Red Dreams

by Dennis Etchison

  "Nothing."

  "The ba—"

  "No. Of course not."

  She waits a beat. "The C.O. thing." I start to answer again, but her fingers tighten on my head. "I know it's getting to you." Her tone: strangely serene, as if separate from the words.

  "It's nothing."

  "Nothing," she says then, "is something inside out." I have to look up. The dark eyes slip back to that other place. I can't help trying to press deeper into them.

  This is one night.

  The horror lies in that there is no horror.

  I sank back into the dry, distended hand of the chair, the chair crackling, accommodating me. Out somewhere the crickets began to chirp, a sound like the clicking of poker chips.

  Rocking. Trying to rock. I held my breath. I couldn't smell then. Or see. I tried not to feel. Only the motion. And the story.

  I remembered our first week. My II-S had expired that quarter. The first days of our relationship were like the first bites of a watermelon before you hit a seed. It started at Santa Monica. She was walking out of the sea and the sunlight was firing blinding bolts around her silhouette and I stood transfixed and just watched her come up to meet me. The next day my eyes peeled burned skin. She said she had run away from a place where they wrapped her in wet sheets. When she found out I lived in Silverlake, too, she asked me if I had a car. I told her I didn't and she moved into a new apartment ten miles away just to test me.

  I was the one who gave her the book, along with Albion Moonlight and From Bindu to Ojas and some others. Of course you will blame me, as you should. Naturally. It started with a visit to his office in Little Tokyo; you know the type: Monday night Zen classes served up with brown rice; the following night another course. The regimens. Something. I didn't go. The vigil at the Friends House, a WRL meeting, maybe a counseling session somewhere or hours alone just going over and over my duplicate file. I don't remember.

  When she came home I had turned down the bed. Afterward she shook herself like a puppy coming out of sweet grass and smiled around the house and left her hair down the rest of the night. In the morning she woke me to announce that she had dropped something. We searched the floor for her last pill, more valuable than a contact lens—it couldn't be insured. She wished it had been an IUD. Later she tried to drink a bottle of Jergens Lotion while I was out mailing a letter to the Board. "It smelled so good," she said. "Just like burnt almonds!"

  After the Form was filed I had to beg the usual collection of "imminent piety" reference letters. Then the reclassification: 1-A. No surprise. It did not take long; the Justice Department is no longer involved. Then the appeal. Then the request for a personal appearance. Then the letter requesting an appointment with the government Appeals Agent, a Compozed Larry Blyden impersonator who knew nothing. A formality. I can no longer remember when her thinness first became frightening. Then the personal appearance and the two counselors along as witnesses: refused admittance, of course: one more detail duly noted in case of a court test. The refusal to reopen the classification. Then the appeal to the County Board, where it is said the rubber stamp falls like a blade every eleven seconds. Then the filing of Form 151 with the Local Board, followed by their refusal to reclassify and rewind the appeal procedure for another replay. Then the pre-induction physical, follow the colored stripes up and down the stairs and get in line for short-arm inspection. Later the fellow next to me bit his lip and spat blood into the beaker and it almost worked. Then the appeal to State Headquarters. Their reply. Then the letter to the National Director. She spidered her fingers around cups of mu tea, talked rapidly of tests in darkened rooms and small bottles and extractions. Then the first set of induction papers. Then the change of address through a front in San Francisco. Then the flight up to the Local Board there for a transfer of induction <—> $11.43 each way on PSA. Then the National Director's refusal to intervene. Then the new induction date in Oakland. Then the transfer back down here. Then the letter from the Friends counselor pleading for a new hearing. Then the letter requesting another appointment with the Appeals Agent, adjusting his glasses with sweaty fingers, handshake clammy. Then the new induction date. Then a final transfer back up to the Oakland Induction Center…

  Shyla. Shyla. It grew more and more difficult for her. I don't know how it happened. I don't even know what happened to her. Her condition was not enough for a Ill-S under the new law. For a time I thought of her like the place where I had met her: storms rend the sea but never change its hardness. If anything she seemed to be growing softer, more sensitive. That was good. I thought that.

