Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I don’t know how that got in here.”

  “What are those things?” she asked, shivering. She was looking rapt at the sketch; it was more attention than she’d paid to anything I’d shown her.

  I didn’t know how to answer. “I’ve been calling them shadow people.”

  She stared at the sketch for a while more. “It’s amazing.”

  I really didn’t know what to say.

  “I didn’t know anyone else . . .” She turned her face to me, eyes following after as though stuck on the sketch. “I want one of these for my house. However we end up doing the room, I want a painting like this to go in it. Can you do that?”

  I found my inner professional at last. “Of course,” I said, trying to make it sound like I had paintings commissioned every day. A voice inside me was shouting joyfully, for the first time in I didn’t know how long.

  Of course, it only took one thought to turn joy to sorrow: I can’t wait to tell Kyle.

  That night I loaded two bad dreams into the machine.

  #

  Days and weeks became blurry again. I went back to one bad dream per night, but they were getting worse: darker in color, stronger in odor. I kept thinking of them as full of OTs, until I remembered what Kyle had learned—the actual makeup of dreams didn’t change.

  The headaches got more intense, and sometimes I woke screaming and vomited over the side. The wastebasket was on my side of the bed now. The shadows transfixed me and frightened me but I pinned them to canvas with my paint, and people liked them. I was baffled by the way people looked at them; it was more like recognition than anything else.

  My client had spread the word about my painting. Soon other clients wanted them, and before I knew it I was having another gallery show.

  My mother was so proud she flew in for the opening, but when she came to the house the look on her face wasn’t pride. She’d hardly set her suitcase down before she headed to the kitchen again, and she would have started cooking right away if I’d had any ingredients in the house. As it was we were late for the opening, and she made do with doing my makeup. I’d almost forgotten about makeup; I still hadn’t uncovered my mirrors.

  “You’re not getting your beauty sleep, are you?” she asked me, holding my chin as she painted the space under my eyes. I looked up into her face, wondering where I’d have to look to see her facelift scars. She moved my face to one side, and the monster in my head shifted and growled. Reflexively I closed my eyes. Dark shapes menaced.

  I couldn’t answer her question. I was getting some kind of sleep, but it wasn’t beautiful.

  Mother didn’t mention the fact that all my pictures were still turned to the wall. She didn’t mention the mirrors, or the closed door to Kyle’s office. She didn’t mention Kyle at all. But when she left after two days, my fridge was full of food again.

  And then, inevitably, I was down to my last bad dream. It was almost black, almost opaque, the way my turpentine looked when I’d been rinsing brushes in it all day. When I opened it the reek hit me like a physical thing. The orange blossom smell was still detectable, barely, under heavy waves of sulfur, rotting garbage, and gear oil. It made my eyes water, yet my only thought was worry about what I would do the following night.

  I painted my heart out on that last day. And ended up with a portrait of Kyle that mixed memory of his ghastly near-death appearance with the shadow people in an impressionistic wash. I cried almost the whole time, tears blurring my vision so I couldn’t even tell if the damn thing was any good.

  I stashed it in a corner, face to the wall.

  Cold turkey was harder than I thought. On my first dreamless morning I woke up disoriented, hearing voices whisper in a language I couldn’t understand. I didn’t remember having a nightmare, but a feeling of horror clung to me all day.

  After that, things felt stalled. I still painted at first, but it was only momentum that carried me. The headaches started to fade away, and I recognized that as a blessing. But I passed my days like a ghost. I stopped answering the phone again. Every day I tried to paint, but some days I just sat with a brush in my hand for hours before giving up and turning on the television.

  I hadn’t realized how much the bad dreams had affected me until their effects started to wear off. After the first few days I found myself thinking more clearly. I was able to focus more on my design work, though I still found it hard to paint. The shadow people were slinking away from me, keeping to the shadows where they belonged. Perhaps they’d never been there after all.

