With eyes half-closed and body half-present, K’é nodded *their head slowly and followed Asdzáá Hashké’s hand rising and falling. As her hands slowed down even more, she started asking *them questions:
“Where are we now?”
“Ah … sitting in a truck playing with some house keys … or …”
“Do you see me?”
“You’re … off to the left side of me …”
“What am I wearing?”
K’é let *their eyes close to concentrate more. “You have on grey pants … light brown or a cream-coloured shirt and a jacket …”
“What else do you see?”
“The inside of the truck, the keys in my hand, and we’re in front of a house … it’s blue and has white trim on the windows with flower boxes underneath the windows. I feel like I know the people in the house … wait, the image is dissolving away …”
“It’s okay, stay with me … I’ll see you inside.”
K’é’s eyes fluttered open and for a split second saw Asdzáá Hashké with her hand on the table and her eyes rapidly darting back and forth beneath her eyelids, as if in a trance.
Asdzáá Hashké called K’é back into the dream and K’é followed by closing *their eyes. “Where are we now?”
“There’s a sink to my left and your right. Why can’t I see your face?”
“Try not to focus on that too much. I can feel you in the space … focus on that sensing … relax yourself a little more.”
“Okay … am I dreaming?”
“You’re Travelling now. Keep going.”
“I know we were just outside and now I’m here with you standing in front of me … I still can’t see your face but you have on the same clothes and you have to head out somewhere. Oh, this is so strange to tell you that I just dreamt about you while we are Travelling. I mean, we’re Travelling together … I’m following you … uh …”
“They’re the same. The only difference is we know how to do this on purpose. I’m going to go now and you will wake up soon …”
The image dissolved slowly. K’é took one more look out the window to the field of blue-grey sagebrush, red dirt, and mesa dotted with pine trees. The feathered clouds fell from the sky and K’é opened *their eyes to see Asdzáá Hashké looking at *them from across the table. She put her hand over *theirs and smiled wearily. “You did well, shiyáázh. Not bad for your first time following me in.”
K’é returned the smile and noticed *their shirt was damp from sweat and *their hands were clammy. Asdzáá Hashké squeezed *their hand and then K’é pulled *their hands down to their pants to wipe *their palms.
“Wow, I’m tired,” K’é said.
“Let’s take a few minutes to recover before we go in again, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.” K’é sighed and got up to get a glass of water for both of them.
“That’s the trade-off. You get used to it. I learned to not do anything too demanding after Travelling. You’re young yet, so it won’t be too tiring when you’re starting out.”
“It reminds me of those dreams I have where I fly around. I wake up feeling like I ran a marathon.”
Asdzáá Hashké smiled. “It’s one thing to figure that out on your own. It’s another to bring someone in with you and lead them through.”
“Will I learn how to do that too? To lead someone through?”
“Yes, but for the next while we will just have you follow me in.”
“Where do we go when we go in? I know we call it dreams, but where are dreams?”
“We don’t go anywhere; we’re already there. We are using our mind and body to shorten the space between the worlds so we can enter—it’s a shared space. Does that make sense?”
“Not really … but I trust you.”
“In our next jaunt in, stay close by. I need your energy to get a message across to a relative. Will you do that for me?” she asked behind tired eyes.
“Of course, anything you need.”
“You see … I’m too old now to do this on my own. I’m going to need your help. And you kind of owe me one,” Asdzáá Hashké said jokingly.
“What do you mean?”
“You remember how I told you that people returned to the reservation because they were all being guided by dreams? And remember how we all hid in our canyons and bunkers and how it saved us from destruction? Well guess which old woman Travelled to your mother’s dreams to make her return home?”
“Mine?”
“Yes. And guess who she was pregnant with when she finally arrived?”
“Me?”
“Exactly. Now it’s your turn to Travel and dream our ancestors back to their rightful home.”
“Whoa.” K’é considered the enormity of this knowledge, like considering the enormity of the universe, all trapped in the body of this supposedly frail elder.
“I know. It’s big. It’s confusing,” Asdzáá Hashké said with a chuckle.
K’é sat down in front of Asdzáá Hashké. Again, just like last time, she raised her hand and started the slow breathing. K’é closed *their eyes and slipped into the dream.
*They are on a couch. Asdzáá Hashké sits on the chair at the kitchen table nearby.
“Good, you made it through. I don’t think our relative is here yet. Let’s look around the house,” she says as she stands up and walks into the kitchen. K’é looks around and notices how messy the room is. Cheese Balls littered across the coffee table. A bottle of Pedialyte, half empty, sits on the counter. A bright overhead light is littered with dead bugs. The sound of keys turning the lock. The front door opens. *They look up and notice a woman standing in the doorway. She looks back at K’é and Asdzáá Hashké in confusion.
“Oh god. Am I dreaming again? Wha …? I think I fell asleep in front of the TV again. Where am I?” The woman motions to leave, panicked.
“No, stop! Don’t go! I mean …” The woman recognizes K’é’s voice. She looks back and forth between K’é and Asdzáá Hashké in confusion and fear. K’é looks toward the kitchen at Asdzáá Hashké wondering what to do next.
