Nancy Christie
Nancy Christie's fiction and essays have appeared in Experience Life, Tai Chi Magazine, Woman's Day, Stress-Free Living and many other magazines. She is also the author of The Gifts of Change and a member of the ASJA.
They blamed the airline crash on “equipment failure.” Some little cog or pin or cylinder had failed to move when it was supposed to, and so the connection was not made in time.
Mechanical misconnection. Crash. Burn.
I purposely had avoided watching any part of the televised reports because I was afraid I would dream about it. But the information could not be avoided. The news was everywhere: on the radio, in the paper, part of everyone’s conversation. And so the dreams came.
I was watching rescue workers at the scene of the plane crash. One woman, improbably dressed in a starched white nurse’s uniform, white hose and shoes, was bringing from the wreckage small stained bundles that turned out to be dead infants.
I remember the sticky film of blood and body fluids as she unwrapped them, and I wondered why there were so many dead babies on the plane.
When I arose the next morning, I saw the bed sheet was stained with pink, and I realized my period had come—unexpectedly, but not undesired. We didn’t want any more children. We had agreed on that. That was why the IUD scraped me clean with efficient regularity.
No babies to be born, no eggs connecting to a nutrient-filled lining.
Disconnection. Removal.
So why the dream?
I have never had much luck understanding the hidden message behind my nocturnal imaginings. Sometimes, I can brush them off in the light of day like so many cobwebs—vague, insubstantial. Sometimes, though, the dreams are not so easy to dismiss. They linger, like a damp fog chilling my bones.
Some, like the dreams of phone calls from some unnamed person, return again and again to haunt me.
I can remember one of the dreams: “What now, Anna?” the voice reaching to my ears through the wires.
As I held the receiver, a hand snaked out of the mouthpiece to fasten around my wrist. The fingers were cold and unyielding.
“What now, Anna?” insistently, and then the line went dead.
When I awoke, I was lying rigid, my fingers clenched together, my body drenched with sweat. For a moment, I thought to awaken my husband. But he wouldn’t understand.
I have asked my husband if he dreams, but he says he does not. I have watched him, on those nights when I can’t sleep, and seen his face change and his eyelids twitch, and wonder where his mind is roaming. But he says he does not dream.
My children dream. I know this because, from me, they have inherited the ability to walk and talk in their sleep, carrying on conversations, moving from one room to the next, with the stubborn irrationality of the somnambulist.
Sometimes, as I guide them back to bed, tuck them in and close the door, I wondered what kind of dream world held them captive, what possibilities existed for them in their night-time fantasies.
When I was young, my dream-life was so active my parents fastened extra chains to the doors to keep me in the house. I was always trying to leave—go somewhere, see someone. The world held so many possibilities that daylight hours were not sufficient.
Now I dream of sorrow, loss, pain. I have killed off and buried every member of my family in my dreams: been present at their funerals or received the news second-hand through the phone wires. My father alone has died three times that I can remember.
After the last dream, I called my parents, but heard only the message on the answering machine: “We aren’t in right now. Leave your name and number and brief message.”
I wanted to say: “Are you alive or dead?” but my parents are in their seventies, and I didn’t wish to alarm them.
So I waited until they returned from what was yet another road trip. By now, they have crisscrossed Florida so many times that tracing their journey on a map would result in a cat’s cradle of pencil lines.
And, after so many trips, their roles are carefully delineated. My mother packs, unpacks, re-packs. My father carries suitcases out to the car, checks his watch, and sighs loudly enough for my mother to hear. Other people have alarms to keep track of the time. My mother knows the time by the length of my father’s sighs.
In the car, my father drives and my mother talks. One activity is totally unrelated to the other, and they are both satisfied merely with the other’s physical presence. I know from experience that there will occasionally be cross words, arguments even, revolving around the adjustment of the air flow, the speed of the car, the amount of stops between origin and destination.
But these are merely misfirings of an otherwise well-tuned engine. After all the years together, there are enough working connections to keep the motor running.
Once they were home, I called again: “How was your trip? Were the roads busy? Are my nephews taller?” (Are you still alive, or have you died and no one has told me yet?)
“The trip was fine,” my mother said, and my father grunted in the background. “Of course he drove too fast—you did, dear, even the patrolman said so!—but the scenery was beautiful. You should drive down someday with the children.”