  As my mind cleared it hit me, like a slap, that there were still a few dreams left in the house. When a person used a DreamCatcher to take what Kyle called “non-native” dreams, that person’s own dreams were bottled. When the donor system had first started, Dreams 4 Life collected those dreams, but at some point the courts ruled that they couldn’t force people to surrender their dreams, even if they were diagnosed as unhealthy. Kyle used his dreams for experiments, but there were still a few left. I found four of them in Kyle’s horribly empty office, and lined them up next to my DreamCatcher.

  I was hesitant about taking Kyle’s dreams; it seemed like an invasion of privacy. Also, selfishly, I feared what taking one of his dreams would do for my art. I needed bad dreams to paint, and while his were supposedly unhealthy, they were all clear and smelled like a summer’s day, even after months unrefrigerated. Finally, I was a little afraid of what I’d see. Was it a good idea to jump inside your dead husband’s unconscious mind? What if I learned something I could never unlearn?

  I was a coward. Those dreams sat on my bedside table for at least two weeks.

  I was sitting in my office with a paintbrush in my hand, staring at three paintings of rooms I’d designed. The clients had all commissioned shadow paintings, but I couldn’t see the shadows anymore. The phone rang, and it startled me but I ignored it and kept glaring at the uncooperative paintings. Our phone didn’t play the outgoing message out loud, so the only place I heard Kyle’s voice was in my mind: You’ve reached Kyle and Mara’s phone; leave us a message. I wondered if I would ever be able to change that message.

  I jumped when the phone beeped and a singsongy male voice filled the room. “Mara, it’s Kent from the gallery. I’m just calling about the new series. We can’t wait; people are talking; very big buzz on the next show. Hope it’s going well. You know where to reach me.” I wanted to scream. It wasn’t going well at all. I was a fraud who’d done one thing that people liked, and I couldn’t even do that any more.

  I put down the paintbrush and tore through the room, looking for any sign that I was an artist after all. What I found was Kyle: the painting I’d done of him under the influence of bad dreams. I’d almost forgotten about it. Looking at it now I felt like someone else had painted it. Edvard Munch, maybe.

  It felt wrong to be proud of making such a ghoulish image. But I was. Out of a swirl of angst and ennui, Kyle’s eyes stared with something like humor.

  It made me smile. I missed him so fucking much.

  That night I loaded one of Kyle’s dreams into my DreamCatcher. I dreamed that I was at a cocktail party in a huge blank space. People wandered around like ants, shaking hands with each other, and sometimes when they did, both people jumped like they’d stuck their fingers in an outlet, and a wispy form emerged from their clasped hands. I recognized the forms. I had painted them many a time.

  In the dream I—as Kyle, I guess—walked around the party, shaking hands and occasionally getting shocked. It was probably Kyle’s mind that was trying to find a pattern to the shocks and shadow births. Eventually he figured it had something to do with the clothes people were wearing. He/I only got shocked by people wearing hats.

  I woke laughing, but my face was wet with tears. The dream was like a hug from a loved ghost—it seemed like pure Kyle, fear of parties and all. It also seemed like a clue to the mystery of the shadow people, and perhaps by extension to the bad dreams. I wished he was ther
e to interpret it.

  I wished he was there, period.

  That day I dared, with trembling hands, to turn one picture around. It had always been a favorite of mine, a perfect embodiment of my geeky love, taken at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. We’d spent minutes setting the shot up so that it looked like one of the giant radio telescopes was coming out of his right ear. His hand was held flat next to his head, gently cupping the bottom of the massive dish. There were a few photos with this pose, all with different facial expressions, but the one I’d framed showed him with a knowing look, as if he was receiving a great cosmic secret.

  Looking at the picture didn’t hurt as much as I’d feared. I just hugged it to my chest and cried.

  The next night I took another of Kyle’s dreams, but I didn’t remember it in the morning.

  The third dream took place in a huge house with big blank rooms. There were lines to get into all the rooms, populated with a shocking cast of individuals, from midgets to giants, in colors from human skin tones to green and purple. Many of them seemed more like animals than humans. When the people went into the rooms, though, they all became the same. One feature at a time the individuality was stripped away until the people themselves were nothing more than shadows.