  One night coming home from there like so many other nights.

  Looking up and seeing her halfway through the bead curtain.

  Her body like one of those starving African children, bloated belly and pencil-thin wrists.

  I stand and take her hands. "Hey, your gloves are cold," I tell her.

  "I'm not wearing any."

  I breathe on her fingers. We sit. After a while I say, "How is…?" The way she looks, I don't want to press it.

  "H-he's pleased with my progress. He said so. The examination—"

  She creates a little pull at the corners of her pallid mouth but her eyes lid over. Her finger makes a fine tracing around my jaw line.

  "David," she pronounces. That is enough, I think. Then her lashes fly together and I can feel the strain growing as it draws together in her. It feels something like desperation. "David, let's get out of here." Her eyes open. She is unbelievably sanpaku, I notice, and for some reason, though I know better, I get a cold rush in my chest. "Now. Tonight. We could start fresh—in Mendocino. Anywhere. Oh shit."

  "Hey, hey."

  I see she is struggling to stay ahead of herself. "I can't have it this way. I want to get Out of here, out of L.A. We have to, don't you see? This place is some kind of—of necropolis for—for the waiting dead." She shudders, unbelievably.

  I have no idea what to say to that.

  Then her eyes, flicking between mine, lose some of their depth and withdraw in the manner of a camera iris stopping down, click. And I know she has remembered my case and the way its weight has me anchored here.

  I take her head in my lap and stroke it. Now there is neither resistance nor consent…

  She casts the yarrow stalks. She sits cross-legged, staring as into scattered entrails. She is still for a long time. Then she takes the book down from the shelf and unwraps it and the three coins and throws them, too. I ask her for the reading.

  "'If the bridge is weak at both ends,'" she recites in a dull, emotionless voice, "'it does not matter what happens in the middle.'"

  The hours unravel and I cannot think of a thing but her. In bed she tosses just outside my arms. Once she sits up.

  "What is that?" she whispers out of what sounds like terror.

  "That?" I try to follow the trajectory of her stare. "That?" I get out of bed, pad to the corner, find a thing, pick it out of the dust. "Well, what do you know?" I turn it over and over. "It's nothing. It's an old pretzel! Ha."

  "Oh." She sinks back.

  I start to toss it over to her but I am afraid she might scream.

  Just before I drop off, I study her face, the flawless line of her nose, her soft lip, her shoulders. I can no longer be sure when she is asleep, awake.

  There are marks in the muscle of her upper arm.

  I bend closer. Everything is a grainy blue-gray in the near dark. But there they are: tiny specks also dot her face around the eye sockets, her forehead, her temples, her cheekbones. With a shaky finger I tip her head to one side on the pillow. Marks along the tendons of her neck. I wonder how many marks there are.

  Dr. Soeul, I realize, has been practicing—what?

  What do they call it?

  A fist tightens in my stomach.

  She has promised that she is seeing an obstetrician as well. I believed her. I was busy.

  She is weak. It is more than that. It can be stated simply. Something in Shyla is missing.
It has not always been this way.

  In the middle of the long night I wake at the sound of her voice close by me.

  "…All cold and clammy and brassy like a mummy's fingers… !" Her voice is racing, lost.

  "Shyla?"

  No answer.

  I try to sleep some more. But I keep listening to her dreams. It is as if I need to hear them.

  I wonder what happens when the dreaming stops—or goes mad.

  Morning and I come out of it to find her on her back staring into the mottled pattern the sun makes on the ceiling.

  I kiss her. No response. I feel like a man who has awakened to find himself bound in cement.

  I blow the spider web of hair off her forehead. "Sleep okay?"

  "For a while I couldn't," she replies. "The moon on the bottom of the bed wouldn't let me."

