The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “But he was a fighter.”

  Roy had seen the same videos as Angel, of Jake Hawkins spattered with blood, beating the crap out of his opponents. There were things Jake’s wife didn’t know or couldn’t understand. Not the way Roy knew him. Felt him.

  “He had to make a living.”

  “There are other ways.”

  “What would you know?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I read about your family. How would you know what it means to struggle?”

  Roy’s eyes were still focused on the steaming kettle. He turned to face Hope. She was on the couch, still clutching her purse, but the plaintive fear in her face was replaced with something more defiant.

  “You’re right. I have no right to judge,” he said. “But my family came from pretty humble roots—and does this seem like a happy place I’m in? You think I’m not struggling?”

  Her gaze dropped, but the edge of defiance remained. She was a fighter, too. “I … this is …,” she stuttered.

  “You need to go.” A searing pain behind Roy’s eyes. “You don’t want to be part of this.”

  “I can stay. I want to help.”

  “You need to go.”

  * * *

  Roy sprinted the ten blocks to the corner of Second Street and Avenue B, where the Never Inn stood. He went up and down the street but couldn’t find it. It had disappeared.

  He checked his phone, did a search for the Never Inn, but came up empty.

  The place had never existed except in his mind.

  35

  “There are reported cases of transplant patients assuming characteristics of their donors,” Dr. Brixton said. “It’s common, in fact, though disputable. I’m afraid you are in somewhat rarefied territory. You are your own guinea pig.”

  In the dark corners of the room, the hot-water radiators grumbled as if struggling to shed some heat into the damp chill of the church basement. The Englishman’s gray wool sweater had a hole at the neckline, and Roy became obsessed with the idea of grabbing the errant thread and unraveling the whole thing.

  “Hallucinations, certainly. I’m not surprised,” Dr. Brixton continued. “Your mind has undergone considerable stress. Dementia. Psychosis. These are to be expected and even predicted in your case.”

  When Roy didn’t respond, Brixton added, “You should admit yourself to a facility. I’m being serious. Paranoia is another projected effect of your condition—a gradual blurring of reality. You are on a slippery slope, Mr. Roy.”

  Brixton had a habit of calling him this ever since Fatmata had written it on his name tag sticker in the first meeting. Roy hated it. He sat hunched on a folding metal chair in front of the doctor, one knee bouncing up and down.

  Roy asked, “How do I know if something is real or not?”

  The doctor bared his teeth as if he had bitten into something unpleasant.

  “Just give me something I can use,” Roy said. “Something practical.”

  “Well, a shared experience. Does someone else see it? Does something make sense in the wider context?”

  Roy hesitated, then reached into his backpack and pulled out Primrose’s earring. “Do you see this?”

  “A golden fish.”

  “So it’s real.”

  “Assuming I am real.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Roy muttered under his breath.

  “You see the problem,” Brixton said, “but I assure you, I am real.” He smiled. “What does that object in your hand signify to you?”

  Roy put the earring away. “What about the dreams? I dreamed of that little girl, and then I found her. Doesn’t that signify something? You said my body has two brains now. Is Jake talking to me?”

  “Let me ask you this. Did you want a family? Before the accident?”

  There was no use ducking it. “Sure, but my wife wasn’t ready.”

  “And your wife, Penny—did you feel close to her?”

  She cheated on us, said a voice in Roy’s head. “Not as much as I wanted to.”

  “And now,” Brixton said, “you have a woman who seems ready to give you unconditional love, beyond even any expectation. With a ready-made family.”

  “So you’re saying she might be a figment of my imagination?” He pulled from his pack the scrap of paper that Hope had written her cell phone number on. He had tried calling it already, twice, to be sure—and she had answered both times.

  “More a product of wishful thinking, perhaps, on your part and on hers. I’m not saying it isn’t true. I’m just saying to be careful.”

  “She said Jake was murdered.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t want to believe that her husband committed suicide. What are the odds that you really found your donor so quickly? And one almost next door? One with a beautiful woman as a wife, with the little girl of your dreams?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How many people were on that list I gave you?”

  “Twenty thousand, maybe more.”

  The doctor remained silent, but that sour look returned to his face.

  “The moles look the same,” Roy said. “On my body, from what I saw in the pictures.”

  “Did the wife inspect any birthmarks? Anything very specific?”

  “She said I smelled the same. Said she recognized his hands.” Roy held them up for the doctor to inspect.

  “What does Dr. Danesti say about all this?”

  “I’m staying away from him.”

  “And why is that?”

  The doctor’s face now had the obsequious expression Roy had seen on Primrose’s face when she was trying to psychoanalyze him. I thought you hated Danesti. Now you want me to bare my soul to him? But he remained silent.

  “I can see I’m not going to convince you,” Brixton said after a few seconds of silence. “Why don’t you go and talk to the only other person on this planet who shares your experience?”

  * * *

  The rest of the transplant support group sat in their chairs, back to their droning conversation. This was what they did on Friday nights?

  He paced in front of the coffee machine.

