Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  Marlin took a quick, shallow breath. The polished mask she usually only used with clients slid into place. “Two weeks,” she said firmly and strode off down the hall.

  Behind me, Dad was mumbling. The tempo of the stumbling words increased until they streamed from his mouth in his incomprehensible, gravelly, Aomori village dialect. Just as I turned around, he stopped.

  Eyes wide, face pale with tension, Dad spoke in clear, accentless, English. “You’ve got to get away, Koi. Before it’s too late. Run away!”

  Chapter Three

  Ken sat next to Dad on the couch. Dad had his arms wrapped around bent knees, rocking back and forth, mumbling gibberish in Herai dialect again.

  My cheeks flushed hot. We were a family of lunatics.

  “Can you get a glass of water, please?” I asked Ken.

  There had to be tranquilizers left in my bathroom cabinet from my last stint as caregiver. Marlin had reminded me to update the prescription but I…yes, here they were. I grabbed the plastic bottle and raced back to the living room.

  Ken stood in the kitchen with an unreadable expression, water glass in hand. I grabbed the glass and headed back to the couch.

  “Dad?”

  More mumbling. All in that Aomori prefecture Herai dialect. Whatever burst of energy had prompted that crazy warning in English, it was gone now.

  I pulled him onto the floor next to me and gathered him close, pinning his elbows to his sides with one arm, while with the other I pushed a small, pink pill into his mouth. So thin. Like his bones might poke through the frail parchment of his skin.

  Dad fought me, spitting the pill back out.

  “Let me,” said Ken, coming round the couch.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, tone biting. “Just leave us alone for a minute.”

  Ken backed away, heading to the bathroom.

  Without the audience, the panic inside me eased.

  “Dad, you have to take this pill, okay? Please just take it.” I repeated both in English and Herai dialect. On the third repetition, Dad let the pill in through the barrier of his lips.

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple convulsing, but when I tried to get him to sip water, he dribbled it all down the front of his shirt.

  I let go, keeping the burning behind my eyes from spilling out in tears by biting my bottom lip.

  Dad could sleep in my room tonight. But I had to unfold the couch for Ken.

  A flush sounded in the bathroom.

  The faster, the better.

  In record time, I had the couch unfolded, threw blankets and a pillow on top, and pulled Dad into my room.

  “Make yourself at home,” I called to Ken as I shut the door.

  For a moment, I just sat on the edge of my bed next to Dad, breathing in and out, feeling like my tiny room was the safest place in the universe.

  Safer than out there, where I would have to find something to say to Ken and his carefully neutral expression.

  Dad yawned, his eyelids heavy with tranquilizer-doziness. I helped him lay out on my bed, tugging off his flip flops. Crap. The Japanese style futon was folded up in the closet out there. No way was I going back out there. I grumbled like an old lady while I made a nest of blankets on the floor to sleep in, but the tranquilizer must have worked on Dad. He made only the hitching rhythm of sleep-breathing, and there was no sound from the living room at all.

  Despite the leftover adrenaline in my system, I only had a few moments to wonder about what Ken wore as he lay on my couch bed outside the bedroom door, before I, too, fell asleep.

  And dreamed.

  A flash of the dead movie star’s face in his movie-villain’s makeup, streaked with inky tears. I ran from some nameless, shadowy terror, before a part of me recognized this wasn’t my dream, but the Rite-Aid clerk’s fragment.

  The dream blurred, coalescing into a dark forest.

  Yellow eyes peeked from behind a canopy of dark branches. Overwhelmingly heady scents of musk and bitter green, the old dry must of moss leaving a patina on my tongue.

  Urgency filled me. I crouched low against the pine-carpet, my arms and legs awkwardly angled, but strong, shaking with the need to run…and then I did. A blur of motion, breath burning through my lungs, and a speed like falling through misted air.

  There was another, terrible dream after that. Then I awoke, sweating and gasping for air, feeling bloated and swollen like I’d just had a Thanksgiving feast.

