Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  I already knew where he lived—before one of our coffees, we’d stopped by his apartment to get his coat because “oh come on, Rose, it’s not that cold” and then it turned out to, in fact, be that cold. Idiot. It wasn’t far from our park, in a building that was a bit like Damien—totally unremarkable. Despite the proximity, Damien tried to brainstorm some other places we could go. But between my family and the fact that neither of us had an office (though I did wonder, briefly, if I should suggest going to Dr. Bright’s, but she’d already agreed to come and meet Damien tomorrow, maybe see if she can help and I wanted to dreamdive now), Damien’s place was the obvious choice.

  “Let’s do it tomorrow morning.” He sighed. “I just need some time to clean the place up.”

  I was a little disappointed I’d have to wait, but I’m not exactly the neatest person in the world, so I understood. When I got there this morning though, I wondered what exactly he’d been cleaning up.

  After Damien closed the door behind me, we just stood there, two steps into his apartment, not saying anything. He didn’t invite me to sit or offer water or really do anything normal that a person would do when you’re in their home but, then again, nothing about this was normal.

  So I took the opportunity to look around the place. To call it a “home” may be too strong of a word. The furniture was nice—a lot nicer than I expected, honestly, based on the way Damien dresses—but there was nothing hung on the walls, no trendy throw rugs or comfy pillows, no TV, no knickknacks, no sense that anyone lived there. It was sparse as HELL. The sole non-furniture objects were a stack of dog-eared paperbacks by a chair near the window, the only blush of Damien’s personality in the whole space. Something in my heart squeezed tightly.

  “So, this is the place,” he said finally, shuffling his feet and clearing his throat.

  “It’s nice,” I said, feeling SUPREMELY awkward as I looked at Damien’s haggard face, the circles under his eyes somehow even more pronounced. I wondered if he’d kept himself up all night in anticipation and was about to ask when—

  “Right, let’s get to it,” he said, abruptly walking over to the couch, throwing himself onto it, and closing his eyes.

  And that was that. The niceties were over and we were getting straight to the point. And that was where the straightforwardness ended.

  The moment I dove into Damien’s head, I knew something was wrong. Most dreams are fixed locations—a classroom, a magical land, a grocery store, outer space. Everything from the mundane to the fantastical, sometimes one location through the whole dream, sometimes rapidly changing. They usually have blurred edges—like a video game that hasn’t fully rendered—but each location is at least coherent.

  This was … not. More solid than the flashes of images and emotions I got from him when we were both at the AM, but no easier to grasp. It was a cornfield, long stalks stretching into the sky, but also the woods, spindly branches hanging over my head, scraping my skin, ocean water lapping at my feet. A patchwork of nature, not a beautifully constructed place crafted from imagination, but a jumble of memories and feelings clashing together to make an unnavigable maze.

  “Damien?” I called out. Other than calling out Aaron’s name in those first few dreams, I don’t typically announce myself, instead choosing to familiarize myself with the materials in front of me. But I didn’t know what to do with this.

  There was a sound. A crunching of leaves, a wave breaking against the shore, the rustle of wind through cornstalks. I spun around, trying to find the source, only to discover that everything had vanished. I was suddenly in a motel room. This, at least, was comprehensible.

  I started to wander around, looking for the seams of the world, looking for anything out of the ordinary that I could use to construct something that might comfort Damien. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to change—the dream so far had been frustrating but not a nightmare.

  It was like just having that thought brought the nightmare along.

  The ground shook, the motel bed falling through the floor before I’d taken more than a few steps. It became a grave, a pale hand clawing its way out, a tall man pulling himself up from underneath, crawling toward me with skeletal arms. I thought fast—the floor had swallowed up the bed, maybe it could open up and take this corpse away with it. I centered my feet, imagined the floor underneath the crawling man opening up and then it did, taking him into the black, but it just kept opening and soon I was falling too, down down down down—

  I landed, hard, back in the cornfield. At least this time it was just a cornfield.

  A blur ran past me, rustling the stalks.

  “Damien?” I tried again. He didn’t respond, but I saw his back disappear farther into the field and I chased him, my feet tramping down the cornstalks, following the path he had been carving out. That meant the tall stalks could be destroyed, pushed down by both of us. I focused on that reality of this dreamworld and soon the field was flattened, the cornstalks splayed like a meteor had hit them.

  Damien reached his destination, a slim figure curled up in the fetal position on the ground. In a flash, I was next to him, watching him kneel down to look at the person—an Asian man, Damien’s age I’d guess, sunken face and long hair. The man looked familiar, so it must have been the person he rescued from the AM last summer, the person he was trying to rescue in that dream. But he said that person was safe, so why still have nightmares about him?

  And this was a nightmare. Damien was shaking the man by the shoulders, shouting at him to wake up.

  He was dead.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Damien was crying into the man’s hair, whispering into his ear as he pulled him close. The body was limp, looking small and broken in Damien’s arms, but still somehow beautiful. Like a handsome prince who had been cursed, Damien the knight who was too late. The two of them shook with Damien’s sobs, the pain of loss cutting through the air like a wind sharp enough to make you bleed.

