The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  A bit more than a year after he first managed to make one of the donor body’s fingers tremble, he could now pick up pens and tie a Windsor knot. The human brain had an amazing ability to rewire itself, Danesti liked to tell Roy at every opportunity. Danesti loved to tell anyone who would listen. Roy even had a little numb sensation in some toes now.

  He even started to think of it as his body … sometimes.

  As excited as he had been to finally get out of Eden, he was emotionally flat. What had he been expecting? A surprise party? Balloons? One thing he was expecting, though, was the pitter-patter of paws. “Where’s Leila?”

  “I have something to show you,” his wife said.

  “What?”

  “Come on. Get up.”

  Roy extricated his legs and unstrapped his waist from the exoskeleton, stood up slowly, and stepped out of it. Soon, it would be gathering dust in the corner of a closet. “Do I have to close my eyes?”

  “Just come on.” Penny grabbed his hand.

  He followed with shuffling steps, his unassisted gait still penguin-like. She led him to the doorway to the garage and put one hand over his eyes. He played along and closed them. She opened the door and flipped on the lights, then took her hand away. In front of them, his old baby-blue Porsche 356’s chrome glistened under the fluorescent tubes overhead, the whitewalls pristine, the tan interior leather perfect.

  “Is that …?”

  It was the car that had tumbled off the cliff in Montauk with them in it. Penny had been driving, but only because he was too drunk even to get in the car without some help. He still didn’t really remember the night, but seeing the car, he felt a lump in the pit of his stomach.

  She handed him a note in Sam’s unmistakable scrawl: “Better than new, just like you.”

  “Sam had the car rebuilt. Dragged it off the beach and reconstructed it. Said it was a good—”

  “Metaphor?”

  “Something like that.”

  Even before the accident, Sam spent more time than Roy on that car. He was always in here putting in a new fuel line or replacing the wiring. Said it was good bonding for them to work on stuff like this. He did a lot of that ever since Roy’s father passed.

  “And I have something else to show you.” Penny pulled him back down the hallway and turned right.

  Roy didn’t recognize this corridor. “Wait, was this …”

  “This is new.” She opened a door in front of them and stepped into a huge atrium, glass walled, with a complete gym and workout machines.

  “A gift from Eden. They did some other upgrades to the house. For your rehabilitation.”

  “How much did it cost?”

  “Free.”

  Nothing’s free. Roy imagined the press tours he’d have to go on to repay in kind. Still, here he was, walking around his house, maybe even heading down to the beach, when by all rights he should be dead. “Please thank Dr. Danesti.”

  “You can thank him yourself.”

  A purposeful sigh. “Do we have to?” He remembered again that he had agreed to attend an Eden fund-raiser tomorrow.

  “You said you would.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Then can’t we cancel?”

  “But he has a lot of people coming. A lot of important people.”

  Roy pulled his hand out of hers and turned to walk back to the front of the house. “I’ve still got blank spots in my memory.”

  “It’ll come back. He says that going back to the—”

  “I’m not so sure.” There wasn’t a lot he could do about it, so he switched topics. “Where’s Leila? Is she out in the yard?” The house suddenly felt empty. “Where is she?” He shuffled faster, turning past the kitchen, to the sliding doors looking into the yard.

  “Leila’s dead.”

  A silent thunderclap. Of all the things he had looked forward to when he got home, seeing his dog was right at the top of the list. Leila. A little caramel-colored pit bull he’d rescued from the pound ten years ago, before he met Penny. It had been just him and Leila. These past months, he had asked about her, wondering why nobody brought her into Manhattan.

  “What happened?” His legs deadened, and he staggered to the edge of the couch to catch himself.

  “She was ten, Roy. She was old.”

  His wife had never liked the dog. He often thought she was jealous of the bond he shared with Leila. She often said he spent more time walking the dog than talking with her. In truth, his girls had been jealous of each other. “What happened?”

  “Sweetheart, are you okay? Can we stop talking about the dog? I have something important to tell you.”

  Roy squeezed his eyes shut and fought the dizziness. Maybe he should have stayed at Eden.

  Penny took his hand, held it tight. “I want to have a child, Roy. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, what I’ve been waiting to tell you. I wanted you home. We can have a real fam—”

  The front door chime echoed through the house.

  Husband and wife stood a foot apart. They stared at each other, then both turned to look at the shadows on the front stoop. The doorbell rang again. His mother wouldn’t ring. Nobody rang a doorbell anymore. These days, any visitors would call ahead—or any known visitors would.

  Roy said, “If it’s reporters, tell them to get lost.” He sat at the kitchen counter, head in his hands, and tried to make the room stop spinning.

  Penny opened the inside door, then half-opened the screen door.

  “Mrs. Lowell-Vandeweghe? I’m Detective Devlin with the Suffolk County Police Department.”

  Roy pulled his face up from his palms just in time to see the attractive face of a dark-skinned woman in uniform with short black hair holding up a badge. Beside her stood another policeman, young and pale-faced. Penny pushed herself through the door and closed it behind her.

