo-jumbo, and so I tell him what’s on my mind.

  “Madelyn’s in a bad way, Henri. I’m worried about her and Sam and you and me too. The rules in this place instruct us to speak calmly and optimistically, but you opened your eyes and yet you can’t see anything. Or can you? How about briefly squeezing my hand, just a little? Neither of those moronic doctors ever needs to know. You can continue to string them along if you like.”

  His hand doesn’t move.

  “You could blink. Once for yes, twice for no.”

  He doesn’t blink.

  * * *

  —

  I recall our first kiss. We’d already spent two nights together without exchanging a single word, although on the second night our hands and our eyes spoke. I’ll never forget the ballet our hands performed as they stroked and cradled one another. Never before had I had such intimate sex with a man as during that second night, as Henri and I lay on my bed and our hands made love. Those movements contained the future, and our fingers sketched out and agreed upon every encounter to come—desire, tenderness, seduction, arousal, and release.

  On our third night together we kissed. Earlier, we had walked through the dark streets of London from which everyday life had withdrawn and been replaced by street cleaners, and all the bars, so recently thrumming with fate and desire and drunken merriment, had tidied away their chairs and with them any promise of bliss. We walked across the Golden Jubilee Bridge from the Victoria Embankment. I leaned against the railings with my back to the river.

  “Never turn your back to the sea,” Henri said all of a sudden, his voice calm and imposing. He placed his hands on the railings on either side of my waist, creating a protective bubble with his arms. I could feel the warmth of his body as at last it came closer to mine.

  “I’m not turning my back to it. I can see it reflected in your eyes,” I said.

  Then he kissed me. He kissed me so firmly and sensuously that it seemed as if that kiss opened up entirely new vistas. Our bodies put into practice the deal our hands had sealed and answered the questions our fingers had posed.

  * * *

  —

  Now I press his unresponsive hands to my cheek and forehead. His uninhabited eyes look like empty windows.

  I won’t cry. I don’t cry.

  Darkness is closing in, and every bed in this warehouse of wandering souls stands in its own pool of light. Around us I can feel the souls trying slowly to free themselves from their bodies, like tiny sparks detaching themselves and floating into the air.

  I gaze at Henri and quietly tell him what it was like when we met. I recount everything, every day we spent together, and I continue by telling him about the times when my father would sing to me and other times when we would run out onto the lawn where the grass reached his chest and was taller than I was. When it was raining he would sing and I would dance, and he said, “You’re unbreakable, my girl. No soul is ever erased.” I could feel what he meant, even if I didn’t understand his words. “Every day is a step, Edwina. Every day is another step toward a distant goal.”

  I imagine that I’m a lighthouse, emitting a beam of words, memories, and songs that will guide Henri out of the darkness between the worlds.

  Henri

  I cling with waning strength to the glass barrier, and below me loom the watery depths from which I propelled myself upward. Death lurks in the surging, roaring, gurgling blackness, but it’s farther away than I feared.

  I can feel my heart thumping, as if something just caused my heart to race. Something is amiss. It feels as if all my nerve ends are spreading out like jellyfish tentacles, and I use them to explore the other side of the glass. Something is different from normal. From normal? From yesterday? From a year ago?

  There are no more blinking emerald lights, none of the annoying beeping or the electrical odors of the monitoring devices. There are no longer any shadowy figures whose thoughts about dinner and dieting lap against the shores of my lonely island, no voices counting drops or murmuring medical terms. There’s somet
hing else, though, shimmering like the air above a fire.

  Thoughts! But they make no sense, they belong to…the wandering souls. Who pronounced those words?

  The fine threads that constitute my invisible feelers are searching, revealing for the first time the dimensions of the room around me. It is large. No ordinary room. This room is filled with sighs—continual sighing as if people are letting go of things and people and times. And life. My mind goes back to a door—a door on an island—and to the kindly face of a woman embracing a girl underwater. Then I hear the child weeping. The child on the rock. Madelyn.

  That’s her name? How do I know that?

  Other things occur to me, as if chestnuts were raining down from an invisible tree onto the ground before me.

  Scott wants to study psychology, specializing in psychosis. Who’s Scott?

  Madame Lupion has a squint and a kitchen crammed with handwritten recipe books, including one for tarte tatin, which you bake facedown with caramel in a special flat pan. I’ve no idea who Madame Lupion is, but my grandfather Malo had one of those pans for making tarte tatin.

  Greg was here and so were Monica and Ibrahim, who has a tattoo and says he’s going to go to work for Amnesty International as a human rights lawyer.

  I have the impression that I’m leafing through a book I didn’t know I wrote. I also notice that something else is different on the other side of the barrier. The light has a different quality, quieter and more sheltered. My chest hardens into a rock with a heart of stone beating inside it. I’m alone. Completely alone! I panic, I want to scream, I want…

  “Calm down, Mr. Skinner,” a woman’s voice says. “Everything’s fine. Nurse Marion’s with you. Shush, everything’s all right. The stars are breathing and so are you. Nothing bad can happen to you. You’re safe here.”