by Cody Sisco
Granma Cynthia stood stiffly and wouldn’t acknowledge a word Victor said. Hieu had retreated quickly. The only other person with them was Auntie Circe, who seemed to be listening but whose face was like stone.
“I’m trying to tell you,” Victor said. “The evidence is clear. There’s polonium on the data egg and on me. It must have come from Granfa Jeff, and I think it’s what killed him.”
Auntie Circe shook her head at him. “Victor, polonium is extremely rare. I seriously doubt—”
“I tested it. I tested myself. Look at the printout.”
Granma Cynthia sniffed, but Victor could tell by her posture it was a disdainful gesture, not one of mourning.
Ma said, “Sweetie, if you’ll just calm down, I’m sure you’ll see—”
“I am seeing. It’s all of you who are refusing to look past your prejudices.”
Fa looked up, frowning. He pointed at Victor, and it felt like a jolt of electricity. “You will not speak to your family this way. We raised you as best we could—”
Whatever lecture Fa was about to launch into was cut short by Hieu’s return, accompanied by an urgent sounding throat-clearing. Hieu went to Granma Cynthia and whispered in her ear.
“Why don’t we just open the gates to any piece of trash that wanders by?” She stalked toward the mansion.
“Who is it, Lê Quang?” Auntie Circe asked.
“Ms. Elena.”
Victor whirled to look down the hill, but the gate was hidden behind bushes, trees, and statuary. He caught Ma and Auntie exchanging a look. “What’s she doing here?” he asked.
“I invited her,” Ma said. “Please bring her up, Lê Quang.” She turned to Victor. “When you said you had an announcement . . . I know you feel this time is different, but I thought maybe if she was here, she could help.”
Victor gripped the data egg in his pocket, regretting that he’d tried to explain anything to them.
Auntie Circe wore an expression of curiosity and concern. An ornate gold band held back her dark ringlets. She said, “When we spoke before, you agreed to give this fantasy a rest.”
If he told her he still wasn’t taking Personil, she’d just assume that was the reason for his behavior. “I know, but I found a supplement for my medication, and my mind started to clear. Now I see clearly.”
“What kind of supplement?”
“Herbs.”
“Herbs?” Her voice cracked. “Interesting.”
“It’s not interesting,” Fa said, “it’s delusional.”
“Linus!” Ma cried, then feebly added, “Please watch your language.”
Fa said, “We all need to understand how serious this is. I’ve never seen Victor like this. None of you have. We’re not going to get over this by pussyfooting around.”
Elena trotted up the path, leaving Hieu behind. Victor caught sight of her hands, what they held, and his breath caught in his throat. He felt his knees give way, and he fell on the grass, but his gaze never wavered. She was holding his dreambook.
His ma rushed over and asked him if he was hurt. Victor shrugged away and lurched to his feet, advancing on Elena.
“What are you doing with that?” he demanded.
She said, “You needed to see it.”
“How did you—”
“I broke into your apartment. After what you said at the university, I couldn’t let you keep going. You need a reality check. This book proves your fantasies are dangerous.”
The journal had been a gift from his granfa many years ago; everyone at the 1981 Eastmore reunion had received one. It was an old Eastmore tradition, his granfa had explained. Other family members probably used them as day planners, as scratch books, and for other innocuous reasons, but the red real-leather-bound book that Elena held had served an important, almost holy purpose for Victor. Within its pages, he recorded dreams shattered by violence and soaked in blood.
How could Elena do this to him? He never should have told her about the dreambook. If his family read it, they would immediately place him in a Class One facility with the other extreme cases: the deranged, ultraviolent, mind-numb, and catatonic.
“We can’t pretend you’re okay,” Elena said. “But we’re going to get over this. Maybe it would help if you wrote your ideas down in here.”
“I’m not writing anything down. I’m not going to copy these test results down and pretend they came from some fucked up delusion.”
“What test results?” Elena asked.
