What Dreams May Come (21 page)

“I want him back. I need him,” she said. “Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?”

I swallowed. My throat was dry; it hurt. My arm ached from the bites. I might as well be alive again. This level was so horribly close to life. And yet so horribly far, only racking sensations present, no compensations of any sort.

“Tell me about him,” I heard myself ask. I didn’t know why I said it. I was straining now. The effort grew more arduous with every passing moment.

She only wept.

“What did he look like?” I asked. Once again, I knew what I’d begun. What I didn’t know was if it would work. Why should it? Nothing else had.

Still, I went on. “Was he tall?” I asked.

She drew in shaking breath, fingering tears from her cheeks.

“Was he?”

She nodded jerkily.

“As tall as I am?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. A shuddering sob instead.

“I’m six foot two. Was he as tall as me?”

“Taller.” She pressed her lips together.

I ignored her reaction. “What color hair did he have?” I asked.

She rubbed her eyes.

“What color hair?”

“Go away,” she mumbled.

“I’m only trying to help.”

“I can’t be helped.” Through gritted teeth.

“Everybody can be helped,” I told her.

She looked at me, expressionless.

“If they ask,” I said.

She lowered her gaze. Had the significance of what I’d said reached her mind in any way at all?

I asked another question. “Was he blond?”

She nodded once.

“Like me?”

Her teeth clenched again. “No.”

I fought an overwhelming urge to give up, stand, walk out of the house, go back to Summerland and wait. It all seemed so utterly hopeless.

“What did he do?” I asked.

She had her eyes shut. Tears squeezed out from underneath the pressing lids and trickled down her pale cheeks.

“I heard he wrote for television.”

She mumbled something.

“Did he?”

“Yes.” Through gritted teeth again.

“I do too,” I said.

It seemed unbelievable to me that she could not see the connection. It was so incredibly obvious. Yet she didn’t. Never had the meaning of the phrase been so vivid to me: None so blind as those who will not see.

I wanted to leave But I couldn’t desert her. “Were his eyes green?” I asked, plodding on.

She nodded weakly.

“Mine are too,” I said.

No response.

I shuddered fitfully. “Ann, can’t you see who I am?” I pleaded.

She opened her eyes and, for another of those moments, I had the feeling that she recognized me. I tightened, leaning toward her.

Then she averted her face and I shuddered again. Dear God, was there no way in heaven or hell of reaching her?

She turned back quickly. “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded.

“I’m trying to convince you who I am.”

I waited for her inevitable question: Who are you? It never came. Instead, she slumped back on the sofa, closing her eyes, shaking her head in slow, weary turns from side to side.

“I have nothing,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to herself or me. “My husband’s gone. My children are grown. I’m all alone. Deserted. If I had the courage I’d kill myself.”

Her words horrified me. To have committed suicide and ended up in a place so dreadful that it made her think of committing suicide. A twisted, unrelenting reflection within a reflection.

“I feel so heavy,” she said. “So tired and heavy. I can barely lift my feet. I sleep and sleep but always wake exhausted. I feel empty. Hollow.”

Albert’s words returned to torment me. “What happens to suicides,” he’d said, “is that they have a feeling of being hollowed out. Their physical bodies have been prematurely eliminated, their etheric bodies filling the void. But those etheric bodies feel like empty shells for as long a time as their physical bodies were meant to live.”

It came to me, at that moment, why it had been impossible to reach her mind.

By placing herself in this spot, she had removed her mind from all positive memories. Her punishment—albeit self-inflicted—was to recall only the inimical things in her life. To view the world she remembered through a lens of total negativism. To never see light but only shadow.

“What is it like to be here?” I asked impulsively. There was a cold sensation in my stomach. I was starting to feel afraid.

Ann looked at me but seemed to gaze into the darkness of her thoughts as she answered. Speaking at length for the first time.

