Hilton felt dizzy under their stares, by the suddenness of the moment’s turn against him. He took a lurching step toward Kaya, who ran away from him into Dede’s waiting arms. “Stop it, Hilton,” Dede pleaded, clinging to Kaya. “Please stop. Please.”
I wasn’t going to hurt her, Hilton thought, wounded to his soul. Jesus. Why would I try to hurt her? He gave them both a baleful look, then he stumbled out of the family room through the hallway, grabbing his wallet and car keys from the table in the foyer. He could barely breathe, they’d hurt him so much with their fear. All of them.
Standing near the front door, he stared down the hallway at Jamil’s closed room and fought not to go there, sit on Jamil’s bed and try to fix everything. He could barely comprehend the idea that he was not free to go to his son’s room, that in Dede’s state she might actually call the police.
Hilton took one last glance at his serene living room, then fumbled with the doorknob to face the darkening skies outside.
CHAPTER 28
Screaming, Hilton finds himself flung inside a dance of bright, hungry flames. When he moves, the hissing fire licks at his face and bare chest. He bats at the blaze as though it is a cloud of marsh mosquitoes, spittle running down his chin.
Then he sees her.
She is thin, tall, with an angular neck and her chin held high as she stands motionless in the wall of fire, which does not seem to touch her. She is a young woman Hilton has never seen before, but instantly he divines everything about her: she speaks French and Creole, she was bom in Port-au-Prince, her name is Marguerite. She is beautiful and dark, and he longs to hug her like a sister. He wants to take her hand and run.
How is it she doesn’t writhe in the heat or feel the pain? The girl lowers her chin until her large brown eyes are staring at Hilton dead-on. She is weary, he sees. She is too tired even to scream.
“Your last death,” she says in a fractured whisper, “will come in a burst of flames. It’s not so difficult. Just watch.”
Then, slowly, she clasps her hands in front of her chest and begins to kneel. The flames seize her; first stripping away her shoulder-length hair, then feeding off of her dress and her flesh until she is so charred she begins to wither before him. Her eyes watch him, unblinking in the sockets of her bubbling skull.
“Come, Hilton,” she says.
CHAPTER 29
“La reina, Celia Cruz,” the radio announcer kept saying between salsa sets, and Hilton tried to invoke his sophomore-year Spanish to remember what the word meant. He passed five minutes drumming his fingers against his temple until it hit him: the queen. Relief washed through him like an elixir. The smallest victories were so important to him.
Raul hadn’t moved his Biscayne Boulevard office, though the neighborhood around it had grown more shabby in the years since Hilton last visited. He had plush carpeting now and central air conditioning instead of fans, but he was in the same building, playing the same Spanish-language radio station. Hilton flipped through the issues of Cosmopolitan in Spanish and Psychology Today on the magazine rack, simply waiting, as he had been for nearly two hours. All of the pages were a blur to him. The seats around him were empty, and he was alone except for Raul’s receptionist.
The door to Raul’s office opened, and a middle-aged woman wearing a black dress and veil, mourning clothes, walked out. Her face was nearly covered in liver spots. She seemed to take a long gaze at Hilton, then she said a few friendly words to the receptionist in Spanish, pausing to confirm her next appointment. Already, Hilton was on his feet.
“One moment, sir,” the receptionist said to him, looking annoyed. She didn’t know Hilton, and he’d been hounding her all morning. She finished her conversation with the woman in black, pointedly taking her time, then punched her speaker phone to buzz Raul on his intercom.
“Dr. Puerta, there’s a man here—”
“It’s lunchtime, Mercedes,” Raul’s voice came back.
The receptionist shrugged at Hilton. “I know. He wants to—”
“It’s me, Raul,” Hilton said, leaning over into the speaker.
“Hilton?” the voice crackled back. In an instant, Raul was standing in front of him, holding tightly to Hilton’s forearms as though he would kiss him, his expression overjoyed but cautious. “I’ve been trying to find you for three days. Come in.”