“Don’t,” Fa warned. “We can’t indulge him anymore.”
Victor waved the sheet of biopaper at her. “I tested myself for radiation. Positive on me and on the data egg Granfa Jeff gave me. Here. It’s not doing me any good.”
Elena took the sheet and bent her head to examine it. As she did so, Victor grabbed the dreambook from her and tucked it under his arm.
Auntie Circe spoke softly. “I think we need to consider whether the Carmichael ranch might be a good place for you, temporarily, until—”
“Until what?” Victor asked. They all knew his condition was degenerative.
Part of him wondered if he belonged at a ranch. For as long as he could remember, he lived in fear that the events chronicled during fitful snatches of sleep would come true. When Samuel Miller rampaged through Carmichael when Victor was four years old, he had recognized the black-clad man stalking through the streets because he’d seen the man in his dreams.
Victor had started writing his dreams down on slips of paper and tearing them to shreds. Then he’d received the dreambook, and, gripped by a compulsion, he’d poured his dreams onto its pages. He never read through what he’d written, however. The details were too gruesome, too vivid; more than that, he didn’t want to confront the truth of his mental illness as depicted in those pages. Every horrible fantasy, every fortune-telling dream only symbolized the ways his mind was broken.
Victor said, “No one comes out of those ranches. They’re almost as bad as the facilities. It’s all a sick system to make you feel better because people like me see things and say things that you don’t want to hear.”
Elena held up the biopaper. “This is real?”
Ma snapped at her, “I didn’t invite you here to encourage him!”
Auntie Circe said, “Victor, think about your future, your promotion. You don’t want to walk away from an opportunity like that. Unless you—I hate to say it this way—unless you snap out of this, we won’t be able to use you a spokesperson. This is your last chance. You have to choose the life you want.”
Granma Cynthia trudged down the path and interrupted: “I’ve had enough of this. I won’t be made to feel helpless in my own home. The police are on their way. If Victor is here when they arrive, I’m going to insist they arrest him—if not for slander then for theft and whatever else I can think of. I gave the Health Board a call too.”
“Mother!” Auntie Circe advanced on her as swift as a tiger, but Granma Cynthia stood her ground.
Elena tugged at Victor’s hand. “Come on.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“They’re not listening, Victor. Come on.”
“What’s the point? I might as well just check myself into a facility.”
Elena whispered, “If this is what you say it is, then you might be onto something after all. Now come on, you win nothing by getting arrested.”
Elena led him down the path. He could barely form a coherent thought, her reversal was so unexpected. His parents called to him as he retreated down the hill.
He hesitated.
“We need to go,” Elena said.
“You believe me? About the radiation?”
“Maybe. Something doesn’t add up.”
Victor and Elena hurried onward. A warmth started to spread in his chest. Someone finally believed him. One thing was clear: Victor wasn’t quite the useless broken person everyone thought he was.
Elena asked, “So what’s the plan?”
Victor said, “We need to retrace
his steps. Where he went, what he did in those last months.”
Victor stood up straighter. Now he was a man, a thinking man, and he could stand with a dignity that no one could take away. No matter what his family thought, he would find out the truth about Granfa Jeff’s death.
His MeshBit chimed and he squeezed it. A message started to play.
“The Classification Commission hereby orders you to submit to a reevaluation with Dr. Santos at nine in the morning on 29 February 1991. Location details are encoded in this message.”
“That’s three days from now,” Elena said.
Victor’s jaw hung open. Three days. There was nothing he could do to prepare in just three days. He was screwed.
Chapter 14
I was standing on a raft, floating through a thick mist. Everything was blue. When the raft reached the end of its journey, it sank, and I floated alone in a red sea of letters. I tried to swim, but my arms gave out and then my legs. My last thought swam away with my breath, and I dissolved into the sea.
