Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  Kyle sat on the floor next to the bed, a puddle of watery shit staining his pajamas and spreading onto the floor. He held his head in his hands, leaning against the nightstand. The wastebasket was on its side halfway across the room, and everything from the nightstand—from the DreamCatcher to the Kleenex to the pill bottles to the now-shattered glass of water—was on the floor all around him.

  “Are you one of them, or are you Mara?” he asked, looking at me through his hands.

  I set the bag down by the door and knelt in the wreckage by his side. “I’m Mara, honey.” I put my hand on his arm and he flinched.

  Finally his face softened as he recognized me.

  “Oh, you are. Good.”

  He reached for me with his thin arms and I held him as tight as I dared. My eyes felt as wide as two flatscreen televisions, broadcasting static into the dark room. I was too shocked seeing him cry to cry with him. “What happened?”

  “I fell. It was the shadow people again. They didn’t leave, even after I was awake.”

  “It’s okay.” I thought about the size of the bruise he’d have tomorrow. I wondered if we should go to the hospital.

  Kyle pulled back from me. His eyes were so red. “Why do you keep saying that, when you know it’s not?”

  I thought for a long time about an answer, but I couldn’t find one. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  My heart broke. I felt it seize and snap, felt it replaced with an icy weight. “I am too.”

  We sat for a while that way, arms around each other in a dark room, in a puddle of excrement, vomit, and broken glass, rotten dreams. The sky was lightening by the time I’d gotten him and myself and the room cleaned up, Kyle’s dream machine loaded with five guaranteed excellent unique dreams, and into bed.

  #

  In the morning he was dead.

  The only thing I remember clearly about that day is waking up in the dim daylight thinking of shadowy forms. I sensed immediately that the room was one soul short, and I rolled over and put my hand on his stubbly face—gently, as if to wake him. He didn’t startle.

  After that I must have called people because his body was gone and my mother was in the house, along with a number of other people I don’t exactly remember, and they were cooking and cleaning and telling me to sleep and to eat, and offering me pills and hugs and telling me to sleep some more. Days must have passed this way.

  I don’t remember crying, but my face hurt all the time. It felt new, ill fitting. At one point I went around the house turning all of the pictures on their faces. Hanging ones I covered with scraps of fabric. For good measure I covered the mirrors too. We weren’t Jewish, but it seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t want to look at my tear-mottled face.

  One thought bubbled up through the haze over and over: I killed him. With the illegal dreams, or with my own worthless dreams, or maybe just by not being there when he fell. I killed him. The refrain played on endless repeat, only beat down temporarily by my mother’s distractions or food shoved in my face or utter fatigue.

  There was a funeral. It was unremarkable. My mother slathered my makeup on thick but still I could see the lie in every face that told me how good I looked. I cried every time someone told me how strong I was, so I guess they were wrong about that too. My chest hurt and my bowels felt like water.

  After the funeral, it seemed like everyone in the world was in my house.

  Kyle’s friends from school were there, skulking about looking geeky in ill-fitting suits. One by one each of his professors shook my hand and told me, in slightly different words, how smart Kyle had been, and each time it felt like a slap in the face.

  His parents were there too, of course, and after too many drinks his mother started yelling at me for not taking better care of him. His father tried to calm her down and get her away from me, at first, but when she yelled, “You should have told us he was dying!” he apparently decided she was right. In the end, my mother rescued me by pretending not to be able to find the extra toilet paper, and I almost loved her for it until she whispered, “You really should have told them.”

  Some of my friends from college made it, although not the ones I really missed, and they clumped together drinking and reminiscing. One kept peeking under the fabric-covered pictures and paintings. Another brought her camera and actually took pictures. None of them had known Kyle well.