“Where’s the funeral?” Hilton asked, following Raul into his office, which now had walnut bookshelves stacked across the walls and gave the room an air of dignity that had been absent before. Hilton felt as though Raul were someone entirely different now; not the therapist he’d known, not the friend he’d been so at ease with.
“Mrs. Sanchez? She’s a widow. We’re doing grief-resolution therapy. You shouldn’t make fun. Grief is a monster many people lose their lives to.”
“Letting go . . .” Hilton mumbled.
“Exactly.”
“Believe me, I’m in no position to poke fun at anyone,” Hilton said dourly. He refused the coffee Raul offered him from the espresso machine on his desk and watched while Raul poured the thick, dark liquid into a nearly thimble-sized plastic cup for himself. As much as Raul tried to hide it, Hilton could see Raul was disturbed by his looks, and he couldn’t blame him. With his beard growing untrimmed and the swollen discoloration beneath his eyes, Hilton had barely recognized himself that morning when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. He’d been living at the Holiday Inn on South Dixie Highway, ten minutes from his home.
“So, compadre . . . how are you?” Raul asked.
“If you were looking for me, you must have some idea.”
Raul acknowledged him with a sheepish smile. “I tried to call you at home over the weekend, and I spoke to Dede at length. I’m very sorry, Hilton.”
Hilton blinked, staring out of the window at the vagrants and underdressed women passing outside. No one had offered him condolences until now because he’d avoided his friends, including Curt, and Raul’s words stung him anew with their finality. Then anger replaced his sadness. “I’m sure she told you I’ve turned into Jack Nicholson from The Shining.”
Raul hesitated. “Dede is in a lot of pain.”
“She can join the fucking club.”
“Tell me what happened, exactly.”
“If I do, you’ll take her side.”
“Look at me, Hilton,” Raul said, and Hilton gazed back at his friend’s soft eyes. “You know me better than that. Since when do I take sides? She’s very eager to find solutions. She said she’s willing to start counseling if you—”
“If I what? Commit myself to Bellevue?”
“It’s not like you to close your mind so, Hilton,” Raul said. Not fucking like him. It also wasn’t like him to carry on conversations with corpses. Between the look on Raul’s face and the ridiculous understatement he’d just made, Hilton couldn’t help laughing. He sank into his chair until he was slouching, the laughter was so deep and quenching.
Raul wasn’t smiling. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Hilton’s laughter stopped abruptly. “Because I needed a therapist,” Hilton said, glaring.
Raul lowered his eyes. “Touché. I deserved that, so I’ll accept your hostility. But I had no idea of the extent of this, Hilton. If I had, I would have behaved much differently. Whatever you need me for, I’m here for you now.”
Finally. Those were the words he’d craved to hear. “If I am cracking up, it’s because of my dreams. Hypnotize me. I need to remember, Raul.”
Raul sighed, distressed. He tasted his coffee in silence. “If not, I walk. It’s that simple,” Hilton said.
“Yes, yes,” Raul said. “All right. I can see you intend to make my work more uncomfortable than it is already. You want me to be your therapist, yet you diagnose yourself and offer your own treatment. You realize you’ve never been able to recollect the dreams under hypnosis before.”
“I realize that. Let’s go. I don’t care how long it takes.”
Raul
began to fumble with the cassette player he used to record his hypnosis sessions, and he pulled a small glistening boom box from under his desk. “You need to be relaxed.”
“I am relaxed. As relaxed as I’m going to be, wired on caffeine and sugar and getting no goddamn sleep.”
“Sit all the way back in your chair, and put your feet flat on the floor,” Raul said. He flipped on gliding, futuristic-sounding music at a barely audible level. “Allow your eyes to close.”
Relax. For an hour, they had little success. It’s not working, Hilton kept saying, but Raul pressed on with a patience that softened Hilton’s mood. Raul told Hilton to imagine himself at the top of a steep mountain, and with each step down he felt ten times more relaxed. Together, they breathed deeply. In and out, in and out. Bit by bit, Hilton felt himself letting go.
