Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  I just didn’t think she’d have kept talking to me if I had told her the whole truth. Losing my power because I got beaten so badly by a seventeen-year-old who was just trying to protect his boyfriend … I know I fucked up. Trying to use Adam as leverage … I know it was wrong, okay? And I think not telling Rose the truth is wrong too, but I can’t figure out why. It’s not hurting her to not know. I can still try to help her without her knowing everything about me. I don’t have my power, I can’t manipulate her.

  Fuck, this is hard. This is why I need to talk to you. I don’t know how to be good. I think I could have learned from you. But I fucked that up too.

  JANUARY 19TH, 2017

  As much as I was relieved to be out of the AM, it was a bit weird being back in Dr. Bright’s office. I feel like we’d barely gotten started at the whole “getting to know each other well enough for me to really actually tell her stuff” before I just went right back into the extreme level inpatient. But I really do want to do better. I want to be better. And I really wanted to try today with Dr. Bright. I wanted to answer her questions honestly and be vulnerable and maybe even tell her about my dad. And I think I did an … okay job. But I got a little sidetracked.

  The conversation started normally enough with her wanting an update on my second go on the rehab merry-go-round.

  “I take it your stay at the AM was helpful?” she asked, that carefully neutral mask perfectly situated on her face. I thought back to Owen’s dream, the glowing, sunny version of Dr. Bright who smiled freely and wondered if that person was a figment of Owen’s imagination or someone who truly existed.

  “Yeah, it was.” I nodded. “I think it was the right call, going back in.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, giving me a warm smile that felt genuine but wasn’t nearly as easy and natural as the one I’d seen in the dreamworld.

  I meant that. Despite the fact that it hadn’t been an exactly … relaxing stay, what with the first week of what felt like the worst kind of withdrawal and the second week of those twisty and unpredictable dreams, going back to the AM had been the right choice. I was feeling more grounded and centered, had been sleeping more normal hours, was even thinking about going back to Milton soon to see if they’d let me jump back into work, was planning on spending the whole weekend with Emily.

  “Could you walk me through your time there?” Dr. Bright asked. “They haven’t sent the file over to me yet.”

  “Didn’t Agent Green call?” I asked. “He said he was going to fill you in.”

  “Ah. He did. I missed the call and didn’t—” She cleared her throat before continuing. “I haven’t had the time to call him back.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, desperate to ask more. “I know that you weren’t on board with me going back to the AM,” I said, like it was my job to defend Owen. “But it did help. I think I needed that week of just no dreaming. It was really hard at first. Empty and lonely and I woke up with that itch under my skin but after the first few nights, I was waking up rested. And actually looking forward to my day. To being out in the world, talking to real people.”

  “That’s wonderful, Rose,” she said, and the way it sounded coming out of her mouth made me think of Owen. He says “wonderful” all the time. I wonder who picked it up from who. “And you’re having an easier time getting up in the mornings? Staying awake?”

  “Mostly,” I said, thinking back to this morning, when I woke naturally, at a reasonable hour, for the first time in what felt like months. They had alarms at the AM that would wake me gently if I slept more than ten hours, and I’d been sleeping through my own alarms for weeks, ignoring the blaring sound when it would seep into the dreamworld by covering it up with music of my own creation. Which is pretty fucking cool if I do say so myself, but also completely baffling because I do not have a musical bone in my body.

  “There were still times that I wanted to stay in the dreamworld. It’s just so…” I tried to find the words. “Sometimes I think that learning to control it was the worst thing I could have done.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I expected it to take forever,” I said. “Gaining control, that is.”

  “You adjusted remarkably quickly,” she said, sounding genuinely impressed.

  “Do you think it’s because I come from an Atypical family? That there’s something in our DNA that makes us really good at this?”

  I felt strange asking the question, like I was trying to suggest that my family was special or better, which I absolutely do not believe. I mean, I love my family and yeah, we’re Atypical, but we’re also just people. But Dr. Bright didn’t seem to think it was a crazy question.

  “Did your brother have an easy time learning his ability when it first started up?” she asked.

  “I guess.” I shrugged, annoyed that I was being asked to consider Aaron’s duck-to-water ability to be good at everything. “It also only took him a couple months to get used to reading minds and learning how to lower and raise the volume on them. Though, he was at the AM for two whole months, so that might have made things easier.”

  “Does it bother you that you had an easier time than you expected?” she asked. The question surprised me. Aren’t you supposed to be happy when you’re good at something? When something is easy? I didn’t know I was allowed to be anything other than satisfied with that.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly, still considering the question. “It bothers me how quickly I got sucked into it. In the beginning, I was so worried about going into people’s dreams and learning stuff about them but now I want to do it. I understand Aaron a lot better now.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “His telepathy. He likes hearing people’s thoughts,” I explained. “I didn’t get that. I just thought it was really annoying to have a brother who could hear what I was thinking. And a little creepy. But it’s not a voyeuristic thing for him. He tried to explain it to me once. That he wasn’t listening to spy on people or to learn their deep dark secrets, but to understand them. He talks about how it’s not just the thoughts themselves but the shapes of them—the patterns they make. He makes it sound like art or music. Something beautiful.”

