2 THE WHITE HOTEL
Sometimes you wonder what a particular dream might be like. Or even if it is a dream. The whole “the waking world is really a dream,” as typified by films like The Matrix, is a bit of an overdone trope now. That doesn’t mean you can’t imagine what one would be like. Or if a dream of your own might carry some weight with someone else.
They say dreaming is useful. That it helps to clear old detritus out of memory. Could dreaming be useful in other ways? Hard to say. What is certain is that dreams, a la Lovecraft, can sometimes provide the basis for stories.
Not that this tale is a dream of mine. One of the perks of writing fantasy is that you get to dream all the time. That’s the easy part. Writing it down is what takes time, and a bit of discipline.…
The room was beautiful. King-size bed, Empire-style lamps on end tables, thick pile rug, heavy blackout curtains, wall TV, and everything executed in a rich, creamy white with brilliant gold trim. Even the wet bar, except for the cut crystal glasses, was all burnished gold and glossy ivory.
Turning a slow circle, Edda took it all in. It made no sense. What was she doing in such a place? She certainly couldn’t afford it, not on her income. Had someone tipped her with a gift certificate for a weekend at some fancy uptown establishment? She couldn’t remember.
High-falutin’ fancy or not, the TV only played expensive pay-per-view movies. She couldn’t get any other channels, not even network. She ought to call the management and complain, but for some reason she didn’t feel like it. Instead, she wandered into the bathroom.
If anything, it was even more impressive than the sleeping area. The designer had done their work well. She took in the glistening white sunken marble bathtub with its gold fixtures. Naturally, the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body oil matched the rest of the décor. She smiled to herself as she slipped out of her clothes and ran the bath. If the color scheme was consistent throughout, this was one hotel that wouldn’t have any difficulty finding soap to match its bathrooms.
All rising steam and tickly foam and warm liquid caresses, the bath felt wonderful. Afterwards, she dried herself with one of the plush, unmonogrammed towels and tried a touch of the complimentary body perfume. It seemed almost sinful to climb back into her plain, everyday attire, but except for the complimentary bathrobe hers were the only clothes in the room. Perhaps she’d left a suitcase down by check-in, waiting to be brought up. She tried to call the bell desk, but like the TV, the phone didn’t work.
Idiot, she admonished herself. If the phone’s out of order, you can’t very well use the phone to notify the hotel that the phone is broken. She’d have to tell someone in person. Feeling wonderfully refreshed from her bath, she checked her hair in the bedroom mirror, opened the white door, and stepped out into the hall.
It was as white as her room. Pure, untrammeled white, from the soft carpet underfoot to the snowflake pattern on the wallpaper. White except for the gold trim on the door jambs and wainscoting, the room numbers themselves, and the elegant but simple light fixtures that flooded the corridor with gentle white light. She made a note of her room number: 9432. As she headed down the hall she marveled at the ability of the unseen hotel staff to keep so much whiteness so astonishingly dirt and stain free in the face of what must be a steady flow of guests.
Turning a corner, she found herself facing another corridor. With a mental shrug, she started down it. Must be one of the bigger chains, she thought as she padded along, because this was certainly one of the bigger hotels she had ever been inside. Not that she had stayed at many hotels. Motel 6 lay at the upper end of her travel budget. Reaching the end of the hall, she turned another corner. Found herself facing another corridor.
She was getting frustrated. If she could just find a house phone, she’d call in the message about her broken phone. But there was no house phone. No house phone, and no bank of waiting elevators, white or otherwise. She turned another corner.
Another corridor. And another after that. And another.
She started running. Her mounting panic was multiplied by the fact that ever since she’d left her room she’d encountered no one else, not a single solitary perambulating soul. Not a guest, not a maid, not a bellman. Having apparently forgotten to bring her own phone and not owning a watch, she didn’t know what time it was. Come to think of it, she didn’t remember seeing a clock in the room. That seemed a peculiar oversight for so well furnished a hotel.