“Did you dream last night, Hilton?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what happened in the dream.”
Complete silence, Hilton would hear on Raul’s recording when they listened to the tape an hour later. Hilton couldn’t remember much of the session, and he couldn’t understand why his friend looked so shaken, why his fingers were unsteady as he pressed the button to fast-forward the tape. He was almost afraid to find out, as he’d felt afraid to hear the answer to the question he’d asked Kessie that night.
“We didn’t have much luck with the dreams,” Raul explained as the tape whirred on its spools, “but there’s something very important I want you to hear, from when your trance state was deepest.” Raul pressed the PLAY button, and Hilton heard the conversational drone of his own voice in midsentence:
HILTON: —journeys. All journeys make you tired.
RAUL: What kind of journeys? Where do you go?
HILTON: To here.
RAUL: To this room with me?
HILTON: To here. Wherever I am is here. Here is wherever I’m safe. Where they can’t follow me.
RAUL: Who is following you?
HILTON: All of them.
RAUL: Who are they?
HILTON: The others. The ones who are gone. They’re angry with me.
RAUL: Angry why?
HILTON: Because I have the gift of flight. Because I can always find doorways, like Nana could. They envy me. They want me gone.
RAUL: Gone from where?
HILTON: No one is meant to live in the between. They thought the hearse would take care of it, but I fled again. Now it’s nearly time for another birthday. I’ve stolen thirty birthdays from them. That’s why they’ve sent him.
RAUL: Who?
HILTON: Charles Ray. He isn’t a traveler, but they talk to him when he sleeps.
RAUL: Tell me about your dreams, Hilton.
HILTON: I already told you. They’re not dreams. There’s no such thing as dreams.
Raul turned the tape off, his eyes weighing heavily on Hilton.
Hilton didn’t move, the words from the cassette still ringing in his ears with their utter lack of sense, spoken from his own lips.
“So what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Hilton asked.
“You tell me.”
Hilton squirmed, uncomfortable under Raul’s desperate eyes. “It’s a lot of horseshit. One thing sounds familiar, something a blind man at Miami New Day told me about dreams being journeys. Give me a break. I was under hypnosis.”
“Hilton,” Raul said, leaning closer to his face, “being under hypnosis wouldn’t make you say such things. Hypnosis is the road to the unconscious mind. What you were saying about ‘the others, the between,’ that’s coming from you. Do you understand? I don’t plant what grows there, I merely harvest it.”
“Play that again,” Hilton said, and they listened to the exchange in silence. By the time the tape finished the second time, Hilton’s heart was pounding and his palms were damp. Was he really crazy, after all?
Raul’s voice had never been so firm: “Tell me the truth, Hilton. Are you taking large amounts of cocaine?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Hilton snapped.
Raul sighed, wiping perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief. “I’ll tell you why I ask. You’re my friend, Hilton, and therefore I have to be honest with you,” he said, as though it were difficult to speak. “I’m very concerned about what I’ve just heard. It’s paranoid and delusional. Sometimes that’s the effect of too much cocaine, or amphetamines. You’ve constructed an entire fantasy world in your mind, and I suspect that sometimes it has spilled into your consciousness. That would explain some of your erratic behavior, the episode with Jamil. We need to give this closer attention.”
The others. The between. What the hell could it mean?
“I’m not going to a hospital,” Hilton said, his mouth dry.
“You have a severe sleeping disorder. That much is clear,” Raul said. Again, he rubbed his forehead nervously. “But I think there’s something else that may or may not be related, something more serious. And we can control it with treatment. Medication.”
“What?”
Raul paused a long time before speaking. “Schizophrenia.”
Hilton didn’t answer. His eyes felt glassy. He could barely grasp Raul’s words as he began to explain what schizophrenia was, how it altered the sufferer’s perception and reality, is thought processes. If the schizophrenia was latent, Raul said, it might have been triggered by his stress since the death threats began. Or, he said, it may be genetic.
