The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “And the fentanyl?”

  “I’m taking it easy.” The truth was, he needed more.

  The doctor stood and straightened, his face loosening up. He opened his mouth and rubbed his cheeks. The actor getting ready to go onstage. He took a step for the door. Outside was a small mob of reporters. Each time Roy came for a checkup, it was an implicit invitation for a press conference.

  Roy said, “Before we go out there, I have another question that’s been bugging me.”

  The doctor waited.

  “How much is all this costing? How is it being paid for? I checked our insurance, and it maxes out at a million a year, but for almost two years I took up half the top floor of one of the most expensive buildings in Manhattan, plus a staff of a dozen doctors and nurses. And then there’s the exoskeleton …”

  “Please, Roy, we don’t need to—”

  “It’s not like I’m some combat vet that Uncle Sam is footing the bill for because I got my legs blown off being a hero. We crashed my Porsche when I was wrecked after a party—almost killed my own wife.”

  “It was your wife driving.”

  “Because I was wasted. But to my point—why do I deserve all this?”

  “Your fate in this will equal my own.”

  It was an odd choice of words. “I need to know.”

  The doctor’s face creased up, but some inner wall was breached. “The Chegwiddens made a significant contribution.”

  That made some sense. The accident had been on their property. Probably worried about liability, and Primrose Chegwidden was as rich as a Rockefeller.

  “And your own trust fund is paying part of the costs.”

  That caught Roy off guard. “My fund? You mean Atticus approved this?” Their family lawyer—Roy’s lawyer—was managing director of the trust fund set up after Roy’s father died. Under his breath, he muttered, “There won’t be a penny left in it.”

  His father had left a few million in the trust two decades ago, but anything left would be gobbled up by what this had to be costing.

  Danesti said, “Most of your trust is intact, because I am funding the largest part myself. For you.”

  Roy’s cheeks burned—embarrassment but also relief. “Ah, well, then, thank you.”

  “Because you are helping me. Do you understand? The first two surgeries I attempted were on patients who had underlying medical conditions that made their recovery difficult. They died within months, and our great enterprise was on the verge of failure. But you, and Mr. Sheffield before you, represent a new beginning for Eden. Two successes to show the world, and both within, let’s say, a certain circle of people.”

  Roy was always quick to spot an angle. “Rich people.”

  “Money is not the purpose, you understand, but a necessary evil. A means to an end. Eden Corporation is nonprofit.”

  So it wasn’t so much the money Roy had as the pond he swam in.

  People like his friend Sam, the Chegwiddens, and the other billionaire diaspora that his mother clung to, with her the glittering dominatrix socialite at their center. Danesti had been his mother’s doctor before the accident—not for plastic surgery, but for “rejuvenation” treatments. The transfusions of young blood and plasma. Perhaps his mother had begged Danesti to save her son, had made the case for it. If she had, there was something in it for her, too. There always was.

  Danesti put a hand on the door. “And now, you help me?”

  He opened the door. At the other side of the rehab room, an expensive gym-like space forty feet across, waited a gaggle of reporters surrounded by cameras loaded on their operators’ shoulders. The lights blazed on, the glare dazzling his eyes.

  Time to get the show on the road.

  Roy strode confidently behind the doctor. He smiled for the cameras, waved to them. Maybe he would even get onto Page Six or the evening news. Or the national news. He bet his mother would be cursing his choice of the old T-shirt he had on.

  Dr. Danesti walked ahead, leading a round of applause, which the reporters joined. “I present to you Mr. Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe. A terrible accident destroyed his body, and now, less than two years later, he is up and walking, through the miracle of body-transplant surgery.

  “Decapitation is an extremely complex surgery,” the doctor explained, his cheek hollows dark in the bright camera lights. “Even after cooling the bodies and heads of patient and donor to ten degrees Celsius, we have less than an hour to reconnect the blood supply to the brain, and then a few more hours to complete the most complex of procedures. In Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe’s and Mr. Sheffield’s cases, we have shown that it can work.”

  Roy picked up three tennis balls and began to juggle them. He dropped one. The reporters laughed and made notes. The prize pig, but not that prized. He’d seen clips of Shelby Sheffield when he did his walks of fame, and there were dozens of reporters. He counted four cameras here. The next guy getting his head chopped off would be getting only a pat on the shoulder and a sugar biscuit.

  Danesti, ever the showman, didn’t miss a beat. He stepped in front of the cameras and gave the best serious-thinker pose he could do standing up. “When Louis Pasteur first said that microbes caused disease, he was ridiculed, just as I was when I first proposed the idea of a complete body transplant.”

  “Don’t you feel like you’re playing God?” asked a squat young reporter in front.

  “When they carried out the first human heart transplants in 1967, there was moral outrage that it went against God. The same thing happened with the first test-tube baby in 1978: cries of blasphemy, that we were playing God. Now all these things are so common, we don’t give them a second thought.”

  “But don’t you think we’re taking this a little too far, too fast?” the reporter pressed.