“I see but not clearly,” she said. “I hear but not clearly. Things happen that I can’t quite grasp. Understanding always seems a few scant inches from me. I can never reach it though. Everything is just beyond me. I feel angry for not seeing or hearing distinctly, for not understanding. Because I know it isn’t me that’s missing things. But that everything around me is vague and held those few, scant inches from my understanding. That I’m being fooled somehow. Tricked.

“Things happen right in front of me and I see them happen but I’m not sure I’m getting them even though it seems I am. There’s always something more going on that I can’t figure out. Something I keep missing even though I don’t know how I’m missing it or why.

“I keep trying to understand what’s happening but I can’t. Even now, as I speak to you, I feel as though I’m missing something. I tell myself that I’m all right, that everything around me is distorted. But, even as I’m thinking it, I get a premonition that it is me. That I’m having another nervous breakdown but can’t identify it this time because it’s all too subtle and beyond my comprehension.

“Everything eludes me. I can’t describe it any better. Just as nothing works in the house, nothing works in my mind either. I’m always confused, off center. I feel like my husband must have, in dreams he used to have.”

I found myself leaning toward her, anxious to capture every word she spoke.

“He’d be in New York City, for instance, and be unable to get in touch with me no matter how he tried. He’d talk with people and they’d seem to understand him and he’d seem to understand them. But nothing they’d say would work out. He’d dial telephones and get wrong numbers. He’d be unable to keep track of his belongings. He couldn’t remember where he was staying. He’d know he was in New York for a reason but couldn’t remember what the reason was. He’d know he didn’t have enough money to get back to California and all his credit cards were missing. He’d never be able to figure out what was going on. That’s how I feel.”

“How do you know this isn’t a dream then?” I asked. A glimmer.

“Because I see and hear things,” she answered. “I feel things.”

“You see and hear… you—feel in dreams too,” I replied. My mind was laboring but I sensed that there was something there. A connection.

“This isn’t a dream,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“It isn’t a dream.”

“It could be.”

“Why do you say that?” She sounded upset again.

“I’m trying to help you,” I said.

She answered, “I wish I could believe that.”

It seemed as though a faint light touched the shadows in my mind. She hadn’t believed me at all before. Now she was wishing she could believe. It was a small step but a step.

A new idea occurred; the first I’d had in a long time, I realized. Was something clearing in my mind? “My son, Richard, has been …” I paused, the word eluding me. “—looking into ESP,” I finished.

When I’d spoken his name, her face had tightened.

“He’s been talking to a psychic,” I said.

Again, the tension in her face. Was I harming her or helping? I didn’t know. But I had to go on.

“He’s come, after much thought, to believe—” I braced myself. “—that there’s life, after death.”

“That’s stupid,” she said immediately.

“No.” I shook my head. “No, he believes it. He feels there’s proof that survival exists.”

She shook her head but didn’t speak.

“He believes that murder is the worst crime anyone can commit,” I said. I looked directly into her eyes. “And suicide.”

She shuddered violently; tried to stand but didn’t have the strength and sank back down again. “I don’t see…” she said.

My mind felt clearer now. “He believes that the taking of life is reserved to God alone,” I told her.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked in a low, shaking voice. She trembled as she spoke, huddling against the sofa. Ginger was looking at her frightenedly, ears back. She knew something was wrong but couldn’t fathom what.

Again, I braced myself. “I’m telling you because my wife committed suicide,” I said. “She took an overdose of sleeping pills.”

That blank look crossing her eye again. For some reason, it lifted almost instantly as though she couldn’t manage to retain it. She shook her head. “I don’t believe…” she started. Her voice sounded feeble.

My mind felt clearer yet. “What bothers me is that Richard believes she still exists,” I said.

No sound. A shaking of her head.

“That she’s in a place not unlike our house,” I said. “But a gloomy, negative version of it. Everything depressing and cold. Not functioning. Dirty and disordered.”

Her head kept shaking. She mumbled inaudible words.

“I think he’s right,” I said. “I think that death is a continuation of life. That the person we are persists afterward.”

“No.” An escape of sound, like a stricken breath.

“Can’t you see?” I asked. “Your house was beautiful and warm and bright. Why should it be like this? Why?”