But we do not make car trips—not after the first and last vacation we took. The children fought all the way—an endless eight-hour bickering. Their motors were racing, and there was no way to slow them down.
All during that endless drive, my husband gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white, and his lips were set and tight.
On the return journey, it was more peaceful. The children, tired after eight days of beachcombing and swimming, occupied themselves with souvenirs. In the quiet, I could hear the radio station playing a song my husband and I had once danced to.
He glanced over at me, and then reached out to hold my hand—an unaccustomed gesture of affection. But my fingers were greasy from the fries I had been eating, and, after a moment, he released me.
Equipment failure.
That night I dreamed again of the crash scene: a girl-child, not more than three or four, wearing only white training pants. I remember especially her short golden curls, tangled around her face.
She walked, with the precision the young sometimes show in unfamiliar territory, to stand before an empty stretcher waiting on the stony ground. For a long time she stood in front of it, one finger probing inside her mouth, and a look of intense concentration on her face.
There wasn’t a mark on her: no scratch, no scrape, no burn. Yet I knew she had been on the plane, and somehow, crawled from the wreckage.
Finally, her probing finger found what it was searching for, and she drew out of her mouth one very small baby tooth, loosened perhaps in the crash. Carefully, she laid it on the stretcher, and then stood up, gazing at it, waiting, I suppose, for the Tooth Fairy to bring her some coins.
Only the young can hope like that—without reason, without proof. If I once held that much hope in my heart, it has faded away. Now I only believe in what I can see and taste and feel with my hands. That is what’s real—not hope, not dreams.
And yet, as I stirred my coffee in the early morning hours, I wondered if she was waiting there still.
Dreams—even the truly dead can not escape my dreams. I bring them back to life: where we talk and embrace, exchange love and words, re-connect after years apart, only to say goodbye in the end.
When I awake, they are still dead. That is the trade-off I am granted: the alive remain living, despite my dream-murders, but the dead must stay dead.
Lately, I had been waking with sleep-induced headaches and heavy eyes. My doctor prescribed small blue pills “to relax me.” They took away the dreams, leaving my mind empty and washed clean, like the land after some terrible flood.
The feeling would remain into the daylight hours, and I found I was losing track of what day it was—what week, what month. Sometimes, last year and yesterday seemed interchangeable, all washed with a gray fog.
I didn’t feel tired any more. I didn’t feel anything any more.
So I stopped taking the pills, preferring the exhaustion of my dreams to the terrible emptiness.
During the day, I do what thousands of other women do. I shop for groceries, wash clothes, make beds. I dust the furniture, run the sweeper, plan the evening meal. I watch the afternoon soaps, the six o’clock news, the evening sitcoms. I go to bed with my husband of fifteen years, lying down on the cotton sheets and feather pillows.
Sometimes, my husband falls asleep right away, snoring into the pillow, while I lie awake, watching him. Sometimes, we make love, a carefully orchestrated dance of bodies and hands—connecting physically but not emotionally. Not anymore.
When we are done making love, he pats my shoulder, the way one would pat a mare after a day’s exercise, and then pulls the sheet around himself and turns away.
I want to cry, but I don’t. I wouldn’t be able to explain the tears, even if he would ask. He doesn’t mean to hurt me. But there you have it. I am hurt anyway.
Movement out of sync, engine out of tune. Damage.
The next morning, he would be especially kind to me. He is a kind man, but, on those mornings, there is an extra sense of gentleness about him—which is why I never refuse to make love to him. Gentleness, even when it is a substitute for love, is not a thing one can refuse—not in this world, where mindless cruelty is so common, where random failures can destroy unsuspecting lives.
I know I am fortunate. I have healthy children, a responsible husband. If I want more, I keep it to myself, lest what I already have be taken as a punishment for my greed.
Tonight there was another dream: the ringing of the phone, and a single question—“What do you want?” Then nothing more, and I awaken, the question echoing in my mind.
What do I want?
I look around me—at fifteen years of furniture and wall coverings, at fifteen years of marriage and family life, at fifteen years of connections.
“I don’t know,” and I turn, hugging my husband’s body for warmth.
© Copyright 2008 Nancy Christie