Conjuring Dreams or Learning to Write by Writing

  "It's Me Again, Michael"

  "It's me again, Michael . . ."

  Michael started violently from his doze in the easy chair, shattering a fitful sleep as deep as any he'd been able to get since the accident. Now, he searched, wide-eyed with fear, the moon-silvered room, shaking, scared—of memories—of dreams.

  The dreams were the hardest to escape. They tortured his nights until he slept always on the edge of consciousness without waking. Dreams of a laughing wife and a dimpled babe, of a somber double funeral with mismatched coffins, of reaching for a strident phone

  (it never rang)

  only to hear his life shatter in two sentences. "No, Mr. West, this is not a joke. Your wife and child are dead." Worse still were the dreams he couldn't remember, that jerked him awake, wet with dread of a horror he couldn't describe, couldn't quite see. He knew they had to do with the accident

  (murder)

  but somehow they frightened him more because he couldn't remember, because they skirted his touch, teasing just barely beyond his memory—because there was an ominous deliberate horror there not in his other dreams.

  The daytime memories, too, were near inescapable. They disquieted days already filled too full with exhaustion, sorrow, overwork. The more tired and depressed he grew, the harder to push them away until it became only a futile effort on his part.

  He tried pushing now, but it was only a token resistance. Resigned, he closed his eyes and waited for the pain all over again. This time, his mind surprised him, flying back much further than six weeks, scrolling back to when he was a child, a fanciful child . . . who heard a voice in the night.

  He couldn't have been more than six years old when he heard it the very first

  (second)

  time, just a raspy thread of sound, surely not enough to wake a child notorious for sound sleep. It was a hoarse whisper, undoubtedly from his dreams, but it seemed to slither through the still air of the toy-filled room dimly lit with the orange nightlight—a dim room but light enough to see its emptiness of anything . . . alive.

  "It's me again, Michael."

  Logic and empty rooms don't apply to six-year-olds. Terrified, he had sat up in bed, screaming and sobbing, listening for the sounds of his parents' feet, hearing instead the soft sound of Laura, the babysitter, coming to comfort him. His parents were still away when he went back to sleep, comforted by Laura's gentle voice.

  When he woke up, he was told they would be away forever. No one really told him what happened—how it happened—but he found out the way most kids find out what no one wants them to know. They just keep their mouths shut until they're forgotten or until some grown-up thinks their attention has wandered. He knew—all about a new Mercedes stalling on the train tracks, how the engineer never saw them until the train made contact, how the driver in the car behind his parents saw them pounding, pleading, pounding to get out—and couldn't.

  ("It's me again, Michael")

  Sometimes, he thought he knew more than the grownups told him. Even before he heard the details, he could close his eyes and see his parents, locked in, faces distorted as they pressed against the glass, the tears in his mother's blue blue the eyes, the terror on his father's face, all bleached nearly white in the glare of the train's headlight.

  It was one of those freak accidents,

  (murders)

  like when his sister fell off the balcony when he was two. He was really too young to remember, one would think, but he could still recall the dull thump she made as she hit the ground, the ruined smile

  (grimace)

  of broken teeth frozen on her face as she stared sightlessly at him from the other side of the screen door. A tragic accident. The dreams where she is pushed, protesting, her arms fruitlessly pin wheeling as she is propelled over the edge, they were just dreams, just the imaginings of a fanciful child trying to find explanations for first one accident and then another. Mishaps

  (youknewyouknewyouknew—You heard the voice then, too)

  there were no answers for. What he had dreamed were coincidences dredged up from childish folly by his most recent tragedy—another freakish accident

  (murder)

  that killed his Sarah and little Bobby. No one can make a plane nosedive into the Atlantic. No survivors. A freak accident.

  It was just a touch of childish imagination that made him half-suspect

  (know)

  that something else had woken him in terror that night, sent him reaching for the phone before it had had a chance to scream. A harsh voice, but quiet:

  "It's me again, Michael."

  "It's just a dream!" Michael shouted to the moonlit room, but the room was empty. He shook his head and settled himself back into his recliner, forcing himself to breathe normally again. In only moments, he began to doze, his mind musing, chuckling nervously at his own silliness, sorrowed at the memory of his loss—all his losses. His mind whispered soothingly that it didn't matter. There was no one left.

  "It's me again, Michael."

  Somehow, he wasn't surprised, so he just lay there, awake, eyes closed, afraid to look at what had come for him at last. There was no one else left.

  "It's me again, Michael. It's me."

  Michael opened his eyes. Of course it was.