  It was truly awful. And I felt completely unequipped to fix it. Nothing about any part of the dream had given me any indication of what would comfort Damien and I had no idea how to bring this guy back to life. I didn’t ever create people in dreams. Wild animals, magical creatures, sure. The closest I’ve come is manifesting my family in a dream, but they’re my family. I know them well enough to build a dream construct of them. I didn’t even know this guy’s name.

  Two shadowy figures appeared then—two women, both incandescently beautiful. One tall and tan, one short and dark skinned, both like projections of people. See-through and wavy, not really there.

  “Do you forgive yourself?” they asked in a ghostly chorus. Damien shuddered, pulling the man closer.

  Suddenly, I knew what to do.

  The man in Damien’s arms opened his eyes, shocking Damien into still silence.

  “I forgive you,” he whispered.

  Damien and I both gasped awake at the same moment.

  We sat there, on the couch, getting our breath back, not looking at each other. I had no idea what to say. No idea if I’d helped. No idea if Damien was going to be mad at me for seeing something so personal.

  “I—” I started, not sure what I was going to say, if I was going to apologize, if I was going to ask a question.

  “You were there, weren’t you?” Damien jumped in, his voice soft. “It worked?”

  “Oh, uh…” I blinked. “Yeah. Yeah, I was there but … I don’t know if it worked. I tried—I tried to change things.”

  He nodded, cleared his throat, rubbed his hands on his legs, and stood up.

  “I’ve gotta—” He made a vague gesture toward the back of the apartment. I stood up too, unsure what he was trying to say.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked, a pained look on his face.

  Aha, he was kicking me out.

  “Oh, yeah, okay,” I said, moving toward the door.

  “Cool.” He moved farther away. “Cool.”

  It was silly to feel reject
ed, but that was what was coursing through my body in that moment. Panic and doubt that I had done the right thing, that I hadn’t ruined the first friendship I’d made in years.

  I put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Rose?”

  I turned to look at Damien, his hunched shoulders, his hands stuffed into his pockets, his pained face. I braced myself for an excuse for why he couldn’t meet tomorrow after all, a chastisement.

  “Thank you.”

  FEBRUARY 2ND, 2017

  I don’t know what I expected after yesterday, after going into Damien’s head, but I hadn’t anticipated that we would just ignore it completely. Today started the way every day starts since we had that first coffee; Damien and I texting each other. We’ve been talking about everything: our abilities and the AM, yes, but also our lives, sharing random YouTube videos and Spotify playlists back and forth, just … normal stuff. Damien likes to read too, has read all the fantasy novels I loved as a kid, so we talked about books when we ran out of people in the park to make up stories about. I haven’t really read a book in what feels like years—it was nice to be reminded that it’s something I used to love.

  I really thought I was starting to make a friend. A real friend. Not someone I work with and kind of get along with, not someone I’m dating while hiding half of myself, not a family member I tiptoe around on the best of days and fully collide with on the worst. But someone who liked me for me, for the entire person I am, and who I could trust.

  That all promptly went to shit this afternoon.

  It all started when Damien turned up to our coffee hungover. At five in the afternoon.

  “God, you look terrible,” I said the moment he came into view. And he really did. I didn’t think the bags under his eyes could get worse, that his hair could become more of a rat’s nest, that his cheeks could get more sunken. I was feeling pretty bad about my so-called attempt at “help.”

  “Hello to you too,” he grunted, though he honestly didn’t seem that annoyed by my greeting. I was finding that if I just treated Damien like Aaron—like the irritating older brother who I actually loved—his shoulders relaxed and his barely-there smiles came more easily.

  “Sorry,” I said anyway. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He groaned. “Just a little hungover.”

  “It’s five o’clock in the afternoon.” I couldn’t help the little laugh that escaped me.

  “It was a rough morning,” he said darkly, rubbing his eyes.

  “Yikes, what happened?” I asked, my heart beating fast. Had I made the nightmares worse?

  “What do you think happened, I drank half a bottle of bourbon, drunk dialed my—” He stopped himself, wincing and averting his eyes before taking a deep inhale and continuing. “Then I took a nap and a cold shower and now I’m here and I’ve got a headache so can we skip all the probing questions about the AM for today?”

  Even though I was feeling like I was starting to get to know him, it was still easy to forget that Damien was like this. You could never ask him questions or talk to him like a normal person. But I can tease him like I tease Aaron, hold him at an arm’s length and rib him instead of risking either of us ever admitting we care. That’s a more comfortable lane for me to stay in anyway.

  “Jeez, cool it on the attitude. Here—coffee.” I handed him a cup, not as quite as hot as it should have been, given that I had been sitting in the cold for thirty minutes.

  “God bless you.” He sighed before taking a sip.

  “So … drunk dialed an ex?” I guessed. He flinched, trying to pass it off as the coffee being too hot, but I knew I’d hit pay dirt.