  But Kyle’s brother was the strangest of all. He had always been a dedicated and talented musician, playing whatever instrument he picked up with ease. I had expected him to play at the funeral, but he declined. He told me later that he hadn’t been interested in music for a while. It didn’t sound right, he said. He’d been on dream-therapy, Dreams 4 Life, and it was changing his life. He felt better than ever before, and he realized how selfish he’d been and how trivial his life. In fact, he told me, Kyle’s death had made him realize how fleeting life was, and that was why he was going to do something meaningful with his, and join the Army.

  Almost my only crystal clear memory from that day is telling him, “Your life is meaningful. Don’t sacrifice it in one of these stupid wars.” He shook his head at me, as though I just didn’t get it. Though he smiled, his eyes looked haunted.

  I collapsed into my bed with the house still full of irritatingly normal conversation, but thankfully when I woke up the next day everyone was gone. Only their casseroles remained.

  My mother had left notes by the phone with all of my messages sorted into two categories: clients and condolences, and I wanted to sweep them all into the recycling bin. I went into the room that had been Kyle’s office. You killed me, it seemed to say.

  I shut the door and went into my office. It was a mess of unfinished sketches and paintings, mostly of rooms in my rich clients’ houses. The blank canvases stared at me like a room of mirrors, and I hadn’t enough fabric to cover them all. I shut that door too.

  The fridge was jammed with neatly wrapped food I was unlikely to eat. Behind it, though, I saw three trays of Dreams 4 Life dreams. They’d apparently kept delivering for a couple of days, and had neglected to collect the unused and rotten dreams. The ones in the fridge looked to be about half viable, not that it mattered now.

  In the living room, the remote controls were missing. I looked in the couch cushions, under the couch, and behind the television before I remembered there was a drawer in the coffee table. I opened it to the most terrific clatter of glass on glass, like a brief hurricane through an ill-tuned windchime. My mother had transferred everything from the coffee table into the drawer, preserving the arrangement of the bad dreams in neat lines. They fell against themselves like drunken soldiers when I pulled the drawer out. Some of Kyle’s notes were there too, his multi-colored scrawl all over them. I grabbed the remotes and shut the tinkling drawer as quickly as I could.

  The first few nights I slept raggedly and woke tired. During the days I pattered around in my sweatpants, avoiding my clients and ignoring calls from friends who were still in town and wanted to do lunch. Eventually those stopped. A few times I picked up paintbrushes, but when I looked at the white canvases all I saw were the walls of my clients’ homes. I thought in wall colors: Navajo white, Wimbledon white, eggshell, ecru, espresso, pale taupe.

  It could have gone on like that forever, but finally I got hungry again. I pulled a saran-wrapped baking dish of macaroni and cheese out of the fridge and behind it were the Dreams 4 Life trays, and it occurred to me that an ON boost certainly couldn’t hurt me, and just might help. My natural ON levels were never dangerously low, but they weren’t particularly high either.

  Of the original fifteen dreams, six looked clear. I loaded two of them into my dream machine.

  #

  I woke in the morning feeling like I’d forgotten something. The world looked like I was viewing it through a blue filter. I walked out to the living room, feeling how cold and hard the wood floors were against the soles of my feet.

  That morning I couldn�
��t remember why I’d been avoiding my clients. I went right through the messages my mother had taken and called them all back, setting up consultations and design meetings for the next week. Then I got to work, sketching rooms, pulling fabric swatches for upholstery and window treatments, and researching a new kind of cork flooring I’d heard about.

  My heart still felt like a frozen boulder I dragged behind me, tethered to my chest. But I was less aware of it. If I didn’t look over my shoulder, I forgot my burden for a while. Sometimes, though, I thought I saw shadows moving in my peripheral vision, and I started to be afraid. When I looked, they were always gone. Just my brain misinterpreting the fabric draped on the walls or the darkness that clung to wooden furniture.

