by Aimee Bender
He began to seek out some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—“a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arms…” said the website of the town “named for Dr. E. D. Atwater, of the land department of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad”—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found hundreds of people, streets and companies named Atwater, but nothing that resonated… until he found a listing in a San Diego phone book, and did a search on the computer.
Atwater Transpersonal Institute. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn’t read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.
At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building honeycombed with courtyards huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think I know a woman who is being treated here. I’d like to see her, please.”
The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.
Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.
Howell wanted out, needed in. She’s here, somewhere, it’s all here, it wasn’t in your mind, oh God, it was all real—
“I’ll just get Dr. Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a puppeteer being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.
“Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It’s not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier.”
“What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor’s feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man’s reaction.
“I—my God, what’re you doing out here?” asked Dr. Atwater.
“You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?”
“That’s correct. Maybe you—”
“I have been having bad dreams for a long time, Doctor. About this place.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe if I could show you…” Dr. Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here, liquid chimes that made him feel sleepy.
“Binaural tones guide the treatment,” Atwater said. “Shamanic cultures use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It’s subtler than medication, and it doesn’t blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets lucid dreams become the patient’s reality.”
“For how long?”
“In my papers, I recommended regimens of three-day sessions over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this.”
Howell stopped avoiding the Doctor’s eyes. Against the tanning bed bronze skin, they were cold, faded gray. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?”
Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the tiny cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze. It wasn’t her.
The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.
“One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy, he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He’s been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he’s getting better.”
Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient’s face, Howell muttered, “No, he’s not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?”
Atwater’s eyes flatly regarded him, but he saw the lambent red glow kindling in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a mask of flames. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are you looking for?”
“You know, don’t you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor’s arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!”
Atwater’s eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group… Well, that’s a mystery solved, at any rate.”
As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him into the wall. “Where is she?”
Atwater sighed. “Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They’re very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown autistic.”
“Your dream therapy wrecked her brain.”
“No, my friend, you did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with dripping IV solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.
Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Semi-vegetative autistic from birth, ward of the state. We secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph.”
Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.
“At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated… until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that’s what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn’t I?”
Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped.
“At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms. Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms. Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But you found her.”
Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he’d ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn’t notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.
; “His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler.”
Atwater’s shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.
“For so long, I’ve thought of you, Mr. Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured.”
Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.
THE DARKNESS
AMELIA GRAY
“I think I’d call us strange bedfellows,” the armadillo said.
The penguin barely heard her. He was, at that moment, attempting to hold a straw between his flippers.
The armadillo centered her shell on the barstool. She was drinking a Miller High Life.
“Strange bedfellows indeed,” she said.
The penguin gave up on holding the straw and stood on his stool to reach the lip of the glass. He could barely wet his tongue with a little gin. “What’s that?” he asked.
“You are a penguin, and I am an armadillo,” the armadillo said. “My name is Betsy.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” murmured the penguin, who was more interested in the condensation on his glass. “I fought the darkness.”
“You did not.”
The penguin swiveled his head to look at Betsy. He had very beady eyes.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Ray,” said the penguin.
“That’s a nice name.”
“I fought the fucking darkness.”
“Neat,” Betsy said. She let her long tongue dip into the bottle, lapping the surface of her beer. “What was that like?”
“Well Betsy,” Ray said, “it was evil incarnate.”
“Oh.”
“Imagine the worst evil ever done to you in your life.”
Betsy thought of the time she was locked in a shed.
“Got it,” she said.
Ray pecked at his highball glass in anger. “Well,” he said, “imagine that, except fifteen times worse. That’s what the darkness was like.”
“That sounds terrible,” Betsy said. She was trying to be noncommittal about the whole darkness thing in the hopes that Ray would drop it. Before coming to the bar, she had used vegetable oil to shine her shell to a high sheen. In her peripheral vision, she could see the lights above the bar playing off her shoulders.
“What do you think of my shell?” she asked.
Ray leaned back a little to appraise the situation. “It’s nice,” he said.
“I like your coat.”
“This old thing,” Ray said, patting his feathers. “It’ll smell like the bar for weeks. You can’t get this smell out.”
“That’s the good thing about a shell,” Betsy said.
They sat in silence. Betsy wondered if she had perhaps said too much about her shell. Ray wondered where the bartender got off serving a penguin a drink in a highball glass. He would have rather taken his gin out of an ashtray.
Betsy tapped her claw against the beer bottle. “Have you ever protected an egg?” she asked.
Ray realized that he was at the state of intoxication where anything Betsy could possibly say was going to piss him off. Keep your cool, buddy, he said to himself. She’s just trying to make conversation.
“Usually that’s a job for the lady penguins,” Ray said. “I am a male penguin and therefore, no, I have never protected an egg.”
“Right,” Betsy said. “Well, I saw a documentary once, and a male penguin was protecting an egg. I figured maybe you’d have some experience.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any experience. I guess that makes me less of a penguin.”
“I wasn’t saying that.”
“I suppose you think I’m some kind of lesser penguin, just because I fought the fucking darkness and tasted my own blood, because I haven’t protected a stupid fucking egg.”
