Death Trance

by R. D. Zimmerman

  Trance. It was coming. Crawling through my skull, into my mind. And my feet and hands, too. I could feel it there, eating from the outside, nibbling in. Now that I sensed it, I knew it was going to be great. Inner harmony. Hypnosis. I could be addicted to this, I remembered.

  “You're falling,” chanted Sister, riding my thoughts and brain waves. “And then all of a sudden… whoosh, a great net appears and catches you. Next you realize you're rising. Being lifted up.”

  I felt a great swirl of air blow through the open doors and wrap around and lift me. Yes. Up. I was rising into the air. In blackness. In darkness. Lifting right off that leather recliner that dear Sister had imported from the Big City. I'm rising, I thought. I'm going up. Higher. Lighter. Lighter into light. Yes, here it was: three.

  An enormous rush of tingles surged through me. Oh. This was good. No, great. I saw myself floating into the air, magically and wonderfully. There I was now in sunshine. Secure but gone. Very gone.

  From outside, from somewhere close but at the same time far away, a voice called, “Alex, you're there now, aren't you?”

  Chapter 3

  “No shit,” I called out of my trance.

  “I thought so.”

  “And how.”

  I sensed I was on some sort of magic carpet, flying out the French doors of this third floor, out over the house, out over the lake. Blue lake. Blue cloud. Oh, this felt good. I hadn't felt so relaxed in months. Ripples of air. Swirls that held me. Massaged me. Comforted me.

  “Let loose of everything, Alex. Let yourself go,” called Maddy from back there, back on the other side.

  “Trust me, I'm gone.”

  “Don't worry. I'll make sure everything's all right.”

  “Who's worried?”

  I felt as if I were in a dream that I could control. A dream, that's what hypnosis was like. A dream that I could direct, and that I could talk from. I was in trance, as fully under as if I were in the deepest depths of sleep, yet I was also completely awake and aware. I could be under and communicate with the outside—sister Maddy, for one—at the same time. It was an extremely odd sensation, as if I'd opened some magical door in my mind and disappeared into a secret part of my being.

  In my trance, I felt myself sitting up and turning around. In my mind's eye, I saw myself way up there, in the sky. I looked back. There was the house with all its columns. So big and white. And there at the top, standing in the widow's walk, was my sister. Maddy. She was standing and waving. Looking at me. No wheelchair. No sunglasses. That's why she liked hypnosis, used it every day, for she could travel everywhere and see everything, both in my trances and hers.

  “Run with it,” she called, waving to me from the widow's walk.

  A swell of emotion erupted. Hypnosis did that to me. Made me free with my words and thoughts.

  “Maddy, I'm glad I'm here. I miss you. I don't like living in different places. We had a lot of fun growing up in Chicago, didn't we?”

  “Oh, yes. The best.”

  “I worry about you, you know,” I said, the truth serum of hypnosis pushing my concerns to the surface. “Do I need to worry about you? I do. A lot.” Especially since our father died and we'd had to put Mother in a home. “I feel guilty, too.”

  “Please don't, Alex.”

  “Why? I wonder why it wasn't me whose eyes went or who was hit by a bus. I mean, why didn't just one of those happen to me?”

  “God, then we'd have had a blind brother and a crippled sister, or vice versa. That would have been truly pathetic,” she said with a slight laugh. “No, Alex. You were meant for other things. Please don't worry. I'm not angry about any of it anymore and I've found an odd kind of happiness. I'm filthy rich, too, and I'm going to do some great things with that money. That's what I'm meant to do, that's my purpose. I might have a job for you, actually, if you're interested. Oh, and there's another matter I really do need your help on, but first things first. This is your trance.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  My trance. That was why I'd come to Madeline's island. Touch base here, fly away. I was a flier, not a digger. Diggers went deeper and deeper into trance. Burrowed themselves in darkness, dug all the way to China. Not me. I started in darkness, for sure, but then I launched myself, flew higher and higher. I loved that part. Going up and up. Now I was up in the clouds. Cool, white, fluffy clouds. I'd come to Maddy's so she could launch me, so I could…

  “Oh, I know why I wanted to be hypnotized,” I said, my voice suddenly flat with sadness. “Toni. Do you remember her? She was from Chicago and she came up to Minneapolis and she was murdered.”