  Fedora stood next to him, inspecting the two jars marked “Clooney” and “Pitt” that Roy had just pulled from his backpack.

  Hope hadn’t asked for any of Jake’s possessions back when she left his apartment. Why was that? He stole them from her house, and yet, she left them all with him. It felt as if she was marking her territory, like leaving a toothbrush after a date.

  What did meeting her prove?

  That she didn’t know that her husband was a psychopath?

  “You know how much this would have been worth?” Fedora said. He held up the empty Clooney jar.

  “Just give me a second.” Roy pulled out his phone and called Angel.

  The detective answered right away. “Are you okay? I’ve been trying to call you all day.”

  “Angel, listen. I’m sorry about the other night.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  “Telling you to cancel the investigation. I still really need your help.”

  “I never leave anyone behind, bro. Don’t worry about it. But I’m going to send you something. You might want to sit down.”

  Roy didn’t bother looking for a chair.

  He paced past the coffee machine and turned and walked back again. His phone pinged with a text message. An image: two people, locked in an embrace. Kissing. He zoomed in on the image. It was his mother, much younger. The image looked scanned from a newspaper. Who was the man she was kissing? He zoomed in further.

  “That’s your friend, Samuel Phipps,” Angel said, his voice small and tinny through the microphone.

  Roy put the phone back to his ear. “That’s Sam?”

  “From the Saturday, July eighteenth, 1987, edit
ion of Page Six, the gossip and celebrity column. Looks like your mother and your friend had some benefits.”

  Roy was just nine years old when the picture was taken. His mother and father had been married for … fifteen years by then. He looked at the image again. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

  Angel had called six times already.

  “Are you sitting down?”

  “Sure.” Roy stopped pacing to refill his coffee cup. He hadn’t slept in two days.

  “I went and talked to that doctor, the one I mentioned? He’s in an old-age home in Queens, in his late eighties. Not quite all there, but he says he signed your birth certificate. Southampton General wasn’t built until two years after you were born. So I asked him how it was possible, if it was a mistake. I didn’t expect him to even remember, but he remembered you.”

  “Can we hurry this up?” Roy downed the cup of barely warm coffee in one gulp.

  “You sure you’re sitting down?”

  “Hey, man, you want some water?” Fedora asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  Roy thanked him and took the bottle but didn’t open it. “Angel, just spit it out.”

  “The old doctor said he didn’t care anymore. Said he was too old. He says your dad paid him to fake the birth certificate. I think maybe your mother didn’t give birth to you.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe a surrogate, in India. At least, that’s what this guy said.”

  Roy remembered his mother’s friends talking about using surrogates. Eden had subsidiary offices over there. “Are you serious?”

  “The old doc was a real hoarder. I got a picture and a name. Grainy and black-and-white. Adhira Achari, an Indian girl in Chennai. Except she must be in her sixties now. I don’t know, maybe this is nuts. This doctor has Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t even remember his own daughter when she—”

  “I need to see it.”

  Another ping on his phone. Another image. The Indian girl.

  Angel said, “Let’s meet. I’ll show you more and we can talk it out.”

  “I need to go somewhere first. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to look into LCT Capital,” Angel said. “That okay with you? Your friend Atticus? I’m going to look in his safe.”

  “Sure.” Roy felt the room wobbling. “I’ll call you later.” He hung up.

  His friend Fedora watched him. His lips pursed.

  “I can’t go out to Meatpacking,” Roy said.

  Fedora shrugged—no big deal. “Can I keep the jars?” When Roy nodded, Fedora added: “You should drink some water, my friend. You don’t look good.”

  * * *

  The taxi dropped Roy outside a multispired mansion on West Eighty-Seventh Street. The house was stately but decrepit looking. Its cornice gargoyles crouched between two of the four-story brownstones that were the signature architecture of the Upper West Side near Columbia University.

  He’d heard of these country homes built in the 1700s that had survived the Gilded Age housing boom in Manhattan, but he’d never seen one with his own eyes. A holdover from the old old money of New York, and now it was Shelby Sheffield’s home—the only other person on the planet who had undergone a body transplant and lived.

  None of the lights were on.

  The house looked dead.

  Even the streetlight out front was dark.

  Roy paid the taxi driver and walked up the stairs to the front door. Rang the doorbell. Waited.

  Sheffield hadn’t answered Roy’s first phone call an hour ago, but he rang back right away after Roy left a message explaining who he was. He said he’d been waiting for Roy to call him. That they were listening, that he couldn’t talk over the phone. He said to come over to his house right away.

  The taxi ride up from midtown, straight along Broadway, had taken on a cinematic feel, as if he were watching a movie with the colors too bright. Sitting in the back seat, he started to fall asleep, felt his eyes drooping, right up until the taxi driver was yelling at him. Telling him they had arrived.

  Was he sure he had the right address? The house was dark. Roy opened the bottle of water Fedora had given him, and took another sip, tried to wake himself up a bit.

  A creaking sound.

  Roy squinted into the darkness. Below the staircase, in the shadows, a hand beckoned.

  “Come on, hurry!” Shelby Sheffield said.