  He rubbed his eyes, still trying to get through his shock over Leila’s death. Now cops were here? He struggled back to his feet and was halfway to the door when Penny reappeared, thanking the police and wishing them a good day.

  The smiling policewoman glanced from Penny to Roy, but then her eyes swiveled back to Roy, her casual glance intensifying. Her partner sensed this and also took a look at Roy. Behind them, in the bushes, another figure lurked, but Roy couldn’t see much before Penny backed through the door, thanking the detective again.

  She closed the door.

  “What was that about?” He had heard the man call the woman “Del.”

  “Some hiker is missing. They’re looking for her.”

  “A hiker? Around here?”

  “Up in Nissequogue, near the state park.”

  “Why are they at our front door?” Nissequogue was halfway across Long Island.

  “Someone saw her around here. I said I hadn’t seen anyone, that we just got back in from Manhattan.”

  “Why did she look at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “She stared. Like, really stared.”

  “Your face was on the TV news all week.”

  “And who was that out in the yard? Behind them?”

  “Maybe a reporter? Dr. Danesti said they’d be sniffing around.”

  Roy was too tired to pursue it. “I’m going to take a nap for a few hours. I’m wiped out.”

  His wife put her hand to his cheek. “Are you sure? I might just go out to the Habitat for a bit, then.”

  “Habitat?”

  “For Humanity.”

  “Oh, right.” He had almost forgotten.

  She was working half days at the Women Build program. It paid a nominal salary, but then, it wasn’t a matter of their needing income. She also volunteered at the East Hampton Historical Society. Of the two of them, she was by far the less slothful. Or a
t least, she had been. After almost two years of grueling rehab, now he could hardly resist the urge to jump on an exercise bike. He had never been so fit, yet he was exhausted.

  “Is that okay?” his wife asked. “Or do you want me to stay here?”

  “You go. I’m hitting the sack. I’ve got my phone and medic alert button.”

  “I’ll be a few blocks away if you need anything. And don’t forget your medicine, remember—”

  “I know. If I don’t take it, I die.”

  6

  Detective Delta Devlin stared at the closed door.

  “Did you see that?” her partner, Officer Coleman, asked her.

  Del saw something, that was for sure, but she wasn’t sure what. She always preferred getting a lot of information before giving anything away, and Coleman seemed to know something she didn’t, so she asked, “What did you see?”

  “That was that guy. You know, that guy.”

  “You gotta be more specific.”

  “He was on the news this morning.”

  Del rarely watched current events—rarely watched television at all. Her partner needed to up his descriptive game if he wanted to get the detective stripes she had earned only a month ago. “What for? What did he do?”

  “Got his head cut off.”

  “He what?”

  They turned and jogged down the front steps onto the gravel driveway. Too hot to be in full uniform, but the deputy chief had insisted on it, especially if they poked their noses into East Hampton’s backyards. Both of them. Told them to shine their shoes, too, which bordered on insult coming from a white man to a person of color. But then, he was speaking to her whiter-than-white-bread partner at the same time.

  “He had a full body–replacement surgery last year. Got sent home this morning. It just clicked when you said his name, DeWay. That was him right there—Van DeWay! Not exactly common.”

  “No kidding? Body replacement? Like from the neck down?” Even she had heard of it. “And FYI, his name’s not ‘Van.’ That’s part of his surname: Lowell-Vandeweghe—one of those hyphenated blue-blood names.”

  “And they cut off his head. Creepy, huh?”

  Sure, creepy, but then, she’d seen creepier things on the job. A soft gurgling and squirming and black, blood-soaked dirt crowded her mind. The image of the scarecrow, that bookie Pegnini impaled on the fencepost, was never far from her nightmares.

  But Coleman’s account explained it.

  The guy’s face she had just seen inside the house was flushed, ishma-red in anger, but the wife’s face had that tone of pink-orange-ishma that often crisscrossed people’s cheeks when they were lying. She figured they were having a fight, which wasn’t unusual on any given house call where a man and a woman were involved.

  What was unusual was the shade of his arms. She saw colors differently from everyone else, and had her own systems developed for describing what she saw. His arms were blue-green-pink against the steady blue-blue-pink of his face. She had never before seen someone with differently colored skin like that, not ever, and she was a careful cataloger of everything skin and color related. When she saw him standing there, it was like seeing a unicorn. She couldn’t help staring. It was not often you saw a unicorn.

  “You didn’t recognize him?” Officer Coleman asked.

  “I noticed his wife was lying.”

  “You think so? About the hiker?”

  “Not about the hiker. Something else. They were arguing.”

  “Nothing to do with us, then?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “What else did you notice?”

  “The way the wife only spoke to you even after I introduced myself as the detective.”

  “You think because you’re a woman?”

  “Or not white, or both. Take your pick. This place is a WASP nest, isn’t it?”

  She regretted the words even as they came out of her mouth, but Officer Coleman laughed it off.

  “You haven’t spent much time in this part of the Hamptons, have you?”

