The Between (6 page)

“. . . James, J-A-M-E-S . . . Hilton, H-I-L-T-O-N, like the hotel . . .”

He hears unfamiliar voices but doesn’t know where they are coming from. He hears them behind this door, and then the next, and the next, a chorus of unhurried murmurs.

“. . . black male . . . three twelve ’56 . . . What was wrong with those fuck-up Fins today?. . . come mierda
. . .
Up by fourteen zip, and the fucking Colts . . . look at this face . . . Jesus . . . Is this one slice and dice or on ice? . . . Check the M.E.’s form . . . Shit, this face . . . I swear and be damned . . . You said you wanted a hamburger, right? . . . Very funny, you sick fuck
. . .”

No voices behind the next door. He tries the doorknob and it clicks open. But this is not his house. The door opens to a long, brightly lit hallway with more doors on either side. He has never been here before, so he knows he is lost.

The first door he tries gives in to him. He is in an immaculately clean men’s bathroom decorated with potted palms like the ones on his patio. The walls and floors are white and glistening. He walks to a mirror above one of the sinks; there are mirrors behind him as well, so his reflection stares back at him in an infinite assembly of Hiltons.

But no. They’re not identical, they’re not reflections. A line of men stand there with glowering eyes full of hate. Most of them are spattered in thick, congealed blood from head to foot, but Hilton recognizes his own face on each menacing figure. There are dozens of them. Hundreds.

An eerie rasp floats above him as their lips move simultaneously: “Your time is gone, too. Stop running, Hilton.” Hilton stands frozen, blinks to clear his eyes, and stares hard at himself in the mirror. Thank God. The other Hilton figures are gone.

But he has no mouth, he realizes as he glances back at his reflection. This is not his face after all. His brown eyes peer back at him from behind a mass of exposed white bone, caked pinkish brain tissue, and blood-soaked flaps of skin hanging from his jaw like a half-worn Halloween mask.

The sight makes him collapse to the cold floor. The smell of ammonia is nearly overpowering. He closes his eyes to wish himself out of this room, but when he opens them he is still on the floor beneath the sink. He weeps and tries to moan, but again there is no sound.

Behind the polished drainpipe he sees the scrawl of handwriting in black Magic Marker, lone nonsensical graffiti marring the clean wall:
unborn seeds of your insidious kind, of monkey-men.
The incomplete thought jars him, makes him shake. This time he is able to scream at last.

The dreams.

Hilton caught his breath, frozen in bed, listening to the erratic drumbeat pounding inside his chest. His mouth and throat were so dry he had to struggle to swallow. His sheets were wrapped tightly around his feet, binding him like ropes. He touched his face, and his fingertips glided against perspiration. His left cheek was also sore; he’d scratched his face in his sleep somehow. He had been holding his face, clinging to it, when he woke up. That much he remembered.

Dede was gone already, and the morning sun splayed brightly onto the floor from under the patio door’s closed Venetian blinds. Eight-thirty, he saw after glancing at the bold red numerals on his digital clock. Of course she was gone. She began prosecuting cases at nine most mornings, and her routine wasn’t likely to change even after her swearing-in ceremony in January. Dede always joked that as a judge, she wouldn’t hear any cases before noon.

The dreams.

With a start Hilton sat up and reached for a pen and a scrap of paper on his nightstand to take notes the way Raul had instructed him during therapy. Already, with each moment of consciousness and the clearing of his mind, the dream seemed as far away as forgotten childhood temper tantrums. He wrote one word,
Nana,
then stared at the word and crossed it out. He couldn’t be sure. That was speculation, not memory. He didn’t know what images the dream had brought him; he only knew he was still so shaken that his wrist felt weak even now as he tried to write.

Staring at his haggard face in the bathroom mirror, especially his deep brown eyes, Hilton felt a last shiver of uneasiness before he splashed himself with water. Anger and frustration grew in his belly. After confronting memories about Nana and her drowning death, he’d had five years of peaceful sleep. Why would the dreams come back now, when he thought he was free?

He’d been plagued with bad dreams since childhood. Hilton’s earliest memories of his life with the Jameses, once he moved in with them in Miami’s neat, middle-class black neighborhood of Richmond Heights, was Mrs. James in curlers and her pink housecoat, sitting on the edge of his bed, applying a cold towel to his head and telling him to try to sleep, that she’d keep the dreams away. But she couldn’t.