  “And that’s what dreams are like for you?” Dr. Bright asked, bringing me back to the present.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “They are beautiful. I wish I could show them to you. To see what I see … it makes people make sense. I mean, dreams don’t always make sense, obviously. A lot of the time it’s just visual gibberish. Well, and sometimes actual gibberish. But once I got good at going into dreams, it was easier to find the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “People’s true thoughts and feelings. Or, at least, some of them. Everything that lies underneath. Everything that people try to bury every day. You can’t hide from those when you dream.”

  I don’t think I did a good job explaining exactly what that’s like—the feeling of truly understanding, truly connecting with someone when you’re inside their head, while at the same time never getting a clear answer from the dreamworld. I tried to tell Dr. Bright about the dreamdiving I’d done in the past week—another nightmare of my mom’s that this time I was able to change, a dream the other night when Aaron and I played in the snow, pelting each other with snowballs.

  That was one of the dreams where Aaron was awake in the dream, reading my thoughts, making it so that we could communicate with each other inside the dream, like we did the very first time. And it was … good. The first time in a long time that I’d seen Aaron laugh, running around cackling maniacally as we both used the magic of the dreamworld to throw snowballs without actually lifting a finger, modeling the telekinesis that my dad has been using around us since we were kids.

  The next morning there was fresh snowfall on the ground. We were both in the kitchen, looking out over the newly coated yard, and caught each other’s eye. It felt like each of us was waiting for the other to make the suggestion that we go out into the cold and have a
snowball fight for real, but in the cold light of the winter morning, I felt so old, so much older than I had been as Dream Me, and running out into the yard with my brother for some lighthearted fun felt completely impossible.

  Dr. Bright listened patiently as I described these dreams, detailing how wonderful it felt to be inside them, controlling the world of my own making, the joint worlds that I make with my family.

  “Did you ever read any fantasy novels when you were a kid?” I asked, trying to find another way to explain what diving feels like.

  “Some,” she said. “Why?”

  “I read all the Narnia books growing up. Did you ever read those?”

  “Yes, I did. Mar—my brother was a big fan.”

  I clocked that slip-up in the moment. I don’t know why she would have been reluctant to say her brother’s name, but it sounded like his name was Mark. The same guy who came in at the end of one of our first sessions! Presumably the same person who was responsible for the family emergency in the fall. I don’t know why this feels like a mystery to be solved, but there’s something about the whole thing that itches in the back of my brain. Whenever I think of Mark’s face, which I only saw for about forty-five seconds, I feel like I’ve seen it before.

  But because I couldn’t put my finger on it enough to ask any specific questions, I just kept going.

  “Right, okay, so you know the gist,” I continued. “I loved them because that idea of climbing through a wardrobe and finding another world was just amazing. And then watching things like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz … when you’re a kid, you hope that there’s some magical land out there for you to stumble into. And, as you grow up, you realize that there isn’t. And I don’t believe anyone who says they’re fine with that, because it is crazy disappointing. But I found mine. An actual magical world. And I can access it whenever and anything is possible there but it’s also completely safe because it’s not real. But it feels real. And I can’t give it up. I won’t.”

  “No one is asking you to,” Dr. Bright said soothingly, making me think that maybe all of that had come out a lot more passionately than I had intended. “As I said, we can’t treat this like other, non-Atypical addictions. Your ability is part of you.”

  “Can we stop calling it an addiction?” I asked. I had just heard it SO much at this most recent AM stay. “It makes me feel like a failure or something.”

  “Rose, before you went into the AM, there were days when you were only awake for two or three hours. You were missing work, not talking to your family, or Emily—”

  “I could have stopped it,” I insisted. “I mean, I did stop it. Yeah, it helped to go to the AM, but I did the work.”

  “I know,” she said, her eyes bright with earnestness. “You should be proud of yourself for getting help when you needed it. That’s an extremely difficult thing to do. And Rose, you’re not a failure. Addiction is not failure. Struggling is not failing. As long as we keep trying, we don’t fail.”

  I swallowed, wanting so badly to believe that. I nodded, unable to find the right response.

  “How are you feeling about other aspects of your life?” Dr. Bright asked after a moment. “Outside of the dreamdiving.”

  “Good. Fine,” I said, unconvincingly. Dr. Bright fixed me with that powerful stare of hers and I cracked.

  “I don’t know.” I sighed heavily. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t straddle the two worlds, you know? That I could just pick: dreamworld or real world. And I don’t know which I would pick, it changes day to day, but it’s exhausting to jump back and forth.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, her head tilting to the side.

  “It’s like I belong in both places and also don’t belong in either. And that’s not a new feeling—being in an Atypical family and having to hide that, I always felt like I was living two lives. Hell, even being gay in a mostly straight world feels like that sometimes. But this is different from all that.”