  “I know. She was a very dear friend of yours.”

  “It was awful.” The words bunched up in my throat. “The… the police still can't figure it out, and I keep thinking there's something I know. Some clue. I was there, you know. The night she was murdered. I tried to help, to save her, but…”

  “So what do you think; is there something you know that would help solve her murder? Is there something buried in your subconscious?”

  It was clear to me, perfectly, brilliantly so. “Yes.”

  “What is it, then, that you know?”

  “I'm not sure. But it's there, and it's the key, that's what I keep tripping on. This key. It's like it's right down at my feet, right in the grass, and if I can find it, then I'll be able to unlock the mystery of Toni's death.”

  “Of course. So are you ready to recapture time? Would you like to do an age regression?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.” I paused, momentarily lost myself in remorse. “I had to let go of Toni years ago. She didn't want to go out with me anymore. I did my best, but I don't think I ever really got over her, and now I can't get over her death. Not until I understand it.”

  “Not until you make sense of it.”

  “Right.”

  We'd talked about this on the phone. I'd called and told Maddy how I was all screwed up over Toni, kicking myself for what I hadn't done the night she was killed, beating myself for what I could have done. And knowing after the fact that I knew there was something I'd seen along the way. That key.

  So Maddy had suggested an age regression. Not a big one, not a leap of years back to my youth or to a previous life or anything like that. But just back a few months to late April. Back to that week when Toni had come up from Chicago looking for her sister. My doorbell had rung, and there she was. Toni, whom I hadn't seen for almost ten years.

  “In an age regression,” prompted Maddy, “you'll be able to go back and look at what happened. It's like a film that you can play again and again. At points you'll be able to speed it up. At other times, you'll be able to slow it down and look more carefully for what you might have missed the first time.”

  That was what I had to do, of course. Replay the film of that week, scour my memory for what I knew but didn't know about Toni's death.

  “So I need to go back. But where do I start?”

  “Just let the story come.”

  “Well, it started when Toni just showed up on my doorstep.”

  “Good.” Big Sister breathed in, out. In, out. “It all happened not very long ago. Just a few months. And it's all in your memory still. So just let yourself go back. Imagine yourself at the top of an escalator.”

  I was up there in the clouds, and all of a sudden I heard a big whoosh and then right before me a door opened and there was an escalator. Weird. An escalator in the heavens. Leading down. But there it was, all shiny. I peered down it.

  “Do you see the escalator, Alex?”

  “Yes. It's right in front of me.”

  “Good. Now step on it. I'm going to count from one down to ten. When I reach ten, you'll be back there, back then.”

  Oh, I get it, I thought. It wasn't an escalator leading down somewhere. But an escalator leading back in time.

  “One. You're stepping onto the escalator.”

  And I was. Yes, one. Yes, back. There I was yesterday washing my clothes, packing. Wondering about M
addy. Worrying about her. Would she ever marry now? Find someone? Probably not. There probably wouldn't be any grandkids to please our mother—I wasn't making great progress toward reproduction! Then again, grandkids… Mother barely remembered that she had her own children, so grandchildren might be too difficult a concept for her.

  “Two. Let time go backward, carrying you back with it.”

  I mumbled, “Like I said, it started when Toni came to Minneapolis.”

  “Just let that scene play. Three. You have that power, Alex.”

  Smoothly, Maddy did the count, going back through the numbers, carrying me deeper into my trance, transporting me back into time. It all started back then, not long after Liz died. That's what brought Toni to Minneapolis from Chicago. Her little sister, found drowned in the Mississippi.

  And by the time Maddy had counted down to seven, then eight, there was a faint ring.

  “There. Do you hear it, Maddy, the doorbell?” I asked.

  “Tell me about it. Just drift back into time. You're getting closer to the bottom of that escalator. Nine. And…”

  “It was Sunday afternoon, and I was getting ready to go out for a bike ride and… and…”

  “Go on, Alex. Let yourself re-create that scene. You can do that. You can do that so you can better understand what happened to Toni.” Deep breath. Pinch of lips. Exhale. “You were getting ready to go out and then your doorbell rang… and then: ten.”

