Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “The other driver,” the doctor said, “the one who ran the red light, was killed instantly. An eighteen-year-old kid and dead drunk. Now he’s just dead.”

  Henry shook his head. Did the doctor think that that thought would comfort him? He felt a brief regret that the drunk hadn’t suffered; and a second regret that he would wish such a thing of anyone; and then he felt nothing once more.

  “Barbry, I’m here. I came as soon as they called.” He stroked her hand gently, fingertips on palm, and let his palm run under her limp fingertips; and was embarrassed to notice how his body, for a brief instant, responded to the remembered touch.

  He began telling her about his day, because there wasn’t much of anything else he could think of to talk about. [And why had she taken the day off to shop for his birthday? They should have been together in the lab, safe. Instead—]

  Instead, he told her how he and Bill Canazetti had finally made some progress on the Barnsleyformer; because the trick wasn’t in the morphogenesis after all, but in the fractal geometry of the genes. They had gotten a brief, tantalizing glimpse of a simple and elegant recursion formula and would have continued to work on it well after quitting time except the phone call had come from the hospital and—

  And the traffic at the tunnel ramp had been terrible. Backed up all the way around halfway to the turnpike gate. Wasn’t it always that way when you were in a hurry?

  At any rate, he told her, ’Dolph Kavin was doing a slow burn because he’d been passed over for project leader on the cloning team. Old Lady Peeler had picked Amanda Jacobs and ’Dolph had complained bitterly to anyone who would listen [and there weren’t that many] how women always stuck together; but you know how it is with office politics. And he said it was probably a lot different in the old days before Singer had died and the Lab was run on a more personal level.

  And—

  “She’s gone, Mr. Carter.”

  He jerked for the second time at the unexpected touch; and looked from the hand tentatively laid on his wrist, up the arm to the doctor’s sympathetic face.

  “What?”

  “She’s gone. All brain activity has ceased. I—” He broke off, looked uncomfortable, mustered his resolve. “If you would sign a few forms, please. Many of her organs can still be saved, if we act quickly.” The doctor looked at him in mute appeal. Your wife is dead, his eyes seemed to say; but we can still save others if you help.

  Others.

  Strangers.

  And why should he care about strangers?

  Donate organs. A nice way of saying, let’s cut up your wife’s body into little chunks and sew them into other people. Intellectually, he and Barbara had always supported the organ donor movement; but it was different when the actual time came. And what the hell did it matter? Barbry didn’t live there anymore.

  “Yes,” he said; and his voice came out in a sort of croak. “Yes,” he repeated. “Go ahead. It’s what she would have wanted.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” the doctor assured him. “Your wife may be dead, but part of her will go on living through others.”

  Click.

  The most awful thing about the whole business, Henry decided as he rose shakily from the chair, was the way the respirator continued to pump air and the way in which the sheets continued to rise and fall. As if the person beneath them had only fallen into a deep slumber and would awaken when the morning came.

  Sigh.

  Of course, they insisted that he stay and rest. They gave him a mild sedative and they made him lie down for an hour or so. He closed his eyes, but his mind wouldn’t shut down. It kept spinning and spinning, trying to find a way out of accepting what had happened. When he arose only a short while later, he was unrested and unrefreshed.

  It was the early morning pre-dawn hours when he left Roosevelt Hospital and made his way down 9th Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel entrances. There was a mist off the Hudson that gave the West Side a ghostly and unreal appearance. Sounds echoed as if on a damp and abandoned stage set. His was the only car on 9th Ave., and in the distance a single pair of headlights drifted crosstown. If New York was The City That Never Slept, during these hours it at least dozed fitfully.

  Some part of him had taken over from the gibbering, helpless personality crouching in the back of his head. It was a part of him that felt nothing and thought nothing. It was an automaton that made his body do all the right things, like some faithful robot dutifully carrying home its injured master.