She kept drawing back. I knew she was terrified but had to continue. This was the first approach that had accomplished anything.

“Why should your house look so ugly?” I asked. “Does it make any sense? Why should the gas and electricity and water and telephone all be off? Is there any logic to that? Why should the lawns and bushes and trees all be dying? Why should the birds all be dying? Why shouldn’t it rain? Why should everything in your life go bad at the same time?”

Her voice was faint. I think she said, “Leave me alone.”

I kept it up. “Don’t you see that this house is only a replica of the home you knew? That you’re only here because you believe it’s real? Don’t you see you’re making this existence for yourself?”

She shook her head, looking like a panicked child.

“Can’t you understand why I’m telling you these things?” I said. “It’s not just that my children have the same names as yours. Not just that my wife has the same name as yours. Your children are my children. You are my wife. I’m not just a man who looks like your husband. I am your husband. We’ve survived—“

I broke off as she lurched to her feet. “Lies!” she shouted.

“No!” I jumped up. “No, Ann!”

“Lies!” she screamed at me. “There is no afterlife! There is only death!”

The battle ended

WE FACED EACH other, now, like gladiators on the sands of some mysterious arena. A struggle to the death, the strange thought came to me. Yet both of us were already dead. What was our struggle then?

I only knew that, if I failed to win it, both of us were lost.

“There’s no afterlife,” I began.

“None.” Glaring at me, almost cowing me with her defiance.

“Then I couldn’t know of anything that happened after my death.”

A moment’s confusion on her face before she muttered, scornfully, “Your death,”

“I say I’m Chris,” I told her.

“You’re—“

“Your husband Chris.”

“And I say you’re a fool for saying it.” Now she seemed to be regaining strength.

“Believe what you will,” I persisted. “But, whoever I am, I couldn’t know what happened to you after your husband died, could I? I mean details,” I added, cutting her off. “Could I?”

She looked at me suspiciously. I knew she wondered what I was getting at. I continued quickly to keep her off balance. “No, I couldn’t,” I answered myself. “You know I couldn’t. Because if I did—“

“What details?” she interrupted fiercely.

“Details like you and the children sitting in the front row of the church. Like someone touching your shoulder, making you start.”

I knew, from her reaction, that my opening move was a failure. Obviously, she didn’t remember my touch. She gazed at me with open contempt.

“Things like the house filled with people after the funeral,” I went on. “Richard serving drinks at the bar—“

“Do you think—?” she started.

“Your brother Bill there, Pat, your brother Phil, his wife and—“

“Is that what you call—?”

“You in the closed bedroom, lying on our bed, Ian sitting beside you, holding your hand.”

I knew I’d made a hit for she jerked as though I’d struck her. It was something she’d remember vividly, being a moment of sorrow. I was on safer ground now—unhappy ground but safer. “Ian saying, to you, that he knew it was insane but he felt that I was there with you.”

Ann began to shake.

“Your telling him: I know you want to help—“

She whispered something.

“What?”

She whispered it again. I still couldn’t hear. “What, Ann?”

“Leave me alone,” she told me in a rasping voice.

“You know I’m right,” I said. “You know I was there. Which proves—”

The filming across her eyes again. So fast it appeared almost physical. She turned her head away. “I wish it would rain,” she murmured.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” I demanded. “These things really happened. Didn’t they?”

She labored to her feet, looking groggy.

“Are you afraid to hear the truth?”

She sank back down. “What truth?” Her body jerked spasmodically. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s no afterlife?”

“No!” Her face gone rigid with fear and fury.

“Then why did you agree to a seance with Perry?”

She jerked again as though struck.

“He told you I was sitting by you in the cemetery,” I said. “I’ll tell you what he said, word for word. ‘I know how you feel, Mrs. Nielsen, but take my word for it. I see him right beside you. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt with short sleeves, blue checked slacks—’ “

“You’re lying. Lying.” Her voice was guttural, her teeth clenched tightly, her expression one of malignant wrath.