  Chapter 4

  The thing went: wheeeeeee! And again, but more deranged and lots longer: wheeeeeeeeeeee!

  God, I hated my doorbell, the intercom one that rang from the lobby downstairs. It was so damned shrill, and when I heard it I was tempted not to answer. Probably some kid selling candy; I mean, I wasn't against camp or anything, just…Or someone collecting signatures, trying to shut down the garbage burner. I was in my Lycra bike shorts, the skin-tight ones, and a blue T-shirt, and I was all set to go out. Bike ride. Around the lakes, three of them. Ten point four miles. That was the Sunday afternoon I wanted to set in motion. It was really the first warm Sunday of the year; the snow had been gone just a few weeks, the paths had dried, the leaves were ready to burst. So what kind of gearhead—which I was, to be sure, for I'd turned my second bedroom into a garage/repair shop for my three bikes—wouldn't want to be out?

  The stuck-piglike intercom squealed again. Shrieked: wheeeeeeeeee! And I stood in the hall of my apartment, thought about sneaking down the back stairs and out the back door. Escape. For some reason that's all I could think. It flashed through my head: Don't answer the stupid door.

  “But you did, Alex, didn't you?”

  Yes, I thought better of it, realized I couldn't sneak away. It might be a friend. It probably was. Perhaps it was one of the Larses—only in Minnesota could you have not one but two friends with such a Scando name—who'd stopped by on his bike, curious whether I wanted to go for a ride. That's why I went to the intercom, pressed the button, felt as if I was throwing the switch of an electric chair.

  “Hi, who's there?” I called into the box on the wall.

  Pause from below. Then: “Toni.”

  My eyes opened wide. I took a step back. Toni? Of course, it was that Toni. I didn't know any others. And of course she was just walking back into my life. Hadn't I known she would? Hadn't I been waiting all these ten or twelve years or whatever for this?

  Still I couldn't speak, didn't even know what to do. An old scene popped through my head. I was with a friend in New York, we went to lunch, and who do we sit next to in the restaurant but her favorite rock star, her idol of idols, Sting. My friend, Patti, who had searched the streets of NYC for years for him, who had rehearsed her speech (“Congratulations on your baby, Sting”), and who was never without a word, was suddenly speechless, mouth paralyzed, couldn't eat or say a thing, so I sat there for twenty minutes talking about garage door openers until Sting got up and left, after which Patti snatched the uneaten muffin from his plate and crammed it forcefully into her mouth, gummy wrapper and all, and then, with the mouth working again—horribly full of gooey bran and raisins and paper—Patti confessed: “I didn't know what to say, his baby's not a baby anymore!”

  It was the same with me. While Patti had correctly sensed her future and that one day she would encounter Sting, so had I seen in my heart of hearts that Toni would drop again into my life. And like Patti, my opening line, recited backwards and forwards for years, was now outdated: “How's the residency going?” I had originally planned to ask her about that because that's why she broke off with me. Her medical career. Consuming. Or so she claimed and I had never believed. That was an excuse. There was something more, I was quite sure. An affair with another med student?

  But asking about her residency was vapid and stupid because Toni, after all, had to have been a full-fledged practicing physician, an internist in Chicago, for at least eight years now. My premonition of seeing her once again had been correct, only off by about a decade. So there was no way I was going to press the SPEAK button and ask through the little intercom box, “Hiya, Toni, how's the residency going?”

  My mind was as empty as if I'd had electric shock therapy; the only thing I could do was press the other button on the box, the one marked DOOR, which I did, thereby buzzing Antoinette Domingo back into my life.

  Even then I knew it was a mistake.

  My shrink—the one I'd seen some six years back when I was trying to come to terms with Dad's death in a plane wreck—had said forget about Toni, move on. But of course I'd always been eager to move backward, for her, for Toni. And as I pressed the button, allowed Dr. Antoinette Domingo reentry, I had this dark sense. This future sense. This notion that I was doing something that would render harm upon us both.

  So I just stood there in the long, narrow hall of my condo. I opened the door just a crack, leaned against the dark oak woodwork that ran everywhere and for which I'd been willing to pay a premium. What a mistake—not the woodwork, but answering the door and letting her in.