  The neighborhood north of the tunnel ramps had once been called Hell’s Kitchen; but the new yuppy-fied City was a little ashamed of its rough-necked, blue-collar past, so they called it Chelsea North now. They could call it what they damn well pleased, but some things never change. It was still Hell’s Kitchen and, if the police no longer walked the beat in squads of five as they once did, it was because they seldom left their patrol cars.

  If Henry had been entirely himself, he would never have made the wrong turn. But automatons do make mistakes and the sign with the arrow pointing toward the tunnel was placed ambiguously. He meant to turn right at the next corner; but his eyes saw the sign and his hands spun the wheel, and there he was.

  He realized his error almost immediately. He cursed for a moment or two and checked the street sign at the next intersection to get his bearings. He turned, and turned again, and then he saw her.

  The streetlight was a stage spot highlighting a tableau. Brown, ratted hair hanging low around familiar eyes and nose; her body wrapped in a tattered pea jacket, and huddled over a heating grate; hugging a tattered shopping bag to her. Three men—two black, one white—loomed over her, laughing, giving her little shoves, while her eyes darted like mouse eyes back and forth, looking for escape.

  “Barbry!”

  Henry hit the brakes, twisted and grabbed the jack handle from the floor in the back. He burst from the car. “You! You, there! Leave that woman alone!”

  The men laughed and turned on him and the laughter died. If Henry had been entirely himself, they would have pounced without a thought, like any wolfpack. But he was not entirely himself, and he had a jack handle in his hand, and there was something in his eyes. They used to call it the berserker look. It was the look that said that, whatever came, life or death, he would accept it gladly.

  The three liked long odds in their favor. Three strong young males against a lone woman, that was acceptable. But against a crazy man with the berserker look? No. They might walk out of it; but maybe not all three; and certainly not all whole. So they sought the better part and walked away, throwing obscene words and gestures after them to show they hadn’t been afraid after all, not really.

  Henry walked to the woman on the grate and took her by the hands and raised her to her feet. She looked at him with fear in her eyes.

  “Barbry?”

  And she didn’t really look like Barbara at all; and that broke the spell. Henry blinked and his surroundings came crashing down around him. Hell’s Kitchen? How had he gotten here? He could remember nothing since lying down at the hospital. And who was this woman?

  She looked like—. But, no. Her hair was brown, like Barbara’s; but it was a shade darker. The face had the same shape; but the cheekbones sat lower. And there was a scar that ran from under the right eye, across the cheek toward the ear. She stank: of sweat and booze and excrement. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Barbara. And why on earth would he ever have thought that?

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer and tried to pull her hands from his. Henry remembered leaping from the car and looked around with sudden alarm. Those three punks might come back any moment. He began to shake as he realized what he had done.

  He turned back to his car, remembered the woman, and hesitated. He couldn’t just drive off and leave her here. If those punks came back, she’d be worse off than if he had never stopped.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get in the car.”

  She looked at him doubtfully and backe
d away a step, holding her shopping bag like Hector’s shield. Henry pulled open the passenger’s door. “Get in,” he repeated. “They might come back.”

  That seemed to get through to her. She glanced down the street in the direction her tormentors had gone, then looked back at Henry’s Town Car. Her tongue swept out and around her lips. She looked at him again. Then she made up her mind and darted into the safety of the automobile.

  Henry slammed the door, ran around to the driver’s side, and slid behind the wheel. He hit the door lock and all four doors snapped at once. The sound startled the woman who jerked around anxiously. She tried the door and it wouldn’t open; so she slid across the seat from him as far as she could go, putting her bag between them and clutching it to her.

  ***

  He took her with him back to Short Hills because he didn’t know what else to do and it was easier to make no decisions than to decide anything. Once home, he hustled her inside his house, glancing over his shoulder while he did so, to see if—despite the hour—any of the neighbors were watching.