  I blink, resume breathing.

  But "I thought I heard a voice calling me," she goes on. "Then in the dark I heard a voice answer, 'yes?'

  I can't even shudder.

  Finally I come up with, "Well, I hope you feel better than you did last night. You know—"

  "Last night," she says, still staring at the ceiling, the walls, "I felt my brain shaking like jelly. And the water seeping into the ground."

  I just look at her.

  "It's all right, David," she says. "You understand what's happening, don't you? I'm only coming closer and closer."

  "To what?"

  "To the far away."

  I laugh, tight-lipped. I try to think that it is beautiful to have a woman who knows things she will never tell me. I try. She must know. I have to believe in her. I have to return the belief.

  She grew thinner and thinner. I continued to fight my case. The time came. Almost came.

  Mostly I remember the shadows of the leaves on the trees covering the walls of the living room in a moving black wash through the glass. Shyla on the couch. This one day she chose the darkening living room. I don't know why.

  She wouldn't leave the city without me and I had to be with the lawyers at the CCCO. And she wouldn't change doctors. I must have tried and tried. You would think so.

  She had been reading a lot of Patchen that day. Lastly she was studying the cold black flaming on the wall. Sun through leaves. Black centers deeper than the light.

  "I need the dark," she says suddenly, settling the squirming shape behind her almost translucent belly. Her voice is like a rustling now, her body dotted all over. I haven't left this room for three days. The file. "Do you know? It gives all…and it takes nothing back!"

  Turn from the pane. Start to speak. But see. There is no longer any Word possible between her and the dark now.

  Something quietly leaves the room.

  The sun nails black to the wall .

  I sat in the chair. There. After cutting the grass. The sun outside gone away. I don't think I even noticed when it happened. They say it will rain tomorrow. I don't worry about the weather. I haven't for a long time. The sky has lost control.

  This afternoon I burned my draft card. I thought about it a long time. I read it over and over. Then I knew you can never decide from the words. Consider the spaces. She taught me that. I think she did. I squirted it with lighter fluid and touched a match to it and threw it on the air. It flared to something black and fell apart. After that I took my file and scattered it down the hillside.

  A little while ago I sat in the chair. Then I got up.

  I went down the hill. The place called me. I used to go there a lot of evenings when I was a kid and it was warm and I was thirsty after helping with the lawn or something.

  I wasn't thinking anything. Down the hill. The leaves at the corner crackled at my heels. I turned round half-expecting to see myself. Fosselman's was cool neon at the end of the long block. I thought it looked good.

  Went in the store. Too many flavors to pick.

  Got in line. There was a girl in front of me with a snowy streak put in her hair. She turned around and looked at me and the second time she smiled. But I just turned away. Her dress enclosed her like a self-addressed envelope. She swept out with a cone and didn't look back. I noticed her ice cream: it was almost colorless, sort of a brain-gray.

  The counter was stainless steel and plastic frosted over on the underside. Leaned my palms on it and looked down.

  "Double or single?"

  "What?"

  Mr. Fosselman gave me a look.

  "You wanna buy something, or you come here to sprout roots?"

  He didn't recognize me. The hair, the way I don't care anymore. Maybe he did, maybe he did.

  Right then a chill touched my face.

  And I knew that I didn't want anything there. I turned and clipped over the waxed linoleum squares, past the wrought-iron chairs, the peppermint shaft and the cardboard boy licking it so patiently.

  It was cold outside, but a cold that numbs, without a chill.

  I rolled up my sleeves and then threw away my jacket and started east across town, stripping off my shirt, everything as I went, through all the yellow and red lights, stepping on every crack, all the way.

  Tomorrow I will find him in among his sharp gold needles and small bottles; I will take them all back from him and I will kill him and read his bloodstains like a Rorschach test and find an answer.

  Then I will come back here. They will never find me when they come looking, if they do. I have left everything behind. Maybe I will live here, in the trees and bushes, the lawn and the shadows of the shrubbery, and the headstones. Maybe I will.