As Raul spoke, Hilton recalled the string of strange occurrences plaguing him for months. Danitra. The dead man at Miami New Day. Reliving the moment with Jamil at the birdcage.
“Hilton, have you seriously considered suicide recently?”
Hilton looked at his lap. He could only nod. When he looked back at Raul, his friend was frozen with his finger thoughtfully poised beneath his nose. He looked as lost as Hilton felt, with nowhere to go.
“Schizophrenia does not mean you’ll be committed. You’re very lucid right now. It’s an illness, that’s all. Don’t think your life will necessarily be significantly changed forever.” His voice was hollow.
“Then why do you look like you just buried your best friend?”
Raul smiled and nodded, deftly wiping the corner of his eye. “Because, Hilton, I blame myself for not seeing it. Now you understand why I don’t like to befriend my patients. A good friend is not necessarily a good therapist. I have failed you. You never see what’s closest to you. I tell my clients that all the time.”
“So I remember,” Hilton said, and cleared his throat. Schizophrenia. Hilton wondered if the genetic predispositions Raul had mentioned might explain some of Nana’s oddities, the way she’d forgotten things and talked about things that never happened. Hilton remembered, with a pang, that he’d never known the psychological histories of his parents. He’d never known them at all. “Say you’re right about this. Can it . . . can it be cured?”
“Many cases, properly treated, are entirely controlled.”
“And how many end up total nutcases?”
Raul shrugged, uneasy. “Hilton . . .”
“Tell me, Raul.”
“A very small percentage remain severely impaired. You should focus on healing, Hilton, not fear. I realize you must be—”
Hilton was shaking his head furiously. “No. I don’t believe it. I know it makes sense to you, but not to me. It’s something else. A whole lot of tests and treatments aren’t going to change what’s happening to me. The answer is in my dreams, probably even on that tape. I know it, Raul. I know it.”
Raul ignored him, scribbling notes on his pad. “We’re going to begin regular appointments so I can assess you, including a CAT scan. I’m going to bring in an M.D. I work with.”
Hilton was breathing more rapidly, exasperated. There were no answers for him in Raul’s world of science and logic. He needed someone who could help him see his dreams, or to understand them. “Raul, you mentioned another girl who had dreams like mine. A Haitian girl. Where is she?”
“I
don’t know, Hilton. My brother spoke to her last, at the university.” He sounded distracted, still taking notes.
“Is he still there?”
Raul nodded wearily. “I wish you wouldn’t torture yourself with this useless exercise. My brother would only confuse you. He has very strange beliefs.”
“What’s his name, Raul?”
Raul met Hilton’s eyes, looking at him as though he’d never seen such a pitiable case. “If I tell you, do you promise to come back to begin your treatments?”
“If my way doesn’t work, I’ll try it your way.”
Raul ripped a piece of paper out of his notebook and began to write in block letters. “He’s a graduate psych student at UM, but he spends most of his time on Miami Beach. His name is Andres.”
“Andres Puerta . . .”
“Don’t be shocked by him.”
“Shocked how?”
“We’re very different, the two of us. I’ll leave it at that.” Hilton took the paper with Andres Puerta’s name and telephone number as though he were grasping the key to the fortress of his nightmares. He stood up, buoyed by a new energy.
“I hope you won’t be disappointed, Hilton.”
Hilton grinned, memorizing the seven digits. “I won’t be.”
CHAPTER 30
When he opens his eyes, he sees her sitting at the foot of his bed watching a game show. She is wearing the dress he remembers from the day he found her on the floor, a thin housedress with a pattern of linked daisies. Her straight white hair is tied behind her in a braid that winds down her back. They are in his hotel room, but the room is bigger than it was before, and all four walls box them in with door after door. Closed doors, all around.
“I knew you’d never leave me, Nana,” he says.
She doesn’t turn around to look at him, shaking her head. “You’ve done swum out too far. It pains me to watch. All over again. Again and again.”
“Thank you for the night at the pool,” he says, stroking the braid. “My savior. Again.”