His screams woke up the household. The dreams were at their worst in the beginning, when Nana’s death and his living arrangement with these kind strangers in their seemingly palatial home were still new and unfamiliar. His night visitors came in earnest in March, right before his birthday. Bedtime was an ominous thing to Hilton as a child, and not much more welcome when he reached adulthood and no longer believed in vengeful creatures under his bed with gleaming red eyes and an appetite for black children.

In college, he tried friends’ tranquilizers and sleeping pills, which only made his dreams worse. He felt more trapped than before, his dreams playing before him unfettered in drug-enhanced colors. So he relied on avoiding sleep, using coffee and NoDoz to force himself to stay awake working on papers or watching vintage late-night television programs like “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners” until his eyelids flickered in a half-sleeping state that left him exhausted by morning but at least allowed him to rest without dreams.

He could never remember them. Sometimes he’d have a feeling of déjà vu during the day, but no solid memories. He mentioned the dreams to Raul Puerta when his individual therapy began after three months of marriage counseling, and the psychologist was fascinated. He was a dream buff, he said.

“Your unconscious is speaking to you in a language you cannot understand,” Puerta said with his deliberate accent, which sounded almost lyrical to Hilton after the passage of time. “As soon as you wake up, write down what you can remember about them, anything at all.”

This exercise was a failure until that March, near his birthday, when the dreams increased in frequency and intensity. He began to wake up to find his own handwriting scrawled on the notepad beside him, notes written hastily before he blinked to full wakefulness. Usually, he had written one or two words:
Choking. Water. Running.
Then he saw a new word:
Nana.
When he read it, he nearly dropped the notebook.

“What is this Nana?” Puerta asked during Hilton’s excited telephone call, which caught the therapist having his early-morning
cafe con ieche
at his desk before his first client arrived.

“That’s what I used to call my grandmother. I haven’t thought about that term in years. The Jameses always called her Grandma Kelly, so I did too. Now, all of a sudden, this word pops back.”

“Do you remember the dream?”

“No, no, of course not. But seeing this paper made me remember something. I think . . . I think that when I was young, I was afraid of her.”

“Did she beat you? Mistreat you?”

“Nothing like that. It was a childish fear, a sinister fear. I’m not sure why. I think it had something to do with sleeping. Maybe it’s just Nana in my dreams, coming back. And I remember something else about her.”

“Go on. No need for suspense.”

“I think Nana used to have bad dreams too.”

It wasn’t much, but to Hilton, whose memories before his life with the Jameses had become so fuzzy they were nearly nonexistent, it was a breakthrough. He was so excited that day, he could barely concentrate at work. He couldn’t understand why Raul insisted on waiting another two full days until their scheduled appointment to talk it out. Hilton had begun to rely on his therapy, he realized. And maybe it was finally beginning to make a difference.

The road was not as easy as he had hoped, however. After his initial flashes of Nana’s memory, the bulk of her remained unfocused. He could frame her face a bit; the straight white hair (the Jameses had told him she was half Seminole), her jowls, her skin so leathery and etched with lines, so different from his. But there was little else, and the more difficult the memories were to grasp, the more convinced he was that Nana held secrets that could unlock some of his.

After a month or so, Puerta suggested hypnosis, and Hilton was skeptical. “What are you going to do, wave your wrist-watch in front of my face?” he asked.

“No, I don’t need props,” Puerta said. “This is a hobby of mine. I can induce a hypnotic trance with my voice alone. If you are indeed blocking as much as you say, hypnosis might help. We may also see if it can help you remember your dreams.”

Hilton hesitated, telling him he would think about it until their next session. As much as he wanted to remember the woman who had raised him until she died saving his life, he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember his dreams. Their clutch on him seemed to transcend his sleeping state, bringing fears he could nearly touch even while awake. On the worst nights, he would wake up and find he had soaked through his pajamas in a cold sweat. He’d been surrounded by sights, smells, and sounds that were so real they weren’t like dreams at all. He didn’t want to go back to that place under hypnosis or any other time, if he could help it.

