Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  And I worry even thinking about the possibility of a nightmare has sealed it into certainty.

  * * *

  I’m gasping for air, clawing at the ground, the smell of dirt and rot pressing in on my nose, my mouth, the earth clinging to me, squeezing in and around me, pushing me

                        down

                down

         down

  down into the ground.

  I breathe, blood filling my mouth, there’s the smell of burnt hair,

  sharp

         metal

                lightning

  Electricity, electric shocks sending hairs standing on their ends, the current pulling me up and turning me inside outoutout.

  The smell of burnt hair.

  Electricity.

  Electric hair, electric blue.

  Neon.

       Bright.

            The smell of flowers.

  * * *

  The perfume of her hair.

  JANUARY 10TH, 2017

  I don’t remember writing that. I know I must have. It’s my handwriting, looking like I’m guessing it would if I were a few sheets to the wind. I can barely read the words, but it was clearly about a dream I was having. A dream that feels like it’s still right behind my eyelids and like it’s already very, very far away. I don’t remember the details, barely remember a single image, but I can still smell flowers. A woman’s perfume. My skin feels sensitive, like I’ve touched charged metal and gotten a shock.

  So it turned out that I was right to be afraid. First time dreamdiving in a week and I’m instantly dropped into a nightmare. I just didn’t expect it to be someone else’s nightmare. I don’t remember seeing anyone, can’t recall anything about the point of view, but I know I wasn’t me. I couldn’t control anything, couldn’t get myself out or change the dream from the inside. And none of those feelings were even remotely mine. Fear so real and visceral it tastes like rusted metal on your tongue, guilt so all-consuming I didn’t even have to breathe it in for it to crawl down my throat and choke me.

  And then … peace. A burst of blue neon electricity that transformed into warm yellow sunlight, the smell and texture of flowers and skin … calm and rightness. Like I was right where I was supposed to be. I’ve never been in a dream quite so abstract before, quite so abrasive, with so many conflicting feelings that lie on top of one another, none of them getting enough room to breathe.

  Whoever’s head I was in last night has some serious stuff they need to work out.

  * * *

  Warm sunlight.

  Flowers.

  The perfume of her hair.

  The flowers on her arm, pink and blooming.

  Her eyes, smiling and warm.

  I’m so safe here. In the cornfields.

  His smile. His laugh.

  So warm. So safe. The cornstalks grow higher, they bend and bow, growing spikes from their ears, razor blades amidst the corn.

  His laugh is as strong as a razor.

  Her disappointment.

  His teeth.

  January 12th, 2017

  Dear Mark,

  The dreamless sleeping has stopped. The last bit of hospitality that the AM showed me has been taken away. I guess I’m healing up pretty well—I’ve even started taking supervised “walks,” by which I mean thirty minutes where I get to circle my hospital room, handcuffed to an IV while a bunch of AM lackeys watch me through the window. It’s nice to not feel like I’ve been put together with floss and Scotch tape anymore, but the drugs were … not bad.

  I used to dream about my parents a lot. Not really dreaming at all for weeks, thanks to those wonderful sedatives, made me think about how long it’s been since I dreamt about Them or anything related to Nebraska and my life there at all. It feels so goddamned far away, like another life. So does LA, but that I do still dream about. Ever since they stopped giving me the feel-good pills, I’ve been dreaming constantly throughout the night, frantically and almost painfully, and so often about that former life and the friends I had in it.

  Last night I dreamt about you. Which isn’t new About running to find you, here, just down the hall from where I am now. You were in pain, screaming in pain, and I couldn’t run to you fast enough. I couldn’t save you. A nightmare based on something that never happened. Because I did save you. I did.

  I need you to save me now, Mark. Could you do that? Could you save me?

  It’s cold and I am asleep. I’ve been asleep for so long.

  A bright burst of electricity.

  Stone walls, icy and dripping, like a long-forgotten city. I walk closer to the walls, press my hand to their face, feeling the cool moisture transfer to my hand.

  When I pull my arm back, my hand is covered in blood. I’m screaming—or no, someone else is screaming. They’re screaming for me, and now I am screaming, not knowing where they are, not knowing who else might be looking for them.

  I run.

  JANUARY 12TH, 2017

  Again. Again and again, I’ve been having these weird, scattered, staticky dreams, impressions of dreams, memories, something, nothing at all, bright and burning and then dissolved from my hands before I can feel their shape.

  I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, turning over bleary-eyed and still half asleep to write these barely remembered sensations. Then I fall back asleep, usually having more dreams, walking normally throughout the dreamworld, traveling to minds far and wide, familiar and unfamiliar. But nothing else is quite as interesting, as attention-grabbing as those initial dreams, the ones that happen right after I drop off, when I’m in my most vulnerable state. They’re frightening, unsettling, but also … exciting. Untethered. Raw. But no matter what I do, I can’t get back there. I’ve tried finding the seams, felt along every edge of my void for something familiar and unnamable but … nothing.