  “In what way?”

  “It feels more concrete. It’s literally two different worlds. The way I relate to people now is completely different. I can bring information from the dreamworld into my real life if I want, but then there are times when I don’t want the other person to know that I know something. Especially if it’s someone who doesn’t know what I am.”

  “Have you told Emily yet?”

  “No. I’m going to. I really, really am. I just keep chickening out. And I hate it! I don’t want to be this cowardly person anymore. But it’s just so much harder than I thought it would be. And we’ve been dating seriously for nearly three months now and I know I have to tell her but the longer I wait, the more guilty I feel and the less I want to tell her so I keep putting it off and it just goes round and round.”

  “Do you worry she’ll react badly?”

  “I have no idea how she’ll react, that’s the problem.” I laughed joylessly. “I told her I have a form of narcolepsy, which was already weird enough—”

  “Thousands of people have narcolepsy. It’s not weird—”

  “I know, I know, I gave her the whole spiel. And she took it in stride, like she does with everything, but telling her that, actually, I have a completely fake-sounding, fantasy-novel condition might be a hard pill to swallow. I don’t know that’d she’d believe me. I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t grown up in this world.”

  “And what if she does believe you?” she asked.

  “Then I worry that she’ll call me a freak,” I said. “That she’ll break up with me.”

  “How would you feel if that happened?”

  “Completely devastated,” I admitted, afraid to say the full truth but saying it anyway. “I think—I think if I let myself, I could fall in love with her pretty quickly.”

  “If you let yourself?”

  “I’ve been trying to keep a bit of mental distance because, well, I’m scared,” I said, exhausted already by this degree of vulnerability. “If I let myself fall head over heels and then tell her and she rejects me, I don’t know what I’d do. The stakes feel really high. Like this is a huge thing that I could so easily mess up.”

  “How do you think you’re going to mess it up?” she asked.

  “By telling her or not telling her. There’s no good answer. I tell her, she might freak and leave. I don’t tell her and we get serious, I have to hide who I am forever. I want an option C.”

  “What do you think option C would be?”

  “To stop dreamdiving,” I said, the words leaving a terrible taste on my tongue.

  “But you said yourself you don’t think that’s possible.”

  “That’s what I thought at first but the AM, the pills they gave me … they worked really well. Totally dreamless sleep.”

  “And that could be a long-term solution? I thought those drugs were only for detox.”

  “I guess they’ve tweaked the formula, because they said they were basically like normal sleeping pills now. I could take them regularly.”

  “Is that what you want to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe sometimes … sometimes when it gets to be a bit too much. But not every night, I don’t think. I want to … I want to find a safe and healthy way to do it. To dreamdive.”

  “Then you do whatever is going to help you find that balance,” Dr. Bright said, like it was easy. “As long as it’s within the bounds of what your doctor said was safe for you to do. And if there are any problems or you want to reevaluate, you should call them right away.”

  There it was—that strange contradiction I’d noticed in Dr. Bright. She was pro-medication when it helped, clearly very scientifically-minded, always wanted me to check with medical doctors about anything and everything, but didn’t seem to really like the AM. That was when the thought occurred to me: maybe the AM weren’t the only other people who could help.

  “Are there other Atypical doctors?” I probed, as casually as I could manage. “You know, outside of the AM? My family has
always gone there for Atypical-related stuff and to a normal doctor for everything else. Do you know of anyone who does both?”

  “Not currently,” she said, bursting the tiny bubble inside of me that had started to grow. “But if you’re not happy with your AM physician, I’m sure you could ask Agent Green—”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” I said, waving my hand in a dismissal. “My doctor is fine. It’s—”

  And there it was. My perfect moment to tell her about my dad. About how I wanted him to see a different doctor, one who understood about Alzheimer’s and being Atypical and could find a solution to the fact that maybe one was affecting the other and he had different options than someone who wasn’t Atypical.

  But instead, I went a different direction entirely.

  “You used to work there, right?”

  “Yes.” The perfect, neutral face was back. Somehow even more neutral than before.

  “Did you ever get the feeling that … something weird was going on?” I asked, trying to match her neutrality.

  “What do you mean?” Her eyes narrowed.

  “Something shady.” I shrugged a single shoulder like this was the most casual conversation in the world.

  “Rose,” she said, suddenly sounding very serious as she leaned forward on her elbows. “Did something happen while you were there?”

  “No, no, nothing happened,” I rushed to explain, wondering what can of worms I had just opened. “Not to me, anyway. I was dreamdiving and I found myself in another patient’s dreams and it was, I don’t know, it wasn’t good. At first I thought it was just a nightmare but then when I was leaving, he was checking out at the same time. I recognized him from his dream. And I introduced myself, because if there’s any place where you can go up to someone and say, ‘Hey, I was in your dream last night, can I ask you some questions about it,’ it’s at the AM.”

  “What did he say?” she asked urgently.