  In the kitchen, she pulled away from him and ran to the farthest corner and crouched there, making small sounds in her throat. Henry wondered how much human being was left imprisoned within her skull. There but for the Grace of God…Barbry and this bag lady looked somewhat alike, enough to be taken for sisters if not for twins; yet, Barbry had lived here, in comfort if not in luxury, while this woman had lived on a heating vent in Hell’s Kitchen. How easily it might have happened the other way. What trauma might have been enough?

  “Now that I’ve got you,” Henry told the woman, “what do I do with you?”

  She seemed to shrink within herself and Henry held out what he meant to be placating hands. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. If you want, you can have a shower and a meal. And a change of clothes.” The thought of giving this woman one of Barbry’s dresses was distressing. He wasn’t ready to part with anything of hers, not yet. But there was a trunk in the attic, with some cast-offs that she had meant to donate to charity anyway.

  He took the bag lady by the hand, noticing as he did so the track of needle marks up the inside of her arm, and showed her the shower in the bathroom. He gave her a washrag and towels and one of Barbara’s old housecoats and told her to leave her dirty clothing for disposal. The woman glared at him suspiciously, so he shrugged and walked away.

  In the kitchen, he opened a can of beef broth into a pot and turned on the heat. Something not too taxing for her system. As the odor filled the room he realized he was hungry, too, and he added a second can to the pot. After it had come to a boil, he reduced the heat to simmer and walked to the kitchen window.

  The kitchen faced on a woods protected by “greenbelt” legislation from development. No danger of ticky-tacky working class homes depressing the property values. The canopy of the trees looked like a silhouette cut from black construction paper, the false dawn providing an eerie backlighting.

  He still didn’t know her name. He had asked twice on the drive back, but she had remained silent, staring at him with ferret eyes, and he began to wonder if she even realized what was happening to her. Probably not much intelligence left. Etched away by years on the streets and a constant drip-drip-drip of heroin on the brain cells. Odd, how much—and how little—she looked like Bar— Like Barb—.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself not to think of her. The sound of her voice. A wisp of perfume. Remembered kisses.

  After a while, he realized that he couldn’t hear the shower running upstairs. What was that bag lady doing?

  When he checked the bathroom she wasn’t there, so he searched from room to room until he found her. She was hiding in the closet in the guest bedroom. She had taken the few odd garments hanging there and made a sort of nest of them. The wire hangers swung and tinkled like Japanese wind chimes. She looked at him with those ferret eyes; expecting anything, surprised at nothing.

  Somewhere, she had found an old bag of salted peanuts. A relic of some airline flight Henry had long forgotten. She had poured the nuts into her palm and was gnawing at them. When she saw Henry at the closet door, she clutched the foil bag to her, as if she expected him to try to take it away.

  Eventually, she did eat. Not the peanut bag, but the soup Henry had prepared. She wolfed it in great greedy gulps, her left arm encircling the bowl, and her right wielding the soupspoon like a shovel. She kept her eye fixed warily on him the whole time, except when she darted quick looks around her, like an animal guarding its prey.

  When she was done he took the bowl, which she released only reluctantly; and this time when he led her to the shower she seemed to understand. She grabbed the towels from his hands and stared at them. Then she stared at him.

  “Go on,” he said gruffly. “You shower now. I’ll go up to the attic and see if I can find some old clothes for you.”

  When he returned from the attic with an armful of clothing, Henry found the woman in the library, sitting in Barbry’s favorite reading chair. Showered and scrubbed, she seemed like a different person. Certainly, she smelled different: fresh and clean. From the rear, in the soft light and wearing Barbry’s bathrobe, she looked enough like Barbara to make Henry’s heart freeze for a moment. The dresses fell from his arms and he braced himself against the back of his own reading chair.

  And the illusion vanished. All he saw was a bag lady holding the portrait photograph that Barbara and he had had taken only eight months before.