—Victor Eastmore’s dreambook
Semiautonomous California
26 February 1991
That night, shaking in his bed, Victor replayed the message from the Classification Commission at least ten times while he stared at pinpoint glowlights on his bedroom ceiling. Usually people were given at least one month’s notice of a reclassification exam. His mind buzzed, and swirls of color eddied in his vision. He tried every exercise Dr. Tammet had taught him: repetitive hand motions, visualization exercises, sing-song mantras. Nothing helped calm his mind.
Elena had promised to help his investigation but persuaded him to hold off until after the reclassification. She’d ordered him to get sleep and to call her in the morning. But sleep seemed far away.
At three a.m. Victor got up, went to the kitchen, and began pulling glasses and measuring cups from the cupboards and placing them next to bottles of alcohol on the counter. He made as many tinctures as he could, exhausting every scrap of fumewort. He set his MeshBit timer for one hour, then sat on the living room floor, stared at the blue-green glass bead mosaic on the wall, and counted his breaths. When his MeshBit pinged, he started methodically taking the tinctures, one dose every ten minutes. By five a.m., with half the vials emptied, his vision began to blur and his brain ceased chattering. He staggered to his bed, fell on it, and drifted to sleep.
Victor woke up two hours later to the sound of his own screams. In the dream, he’d been drawn and quartered for a crime he couldn’t remember committing. He trudged to the kitchen again, found a vial of fumewort, and uncorked it and drank, letting the stinging liquid run down his throat while he made his way to the living room. He sat at his writing desk with his dreambook and wrote. When he was finished, he placed the book back on the table. The dreambook thrummed, seeming to emit a sound like a distant engine, coming closer. When Victor looked away, the sound faded.
He raked his face with his fingers. Two days until his reclassification appointment, if his family didn’t somehow arrange to have him committed first. His nightmares made sleep a terrible prospect, yet lack of sleep would erode his self-control.
Maybe Pearl could help him. She had experience with other people with MRS. She might help him get rid of his dreams, get some real sleep, and pass his reclassification.
Victor left Karine a message, explaining that he hadn’t slept well but that he would be in the office by noon. She knew all about his condition so she would understand. Her friendship with the family had to be worth something, didn’t it?
People loitered on the sidewalks in Little Asia, but he avoided them by walking next to slow-moving street traffic, and arrived at Pearl’s shop. He pounded on the front door. When it finally opened, Pearl was scowling, though her face softened when she recognized him. She nodded and beckoned for him to follow her into the shop.
The store was as quiet and dusty as before. A box of shiny metal parts and pieces of gray-brown bioplastic sat on the floor next to her desk. She noticed him looking at the box and slid it out of view.
“Back so soon?” she asked.
“My reclassification is in two days.”
“You look like you’re not sleeping.”
“The fumewort helps . . . when I’m awake.”
“I see,” she said. “Tell me. Why do you think I help people like you?”
“I don’t know. To make money?”
Pearl scoffed. “Do you know anything about Little Asia?”
Victor shifted on his feet. He didn’t need a lecture. He needed herbs.
She didn’t wait for an answer. “We have refugees from all over Asia, crammed together in tiny hovels. Forget SeCa’s immigration policy for a moment. Think about why they’re crossing the Pacific. The Buddhist schism”—the m in her schism buzzed like a beehive in Victor’s ears—“grew after the assassination of the Empress Dowager. Then we had the Great Asian War and twenty years of shattered lives. The refugees carried those divisions with them when they came here. SeCa helped at first, but then the Asian Refugee Act passed, and then came the riots, and segregation, and the rural allotments.”
She talked on and on. Her dried-up hands flitted, waving at Victor like flags in a breeze. She ran through a litany of difficult-to-pronounce towns dotting Semiautonomous California’s Long Valley foothills: Jian’ou, Huizhou, Gaobeidian.
“The lucky ones avoided SeCa and went to the O.W.S. or the Democratic Republic of Mexico. Plenty of work there.” The Nation of the Organized Western States effectively controlled all land-based trade between SeCa and the rest of the A.U., and jobs building highways, bridges, tunnels, and railroads were plentiful in the O.W.S. no matter where workers immigrated from.