  None of the bad dreams from last night were gone this morning. They crowded together at the corner of my eyes, pressed on the inside of my skull, spreading creaky dark-wings over me. Daylight shifted in through the shuttered window. From my sprawl on the floor, I craned my neck to see the lump of Dad’s shape buried in the blankets under the brush-and-ink Baku drawing, the only decoration in my sparse bedroom.

  I gave a ragged laugh. This was the first night in ten years I hadn’t slept under the Baku drawing.

  As a young girl, Dad used to put me to bed with tales from Herai village’s version of evil dream-images. Two snakes twined together, a fox with the voice of a man, blood-stained garments, a talking rice-pot; just your common, Hicksville Japan, every day version of terror. Those images didn’t frighten me, and I never had nightmares when Dad tucked me in.

  But on the nights he had the evening shift at Marinopolis, I had terrible, awful nightmares; not the full-on tangled and sweaty fragments I had after puberty, but dreams where nameless things chased me through dark places.

  When, at eight years old, even the sight of Mom in my doorway at night made me burst into tears, Dad took out his calligraphy brush in the middle of the night. In seiza posture on my shag rug he ground ink on a stone and with careful, powerful strokes, brushed an ink outline of Baku, the Eater of Evil Dreams from Japanese folklore, onto thick rice paper bought at Kinokuniya. Baku looked like an elephant crossed with a tiger. Awkward, ungainly, and vaguely menacing, but if you said “Baku, come eat my dream” three times in Japanese upon awaking they were supposed to protect against the ill effects of bad dreams.

  Dad hung that picture over my bed and the nightmares receded. They never went completely away, but they didn’t cause me to startle awake in my bed in the morning, sweating and gasping for air.

  At the beginning of 6th grade I got my first period, and other people’s dream fragments started invading my night times. The mornings I woke with fear like a sour miasma surrounding my head and a bevy of electric eels swimming in my stomach, I opened my eyes and looked first at my Dad’s ink drawing of the Baku.

  It was oddly soothing to see the squashed-together, uncomfortable looking parts of its body echoing the disjointed feeling in my own limbs. Stark, black ink on creamy white a crisp contrast, helping me tease out other people’s fragments from my own reality.

  Sadly the sight of the Baku was doing nothing for me this morning.

  I took a deep breath, feeling it catch in my lungs on pockets of phlegm like cotton ball stuffing. Sticky trails of dried tears streaked my face. Just turning my head to check Dad had made my shoulder muscles scream like I’d paddled the entire distance of the Willamette.

  That forest dream, as incomprehensible as it was in the bright morning light of day, was not the cause of my nausea and unease.

  The last dreams I’d experienced, in the early morning hours before I’d clawed my way through clinging dream cobwebs to consciousness had been Hayk’s fragment.

  No longer just the dead girl in the hall.

  A young boy, too. My perspective had been from above. I’d seen him lying far below me down some kind of well or mud hole. Thick, black hair turning to shiny curls against his head where viscous blood welled.

  The boy was dead. And all I felt was a satisfied glee, a sick triumph.

  Remembering it now made my stomach clench.

  Hayk is a bad, bad man.

  Hayk dreamed of death, dreamed of killing people and was pleased by it. These were not nightmares, they were too…excited. Strong emotions cha
racterized fragments that weren’t purely fantasy, but echoes of reality. Memory-dreams. Wicked memories. That wickedness sat heavily, making my stomach roil.

  I was not over-reacting about this project. It seemed so innocuous, just translating some words, but I didn’t want to help Hayk. I didn’t want to get anywhere near him again.

  Swallowing nausea, I managed to sit up without the room spinning more than two or three times. I pressed thumbs into the inner eyebrow ridge near my nose, trying to keep my head from splitting apart by sheer force. It helped a little.

  My need for the bathroom outweighed any embarrassment over risking Ken seeing my morning bed-head. I staggered to the bathroom and dry-swallowed three ibuprofen. The detangler Marlin had forced me to try felt cool in my palm, but it didn’t seem to do much for the rat’s nest of my hair. At least it smelled nicer than sleep-musk.

  After a few minutes of pulling a wet brush through the worst snarls, I pulled everything back in a neat ponytail.