  “That was my wife,” he said, and she jumped a little and turned and looked at him. Her eyes were childlike. Green, he saw, and not hazel. They didn’t look at all like the suspicious ferret eyes he had seen earlier. “My wife, Barbara,” he explained, pointing to the photo. “She was, she was killed today in an automobile accident.”

  There. He had said it out loud. Now it was true. All of a sudden, he couldn’t look at the photograph. The bag lady looked from the portrait to him and back to the portrait. Then she stroked Barbara’s face gently. She nodded her head up and down in a slow cadence and made a low keening sound. Henry dropped into his chair, crushing the dresses he had laid there. He covered his face with his hands and a time went by.

  When he looked up again, he saw that the woman had gone to the mirror by the bookshelves and was staring at her own face. She was holding the photograph in her right hand so she could see both herself and Barbara side-by-side. With her left, she held the front of the housecoat gathered together.

  “Yes, you do look a little like her,” Henry said. “Not much, but that’s what made me stop there on the street. I—” He suddenly realized he had as much as said he wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.

  But the bag lady seemed not to have noticed, or, if noticed, not to have cared. “I’m Sadie,” she said and Henry jerked his head in surprise at hearing her speak. “Sadie the Lady. That’s me.” She said it in a kind of sing-song voice. She returned her attention to the study of herself and the photograph.

  Henry stood up and walked behind her so he could see the two faces from the same angle. “Yes. You know, if you did your hair up the same way, you would look even more like her.” Barbry had always worn her hair piled up.

  Sadie the Lady smiled, showing an incisor missing on the upper right. She put the photograph down and reached with both her hands to gather her hair into a rough approximation of Barbara’s. She primped for the mirror, turning this way and that. Henry, watching her reflection, blushed. He should have known she would need new underwear, too.

  The tableau in the cemetery seemed unreal. As if he were watching it from far away. Voices buzzed. Puppet figures stood about. He felt things only as if through layers of cotton. People he knew kept coming up to him and gripping his arm and telling him how sorry they were. He couldn’t understand why they were so sorry, but he smiled and said everything was going to be all right.

  Bill Canazetti, his lab partner, told him it was all right to cry. That he shouldn’t hold it in. But Henry just shook his head. Late
r he would do that for Her. Just now, he couldn’t.

  There was a preacher. Barbara had been a church-goer, High Church, and Henry had sometimes gone with Her. He wished now he had gone more often. It was a portion of Her life that he could no longer share.

  The preacher (Priest, he supposed. There was a difference). The priest spoke of comforting impossibilities. Eternal life. The immortal soul. Barbara had gone to a better world. She had left behind this vale of tears. Henry listened. He wanted to believe it. He tried to believe it. It was better to believe such things than to believe that there was no Barbara at all, anywhere. Death was the Great Proselytizer.

  “Most of all,” the man in the funny collar said to the assembled group, “Barbara lives on in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew and loved her. We carry some piece of her with us always…”

  Now, that was certainly true. At least, since he had donated Her organs. There were no doubt several people already who carried a piece of Her with them. And there was the DNA sample at the lab. Under proper conditions it should last nearly forever. Immortality of a sort, though he doubted that that was what the priest had meant.

  Henry decided that, if Barbry did live somehow in his memories, the first thing he should do when he got home was to record those memories on tape. Everything about Her. That way he could never forget.

  He had kept Her clothes and other things. He couldn’t bear to part with them just yet. They were memories, too, in a way; and he wasn’t quite ready to cast them out. In fact [and it would shame him if it ever got out], he slept at night with one of Her slips tucked beneath his pillow.

  And then there was Sadie the Lady.

  Henry had talked her into staying. He didn’t know why. He had put her up in the guest bedroom and let her wear Barbara’s old things. Suspicious at first, she had gradually adjusted. She spoke now, at least once or twice a day; and had wandered off to her closet nest only once. She was still hoarding food, Henry discovered, in several caches around the house, which Henry left undisturbed. It seemed…right that she should be in the house.