  Last night, this last dream, bleeding walls and electric shocks, was finally different. It was as confusing and nauseating as all the others, like I’m running down a staircase in the dark and keep missing a step, but there was something tangible last night. A man. Two men, actually. One of them was the dreamer, I think. As I ran, I saw his reflection blur in the dark glass windows along a long, dark hallway. Dark hair, sunken cheeks, skinny, strung-out frame. He—I, we—ran and ran and ran until we got to a window that was lit up, a hospital bed with a different man in it, a man that looked impossibly familiar to me, so familiar I’m not sure if it was the feeling of the dreamer who I was with or a feeling of my own. Then I woke up.

  I don’t know why I care so much about figuring it out. It feels like maybe whoever’s head I’m walking into has answers to questions I haven’t even thought to ask yet. There’s something about the dreams themselves, the frenetic nature, the fact that I’m never really able to catch hold, that makes me think there’s something hinky going on. Maybe there’s another dreamdiver around and we’re like two radios set across from each other, our frequencies clashing. Or maybe the AM is experimenting on me somehow. I should ask Owen.

  Oh my god, Owen. In a complete photo-negative of the first dream I dived into—or, rather, was yanked into and then spat out of—the last place I went walking was, I’m fairly certain, Owen Green’s head. I didn’t stay for long, too jarred by being in the dream of someone I knew but not that well and the fact that DR. BRIGHT of all people was there!!!

  I was right in noticing the way that Dr. Bright and Owen have both reacted when the other one is mentioned … there really IS a history there. The dream was simple, an apartment living room, sunbathed and homey, with Owen and Dr. Bright wandering around comfortably, going about their day, watering plants and smiling at each other. Like they were in love. Owen just looked like Owen, though it was a bit weird to see him in something other than a suit and tie (I guess he’s a chinos/cable-knit sweater kin
d of guy in the comfort of his own home) but Dr. Bright was glowing. She looked like herself in the sense that there were no big changes and, listen, she might be an older woman, but I know an attractive lady when I see one, so it’s not like she wasn’t already going to look beautiful in Owen’s head but this was …

  I want to be in love like that someday. God, I haven’t talked to Emily in weeks—not since she went back to Arizona for the holidays. Before she left, we exchanged Hanukkah/Christmas/general-secular-end-of-the-year gifts and I’ve been living off the memory of her smile when she opened the box I handed her and saw the gold shell necklace nestled in tissue paper. It was a risk, I know, but I didn’t get her a conch shell specifically, but something more generic, something that would remind her of the necklace she had in her dream without tipping my hand.

  “How did…” she whispered, pulling it out of the box. “My abuela has a shell necklace, kind of like this one. She—she still lives in Mexico, so I don’t see her much, but whenever I do, she’s always wearing her shell necklace.” She held the necklace in her palm, like it was a delicate, sacred thing.

  “Really?” I said, making myself sound more surprised than I was and slotting away the answer to the question I’d had since that dream. “It just reminded me of you.”

  Her eyes went glossy and she kissed me and for a moment my ability felt like a good thing. Like just a good thing.

  We were going to spend New Year’s Eve together, with the lit mag friends that she’s been wanting to introduce me to, but by the time she came back to Boston, I had already called her and told her I had to deal with some family stuff, keeping it vague but being as honest as I could about how serious it was. She was so sweet about it and all I wanted to do was kiss her at midnight but instead I spent the night packing for the AM, then watching the ball drop with my family, my eyes darting between the enormous Times Square clock and my dad as I panicked about the steady march of time and how there’s nothing I can do about it.

  I don’t know where things with Emily are going to be when I go back tomorrow. I don’t know where things with my family are going to be. Where things with myself are going to be. I don’t know what I want. I want to feel the kind of love that Owen felt for Dr. Bright in his dream, I want to find the mysterious dreamer who has been grabbing hold of my brain every night for the past week, I want to go back to work and have Chef see that I have a good palate and excellent knife skills, I want to talk to Aaron about what it’s like to be inside other people’s heads, I want to ask my mom if she forgives me, if she still loves me, I want to quit literally everything else—Emily, my job, my life—and spend the next ten years sitting next to my dad at a baseball game or hearing him talk about the terrible pulp novel he’s reading.

  I want to sleep. I want to dive. Maybe not as much as before—I forgot the way that real fresh air tastes—but knowing that I could have all those things I want, and more, in that dreamworld makes it a lot harder to stay away. Does it matter if it’s not real?

  JANUARY 13TH, 2017

  The last thing I expected to do when leaving the AM was make a friend.

  No, wait, correction: the last thing I expected to do when leaving the AM was run into someone from inside the dreamworld.

  It went like this.