Victor interrupted by saying, “Please, can you help me get to sleep or not?”
“Do I bore you with my stories?”
“No.”
“Ha! You’re a bad liar. Bad liars get into trouble. But not as much as good ones.”
Victor bristled. “You’re different when you tell stories. The way you talk changes.”
She smiled, revealing two rows of teeth that looked so white and perfectly aligned that they had to be fake. “That’s my talent. Tell me, Victor Eastmore. What are you dreaming of?”
Victor’s throat felt dry, and he reached for a tincture in his pocket.
Pearl grabbed his hand. “Come, come,” she said. “I speak to many Broken Mirrors. They don’t appear as haunted as you do. I ask them about their dreams. They claim to sleep like babies. Not you, though. Tell me.”
“They’re horrible. I’m always being chased, or sometimes I die.”
“I thought as much,” she replied. “It’s not so strange. When I speak to people escaping from across the Pacific, I hear many similar things.”
“The dreams are strange in another way,” Victor said. He swallowed with great effort. “I think sometimes I dream about things before they happen.”
Pearl’s eyes lit up. “You poor Eastmores.”
Victor felt his stomach knot. “What do you mean by that?”
“Remind me to tell you the story about the Dowager Empress of China some day.” She smiled though her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I forget, you don’t like my stories. Your dreams come true, you say?”
Victor nodded. “When a refugee boat sank off the coast—it was two years ago—I’d already seen it happen. And the fires in the camps north of Oakland, I saw that too.”
“So much death,” Pearl said, looking down at her desk.
“What did you mean about the Eastmores?”
“When you look closely at the world, you see that everything is motion. When a boulder slips, the entire mountain is changed. That’s why I help people like you.”
She looked at him carefully. Then she said, “Did you know that refugees lived in Carmichael too?”
A wave of warmth rushed across Victor’s face. Whatever she might think, whatever prejudices she held, he reminded himself that he wasn’t like Samuel Miller and he certainly
wasn’t responsible for the man’s actions.
“More refugees died in Carmichael than any other group,” she said. “They had more children, you see.”
Victor turned away. He climbed a stepladder used to reach far-up supplies and counted the number of jars ensconced in cubbyholes in the wall. Pearl stood at the stepladder’s base. He wanted to escape her nattering, but there were no more steps for him to climb.
“Samuel Miller spent lots of time in temples before the attack. People assumed that he was preparing to destroy religious centers in the town, but I wonder why he was so fascinated by Buddhism. We know he questioned the reality of our world.”
Victor turned away. He didn’t want to hear any more about Samuel Miller. He picked up a glass jar, pulled the cork out, and inhaled the smell of dried leaves, spices, fungus, and dirt. He tried to stuff his mind full of the strange scents and leave no room for her. This place wasn’t really a store in any Western sense: no displays to peruse, no adverts to tempt him, nothing to whet his consumer appetite. This was the witch woman’s domain, full of supplies that were certainly not magical but were traded and sold to desperate people who couldn’t care less about the presentation of the wares. He felt a melancholy kinship with these other invisible customers—they all had to deal with her chatter to get what they needed.
Her voice changed to a slow, guttural creak. “Is that why you need herbs, to save us from another Carmichael? From you?”
Foreign thoughts invaded Victor’s mind. He imagined braining her with the glass jar. Blood and shattered glass. A store full of medicine, his to peruse. Such fantasies, however fleeting, were too dangerous to let simmer. He visualized sealing the violent urge inside the jar. He resealed it and replaced it in the proper cubbyhole.
Climbing down, he said, “I would never do . . . what Samuel did.”
“My sister’s family lived in Carmichael,” she said as she looked away, examining some far-off corner of the room. The skin of her face drooped toward the floor.
“We’re not all like that,” Victor responded. “We can lose control, but . . . that man was different. He planned it out. He put the firetraps and mines in place over—”