  * * *

  “Can I turn the lights on?” Roy asked.

  “I’ve disconnected the power,” Shelby answered.

  The man hung back in the gloom, hunched over. Two candles, burning on a wooden table covered in a thick layer of dust, illuminated a small patch of the damp basement. It smelled of earth, of worms, the sweetish whiff of rotting garbage.

  “Only one telephone, an old landline,” Shelby added. “But I keep it in the back. Under a lead box. I knew you were going to call. I’ve been waiting for you. For months. Years.”

  He didn’t look anything like the man Roy had seen in the pictures.

  Shelby Sheffield had been the head of the International Monetary Fund, a celebrated banker and manager of a billion-dollar hedge fund in the nineties. In his pictures, he had been square-jawed, with a full head of natural black hair.

  Even in the videos of Sheffield leaving Eden almost a year and a half before, the banker had looked impressive. Seventy-four years old, but the media said he looked more like fifty. The creature before Roy now looked about the same age as this eighteenth-century house. Thin, greasy hair dangling from his pallid scalp. Folds of skin drooping from his cheeks. Open, festering sores.

  Roy had forgotten why he came. He took another sip of the bottle of water in his hand. “I wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “And I have the answers,” Shelby hissed.

  The candle flames seemed to sparkle in purples and golds, the colors bending the dim outlines of the walls. Shelby moved toward Roy, his face fully illuminated for the first time. Roy recognized the staple scars ringing the neck, the same as his. He put a hat on. It looked like tinfoil. At his temples were jagged marks in the skin, the wounds barely healed. He had dug out the implants.

  Shelby’s eyes were wide.

  “The vibrations—they’re tuning into my mind.” Shelby adjusted the crinkled aluminum foil covering his head. “You must feel them, too. That’s why I stay underground.”

  “What do you know about Dr. Danesti?” Roy asked. “Where does he get his money?”

  He felt his eyes drooping despite a growing fear of the person in front of him. Who left him like this? The man was stick thin. Someone should put this thing out of its misery, said a voice in Roy’s head. It would be a service.

  “Ah, yes, yes, the good doctor Nicolae Danesti. Saved my life, to turn it into this? Not one, but two.” Shelby took a step back into the shadows. “Have you talked to your body? To the person whose body you stole?”

  “Did you give Danesti money?” Roy said, ignoring Shelby’s question. “How much? Did he speak about me?”

  About me? The voice in Roy’s head became louder. Did he speak about who? You mean Jake? You mean me?

  “Don’t trust the doctor.” Shelby’s voice echoed in the darkness. “There is a connection between you and him. A hidden connection. I would kill him, if I were you. Before it’s too late. But don’t say I said that. Not me. Not me.”

  Time oozed to a crawl. The candle flames seemed to freeze in space. A face emerged from the darkness, but it wasn’t Shelby.

  It was Jake Hawkins, his face lit from below.

  “Have you talked to me, Roy?” Jake asked. “Because we have a lot to talk about.”

  36

  Shouts and hooting laughter from the streets below penetrated through the closed windows of Del’s loft. It was Friday night in Greenwich Village, but she and Coleman weren’t quite f
inished with their week. They had finally gotten the download of all the facial recognition hits from Esposito. She had to go back down to One Police Plaza and get the memory key physically.

  Esposito didn’t want to send this stuff over the wires. Those were his words exactly.

  She dropped her backpack by the entrance and fished in her pants pocket for the device Esposito had given her. She clicked on the lights. Coleman followed her up the stairs and into the loft, then began his regular inspection of her paintings. He went to the newest first, just by the front windows.

  He said, “You said your family is Creole but not Cajun? What’s the difference?”

  “‘Cajun’ is a contraction of ‘Acadian.’ They were French people kicked out of coastal areas up around Canada in a war in the 1750s. The Acadians came to Louisiana. That’s who Cajuns are.”

  Del sat down at a beaten-up wooden desk halfway down the loft. She opened her laptop. “‘Creole’ just means ‘pidgin,’ for lack of a better word. A blend. Original French settlers mixed with Africans, Cubans, Germans, and anybody else who got their asses over here back then. Basically a melting pot.”

  “I think I can see what you painted. It’s kinda greenish?” Coleman had his face a few inches from the painting at the front of the loft. He squinted.

  “Oh, shoot, I almost forgot.” Del got up from the desk. The laptop was still starting up. She walked over and switched off the main light.

  Coleman said, “What are you doing?”

  She clicked another switch, and a black light buzzed and then popped to life over their heads, dousing them in a faint blue glow. Speckles of white lint glowed bright on Coleman’s navy shirt in the darkness.

  “Wow,” her partner whispered.

  On the painting in front of them, a four-foot blood-red image glowed bright—an image of what looked like a scarecrow, but with crimson fire seeping down into the ground below it.

  “I grind up spinach in alcohol to extract the chlorophyll, then mix that with titanium oxide,” Del explained. “In normal light, to you, it still looks mostly white—but this black lamp emits long-wavelength ultraviolet, and the chlorophyll phosphoresces and glows red. So now you can sort of see what I see.”