  On each of the next two nights I loaded two more Dreams 4 Life dreams, pleased that no more had gone bad. Maybe there was a time curve to dreams rotting? I wished I could tell Kyle about it, give him more data for his dissertation. It hit me like a physical pain that his dissertation would never be finished. Like falling through a trap door, I was thinking of Kyle again, and my guilt and sorrow were back, more vicious than ever. My hand could almost feel the curve of his jaw under the skin. I fell asleep crying that night.

  And woke screaming. In the dreams, gray figures lurked behind me in doorways, followed me through the house, found me even when I hid under the bed. They were chanting something, or maybe just moaning. As I woke up the details drained away, until I found myself alone in bed, clutching the blanket to my chin, scanning the corners of the room for uncast shadows.

  I got up and went to work, but I felt strange. Haunted. My mother called to check up on me and I have no idea what I said to her, but I must have lied well because before she hung up she told me I was “healing just fine.” I’d jumped so much when the phone rang that I left a line of fine-point Sharpie all the way across my sketch of a client’s new bathroom.

  I was standing in the kitchen holding a Tupperware of dubious-looking chicken when I swear I saw something cross the living room. Nothing was there when I looked, of course, but that same terrible thought that had shadowed me since the morning of Kyle’s death had re-emerged: I killed him.

  Suddenly I wasn’t hungry at all.

  I put the chicken back in the fridge and slid the deli tray all the way out. I was strangely relieved to see my crumpled bag of illegal dreams still there. There were several left over, and on impulse I unrolled the bag and dumped its contents out on the tile counter. I held the vials one by one up to the light, studying each one’s clear crystal shine, beautiful as diamonds refracting. Were they deadly?

  I thought of pouring them down the drain. Instead I loaded one into my DreamCatcher. If it had killed Kyle, it could have me too.

  #

  In the dream I was a spaceship captain, travelling through time, bringing democracy and feminism to medieval societies. I woke laughing, and looked around the bedroom as though I’d never seen it before. I felt like a set of eyelids I hadn’t known I had were finally open. I remembered the sensation from college. I felt awake, really awake.

  I went right to my office and started to paint. I painted galaxies and comets and planets; I painted royal processions and all-woman pirate ships. I painted until I got hungry and stopped for lunch—the chicken was still good after all—then I finger-painted a spaceship on my dirty plate using mustard and relish and raspberry jam. It would have been a good painting, too, if I’d had any blue condiments.

  I felt fantastic until about seven in the evening. The dream had faded away, and the house started to look familiar again. I went to the kitchen to scavenge for dinner, and noticed the light on my answering machine blinking.

  Eight new messages! I hadn’t even heard the phone ring. One was from my dentist, and another was from a friend. Three were from clients, asking about this and that. Can we make the bathroom a darker red? Are the throw rugs washable? And so on. But the other three messages were all from the same client, ranging from impatient to angry to concerned that I was late, later, and apparently never showing up for our meeting. I had completely forgotten.

  Suddenly I felt deeply fatigued. Everywhere I looked I saw work that needed to be done, and there was nothing in me that could do it. But that wasn’t all. I wanted to sleep. I craved a dream. The horror stories of my youth replayed in my head, but despite it all I considered reloading the DreamCatcher—maybe two dreams instead of one would get me all the way through the day tomorrow.

  I stalked around the house for a while, trying to make up my mind. Finally I wandered into my office and was shocked to see the paintings I’d worked on all day. They were terrible. All garish colors and bold lines, with nothing to make them meaningful. They looked like children’s drawings. It made me wonder about the show I’d had in college, the dream paintings I’d done then. Out of disgust I’d thrown the unsold ones away, but I’d still thought they were good. Now I wasn’t sure. Had I ever been an artist?

  I took the remaining illegal dreams from the fridge and poured their droplets down the kitchen sink, washing the vials with soap. After that I got a bunch of rags and solvent and wiped as much of the still-wet oil paint as I could off of the day’s canvases. If only all mistakes were as easy to erase.

