Incarnate (2 page)

“Dreaming ahead isn’t what counts,” Joyce said. “It’s preventing what we see that matters.”

“That’s what I meant I wished.”

But Joyce had already turned back to Guilda. “Have you any idea how it feels to see these things and not be able to do a blessed thing to change them? It’s worse than being paralyzed, it must be. It’s like being the only one who can see in a world full of blind people. It’s like seeing a child on the edge of a cliff and not being able to do anything because you’re too far away and the people who could save the child can’t see and won’t believe. And not just once, night after night, dream after dream. And every time it’s worse because you know nobody will listen.”

Danny was gazing at her as if she’d read his thoughts. Certainly she’d given voice to discouragements Molly hadn’t fully realized that she felt herself. That unresolved feeling in her mind was still there, distant and vague. If the others stopped talking she might be able to grasp it, and it seemed important that she should.

But Helen was trying to speak, a plump young woman perhaps still in her teens, whom Stuart’s gaze kept straying to: long black hair glossy as sealskin, eyes very dark in her pale oval face, curves filling her jeans and t-shirt, and Molly scoffed at herself for suffering a twinge of jealousy, as if Stuart’s opinion mattered. Joyce interrupted before Helen had got out a sentence. “You can tell us this much,” she said to Dr. Kent. “Have any of us had the same dreams?”

“It’s rather early to say,” Dr. Kent said and smiled at Joyce’s immediate fierce frown, “but there do seem to be suggestive similarities, yes.”

Perhaps their murmur of triumph drove Stuart away, through a pair of swing doors. Molly had joined in, but she was wondering which of her dreams someone else might have shared: her sailing ship as long as the horizon, her trying to sing “I’m only a cross-eyed octopus” to an auditorium full of priests, her endless clamber up a sloping roof in a blizzard to get to her parents’ bedroom? More likely it had been one of the dreams she had forgotten by now.

“Some people won’t believe you dream,” dark-eyed Helen said, now that she had the chance. “My husband won’t believe he does. It’s like he won’t admit to that part of himself. It’s very strange.”

“My Geoffrey has to believe in mine,” Joyce said. “Has to put up with them. Not that he can do anything about them, any more than I could.”

“David must be wondering how I’m getting on.” Helen sounded as if she hoped he was. “I wish I could call him. I know I can’t,” she said quickly as Dr. Kent made to speak. “He’ll just have to wonder a bit longer. Do him good. Keep him guessing.”

“I’d like to know how my Geoffrey’s coping. I can’t leave him with a can of beans unless I leave instructions with the opener. Men are such babies, all of them.”

“I think some people are afraid to think too much about their dreams,” Molly said, changing the subject for Danny’s sake. “I expect they feel they’re at the mercy of their dreams. We all are.” Certainly she felt at the mercy of the one she had forgotten; it made her feel ponderous and prickly and stupid. Just then Stuart wheeled in a trolley laden with food on molded plastic trays.

So there must be people in the long concrete building who she hadn’t seen, someone to cook and someone to read the scribbling of brain waves, perhaps, unless a computer took care of the latter. Stuart passed out trays and plastic cutlery, lingered beside Helen and then beside Molly.

Danny was peering suspiciously at his knife as Freda said, “Tell us about yourself, Molly. You haven’t had a chance.”

“I’m in my last year at university before I go out into the big wide world. I’d like to work in the media. I was working for a magazine when I heard about this.” No need to say it was a sexology magazine, it made her feel so stupid. Concocting readers’ letters had sounded like a fun way for her and Stephanie to spend the vacation, but two weeks of inventing variations had left Molly and her imagination exhausted. The day she’d found herself writing about buttered breadsticks she had known it was time to quit, even if she hadn’t seen the call for subjects for the Foundation for Applied Psychological Research. “I’d like to work somewhere,” she said, suddenly realizing, “that would give us a voice.”