Betsy felt tears welling up. Don’t cry, she said to herself. It would be really stupid to cry at this moment.
“I honor your fight,” she said. “I did not mean to disrespect you.”
Ray sank back. “It’s no disrespect,” he said. “I’m just a penguin in a bar, drinking my gin out of a fucking highball glass for some reason.”
“I was wondering why they did that,” the armadillo said.
“Doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” said the penguin.
LI’L MISS ULTRASOUND
ROBERT DEVEREAUX
June 30, 2004
Mummy dearest,
It’s great to hear from you, though I’m magnitudinously distraught that you can’t be here for the contest. Still, I’m not complaining. It’s extremely better that you show up for the birth—three weeks after my little munchkin’s copped her crown!—and help out afterwards. The contest is a hoot and I want to do you proud, I will do you proud, but that can be done from a distance too, don’t you think? What with the national coverage and the mega-sponsorship, you’ll get to VCR me and the kid many times over. And of course I’ll save all the local clippings for you like you asked.
It made my throat hurt, the baby even kicked, when you mentioned Willie in your last letter. It’s tough to lose such a wonderful man. Still, he died calmly. I read that gruesome thing a few years ago, that How We Die book? It gave me the chills, Mom, how some people thrash and moan, how they don’t make a pretty picture at all, many of them. Willie was one of the quiet ones though, thank the Lord. Nary a bark nor whimper out of him, he just drifted off like a thief in the night. Which was funny, because he was so, I don’t know, noisy isn’t the right word, I guess expressive maybe, his entire life.
Oh, before I close, I gotta tell you about Kip. Kip’s my ultrasound man. I’m in love, I think. Kind face on him. Nice compact little bod. Cute butt too, the kind of buns you can wrap your hands halfway around, no flabby sags to spoil your view or the feel of the thing. Anyway, Kip’s been on the periphery of the contest for a few years and likes tinkering with the machinery. He’s confided in me. Says he can—and will!—go beyond the superimposition of costumes that’s been all the rage in recent years to some other stuff I haven’t seen yet and he won’t spell out. He worked some for those Light and Magic folks in California, and he claims he’s somehow brought all that stuff into the ultrasound arena. Kip’s sworn me to secrecy. He tells me we’ll win easy. But I’m my momma’s daughter. I don’t put any stock in eggs that haven’t been hatched, and Kip isn’t fanatical about it, so it’s okay. Also, Mother, he kissed me. Yep! As sweet and tasty as all get-out. I’ll reveal more, next missive. Meantime, you can just keep guessing about what we’re up to, since you refuse to grace us with your presence at the contest.
Just teasing, Mummy dear. Me and my fetal muffin will make you so proud, your chest will puff out like a Looney Tunes hen! Your staying put—for legit reasons, like you said—is a-okay with me, though I do wish you were here to hug, and chat up, and share the joy.
Love, love, love, mumsy mine,
Wendy
Kip brightened when Wendy came in from the waiting room, radiant with smiles.
Today was the magic day. The next few sessions would acquaint Wendy with his enhancements to the ultrasound process. He wanted her confident, composed, and fully informed onstage.
“Wendy, hello. Come in.” They traded hugs and he hung her jacket on a clothes rack.
“You can kiss me, you know,” she teased.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t feel right in the office. Well, okay, a little one. Mmmm. Wendy, hon, you’re a keeper! Now hoist yourself up and let’s put these pillows behind your back. That’s the way. Comfy? Can you see the monitor?”
“Yes.” Eagerly, she bunched her maternity dress up over her belly. Beautiful blue and red streaks, blood lightning, englobed it. A perfect seven-months’ pooch. Her flowered briefs were as strained and displaced as a fat man’s
belt.
“Okay, now,” said Kip. “Get ready for a surprise. This’ll be cold.” He smeared thick gel on her belly and moved the hand-held transducer to bring up baby’s image. “There’s our little darling.”
“Mmmmm, I like that our!”
“She’s a beauty without any enhancement, isn’t she? Now we add the dress.” Reaching over, he flipped a switch on his enhancer. Costumes had come in three years before, thanks to the doctor Kip had studied under. They were now expected fare. “Here’s the one I showed you last time,” he said, pink taffeta with hints of chiffon at the bodice. There slept baby in her party dress, her tiny fists up to her chest.
“It’s beautiful,” enthused Wendy. “You can almost hear it rustle.” What a joy Wendy was, thought Kip. A compact little woman who no doubt would slim down quickly after giving birth.
“Okay. Here goes. Get a load of this.” He toggled the first switch. Overlaying the soft fabric, there now sparkled sequins, sharp gleams of red, silver, gold. They winked at random, cutting and captivating—spliced in, by digital magic, from a captured glisten of gems.
“Oh, Kip. It’s breathtaking.”
It was indeed. Kip laughed at himself for being so proud. But adding sparkle was child’s play, and he fully expected other ultrasounders to have come up with it this year. It wouldn’t win the contest. It would merely keep them in the running. He told Wendy so.
“Ah but this,” he said, “this will put us over the top.” He flipped the second switch, keeping his eyes not on the monitor but on his lover, knowing that the proof of his invention would be found in the wideness of her eyes.
Eudora glared at the monitor.
