What the Dream Kept

What the Dream Kept

Eleven o'clock at night.

Fall wind came off the Hudson and worked at the rusted window frames on the second floor. The house in Milton held the cold.

I went through every room on the first floor.

I turned each lock down and dropped the iron bolts. The front door, the back door, the side door out to the weeds behind the house.

Metal seated into metal, and the sound carried through a house with nothing else in it.

I went down to the basement.

I picked up my father's old tape recorder, the one he had used for years to log my suggestion readings and the sounds I made while I was sleepwalking.

I carried it upstairs to his study and set it square in the middle of the desk, on the wood where the paint had come off.

Next to the recorder I put the small glass vial of clear liquid Ethan had set down in front of my shoe in the basement.

For the next two hours I sat in the chair and didn't move.

I kept my eyes on the vial.

It stood by itself under the yellow desk lamp.

I didn't open it.

I didn't put a finger on the cold glass.

The vial was two inches of glass with a black screw cap and no label on it. The lamp put a circle of light on the desk that took in the recorder, the vial, and about four inches of bare wood past them. The radiator in the study had been dead for years, so I kept my coat on. I worked my thumb back and forth along the split seam in the arm of the chair until the leather went warm under it.

Having it on the desk was an offer, aimed straight at the part of my life that had been sealed off all those years.

I was afraid of the chemical in the bottle, and more afraid of what it was holding for me.

Michael had been in the coma since a quarter to twelve that morning. At six I called Westchester State, and the woman in the ICU gave me two words, stable and unchanged, and told me to try again after seven in the morning. In my wallet was the reference number the county dispatcher had read out to me for the Calloway house, eight digits on the back of a gas receipt. No deputy had been out to Blackwood yet, and the girl in that house was 11.

I pulled out a large sheet of white paper and tapped the black fountain pen against the desk.

If my head went back into the fog after tonight...

If I woke up with nothing left of what Ethan had said in the basement...

I needed one piece of evidence in my own handwriting.

I wrote it out in large letters and bore down on the pen until the ink came through to the back of the page:

"Who was in the house?"

I folded the paper in half.

I taped it to the underside of the green desk lamp's base.

Then I lay down on the cracked leather sofa in the middle of the study.

I closed my eyes.

I started slowing my breathing.

One long breath in through the nose, held for three seconds, then let out slowly through my teeth.

The lucid dreaming technique.

The odd piece of nerve training I had worked out for myself over three years of high school.

The technique I never wrote down anywhere and never told anyone about: drilling the mind to catch itself in the middle of a dream, drilling the turn on the staircase while the nightmare was still running.

Thirty-one years ago I practiced it the way a lonely kid practices anything that gets the ghosts out of his sleep.

Thirty-one years later I was using the same technique to take my own life apart, one layer at a time.

My head began to float.

The quiet closed up around me.

The space between my breaths kept stretching, and then the study came apart into pieces of dark.

I was standing there.

On the seventh wooden step.

I knew where I was and I knew I was asleep. That had come to me a handful of times in high school, and every time the dream had cut out inside a second of it. Nothing cut. The dark held its shape, and the cold on my two wet knees came through exactly the way it always had.

The six fragments came back at once, in the order they always came in:

Fragment one: the yellow hallway light.

Weak yellow, swinging back and forth over the floor below.

Fragment two: the turned-up edge of the runner.

The faded dark red runner at the bottom of the stairs, plowed up into a long fold.

Fragment three: the dragging out of the dining room.

Something heavy, meat and bone, going slowly across the wood floor.

Fragment four: the taste of blood in my mouth.

Bitter and flat, coming up through my teeth while I chewed my own tongue apart to keep from making a sound.

Fragment five: my mother's hand on the far side of the doorframe.

White, the fingers curled a little, holding the wood trim of the dining room doorway before they let go.

Fragment six: both knees soaked.

Cold, all the way through the thin cloth of my pajama pants.

Every time, the dream had stopped at the sixth.

Every time, I had put my head down and run back up the stairs to get away from it.

That night I didn't run.

My mind held inside the dream.

I stopped on the seventh step.

Time came apart in there. One breath of mine ran the whole length of the dragging sound and had room left at the end of it. The grain in the seventh step was sharp enough to count, and so was the chipped paint on the baluster by my shoulder. The far end of the hallway had no detail in it, and the framed photographs down that wall were gray rectangles.

Thirty-one years later I put both feet flat on the wood and turned around.

And the line broke.

The seventh fragment came down.

I hadn't been hiding.

My 15-year-old body was sitting on the seventh step with both arms around its knees.

Fear hadn't pinned me there. I was sitting because my part of the work was already done.

There were no pry marks anywhere on the front door of the house in Milton.

The lock wasn't broken, the frame wasn't split, no burglar had worked the bolt and let himself in.

That door had been opened from the inside.

By me, 15 years old.

I came down the stairs in the middle of the night.

I pulled the big iron bolt back with my own hand and turned the knob and let the cold night into that airless house.