The first time, he had trouble relaxing, so Raul couldn’t hypnotize him properly. The next couple of times, he couldn’t coax Hilton to recall any details about his dreams even in a hypnotic trance, although he’d dreamed each night before. Finally, while Hilton was under hypnosis, Raul asked him about Nana.

“She’s waiting for me,” Hilton had said. Listening to his own voice on Raul’s cassette player later, he marveled at how much he sounded like himself, yet he couldn’t recall their conversation.

“Where is she waiting?”

“At the house. We live on Douglass Road, and I’m late. She don’t like it when I be late.” (Hilton cringed, listening later. Under hypnosis, he’d lapsed into the childhood grammatical habits the Jameses worked diligently to pound out of his head. Instead of a professional Miami man, he was once again a countrified child).

“Tell me about Nana, Hilton.”

“She’s old.”

“What else?”

Long pause. “Wait, I’m ’a go find her. I think she’s in the kitchen. She always be in there cooking.”

“Well, then, go find her for me.”

Longer pause. On the cassette, Hilton heard his voice lower to nearly a hush. “She’s laying on the floor. She ain’t moving. Maybe she fainted, ’cause it’s so hot in here. I wonder how come it’s so hot in here.”

“Did Nana faint?” Raul asked. Hilton sucked in his breath hard but didn’t speak. “What’s wrong with Nana, Hilton?”

“Nana’s dead,” he said in a tight voice.

“Are you at the beach now?”

“No, in the kitchen. She on the floor, she ain’t moving. And when I touch her . . .”

“What happens when you touch her?” No answer. Raul waited a moment, then repeated the question patiently. “Tell me, Hilton.”

“She feel cold. Her skin feel cold, and hard. Her arm don’t move up when I pull on it. She don’t feel like Nana. She dead now. I got to go get help. Nana’s dead now. She dead.”

“Where can you get help?”

“I’m ’a run down the street, but ain’t nobody home. Nobody’s home but that mean man on the end who likes to beat on little kids, but I got to find somebody. So he comes with me. He comes with me when I say Nana dead.”

“What does he do?”

“He don’t do nothing.”

“Why not?” Raul asked him.

“Cause Nana ain’t dead no more.”

Raul clicked off the cassette and looked at Hilton, whose breaths were shallow after listening to his childhood memories recited back at him. This was a creepy feeling to him, tampering with his past, and he didn’t like it. The words on the tape chilled him, as though he’d awakened from one of his dreams.

“There’s more,” Raul said, “but nothing is very informative after this point. We can try it again some other time. I must say, your hypnotic recollection is remarkable. Do you remember these incidents now?”

Hilton shook his head. “Not yet. I do remember an old Korean War veteran down the street who used to beat kids with a switch for no reason, even if they just knocked on his door . . .” He paused. Where had that come from?

“I suspect that it will begin to come back to you,” Raul said, unable to conceal his satisfied smile at the session’s progress.

“That’s fine for you, man,” Hilton said, “but I’m not sure I want it to come back to me after hearing all that.”

“Oh, come now,” Raul coaxed. “A child’s misunderstanding. Your grandmother’s skin was probably clammy after she fainted, and you believed she was dead. It’s understandable you would be surprised to find her conscious when you returned. She then became a ghost to you, and perhaps that’s why you learned to fear her.”

Hilton’s fingertips tingled as though they were being dipped in icy water. He clamped back his thoughts because he didn’t know how they would sound to Raul: what he had felt with his child’s hands so long ago wasn’t clammy skin, it was flesh as lifeless as rubber. There had been no misunderstanding. Nana was dead that day. He’d known as a child, and he knew it now.

He understood then why he had buried her memory. He decided that although he would try to remember all he could about his childhood during his therapy, he would not agree to further hypnosis. It was best not to search for something he wasn’t prepared to find.

“Mr. James, we have a problem.”

This greeting had replaced good mornings at the Miami New Day Recovery Center when Hilton arrived each day. The center’s twenty-eight-bed expansion was a chaos of transferring addicts to new sleeping quarters and coordinating plans with the contractor, who was to begin work next week. All this, and the last grant from the city wouldn’t be approved until the next afternoon’s commission meeting. And Hilton had dealt with government enough to know never to count on cash until it was in the bank.