  I had to get Dad to the bathroom, too. He sometimes wet the bed if I let him sleep too long in the morning.

  When my head settled into a dull, throbbing ache, I risked moving over to kneel by the futon.

  “Dad,” I said. There was no movement. I poked at him through the covers, but the form under the blankets was strangely mushy. I ripped the top cover off completely. Underneath was a rolled up set of sweatpants and a pillow.

  Oh god.

  I rushed out the bedroom door and ran smack dab into a very familiar gray OHSU sweatshirt covering a hard and warm stomach.

  “Oof,” said Ken, his arms coming up to rest on my shoulders, “ever try actually looking where you’re going?”

  “Dad!” I said to him, my heart pounding. His morning scent was faintly bitter, and I couldn’t stop myself from breathing it in deeply, savoring that bitterness.

  “He left about ten minutes ago.” Ken’s eyes darkened, holding mine, the line between pupil and iris bleeding together, becoming obscured. Black eyes, like an animal’s. I had a flash of pine needles on a forest floor, a gathered sense of power in my legs. Moss tasting like stale matcha and dirt on my tongue.

  “He was very lucid. He knew his own name, the date, and that this was your apartment. He told me not to wake you and was out the door. I didn’t see how I could protest.”

  “His nervous breakdown the night before wasn’t a reason?” My hands curled into fists. I took another deep breath and closed my eyes. Punching Ken wouldn’t get Dad back. “I have to find him. His lucid periods don’t last long.”

  I made a move to go around Ken, only to be held in place with his hands heavy on my shoulders. I looked up and saw him sniff the air, then he looked down at me with a penetrating, direct gaze that made me squirm.

  “Not like that,” he said, his voice husky.

  Oops. That’s right. Underwear and a t-shirt were all that I had slept in last night. I hoped to god that the t-shirt at least covered me past my panty-line, but I couldn’t pull my gaze away from Ken’s to check. A furious flush crept down my neck on its way to my toes.

  Ken laughed, low in his throat. A warm awareness washed over me, my flesh goose pimpling all over in places I knew were exposed. Those thick lashes lowered, narrowing his eyes into dark crescents that just barely betrayed movement as his gaze flickered over me from head to toe.

  The hands on my shoulders slowly twisted me around and pushed me back through my open bedroom door. He shut the door between us silently. Controlled.

  Dad could be lying in a ditch somewhere. Or singing Enka half-naked in the fountain at Pioneer Square. This was not the time for an awkward awareness dance with Ken.

  I tore through my pile of semi-clean clothes on the floor in front of my dresser. I pulled on the first things that came to hand; a pair of jeans and short-sleeved, black hoodie with stylized wrasse swimming across the back. Another gift from Mom.

  I was out the door again and down the steps of my apartment building before I realized Ken was close on my heels. He’d taken the time to mousse his hair up into spikes at the top and put on a pair of black jeans, though where he’d stashed them I had no idea since he’d shown up without any bags.

  “You don’t need to come,” I said.

  “Two people can cover more ground.” Apparently he was taking his role as caretaker seriously.

  “I can find him, wait there,” I threw back over my shoulder. But Ken wasn’t behind me anymore.

  He was bent almost double near the mailbox at the end of the sidewalk. He was sniffing again. I halted my headlong rush. He pivoted, testing the air all around him. It should have looked ridiculous, but there was a sense of energy coiled in every muscle, as if he was holding back. Storm clouds pulsing just before they broke.

  How had I not noticed before that his hair was long enough to curl at his neck? Or his shoulders so angular at the joints?

  “He’s gone down the street this way,” Ken said. I shook my head. For real? What, he could sniff Dad out?

  I pointed the opposite direction. “He almost always tries to get back to our old house in Tigard. He’d have gone south to Scholls Ferry.”

  Ken took a step toward me, his features sharp with that coiled intensity. “Are you some kind of test? Did the Council set this up? What do I have to do to prove—”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I snapped. I took a step onto the sidewalk and somehow Ken was again in front of me. I blinked up at him.

  “I didn’t come here to stir up trouble. I am showing my willingness to cooperate,” he said in a low growl.