  #

  For a week I went without dreams, save my own. I didn’t remember these, but that wasn’t unusual. Without the ecstasy of the illegal dreams or the boost of the donor dreams, life was hard. I stepped right back into my grief like it was a movie I’d put on pause. I moped and I paced the house and I tried to work, with little success.

  A few weeks after Kyle’s death, two of his colleagues came to the door, shuffling about sheepishly. “How are you doing?” one asked. I was about to send them away when the other one spoke. “We’re here for the school’s equipment.”

  When they were gone, I stood in Kyle’s now half-empty office. I hadn’t been in there since I’d shut the door after the funeral. It had always been minimalist, but now the place felt desolate. All that remained were piles of Kyle’s notes, rudely scattered across his desk, a couple of filing cabinets, his bookshelf of scientific texts, and his computer. Even his particular smell was gone.

  The pages of notes with their multi-colored scrawl mocked me. I’ll never be done, they seemed to say, and it’s your fault. I should have paid more attention to Kyle’s explanations of the science. Hadn’t he been trying to show me something right before he died?

  I went to the coffee table where his last notes had been hastily stored. A column of letters was circled, with a note at the bottom that read, where are you coming from? I couldn’t answer that question. I didn’t even understand it.

  Kyle’s army of dead dreams still resided in the drawer, organized by color. I selected one of the lighter-colored ones and unscrewed the cap. The stench hit me with surprising force—it still had the sweetness of orange blossoms, but with a sickly undercurrent of something acrid, like burning hair or rotting flesh.

  Even so I loaded it into my DreamCatcher.

  #

  I didn’t wake until after noon the next day, and when I sat up my head pounded like an unbalanced washing machine.

  I almost lay right back down, but I made myself get out of bed and work on a design for an ultramodern living room that was due in a few days. I saw blurred shapes on the edges of my vision, but I tried to ignore them. The pain was glorious. It shrieked in my head like an ill-behaved pet parrot, demanding attention. My grief could barely be heard over the din. But it could still be heard.

  So every night I uncapped a rotten dream and loaded it into my machine. Every morning I woke up feeling a little more tired, seeing a few more shadows, with a headache that throbbed a little more vigorously.

  On the fourth day of bad dreams I was staring at a sketch of a living room and kitchen when I saw the shadowy shapes coming out of the drawing. They peered around the sketched-in fridge and crouched under end tables, their fingers like tendrils reaching, for what I didn’t know. I got out a charcoal pencil and tra
ced them before they moved, outlining their dark forms on the drawing. When I was finished, I held the piece at arm’s length. I kind of liked it, in a creepy way. Then I realized I’d ruined the sketch I’d meant to show the client, and I kicked myself. I set it aside and started working on a replacement.

  The next day, I came back to the ruined sketch. I’d woken up feeling like something dark was sitting on my chest, sucking my breath out. The bed had been damp with my sweat. Looking at the creepy sketch, though, I felt something like pride. I rooted through the assorted sketches in my office until I’d collected a pile of the ones I couldn’t use for work. Staring at each one, it was as if the shadow people were actually in the rooms; all I had to do was trace them.

  By the time I had to leave to meet my client I had dozens of sketches, including quite a few I wanted to turn into paintings. I ran a comb across my aching head, gathered sketches into my portfolio, and shoved what I’d need for the meeting into my satchel.

  When my client came to the door, she looked surprised. I heard her suck in her breath as she hesitatingly opened the door to let me in. I guess I must have looked amiss—I still hadn’t uncovered my mirrors, so I didn’t know—but I didn’t care. I wanted to show her the designs and get back home to my paintings.

  We sat in front of a picture window and I showed her sketch after sketch of new living room ideas. She liked all of them, and I was getting frustrated by her indecision, when I pulled a wrong sketch out of my portfolio. By chance it was her house, with monsters.

  She gasped as I placed it on the table in front of her, and I guess it shows how messed up I was, but it took me a while to realize what was wrong. To me, all the sketches looked like they hid ghostly forms.