  “Not exactly my cup of tea.” She affected an English accent, but it came out more Irish. “Just know it by reputation.” They cleared the end of the driveway and made their way to the next house. Their cruiser was parked at the corner of Ocean Drive.

  “One thing out here, Del: new money is colorblind. This place has as many Jews as whites, and blacks and all the colors in between. You want a WASP nest? Head over to the old money in Southampton.”

  “Thanks for the pointer.” They reached the next house on the block: a sprawling gray-shingled mansion.

  “I think Jon Bon Jovi has a place on this road,” Coleman said.

  “You bring your autograph pad?”

  “I just don’t think we’re barking up the right tree on this, Del. That girl that’s missing—she wasn’t a hiker. I think she was out there, well, working, if you get my meaning. And she’s been missing more than a year and a half.”

  “That mean we shouldn’t try and find her?”

  “Just don’t think we’re going to find her out here.”

  “Want to go back to traffic stops in Brookhaven?”

  Officer Coleman gave a snort and started up the drive. “Just hope this isn’t that goddamn psycho starting up again. The Fire Island Killer? The thought of that guy still being out here gives me the creeps.”

  7

  “Death is something we must get rid of as soon as possible,” Dr. Danesti said to Roy. “Do you know how long humans would live if we removed disease and age as causes of death? If the end only came from a sudden mishap?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “An average of eight thousand, nine hundred and thirty-eight years,” the doctor continued. “That’s how long we would live.”

  Roy focused on the stepped-pyramid shape of the top of the Rockefeller Center a few blocks away, the ziggurat to the new gods in sharp relief against the clear blue vault of the firmament above. He had come back into Eden’s Manhattan offices for another in the unending string of checkups.

  Danesti hovered by the edge of the gurney Roy lay on. He pricked his patient’s right-hand fingers one by one, and Roy blinked each time he felt the pressure. An imaging device watching his face calculated the reaction time between pinprick and blink—or whether he blinked at all. Apparently satisfied, the doctor moved to the bottom of the bed and began to prick Roy’s toes.

  Roy blinked, then blinked again. The pinpricks felt numbed out, but almost every day his sensation seemed to improve, the pain and buzzing pins and needles settling down sometimes to a bearable level.

  “I’ve done dozens of full-arm transplants,” Danesti said, “and nerve regrowth progresses at about an inch a month. But eighteen months after your surgery, and already …” He pricked Roy’s big toe, and Roy blinked. He continued up the leg.

  Some places were still totally numb.

  Done, the doctor picked up a glass of water from the bedside table and took a sip. “Almost nine thousand years. Imagine that lifespan, if we died only by accident. The number one cause of death would be suicide.”

  “I wouldn’t classify suicide as an accident.”

  “You are so right, Roy. Everything starts with brain health. Keep the mind happy and active. Remove suicide, and we could live fantastically long lives. Perhaps forever. Our work here with you at Eden is to break the link of being imprisoned for life in our birth bodies.”

  “I wish I had mine back.” He still couldn’t get used to the size of his hands, but the smell was the worst. He doused himself in cologne every morning.

  “I know you do. I know.” The doctor adjusted his glasses with his left hand, the glass of water still in his right. “But the body can be reconstructed. It’s the mind and the structure of the brain that are the key to longevity. Did you know”—Danesti’s voice took on a dr
eamy tone—“that your brain is being washed with the blood of a man half your age? This is the real fountain of youth.”

  Roy was forty-three. He hadn’t taken care of himself before the accident, and that was an understatement. Fifty pounds overweight and with the beginnings of what they said was cirrhosis of the liver. Too many late nights with Sam.

  “So how old was my donor?” Roy asked.

  They’d never talked about it before. The question of the identity of Roy’s donor forever circled in the back of his mind, like a maddening buzzing insect he tried to ignore and hoped would go away, but never did.

  The doctor focused a clinical smile on his patient, pulling his mind back from its daydream. “I can tell from the muscle and skin tone that it was a man about twenty years of age. In excellent physical condition.”

  Roy paused a second, and then another, before asking, “Can I find out who he was?”

  “That, I’m afraid, is impossible. Unless the family requests it.”

  “Even for you?”

  “The donor system is confidential and beyond even my access.” Danesti reached over to put the glass of water down on the table but released it in midair, two feet off target.

  Roy’s hand shot out and caught it almost before he even registered seeing it.

  A beat of silence. They both stared at the quivering surface of the water in the glass. Not a drop had spilled.

  Danesti said, “Amazing,” and retrieved the glass.

  Roy was just as surprised. He had never been very athletic or even coordinated.

  Dr. Danesti retreated to the attending chair beside the bed. He folded his thin hands into his lap—a bird perched on the arm of the chair—and smiled a toothy grin that stretched his facial skin tight. He probably practiced this in the mirror every morning to improve his bedside manner. A large mouthful of straight teeth, but not bleached white. Slightly yellowed, with one incisor chipped at its edge. Perfect imperfection.

  “Did you take your antirejection drugs this morning?”

  “Every morning.”