  Most of the day was pretty much the same as last time—final checkups, far more paperwork than makes sense for a two-week program, and a final therapy session. I’m happy to say that Dr. Loving was pretty pleased with my progress. I’ve started to … I think “open up” is the official term.

  I still haven’t talked about my dad though. I know she knows. But I just … I wouldn’t know where to even begin. Dr. Loving wants me to continue with Dr. Bright, which I’m game for (especially since I’m weirdly invested in finding out what happened between Dr. Bright and Owen) so I guess maybe I could continue on the track of actually being honest about my feelings, except I’d have to explain everything to Dr. Bright. But where do I begin that conversation?

  And maybe I don’t need to talk about that stuff! Maybe I’m processing it just fine! Dr. Loving didn’t seem to think I needed more work.

  “But don’t be afraid to come back here if things get hard again,” she continued. “This is an ongoing process. As you explore your ability more, learn to live with it in a healthy way, your relationship to it will change, and that relationship will need constant tending.”

  “You mean I might slip again,” I said.

  “It’s not slipping,” she said, shaking her head, her curls bouncing. “There’s no reaching perfection. Just living and learning to thrive. ‘Slipping’ implies failure, but you can’t fail at being you.”

  “Right.” I nodded like I understood but I’m not sure I do. But I think that’s started to change with what happened after therapy.

  As I was walking from Dr. Loving’s office to the main desk to finish my release forms, I took a wrong turn and ended up in some weird back hallway I’d never been in before. There was basically nothing in it—just a door that looked like it led to a broom closet and two bathrooms that looked FOR REAL haunted. The whole hallway did—it had these old stone and vaulted ceilings that Mags had pointed out the other day, talking about how the AM had been here for a long time but had only built the main complex a few decades back, integrating it into the old, stone halls of the original nineteenth-century building. Except this hallway didn’t have that blend of old and new: it was all that old stuff. Like they just kind of forgot to build in this part. I walked all the way to the end, where it led to a locked stairwell—an old emergency exit I assume—and when I turned around to walk back, I got the strongest swell of déjà vu.

  I was practically dizzy with it, the light around me feeling like it was flickering, the world tilting slightly. I stumbled, throwing my arm out to the stone wall, catching myself so I didn’t fall over. The wooziness subsided as I focused on the feeling of the cold stone beneath my palm. When I pulled back my hand, I half expected to see it covered in blood.

  My dream. This was the hallway from my dream. The same stone walls, the same length and shape. The same feeling. But the dream hallway had had so many more doors and … interior windows. Windows like the hallway was lined with hospital rooms.

  I turned around to try the door to the stairwell again, thinking there might be hallways above or below that looked the same, wondering if it’s possible there was someone there whose head I had visited. Someone who had been dreaming wild and beautiful and terrible things. Someone who had a head I wanted a closer look at.

  But no dice.

  Except.

  Then.

  The checkout desk.

  It’s a Friday today, which seems to be the standard checkout day. The lobby was pretty busy, with Mags flitting from person to person, handing out paperwork, intaking and releasing. When I approached the large, round desk, she whirled over.

  “Hey girl, you all ready to go?” She placed a file between my arms, set a pen on top of it, and zoomed away. I chuckled and opened the file, looking it all over perfunctorily before signing where I needed to and closing it again. I looked up to hand it back to Mags to see her, somehow, on the other side of the lobby, intaking yet another person.

  Before I could call out to her or grab the file and walk over, a man stepped to the other side of the front desk. In any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have noticed this generic white guy in a black hoodie but it was him. The man. The one from my dream. His dream.

  He was a bit taller than I remember, maybe a bit shorter than Aaron but somehow even skinnier. But where Aaron always looked annoyingly at home in his body, in a way I’ve never felt, this guy made his skinniness look wrong. Like he’d been deprived of food and sleep for far longer than he should have been.

  I couldn’t help it. Before I knew what was happening, I was walking around the circular desk to stand in front of him. And that was all I did for a moment—just stand. Like, three feet away from him, staring at him, like a total weirdo.

>   “Um … can I help you?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow at me. His voice was gruff and dry, like he hadn’t used it in a while, or he’d used it too much.

  “You’re him,” I breathed.

  I really wish I had opened with something else because a) very creepy way to introduce yourself to someone and b) his eyes instantly went wide with fear.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Sorry, I’m Rose,” I said, sticking out my hand in an offer to shake. GOD it was almost as bad as when I tried to introduce myself to Emily. I mean, I guess this man was the man of my dreams. Hardy-har-har.

  “Oh.” He blinked, looking at my outstretched hand. “Um.”

  He reached his arm out slowly, before grabbing my hand in a shake, slow and hesitant.

  “Nice to meet you?” he said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “I know that was the weirdest way to introduce yourself to someone.”

  “I’ve had weirder,” he said. The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile and he angled his body toward me so he could look directly at me, eyes glittering as they roamed over my face, like he was memorizing it.