  My heart swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank. Toni. Oh, shit. I should lock the door, run and charge out the back, hop on my bike, and pedal away as fast as I could. Right, I thought, I must do that, I should do that, because I knew—I knew, I knew, I knew—that one of us wouldn't survive this. Such was our relationship.

  “We can stop this anytime you like, Alex. Just let me know,” called a protective voice.

  Of course I couldn't stop myself. I had to see Toni. Just one more glimpse. One more encounter. Something I had to seize because if I didn't I'd never see her again. Of that I was certain.

  As I feebly reached for the door, I heard her quiet steps padding up the stairs. The stairs were wood all the way up to the third floor. No elevator. A three-story walk-up, and Toni was winding her way up, a few floorboards moaning beneath her lithe step. Before I even saw her, I was hooked by the sound of her. I stood there and stood there, leaning against the woodwork, hearing over the thump of my heart the sound grow more and more real. I bowed my head. Looked at my hardwood floor for some meaning in all of this. Oh, shit, what was I doing? Why was I making this stupid mistake? That chapter was done, over. Or was it?

  I sensed a sudden presence, a lack of noise. Raised my head, tried to speak.

  I whispered, “Toni.”

  There was just a long slice of her there in the crack of the doorway, but I could tell. She hadn't really changed since the last time I'd seen her, when she and her friend, Laura, a nurse, had swept through our apartment and moved her things out in only an hour. The same narrow shoulders, narrow waist, wide, flat hips. She wasn't particularly tall, though her legs seemed generous in length.

  I took it all in, all those markers. Yes. Dark hair that was thick and long and cut with haphazard bangs; it was the same except for a tinge of a henna. Dark skin that tanned on a cloudy day. Thick eyebrows, nice and brown, as were the eyes themselves, and a beautiful, slender mouth and narrow chin. She wore a white underthing, over that a loose tan shirt tied abov
e those wonderful hips, faded jeans, and sawed-off cowboy boots, the kind missing the top part. White purse, too.

  But the eyes…So very red. Red? Wet?

  “Toni?”

  She stormed the door open like a strong gust, blew into my arms, and I folded myself around her like a tree embracing the wind. Just as naturally. Just as quickly. We fit perfectly, me not too much taller, her head fitting into the crook of my neck. All this as if she'd not been nearly five hundred miles down Highway 94 for ten years, but only down the street for a few minutes. She was shaking, and I pulled her close to me, pulled her as tightly as I could, felt my fingers in her ribs, my hands in that hair that I'd loved to have trail over my stomach. Toni… Toni… Toni… why had we ever stopped? Or had we? Clutching each other in vertical embrace, I wasn't sure we had ever quit. Time seemed arbitrary. This was the way we'd been, the way we'd always be.

  Then I heard a slurp, a good gooey one, and then I felt the wetness, on my neck. God, those were tears. She was crying. For me? No, I wasn't so vain or that stupid. Tears of joy didn't come this fast, this thick. I planted my lips on her forehead, kissed her through her bangs. She raised her head, squeezed me, clutched me. And I kissed one wet cheek, then the other. Our lips met, brushed, but she turned, buried her face back in my neck before more was consummated.

  She said, “Don't let go, Alex.”

  What an opening line to a heartsick old boyfriend, so I clutched back. It was great, this swell of emotion sweeping me back to some wonderful times. I would have stayed there, too, for a long, long time had she not started shaking, then sobbing so. Toni? I rubbed her back, breathed in the sweet, soft smell of her skin and hair. Toni?

  “What is it, what's the matter, what happened?” I asked.

  She sniffled, then choked on a word. She tried again but it came out garbled. My God, what was it?

  Finally, Toni managed: “My sister… my sister Liz. She's… she's dead.”

  Liz? The last I'd heard, Toni's kid sister was a high school senior bent on going to school in the Northwest. So now she was dead? How terrible. A cute kid, that's what I remembered. Confused but cute and likable. What, however, did any of this have to do with Minneapolis, why the hell had that sent Toni into my arms, and why the hell was she blurting all this out to me, the chump she'd said she never wanted to see again?