Joyce was a nurse, Freda worked in a department store in Blackpool, Helen was at library school, Danny was a cinema projectionist and said so resentfully when Helen asked if he was a student too. Molly was surprised how happy she felt just to be with people like herself, people who didn’t regard her as a curiosity or an embarrassment. Her parents had always behaved as if it wasn’t quite nice of her to say that she’d dreamed last night of the morning’s news; even if it were true it was something you didn’t talk about, like her periods, and she had learned not to mention cither as she had ceased to be a child. Since then she’d seldom woken with that sense of having seen a photograph that was waiting to be taken, but perhaps now, as she (bund out about herself-— Now Stuart was stacking the scraped plastic trays and collecting the empty beakers, and all too soon Dr. Kent was saying, “I think it’s time to continue.”

They were standing up when Joyce demanded, “What was the idea of bringing us all together for tea?”

“Why, to see if meeting each other affects your dreaming.”

The others were heading for the bathrooms, Freda stooping a little, Danny brushing back his spiky hair that looked as if he kept losing his temper with it, Stuart watching Helen’s blue-jeaned bottom swaying. Molly glanced back at the circle of empty chairs, and suddenly she felt as if she’d dreamed the meeting. Had the photograph been taken without her noticing, or had it yet to be? For a moment she felt breathlessly apprehensive. She couldn’t tell Dr. Kent, for it was too late for her to know if she’d had the dream or was just imagining that she had. She trudged away to the bathrooms, to her room, back to bed.

She filled her tumbler with water from the jug on the bedside table and lay down, gazing at the microphone. Dr. Kent’s last words were troubling her somehow, mixed up with the dream she didn’t know if she had had and the distant frustration that had seemed, for a moment when Dr. Kent had finished speaking, close enough to grasp. There was no point in saying any of this to the microphone when it might not be switched on, but perhaps she could tell Stuart when he reached her on his rounds.

The thought of how he would react kept her quiet as he taped the wires to her skull. Damn his skepticism, he was here to listen. He was tucking in the sheet now, and she felt his hand under her breast through the mattress, as if he wore a huge clumsy glove. “Anything else I can do?” he said.

“You’ll be lucky.” He reminded her of the obscure contempt the sexology editor felt for his readers.

“Be like that, then.” He sounded offended. He gave her and the room a curt glance from the doorway before he closed the door.

She dragged her paperback
War and Peace
off the bedside table and tried to read. She didn’t feel like closing her eyes just yet. If the idea of dreaming had begun to make her uneasy, that was information too. Perhaps it was rather the thought of having to wake up at the end of every dream that was troubling her; she knew by now that she would. Soon all this would be over and she could write about it. Perhaps that might even help her get a job.

She took out her tasseled bookmark that was cracking the fat spine. “What did I come here for?” Rostov was wondering. “Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? When will all this end?” Not for another thousand pages at least, and the prospect made her eyelids droop. She closed the book on her finger so that she wouldn’t be tempted to give up entirely, and let her eyes close.

She felt Tolstoy settle beside her. She felt warm and safe, no longer troubled by frustration. Sleep must be the answer, and she hadn’t realized how much she needed it. Fish never sleep, she thought, sharks never dream, and wondered what these dreamy thoughts looked like as they swarmed along the wires, spiders of the mind, swarming out of the other rooms to their lair. Was anyone dreaming yet? What
did
Freda dream? It frustrated Molly not to know, but now she was drifting again, Little Nemo piloting the
Nautilus
deeper and deeper through the chambers of the subconscious but nobody was at the controls … little nobody … nobody in the passenger area with its pale green walls and its low chairs on the island of carpet … except that now something was: a circle of seated figures that were altogether too pink, that were turning their blank heads to her. She jerked awake and muttered a description to the microphone, though she wasn’t sure where her sleepy thoughts had turned into a dream. Usually she liked this state, the stream of thoughts and obscure correlations that reminded her of the pages she’d read of a digest of
Finnegans Wake,
but now it felt uncontrollable, sweeping her toward the precipice of dreams. There was nothing to fear, everyone dreamed, but why did they? Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head whenever I feel afraid I hold my head whenever I feel afraid, over and over an’ dover Andover, an Iron Age settlement near London, but she wasn’t sitting a history examination now, she was back in the sexology office and faking letters as fast as she could, for Danny Swain in stained trousers to collect. That woke her momentarily, wondering why she should have thought that was his name, but now she was in a lecture hall where Joyce was haranguing the audience while Dr. Kent heckled, shouting, “A blind man needs no crutch.” That seemed profoundly meaningful as Molly woke; she would have told the microphone except that she was sinking again into the dark, which seemed impatient now. It was all right, she had the microphone, she could keep in touch as she ventured into the dark.