  WHITE MOON RISING

  It went like this: in her room at the top of the stairs in the empty sorority house she lay warm and rumpled in her bed, trying hard to sleep some more. It was now near noon and the light streaming through the open curtains had forced her awake again. She did not seem to care if she ever got up; she had no classes, not for a week. Still she could not make herself relax. The late morning flashed a granular red through her eyelids. Then she heard the front door down below open and close, the click echoing through the abandoned house like a garbage can dropped in an alley at dawn. Probably it was one of the few remaining girls returning from an overnight date or to pick up books before leaving for vacation. Lissa hoped so. Now she could hear footsteps treading up the stairs. She tried to imagine who it was. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Firmly, deliberately the footfalls turned and came down the hall, toward her room. Maybe it was Sharon. She wanted it to be Sharon. She kept her eyes tightly closed. The shoes thumped deep into the rug; the loose board in the middle of the hail creaked. Finally whoever it was reached her room—there, just on the other side of the door. Lissa felt ice crystals forming in her blood. She waited for the knock, for the clearing of a familiar throat, for the sound of her own name to come muffled through the door. But there was no sound. Still she waited. She held a breath. The blood pulsed coldly in her ears like a drum beaten underwater. She wanted to speak out. Then the sound of a hand on the loose doorknob. And the almost imperceptible wing beat of the door gliding open. I know, she thought, I'll lie perfectly still, I won't let anything move in my body and I'll be safe, whoever it is won't see me and will go away. Yes, she thought, that's what I will have to do. Now she clearly felt a presence next to her bed. She was sure that someone was standing there in the doorway to her right, a hand probably still on the knob. She had not heard it rattle a second time. Time passed. She counted her heartbeats. At last she knew she could hold her breath no longer. She would have to do something very brave. With a rush that screamed adrenaline into her body she sat bolt upright, at the same instant snapping her head to the right and unsticking her eyes with a pop. There was no one there. The door was still closed and locked. The room was empty. Suddenly she realized that her kidneys were throbbing in dull pain. She knew what that was. It was fear.

  The sunlight washed in through the window.

  "Oh Joe," said his wife, "it makes me sick, just physically ill. And I know it gets to you, too."


  Joe Mallory cleaned up the steak and eggs on his plate with a last swipe, then hesitated and let his fork mark a slow pattern through the smear of yolk that remained.

  "No." He cleared his throat. "No, honey. Just a job." Gently he removed the newspaper from her side, poked it in half and tried to find something else to read.

  "Joey," she said. She reached across the tablecloth suddenly and covered his hand. "I know you. And I know I shouldn't have let you take this job, not this one."

  He looked up and was surprised and strangely moved to see her clear brown eyes glistening. As he forced his shoulders to shrug and his mouth to smile, she placed her other hand as well over his. From the open kitchen window sprang the sounds of bright chains of children on their way to the elementary school. He could almost see their black bowl haircuts and dirty feet. He wished he could help them, but it was already too late. He blinked, trying to concentrate.

  "Babe," he said calmly, resurrecting a pet name they had abandoned before he went overseas. "One more semester and I'm finished with night classes. Look. You know the size of the government checks, and you know they aren't going to get any bigger. We both know Ray can't take me on without a degree—"

  "You know he would, Joey, if you ask him again. What's a brother for?" Instantly she darkened, regretting the last. She held to his hand, hoping that he would let it pass.

  "Now let me finish," he said slowly. "I can't handle a position like that yet, not without leaning on someone half the time. I have to do it right. This damned uniform is just a job until I'm ready. Till then, well, what else do I know? Really, now?" He flipped her hands over and warmed them with his. "I have to make things right before I go ahead, to feel like I'm my own man. I thought you understood that."

  "Oh, I know all that. I'm sorry. I know. It was just all the details, the whole horrible thing, these last few weeks. It sounds so awful."