  “This is not just my life’s work. Soviet pioneer Vladimir Demikhov transplanted a dog’s head in 1954, and in America, Dr. Robert White performed the first head transplant on a monkey in 1970. This is a progression—”

  “How did you reconnect the spinal cord?” an attractive blond reporter asked.

  “An excellent question. Fusogen is a neural-growth factor. A waxy chemical that we insert into the surgically cut interface between patient’s and donor’s spinal gray matter, it encourages them to grow together. Remember, there is none of the messy neural-tissue trauma you see from an accident. It is clean-cut surgically and reconnected within minutes. In tests with mice in 2016, we had them walking around two weeks after cutting their spinal cords.”

  “Isn’t it a stretch to go from mice and monkeys to humans?”

  Danesti affected the look of an adult explaining to a child how to tie shoelaces. “The mind is contained within the brain, and that’s what makes us human, what makes us us. The reconnecting of blood vessels and fusing of spinal cords is more a matter of mechanics and rehabilitation.” He cocked his head to one side. “And some luck. We do need a compatible donor with good genetics and a blood match. Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe was very lucky.”

  Roy couldn’t help snorting at that, and the reporters’ heads turned his way.

  “I sure don’t feel lucky,” he blurted. “I mean, I do, but … you know what I mean. It’s been hard.”

  “What do you feel, Roy?” asked an attractive blond. She held out her microphone just inches from his face. “I’m Susan Collins, from the New York Tribune. The technical stuff is interesting, but I want to know how you feel.”

  The room went silent.

  Roy stared at the reporter. Her hazel-flecked green eyes didn’t waver.

  What do I feel?

  Sick at his stomach, which was sometimes a queasy phantom stomach that floated in front of him—that was how he felt. Drowning in someone else’s sweat while his brain floated in opioids, his mind unable to grasp on to reality. Shooting pain from arms and legs that weren’t there anymore, and drilling pins a
nd needles from a body he was stapled to, half of which he couldn’t feel—a body he felt he’d somehow stolen from someone. Propped up on a robotic walker for months, primped and preened for the cameras.

  His cheeks burned.

  “I … uh,” Roy stammered. “I feel, uh …”

  “This is a very challenging time for Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe, as I’m sure you all can appreciate,” Danesti said, stepping in front of Roy. “But what I want to make clear today is that death is not an absolute.”

  “You think you can cheat death?” the reporter Susan Collins asked.

  “Death is not an entity to be cheated, but simply an invention made up by nature to help life adapt to changing conditions. We are now at the juncture where, through technology, using our God-given intellect, we can unmake that once-inevitable condition of our existence. The Methuselah Foundation, the Singularity Institute—they take different approaches to the idea of ultimate life extension, but who really wants to upload their mind into a machine?”

  This earned chuckles from the reporters.

  “That is science fiction,” Danesti continued, “whereas today I present to you flesh and blood.” He nodded at Roy. “With our therapies, many clients of Eden will now live more than a hundred years, as will many of you”—he pointed at the cameras and, by extension, to the millions of people watching—“but Roy and Shelby represent the first steps to something more. Something greater. This is the goal of Eden, the age-old quest for the Holy Grail. Ladies and gentlemen, the beginning of everlasting life is now.”

  8

  From a black hole, a screaming face appeared. Blue eyes so pale, the sky shone straight through them. Red hair. She was screaming but silent. Lips closed. A noose around her neck.

  “I’ll get us out of here,” Roy promised, but it wasn’t his voice.

  They had to hurry. The police were coming.

  In the grass ten feet below the wooden platform, his whole family watched. Why were none of them helping him? His dead father stood, impassive, his eyes urging him to do the right thing. Roy heaved and strained to lift the woman but couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

  On the grass below, a tiny red-haired girl watched.

  Roy gasped for air, blinked, and looked around. Penny was asleep beside him. He was drenched in sweat. He’d been dreaming again. Not really dreams. Nightmares. The alarm said 3:05 in the morning.

  * * *

  “It’s getting worse,” Roy said.

  His friend Sam took a swig from his bottle of beer, the neck almost disappearing into the gray nest of his beard and mustache. “You gotta expect some weirdness.”

  They stood at the back of Roy’s yard, at the edge of the line of cedars between his property and the neighbor’s. The lawn service had been there in the afternoon, the cutters and mowers giant ants that swarmed about for an hour before leaving a sudden stillness behind. The air was filled with the strong organic smell of the fresh-cut grass that stained Roy’s tennis shoes. It was the end of the day, the shadows of the trees growing across the house.

  Roy said, “I’m even afraid to go to sleep. It’s like …”

  “What?”

  “The dreams are getting more real.”

  “Than what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sure you don’t want a beer?” Sam had another one in his hand. The guy was always ready.

  Roy shrugged—why not?—and his friend went into the garden shed and found something to open the import with. In the shadows of the back of the structure a kitten mewled, its tiger stripes just visible in the twilight.

  “Come on, it’s okay,” Roy said.

  He put down the bowl of milk beside the food he’d brought out. The little cat took a tentative step forward, a step back, and then trotted up to the milk. Its brothers and sisters followed until the bowl was surrounded by whining kittens. The mother and father had kept their distance to begin with. They waited for Roy to leave before they would come to eat, but he was slowly gaining their trust.