“Hello, Jennifer,” Asdzáá Hashké says calmly.
“How do you know my name?!”
“We were waiting for you. I’m just making my rounds visiting family.”
“I don’t understand. You’re family?”
“Aoo’, shiyáázh. Listen, K’é and I don’t have much time. We have to go soon. So I need you to listen to me. You need to come home.”
“You need me to what?!” Jennifer says incredulously.
“Come home. There’s no more time for being lost. It’s time to be found.”
Jennifer watches the two visions disappear into the ether before hearing Asdzáá Hashké say one last time, “We have to go now. Come home, Jennifer.”
ELOISE
DAVID A. ROBERTSON
CASSIE’S EYES FLUTTER OPEN and she can see a beam of sunlight crossing her room at a forty-five-degree angle from a rogue crack in her blackout blinds all the way to the pine baseboard that her bedroom carpet is tucked under. She stares at the beam and watches dust particles dance within it like embers around a campfire, like they hear music that nobody else can hear, like they know something beautiful that she does not.
She used to know, in a dream, but it’s slipping away with each passing moment. She slides her hand out from underneath the sheets, places it against her cheek, and runs her fingertips across her skin like it might tell her what she knew once, what she knew seconds ago, like every translucent follicle of hair is a letter in braille. Then, she holds her hand out, washes it in the beam of light, and moves her fingers as though she’s never seen them before, as though they’re dancing with the particles of dust, like she can hear the music, like she can remember something beautiful.
Her skin is milky smooth and unblemished; it wasn’t always this way. In the dream, sitting on the bed, smelling sterility and death, her skin was loose as though melting away, her veins thick with the brevi
ty of life, and the lines, all those lines burrowed deep within her flesh. There was another hand: its fingers cross-hatched with hers, a shade of olive contrasted against her own pinkish white. It was a lovely pattern, Cassie’s fingers locked within hers. Emma’s.
“You silly girl,” Cassie says, repeating words, the only three words she can remember from the dream, like lyrics to the song the particles were dancing to, the song that nobody else can hear.
Silly of me, Cassie thinks, to keep dreaming of Emma, so many months after they’d met, so many months of waiting for Emma to call her, so many months of disappointment.
The dream is always the same, and this is the only reason why Cassie is able to remember anything about it. She has taken images from one night, others from a different night, and so on, and pieced them together like a jigsaw puzzle to form something of a memory, and then has, in turn, dissected the meaning of it.
“Why do I keep dreaming about her?” Cassie had asked her mother one morning, when the dream had become part of her routine. Like showering. Brushing her teeth. Dressing. Breathing.
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
“If she didn’t call you, Cass, do you think she wants you to call her?”
“I was talking about the dream, Mom.”
“Do you think she dreams about you?”
Cassie held the phone away from her ear for a moment and fought the urge to throw it against the wall. “We’re always old. She’s dying and I’m old and as soon as she dies, I wake up.”
“What do you think that means?”
Cassie sighed. She had held her breath in until sighing, and now expelled all of it in one fell swoop. “That we’re dead, and I should shut up.”
“Maybe you were never anything.”
Cassie hung up the phone, thinking that her meeting with Emma, though fleeting, had meant everything.
But now the moment is gone, and the echoes of it is haunting her while she sleeps. Echoes of a life that never happened, from a moment that did.
Why.
The radio turns on at precisely at eight a.m., Cassie’s alarm clock. She is always awake before her alarm clock. Her dreams are her alarm clock. Her dreams are not timed well. Her dreams are entirely inconvenient. Cassie pushes herself up and sits at the side of her bed, her naked feet dangling close to the carpet, her toes brushing against the fabric. She reaches out with both hands, stops when her hands are awash in the shaft of light, cups them, then pulls them toward her body like she can bring the light with her, like she can wash her body in it: her eyes, her mouth, her hair, her heart. Like the sunbeam is smoke billowing from a smudge bowl.
She stops.
“Why did I do that?”
There is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle she created, that she continues to create, that looks like this. Pulling smoke toward her body, feathering smoke toward Emma.
The radio is on. There had been a song playing, but now it has ended, and commercials blare out of the speakers. These are the worst, a pet peeve on the level of missing socks. Radio commercials. A jingle about getting a vasectomy. Whatever song the dust particles are dancing to, this is not it. Cassie begins to thrust her fist downward, aiming squarely at the snooze button, but stops mid-air.
“Need an escape?” a man asks through the speakers of Cassie’s alarm clock.
Her fist hovers in the air.
“Need more time?”
Cassie doesn’t know what she needs. The radio cannot give her what she needs. The radio can’t even wake her up in the morning.
“Do you have a problem child who needs some behaviour modification, but you just can’t stand to send them away?”
“God no,” Cassie says, then lowers her fist, hits the snooze button, and the radio stops asking what she needs.
In nine minutes, the radio will turn back on.
Cassie whips the blinds open as though tearing off a Band-Aid, light chases away the darkness, the sunbeam disappears in the crowd, and there is no more dancing, no more music.
There are eight minutes left.