  But there was one room where the people stayed individual. There wasn’t the same variety in that room—they all looked like people, for one. But what uniqueness they had, they retained. I went into that room and asked them why they weren’t changing. “Why, don’t you know?” they all replied at once in eerie harmony. “We’re already the same.”

  When I woke that time, it was like a lightbulb had gone on in my mind. I ran to Kyle’s office to see if I was right. I pulled a beginning textbook on dream science from his shelf and skimmed through it until I found what I needed. Each person has a dream type, like a blood type, that is distinct from the oneironutrients or oneirotoxins contained within. However, unlike blood types, these seem to be compatible with one another. The book went on to explain, as if to a college freshman, that this meant that a person could safely take a dream from someone with a different dream type.

  Well, I thought, what if they’re wrong? The lightning bulb flashed even brighter, like a nuclear bomb going off.

  I called the Dreams 4 Life executive I’d spoken to before. “I only have one question,” I said, heart racing. “Do you mix the dreams?”

  “Of course we do,” she answered. She sounded put out, like she’d been asked if bears shat in the woods, and wondered why she was putting up with someone so stupid. “If we didn’t, people would get actual dream images, and the ON formulations would never match prescriptions. How many donor dreams do you suppose meet a patient’s needs exactly?”

  “Of course. But they’re strictly from human donors, right?”

  The woman paused. Finally she said, “You know very well that human use of animal dreams is prohibited by the FDA.” It wasn’t an answer.

  “Of course.” I hung up.

  My next call was to Kyle’s advisor, Dr. Glenn. He came right over to look at Kyle’s notes, and I watched him read through it all with great interest. He was like a little boy reading a new comic book, gasping and laughing his way through it. “I think you’re right,” he said in the end. He hugged me, and I started to cry. He said what I was thinking: “If only Kyle were here for this.”

  Dr. Glenn worked quickly to fill the gaps in research that would prove Dreams 4 Life was mixing animal dreams into their products, causing dream type reactions including shadowy images and behavioral changes. We worked on the paper together, but Kyle was given first author credit. In the school’s opinion, this represented a genuine addition to the body of scientific knowledge, and Kyle was posthumously awarded his doctorate.

  The story hit the papers before graduation, and mail came pouring in. Even while Dreams 4 Life was refusing to release any of their files, while they were vigorously denying any use of animal dreams, I started to get fan mail. And hate mail. Dreams 4 Life dreams weren’t working the same way they had been, and people were angry.

  One day I came home to find my front window broken, and half a dozen live chickens flapping and squawking and shitting in my house. One of them had a note tied to its leg, carrier-pigeon-style, telling me both that I was a chicken and that I should dream chicken dreams (which were highly toxic). As intimidation went it was pretty hilarious, but messy.

  The saddest, yet most redemptive, letter I received was from Kyle’s brother. He was in the Army, on rotation spitting distance from Iran. Things were scary, he said. Since entering the Armed Forces the feeling that had pressed him to enlist had faded, and now he could barely remember the clarity. He missed it, and he was angry. But our research (it touched me that he thought I had anything to do with it) had showed him why he’d felt that way. He’d written me a song, and as soon as he could get back home he’d come play it for me.

  He didn’t mention anything about his and Kyle’s parents. I hadn’t spoken to them since they’d yelled at me at Kyle’s funeral, and whenever I thought of that it hurt like a missing body part; we’d been close once.

  The school let me accept Kyle’s doctorate diploma for him. I ordered his robe and regalia, his silly graduation hat, but I didn’t invite anyone to the ceremony. It wasn’t mine. Kyle’s name was called and I walked across the stage with a big smile on my face, somehow not tripping and falling on my face. I shook Dr. Glenn’s hand and hugged him tight, and he whispered, “Listen”: the audience was quiet, but a few voices shouted with wild acclaim.

