His shoulder was pressed against the window, rising and falling. He was sleeping. Here. I took quiet steps around my grandparents’ farmhouse as if trying not to stir him, as if he was real.
That night after Dani had dropped me off I’d curled into bed, blankets pulled tight over my head, and I’d felt that slow wave slipping down over my skin, pinning me to the mattress, sleep stifling everything. I’d blinked and I was back on the beach. That’s when I’d seen the boy abandoning the sand and disappearing between the rows of sunflowers.
The scene had shifted while I’d been gone and I wasn’t sure if he was just another one of those moving parts. Here one second and gone the next. I was used to the landscape always changing—evolving and re-building itself to match my memories. But as I watched him stray farther down the row, suddenly everything had felt foreign and haunted and even then as I watched him sleep, I was afraid.
For five years I’d been coming here in my sleep, spending those long episodes among the landscapes of my childhood, the terrain literally sutured by my memories—the big hill I’d sled down that one winter it snowed, the meadow behind our grandparents’ house where Dani and I would spend hours picking wildflowers, the beach where we used to go every summer.
I’d trekked for miles, never tired, re-discovering cotton fields and drive in movie theatres, abandoned playgrounds and old tree houses. Snapshots from every family vacation, every place I’d ever been to, familiar sensations still clinging to them like phantoms. But every place had been empty and I’d always been alone.
When I found my grandparents’ farmhouse it was exactly how I’d remembered it. Same worn furniture, my grandmother’s flower embossed dishes, my grandfather’s coin collection under a faulty floorboard in the bottom of his closet. I’d sifted through her jewelry boxes and buried myself in the scent of his old work clothes.
But as the years went by the small house started to fill with new things. New memories. Every book I’d ever read lined the shelves above the antique fireplace, held upright by trinkets I’d picked up at a flea market outside of town, by the scented candles Dani always gave me for my birthday, by some of my small sculptures.
The shelves were choking now, five years of social exclusion resulting in the kind of loneliness that can only be remedied with words. Lots of them. I plucked one of the books free, a copy of Tuck Everlasting, the cover bowed from countless nights pressed flat against my thighs.
I put it back and reached for a copy of Life of Pi, some loose pages spilling onto the floor. I stopped pretending to browse and finally grabbed my favorite copy of Through The Looking-Glass. It wasn’t my favorite book. I wasn’t sure I had one. But it was one I hadn’t seen in the real world for almost five years. It was a vintage copy, one my grandfather had given me for my seventh birthday. He’d written an inscription on the first page—My dearest Bryn, dream with your heart and the universe will bend at your will.
But then we moved out of my dad’s house and in between packing and trying to salvage the broken pieces of my mom, this little piece of me had gotten left behind. Somewhere. I wasn’t sure. I never saw it again until I got sick, until I came here and then there it was, tucked between an old farmer’s almanac and some of my grandfather’s western movies on VHS.
I sat on the couch, flipping through the pages, corners of them thin and transparent from the oily swipe of my fingers. But I couldn’t stop glancing back toward the window. I couldn’t stop waiting for him to disappear. Because he wasn’t supposed to be here. He couldn’t be. It was impossible.
I remembered the first time I’d told Dr. Sabine about this place.
Twelve-year-old me was gripping the seat of my chair, palms sweaty.
“It’s okay, Bryn,” my mom encouraged.
I chipped at the armrest, staring at my shoes. “It’s like a dream…but it’s not.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Sabine said. “You know it’s possible—”
“No.”
I knew what dreaming felt like and I knew how hard it was to hold on to them when you were awake. But this place was different.
“Is it like the bad dreams you used to have?” Dr. Sabine asked.
I shook my head. “It’s like…memories.” I smiled. “Like everywhere I’ve ever been and everything I’ve seen.”
Dr. Sabine turned to my mom. “It’s unusual. Normally KLS patients don’t dream during an episode.”
“But it’s not a dream,” I interrupted.
“It’s unusual,” she’d said again. “But we’ll run some tests during your observation.”
Those tests turned up nothing. Nothing you could measure anyway. So I did my own research, spending every hour of wakefulness possible on the internet, buried in some book on KLS, on dreams, on delusions, parallel dimensions—everything I could get my hands on having to do with the brain and its ability to bend reality.
And what I’d concluded—the consensus among every doctor, author, and scientist I came across—was that we know more about outer space than we do about the human brain. In other words almost nothing. Humanity had barely scratched the surface, and wherever I was, whatever this was, was still buried somewhere just below that surface.
The wind surged, catching the boy’s shirtsleeve. I watched it flutter against the glass, almost tangling with the pink roses growing along the sill, the one’s I’d given my grandmother last year for her birthday. She’d harvested the seeds and now the window outside her bedroom was overflowing with them.
I watched the wind tear a few petals free and then I was walking towards the door, one hand reaching for the bolt, the other clutching a blanket. I cracked the door, peering out.
That old farmer’s moon from a night my uncle took me and my mom fishing was hanging in the sky. I was eight and remembered unbuckling my seatbelt and crawling onto the dash, my mom’s hands around my waist as I watched it rising over the hill in front of us.
I moved to drape the blanket across the boy’s shoulders but then the moonlight shifted, glinting against him like scales. I stopped, his veins churning a strange color under his skin. The breeze ruffled his hair and as he shifted I took a step back, the light growing dim.
When I dared, I inched closer again. His veins shown through, the light returning, and I jumped back, dropping the blanket.
I stood there, examining him more closely. The color had returned to his cheeks, blushed from the chill, and pressed against his arm they looked swollen like a child’s.
He didn’t look familiar. But even if he had, my memories here never evolved past the landscape, past inanimate objects and vacant buildings. I was the only living, breathing thing here. Until now.
Chapter 7