She has a shower and just stands there, her head pelted by water from the massage setting of the shower head, her hands pressed against the fibreglass shower covering, her feet in a fighting stance, like she’s trying to push the wall down. The heat is on high, and as water runs down her body, steam envelops her like smoke. Trying not to think about the dream makes her think about the dream. She straightens. Moves her hands to bring the steam toward her body, but snaps out of it and cleans herself in another way: brushes her teeth while in the shower. Shampoos and conditions her hair. Lathers and rinses her skin.
There are three minutes left.
She steps out of the shower and leaves wet footprints that lead from the shower to the mirror above the sink. She wipes steam from the mirror and stares at herself until she is only a blurred impression, steam stubbornly covering the mirror again. She wipes it away, it gathers again, she wipes it away, she sees herself old, sees herself young, over and over again. Thinks of Emma. Lying in bed, eyes closed, face turned toward the window, toward the sun. Cassie turned her head that way. They are old like that, like the reflection Cassie sees in the mirror. The steam is allowed to gather, until Cassie looks old again.
There is one minute left.
Cassie reaches forward, places her index finger against the silver glass, and runs her fingertip across the surface in perfect cursive, revealing only pieces of herself in delicate lines. An incomplete puzzle. When she is done, she takes a step back and reads her writing. Silly girl.
Nine minutes have passed.
The radio turns on, as though it was never off, announcing its presence in mid-sentence.
“—you disabled, and want to live with all your faculties for a lifetime? Jump out of that wheelchair and run a marathon? Ten marathons? Run across the world? Do you want to learn how to accept your disability?”
Cassie hears the radio and rolls her eyes. The commercial plays incessantly, like a Beyoncé or Taylor Swift or Drake song. “Then you’ve gotta try The Gate,” she says with a large measure of sarcasm, “and never leave your home again.” She looks away from the words on the mirror, even as they are devoured by the steam, opens the door, enters her bedroom, and walks purposefully toward the radio.
“Have a lost love that you just want a second chance with? Don’t take it from me, listen to the words from Subject Zero, the original Gate participant.”
Cassie stands in the middle of the room. Stares at the radio. She hasn’t heard this part before. This part is not like a pop song.
“Hi,” a girl’s voice says, and Cassie flinches in disbelief, “I met someone and let them go—”
Cassie rushes to the radio and picks it up. Cradles it in her palms with such care, like it might crumble into dust just by breathing on it. She is breathless.
“—but with help from The Gate, I was able to spend my last moments with them, and I’ll never forget it.”
“And then,” the man cuts back in, his baritone drawl replacing the girl’s shy, sweet delivery, “Subject Zero woke up, still a girl, still a lifetime to live.”
“Emma! You didn’t let me go! You just didn’t call!” Cassie shouts into the radio, forgetting its fragility. “Emma! I’m here!”
A radio jingle chimes in, not unlike the vasectomy promo spot only with more production value.
“The Gate is changing the world and how we live in it,” the man carries on.
“Please!” Cassie cries into the alarm clock, as though the speakers are receivers, as though Emma is on the other end, listening. She knows it’s her. She knows she, Cassie, is the one who was let go.
“Book your appointment today. Just call—”
Cassie throws the alarm clock onto the ground and it shatters into particles of plastic and wires and silence.
CASSIE ORDERS A PEPPERMINT TEA and sits down at a table by the window at the back of the coffee shop. Their table. Hers and Emma’s. The barista
knew her order; Cassie comes here too much. She comes here too much like the others that come here, and will stay here like the others that stay here, ordering a hot drink out of necessity, occupying a table for hours; tables here are garnished with MacBooks and coffee rings and empty ceramic cups with lipstick stains. Tables here are garnished with something she hasn’t noticed before.
More than half the people in the coffee shop have their eyes closed with four white circular stickers affixed to their skin; one on each temple, and one on either side of their forehead. These stickers are connected to thin white wires, like EKG leads, that connect to phones or laptops. There is a person beside Cassie, one table over, that is in the same trance as the others. She leans over until she can see the person’s cellphone screen. There is an application open that reads:
THE GATE
PROGRAM: VIATOR
ELAPSED TIME: 0:02:53.21
VIRTUAL TIME: 29 YRS, 9 MTHS, 13 DAYS
Below this, to the bottom right of the screen, is an advertisement for a funeral home, a tiny box that you can click with the touch of a finger.
Cassie looks away from the phone and studies the man. He’s wearing a pair of blue jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt that looks two sizes too big, and a black toque struggling to hide his hair loss. Cheekbones protrude through his skin like knives. He is a skeleton dressed in skin dressed in clothes, layered like a matryoshka doll, and it is clear to Cassie that at the middle of it all, once all the shells have been removed, there is a football-sized tumour somewhere inside his body. He is soggy from chemo. He is inches from death. He is living three decades longer than he has any business to live, right here in the coffee shop, a half-full coffee in front of him still hot, still steam rising from it, steam billowing into the air, dancing to music that nobody else can hear. Five seconds later he gasps, opens his eyes, looks around like he doesn’t know where he is, or when, or who.
Love after the End Page 14