  “You are seriously freaking me out. I need to find my Dad. Let me past.”

  Ken’s face relaxed into a careful blank, his eyes widening from those dark crescent moons of anger. Still disturbingly black, no white at all showing.

  “I know your father, Koi. I’m not sure about you, but he is unmistakable. Even if you are as ignorant as you pretend, you must know that I am not exactly what I appear to be. I can smell him.”

  Ken twisted me around the opposite direction. What was with him and the man-handling? I pulled out of his grasp. Fine. I didn’t know for sure which way Dad had gone. I just had to get moving before I burst.

  Ken had that same air of capability as Marlin, as if he knew exactly what to do at all times. I was the queen of denial, but there was no denying something wasn’t quite normal about him. Something not normal in the same way it wasn’t normal to dream other people’s dreams and to know you were doing it. To know that some dreams were just bad nightmares, and some truly memories of evil deeds.

  I stalked down the sidewalk deeper into the residential neighborhood, past the middle school grounds. Freshly mowed, I could see no trace of my father’s purple jinbei pajamas in the open expanse. And he’d never hide in the thorny border of riotous blackberry vines around the fence. Still I kept walking in the direction Ken indicated with a jerk of his chin.

  Ken was impossible to ignore and write off as totally bonkers. And not just because something about his eyes made me shiver. So he wasn’t normal. He could join my club. Hell, I’d elect him president if his sniffing actually found Dad.

  Past the school we entered the small shopping district. No sign of him here. I stopped abruptly, but that dancer’s grace served Ken well; he halted without missing a beat. He wasn’t even breathing hard from our fast-paced walk.

  “Now where?” I said, indicating the major crossroads past the row of shops.

  Ken bent his head close to my ear and breathed in deeply. I arched away from him.

  “What the hell?”

  “Your scent is very strong, mixed in with your father’s. I was just trying to distinguish the two.” He arched an eyebrow at me.

  “And?” I tapped my foot.

  “This way,” he said, pointing across Scholls Ferry to the shuttle bus stop for PCC.

  Please, no. Please don’t let Dad have gotten on a bus.

  Touching Dad ne
ver gave me his fragments, but he sometimes dreamed mine.

  One Friday evening in my teens, after I’d started dreaming fragments, I’d been at his house for the weekend and fell down his steep basement stairs with a six pack of coke bottles. Picking out the glass bits and cleaning up my knee had required him, reserved as a monk, to touch my bare skin.

  And that night when I’d dreamed the inevitable fragments picked up from classmates at school, there had been a dark dream, a nightmare.

  I had woken up exhausted. At breakfast, Dad casually asked me who I’d eaten lunch with the prior day. I knew something was up—Dad never asked about friends or school work or activities, that was Mom’s territory. I blathered some answer about my current best, actually only, friend Lisa.

  The next Monday at school, Lisa didn’t sit next to me in English. In P.E. she avoided my eyes.

  She wasn’t at school the next day.

  Whispers finally reached me a week later. Lisa’s family had moved away suddenly. An anonymous caller had left messages at the school, and welfare services charged Lisa’s father with sexual abuse.

  I wasn’t surprised about Lisa’s Dad. It wasn’t until after high school that I learned to separate truth memory-dreams from fantasy, but Lisa’s nightmares had never been usual. Her dreams had been a shifting fog of pale, slender limbs posed naked against flannel sheets, and looming, cruelly twisted faces leering with stagnant eyes the same exact shade of green as Lisa’s.

  My surprise came from realizing Dad had dreamed Lisa’s fragments—just from touching my wounded knee. Then he’d gone out and acted on the fragment; this man who’d never even showed up for a Parent’s Night or Teacher conference once in my whole life.

  If Dad had picked up the fragments I’d gotten from Hayk, there was only one place requiring a bus ride he’d be headed now.

  Hayk’s office.

  I hoped to god he was lucid. “He’s on his way to PCC,” I blurted.

  Ken gave me that searching look, like he was trying to see past my skin, directly into my brain. To keep from squirming, I bit my lip, curling my fingernails into my palms.