  “I’ve been there,” I continued, faux-casual, even though I barely had.

  “You’re nineteen,” he scoffed.

  “Okay, so I’ve sugar-high-dialed an ex, it’s basically the same thing.”

  “He’s not an—” Damien started, sounding more uncertain than I’d ever heard him. “I mean, he’s not—it was never like that.”

  “Ah, gotcha.” I nodded sagely, clocking the pronoun Damien had used. I don’t know that I’d pegged him as a fellow member of the queer family, given that he literally looks like a textbook example of “straight cis white man from 2010” but the way Damien’s cheeks were reddening made me think this was more than a friend breakup. I thought of the way he’d been holding the man from the AM, the pain in that nightmare, and felt like I was starting to get the whole picture. “Not an ex-boyfriend, just an ex … something?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Something.”

  He was looking down into his coffee cup like he wanted to drown in it.

  “What happened with you guys?” I asked.

  “What did I say about the probing questions?” He grimaced and took a sip of his coffee.

  “Okay, okay, sheesh,” I said, knowing that I was going to circle back to this.

  “Are you sleeping all right?” I asked, tiptoeing toward the real conversation I wanted to have.

  “Bit better.” He nodded.

  “No more nightmares?” I asked hopefully.

  “I said better, not perfect.”

  “Right,” I said. I’d take better. I actually had helped. And I was going to keep helping.

  “Well, hopefully that’ll change soon,” I said meaningfully. I had been planning on telling Damien about inviting Dr. Bright to our coffee after the dreamdiving but then things turned so awkward and I didn’t know how to broach the subject. But, more than ever now that I’d seen his glitched-out dreamscape, I wondered what the AM had done to Damien, if there would be any way to reverse it. And that wasn’t my expertise.

  “Yeah, what are we doing here?” he asked, looking around at the park that was distinctly not our park.

  “There’s someone I want to introduce you to,” I said simply.

  “Okay…”

  “Someone who I think will be able to help.” God, I was so stupid, feeling excited and accomplished and having put this together, finding an avenue we could explore that might get us more information.

  “Look, if it’s someone actually from the AM, you know I’m not interested,” he said, fear building in his eyes.

  “Of course it’s not.” I rolled my eyes, repeating the same sentiment I feel like I’d repeated over and over to Damien. “I’m on your side. I know you’re worried they’re going to snatch you again and I believe you.”

  “Oh.” He blinked. “Thank you.”

  “Well, it is a bit easier to believe someone when you can see inside their head,” I said, herding him back to the topic of yesterday.

  “Yeah?” He snorted. “I wouldn’t be too sure. You only got into a few dreams. That doesn’t show you everything.”

  “Why, are you hiding something?” I teased and he flinched. I knew he was hiding something—the tall man crawling out of the grave was a pretty good indication that Damien had skeletons in his closet, no pun intended.

  “Aren’t we all hiding something?” he teased back. “I mean, can we ever really know another person?”

  “Oh, don’t be cute.” I sighed.

  “It’s an honest question,” he said. “How are things going with Emily?”

  “Fine.” I sniffed, taking a sip of my coffee, which was now completely cold.

  “Have you told her yet?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I said, even though Damien had been the only person I had talked to lately about my desire to tell Emily. But we’d mostly talked about it over text—any time I tried to talk about it out loud, the mere thought of telling her about my dreamdiving gave me a stomachache.

  “So that’s a no then,” he said smugly. “Kinda proves my point.”

  “I don’t know why I even told you about her in the first place.”

  “Because I’m the only Atypical you spend time with that you’re not related to?” He grinned at me, a mockery of a true smile.

  “God, yeah, that’s true.” I groaned. “But you said you know others. When ar
e you going to introduce me?”

  “I’m not exactly on speaking terms with them at the moment,” he said darkly.

  “Oh really?” I said, grabbing onto this clue. “Does that have something to do with the things you may or may not be trying to hide? Or your ex something?”

  “I said leave it alone, all right?” he snapped, the comfortable teasing camaraderie gone in an instant. “What about this person who’s gonna help me? They must know other Atypicals.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a whole confidentiality thing.” I shrugged.

  “Wait, why are we meeting here?” Damien turned to me, his entire body language changing as he questioned me urgently. “Why this park? Who is this person?”

  “She works just over there,” I said, waving my hand toward Dr. Bright’s building. “She used to work for the AM and I think she already knows the AM is not on the up-and-up and just needs some more concrete proof. You’re the proof to really do something about it. So please stay, I hate to disappoint.”

  “Oh, I’m most definitely going to disappoint.”

  The way he said it, in that dry, affected way, made it sound like it could have been another self-deprecating joke, but his expression told me there was nothing funny about this. The moment Dr. Bright arrived, I understood why.

  “Hey Dr. B.,” Damien said before I could even introduce them.

  “Damien.” I had never heard that kind of tone from Dr. Bright before. She had stopped about ten feet away from us, her eyes wide with surprise as they darted back and forth between us.