  Sam came back out of the shed and handed Roy the bottle. Sam smiled at the kittens and retreated a few steps so he wouldn’t spook them.

  A month had passed since Roy came home, and it felt like house arrest. A month of working out all day with a parade of rehab specialists, making sure his body was connected into the central data collection. He was in better shape than ever before. He had run three miles on the treadmill this morning and barely broken a sweat.

  Between rehab and workout, he had taken to wandering on the beach and around the garden. It was on one of those rambles that he spotted the cats, behind the shed. None of them had a collar. If it were up to him, he’d bring them inside, have the whole gang of them crawling around over his head in the mornings. Penny hated cats even more than dogs. That wasn’t entirely fair—she was allergic. He should have just taken them up to the animal shelter, but right now he was enjoying them.

  He thought of his dog Leila the last time he saw her. He’d taken her for a walk and gotten impatient when she’d wanted to stop and sniff a lamppost. He wished he had just let her be. It was the first and only time he’d had a dog he could really call his own, and in hindsight, the experience was like no other. A fearless, uncompromising love that he missed more than he ever thought he could.

  Sam said, “What about volunteering at the Southampton Animal Shelter again? You used to love that.”

  “I don’t know anybody there anymore.” He had gone back, but the place just didn’t feel the same.

  “Did you think any more on what we talked about?” Sam asked.

  Roy looked down at the cats. Strays, but at least they had each other. “Yeah, I did. It makes sense, but I don’t think I want Penny coming. She seems to want to insert herself into everything.”

  “She’s just trying to help.”

  “I guess.”

  “Hey, I need to get going,” Sam said. “Give you a call later?”

  “Yeah.” Roy didn’t take his eyes off the kittens.

  “You take it easy.” His friend walked off across the back lawn, giving him a small wave goodbye.

  Roy sat cross-legged in the grass and gave the cats space. The mother and father joined the scrum around the bowls. They circled and rubbed against the others. They looked so happy together. They understood each other.

  “Hey, buddy, can you stop doing that?” His neighbor stood on his balcony. The people next door had just moved in, and Roy hadn’t met them yet.

  Roy waved back. “They’re hungry.”

  “I don’t want them around. They’re pissing in our shed. Can you not feed them?” The man waved dismissively and turned around to go back inside. “They need to be gotten rid of,” he said over his shoulder.

  What an asshole.

  * * *

  The rain hammered down.

  Roy’s eight-year-old body tensed.

  “Richard, hurry up!” his mother screamed from the veranda. “They’ll be soaked. We’ll be late for the show.”

  Everyone else called his father Dick. She was the only one who called him Richard.

  His dead father hunkered low, looked his son in the eye. “You ready?”

  Roy nodded. Small white rocks appeared at their feet. Covered everything, flattened the grass. The shush of the rain replaced with a clattering racket against the glass of the greenhouse.

  “That’s hail, Bucky.” His father always called him Bucky. “We’d better hurry. You first, I’ll follow.”

  The heavens ripped open in another flash.

  Roy shivered, his teeth chattering.

  He blinked, then looked around again.

  But now he was sitting in a seat.

  In a car.

  Rain drummed on the windshield.

  Dark.

 
The only illumination was from a streetlight forty feet away. The leather seat felt cold against the hand he had just put out to steady himself. The dream of his father faded. After a second, he clicked on the interior light and blinked again to clear his eyes. This was his Range Rover. The last thing he remembered was feeding the cats, but that had been when it was still light out. He was still wearing his tennis sneakers and jeans, the same shirt he had on before. But he was soaking wet. The clock on the dashboard said one fifteen. The middle of the night.

  Five hours missing. Maybe six?

  In the center console was his phone.

  He clicked it on, his mind still swimming. Penny had called him twice, but he hadn’t answered. No other calls or messages, incoming or outgoing. He clicked the map app. He was on Middle Country Road, just west of Calverton on the north side of Long Island. A fifty-minute drive.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  9

  “Careful of the ghost.”

  Officer Coleman stepped square in front of the East Hampton detective. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Woo, woo-oo-oo.” The jokester waved his hands in the air, miming an apparition, then chuckled as he reached out his hand.

  “Relax, Coleman,” Delta Devlin said, grinning. “That’s my nickname from the academy. ‘Ghost.’” She shook the man’s hand. “Nice to see you, too, Hulk.”

  “Still doing the law degree?” Detective Hogan shook her hand.

  “Almost done,” she replied.

  Twenty-seven-years old, four years on the job, and still not sure what she wanted to do with her life. Become a lawyer? Try for the FBI? She had just earned her detective badge—one of the youngest on Suffolk PD ever to manage it. Could she do it all? Her mother still wanted her to find a nice boy, settle down, and take up painting full time. Less chance of getting shot, Mom never tired of pointing out.

  Hogan said, “Nice to see you again, and best of luck.” He pushed his way out through the station’s double front doors.

  Coleman watched the guy jump down the front steps. “Ghost?”

  “’Cause I see things other people can’t.” After a week with her new partner, she was surprised this hadn’t come up sooner.