I opened the door for my brother.

For three years before that, through the small vent hole Ethan had chipped through the foundation wall with a broken stainless spoon, the two of us had talked without anyone knowing.

Through that gap, Ethan was the only one in the house who treated me like a person.

He didn't look at me like a number on a chart.

He didn't make me swallow yellow pills with nothing printed on them.

He didn't take my pulse or write down my brain readings every morning.

He listened to me talk about thin paperback detective novels, and he passed me pieces of honey cake he had stolen out of the kitchen.

The hole came through behind my father's workbench, in the alcove where the coal chute used to be, four inches across and two high at the floor line. I had to lie flat on the concrete to use it. In three years I never saw more of him than four fingers and part of a palm coming up into the light.

We worked out a schedule. Two knocks on the register in my bedroom floor meant the car was gone and we had 20 minutes. He asked me once what the maple in the front yard did in October, and I told him, and he made me go back and give the colors in order. After that he asked for it every fall.

On the night of October 17 that year, I opened the door because I believed I was getting my only brother out of a basement he had been in for eleven years.

Ethan didn't come in alone.

A second man came in behind him.

A man of 47 that night, 31 years younger than the one I had sat across from this fall.

He wore a gray overcoat and carried a small leather case.

He said good evening in a warm, level, educated voice, the voice I heard again 31 years later in an office at the Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation in Westchester that smelled like photographic fixer.

Dr. Kessler.

Ethan never touched them.

From the first minute of that night to the last, Ethan stood.

He stood next to the dining room doorway, thin inside a loose ash-gray work coat.

Once, while it was going on, he laid his right hand flat on the hall table next to the doorway. He left it there long enough for me to watch it, then lifted it straight up. The varnish on that table fogged under a palm and held the print for a good 10 seconds. There was nothing on it.

His hands hung at his sides.

He wasn't holding a weapon.

He didn't take one more step into the room.

Ethan watched.

His eyes, dark brown and close to black, were wide open, and the hallway bulb was sitting in them.

He didn't blink.

I counted, because counting was the only thing I had left to do. His eyes stayed open through 200 and open through the second 200. Somewhere after that I lost the number and started again at one.

He showed no fear and nothing like anger.

He watched all of it from somewhere outside it, and he never made a sound.

The work coat hung loose on him and I could follow the line of his chest against the doorframe. It moved twice in the time it took the dragging to cross the dining room floor and come back.

Kessler walked into the dining room.

I didn't see it happen.

A 15-year-old sitting with his head down on the stairs doesn't get to see that clearly.

I only heard it.

A wooden chair going into the brick wall, hard.

My father's breathing, broken up.

A sound closing off in my mother's throat.

On the hallway wall, in that yellow light, the shadows broke into pieces.

Kessler's shadow went long and came down over my father's.

Liquid hit the wall and ran down slowly onto the turned-up edge of the red runner.

My mother's hand came out past the dining room doorframe.

Her fingers took hold of the wood trim, shook hard, and let go.

All of it went on in the quiet of an operating room.

Kessler came out of the dining room.

He took a white handkerchief out of his overcoat pocket and cleaned the red off his fingers, one finger at a time.

He walked toward the stairs.

He stopped in front of me and went down on one knee on the wooden step where I was sitting.

He raised the white handkerchief.

He wiped a warm streak of blood off my left cheek.

He did it carefully, the way a father handles a kid who has come home late.

He reached into an inside pocket and took out a small syringe with a cloudy yellow liquid in it.

He tipped my head back.

The needle went into the soft skin behind my ear.

Kessler put his mouth next to my ear and spoke in the same warm voice:

"You'll forget, James."

He pushed the plunger, and the cold ran out along the nerve.

"But you'll write."

He smiled, and behind his glasses his eyes had the shine of a man who has just finished a piece of work.

"Your parents already did the hard part."

I came up out of it.

I was sitting on the sofa in the study and I wasn't steady.

My chest was working hard, the way it does when you come up from the bottom of a frozen lake.

The desk lamp was still putting out the same dull yellow.

The tape recorder sat where I had left it, not running.

Ethan's glass vial stood by itself.

The wet at both knees pulled me back into the room.

I looked down.

Not blood.

The cloth over both knees was soaked through with my own urine, still warm from the dream. At 15 I had been sitting in the same thing, with my parents' blood drying on everything else I had on.

My head was completely clear.

The fog that had been sitting there for 31 years blew out, and what it left behind was the whole picture.

Then the last of it came back, the last broken piece of October 17, and it came back exactly.

I remembered my own voice that night.

I hadn't screamed.

I hadn't called for help.

I hadn't begged Dr. Kessler to stop.

That night, with Kessler's needle behind my ear and the yellow light swinging in front of me, I turned my head toward the dining room doorway.

I looked into the dark brown eyes of my thin brother, standing in the dark with his hands at his sides.

And I said it, very quietly, in the broken hoarse voice of a 15-year-old:

"Ethan, don't."