  I shaded my eyes against the lights but couldn’t see who was making the ruckus. Not until afterward, when I was trying to sneak out of the reception, only to find myself face to face with Kyle’s parents. Before I could even squeak out a greeting his mom had wrapped me in a fierce hug.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “No, I am,” I croaked, starting to cry.

  We could have gone on like that, fighting over who should feel worse, but thankfully Kyle’s dad stepped in. “None of that matters. We missed you, Mara. You look well.”

  His mom nodded. “You did great. Kyle would be proud of you, and I’m so proud of you both.”

  #

  But before all of that—before the story of animal dreams hit the news and the resulting stir put Dreams 4 Life out of business, before chickens forced this decorator to redecorate, before graduation—I had one more dream. I put off using it for weeks, partially because I felt I’d solved the mystery Kyle’s unconscious mind had been working on, but mostly because it was the last part of him that still lived in my house.

  I was feeling better all the time. I’d started eating, and really focusing on my clients and their stupid houses. The work was interesting enough, most days, and it left me with time to paint on the rare occasions when I felt inspired. I even started calling some of my friends back and venturing out into the world.

  I uncovered the mirrors, and was only somewhat startled by the way my appearance had changed. My hair had grown long and unkempt, with a startling white streak near the front. My face was pale and thin. But I knew I’d looked worse, and I knew I’d look better again.

  I uncovered the pictures one at a time, giving myself time to adjust to each one. Eventually the only picture I couldn’t bear to look at was our wedding photo.

  It was the anniversary of our first date, and loneliness weighed heavy on me, so I decided to load that last dream into my DreamCatcher. I was terrified that I wouldn’t remember it, that I would have saved it all that time for nothing. But it was amazing.

  In the dream I, as Kyle, stood on top of a hill overlooking a city. I remember feeling the joy of having walked all the way to the top, the thrill of a healthy body, and I knew the dream must have been from near the end of Kyle’s life. It was twilight, and the lights of the city were twinkling on like Christmas lights, as the stars echoed them above. But something was missing. And then I saw myself—Mara—walking up the hill toward me. I ran to her a
nd we held each other there, between the earth and the sky. I looked into her face and I loved it.

  When I woke up, I went to my favorite mirror, an antique that hung in the hallway between my office and the now empty room, and tried to look at myself through Kyle’s eyes. I felt like I knew who I was, white-streaked hair and all. I approached the last covered photo and pulled the shawl away slowly, letting it fall to the floor like a theatre curtain in reverse. There we were: young lovers stepping hand in hand off of a stage and into a new life together. That life was over now, but I didn’t cry.

  With one finger I touched the glass over the side of Kyle’s jaw. “I love you too.”

  ***unpublished

  Story notes:

  I first started working on this story at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2009, and I can’t remember much of what sparked it, other than possibly sleep deprivation?

  Dad’s Christmas Presence

  It’s a story as old as time: a father’s desire to create a special Christmas memory leads to a tragic chimney accident. Yes, we thought it was strange that Dad missed the frenzy of gift-unwrapping. Yes, we noticed the smoke from our cozy fire backing up into the room as though the flue were closed (but it wasn’t). Yes, we thought we heard a sort of muffled screaming. But then we’d always suspected the old house was haunted.

  It wasn’t. Not then.

  I guess it took Dad long enough to die that he got sort of bitter about it. Jimmy and I were just kids, engrossed in the gimme-gimmes, which I think should have given us a pass. Mom… honestly she’s just not that bright. I mean, neither was Dad. Obviously.

  Ghost-Dad started haunting us as soon as the decorations came down, which was right before his funeral. Mom swore we would never celebrate Christmas again. We shoved the lights and ornaments into boxes in the attic, dragged the tree into the backyard, dressed in our family portrait clothes, and then there he was, all hovery and see-through and still dressed as Santa. Jimmy ran right for him, tackling for a hug, but sailed through the apparition and bonked his head on a doorknob instead. He wailed and wailed and we were late for the funeral, and Mom made me hold the ice pack over Jimmy’s giant goose egg.