She looked up as she took the first step. Either the walls met overhead, high up in the dark, or the sky was utterly lightless. Though the walls were full of windows, not a window was lit, and she couldn’t see a single face in the crowd she was struggling through. Their bodies felt puffy and yielding, they smelled of sodden musty cloth, but she could wake if she had to, if their hands should seize her and drag her back into the dark. Waking was the best means of escape, the only one—but suddenly she was out of the crowd, in a narrow street lit by lamps that dripped black rain. She was in front of a door.

She mustn’t go in. This was the photograph that was waiting to be taken, the red door where green paint showed through the top left-hand corner of the upper right-hand panel, the dog-faced knocker canted slightly to the left, a brass ring in its mouth. There were six doors in that house, but if there were more— She was shuddering and reaching for the microphone in the hope that telling it would help her understand why she was so afraid, and then she remembered that it could do much more: it would let her find her way back. She raised the microphone to her face and glanced back along the cord. It had snapped.

The frayed end lay in the gutter, the exposed wires twitching in the water that was streaming toward the drain. She Hung away the microphone, which struck the foot of a streetlamp with a hollow tinny sound. She couldn’t find her way back. There was only one way to go, for someone had opened the door.

She wanted to turn and run, it didn’t matter where. Worse than nightmare waited beyond the doorway. But the distant frustration was suddenly close, urging her forward, and when at last she managed to make her legs move she found she was stumbling into the house, along the hall, past the staircase where she didn’t dare look up. The knob of the door beyond the stairs felt like a lump of ice in her hand. When the door opened, it seemed to drag her into the room.

It was a back parlor. A tasseled lampshade turned the walls and floor-length curtains a smoky brown. Antimacas-sars drooped over the chairs and settee that huddled around a gas fire, its orange flames stuttering. China dolls lined up neatly, the tallest in the middle, on the mantelpiece beneath an oval mirror. The room was stifling, she could hardly breathe. Then she saw the figures in the room, and she couldn’t breathe at all.

They must be life-size dolls. What else could they be, with their blurred pink faces? But they were moving toward her, and so was the man who couldn’t close his eyes, another man with something nodding on his shoulder, and yet another who was armless, staggering about and crying at his incompleteness. Worse, she was moving toward them. She was suffocating with panic and the heat of the room, she would wake if only she could scream—and then she saw her terrified face in the oval mirror and realized that she could do neither. She had made things change at last, by going through the doorway of the house. The frustration that had urged her forward was satisfied, and now she knew that it hadn’t been hers, nor Joyce’s, nor anyone’s. For one appalling, endless moment, everything was clear: both what would happen, and what she would have to do to prevent it from happening.

Her convulsion tore all the wires off her skull. One adhesive pad pulled out several strands of hair. She was sitting upright in bed, staring at the pale green room, but she felt as if she hadn’t escaped the stifling brownish room. Her head was pounding, her whole body ached with jerking upright. She felt she was being dreamed.

She went stumbling toward the door, though she wasn’t sure which door it was. Someone was crying out, but it was so distant that she could hardly believe it was her voice or that anyone else could hear. She ought to have used the microphone to cry for help, but now she was at the door, clinging to the knob without knowing if she meant to turn it or to hold the door shut. If the bare green hall was out there it would be no relief, for it led to Joyce and the others. She didn’t know why that terrified her— she had already forgotten what the dream had revealed. She knew only that the door was opening as, too late, she struggled to hold it closed.

Stuart was there. Behind him she saw Dr. Kent, who looked baffled. Now that the door was open, Molly was able to distinguish that the cries weren’t her own after all. She couldn’t tell whose they were, which room they came from, but they sounded like the cries of someone unable to wake. At once she was sure that someone was still in the stifling brownish room.