Where was everybody? Even if it was, say, ten in the morning, and the hotel’s business clientele had gone off to work, staff should be present; stripping beds, restocking minibars, changing linen. But there was no one. No one, and no noise. She heard no conversation passing, no vacuum cleaners humming, no televisions whispering through closed doors.
Until she heard, off in the distance, a faint howling.
It should have frightened her. No—it should have terrified her, left her trembling in her stylish but eminently practical shoes. The sound wasn’t pleasant, and it certainly didn’t make her feel any better, but she dealt with it stolidly, as she had all the other disappointments in her young life.
There it was again. Closer? She couldn’t tell. Had someone left their dog running loose in the hallways? Where was everybody?
She began retracing her steps. It wasn’t easy, because some of the corridors branched. As she ran back in the opposite direction, she kept an eye out for the elevators, in case she had somehow missed them. There had to be elevators. Her room number being 9432, she reasoned, she had to be on the ninth floor of the hotel.
The howling was definitely closer now. Or was it more of a growl? She couldn’t be sure, and she didn’t think she wanted to stop and find out. Though she was in good physical condition, she had been running for a while, and her lungs were starting to labor. Breathing hard, she turned a corner. And another. Another.
9432. She reached for the handle. Impossible to tell how near, or how far, lay the source of the howling. It seemed to drift in and out of her hearing. It struck her forcefully then that she had no key. A deliberate and increasingly frantic search of the pockets in her blouse produced nothing. The corridor stretched away to left and right; white, empty, echoing. Taking a chance, she reached out and tried the handle.
To her immense relief, the door opened easily.
It also closed tightly behind her. A quick glance was enough to show that she was indeed back in her room. The empty bottles in the bathroom, the used towels, were proof enough of that. She could no longer hear the howling, growling. The dog, or whatever, that had been making the noise had gone elsewhere. A determined expression set on her pale but not unattractive face, she walked over to an end table and tried the phone again. Still broken; not even a dial tone. What now?
Walking over to one of the two windows, she found the center and pulled the heavy curtains apart. Expecting to confront the city, to see some other tall building opposite the hotel, she found her vision flooded with whiteness. A whiteness that could not come from a heavy snowfall, since it was September. A whiteness that overwhelmed everything else. That was when it hit her. That’s when it all made sense.
She woke up in her own bedroom. It was far less fancy than the hotel room she had dreamed, but at least everything in it worked: the phone, the TV, the clock radio whose red numerals ticked over silently as she eyed it. Three forty-six in the morning. A little early. The alarm wouldn’t turn on KXLW for another forty-five minutes yet. Plenty of time to get to Karoly’s Restaurant and be ready for the breakfast shift. That’s where she worked; Karoly’s. Breakfast through lunch shift. She liked the schedule. It gave her time in the afternoon to do the ordinary things nine-to-five workers had to rush to accomplish, from going to the bank to marketing, without having to hurry or fight commuter traffic or worry about the creeps who stalked the city streets after dark.
It wasn’t such a bad dream, she mused as she dressed. She’d had far more upsetting ones. The unseen howling thing hadn’t been very nice, but neither had it been a vision of devouring teeth and bulging eyes and bloody fangs. It had been just another dream. Another dream, another day. One step closer to the new TV she’d been eying in the window of the JR Electronics shop on Second Avenue.
Work passed uneventfully, as always. Evening brought a trip to the movies with Darlene, her best friend. Coffee and cake afterwards, then home. Time enough to watch the early news, and then sleep.
She was back in her room in the white hotel. 9432. Same layout, same furnishings, only the linens had been dutifully changed and the bathroom restocked.
By the fourth night she knew it was a dream when she was in it. Stuck with it until it went away or changed, she decided to relax and enjoy the experience; the luxurious bath, the classy radio that played odd but enjoyable stations, the television that played only pay movies (hey, she wasn’t being billed, so why not indulge?). The lack of a view didn’t bother her. In Manhattan, that would just translate to another building across the street anyway. On several occasions, she left the room to take walks down the corridors. Every time, she saw no one else. Twice, she heard the howling and returned quickly to her room. Twice, there was nothing, no noises, leaving her free to explore. But she never found the elevators, or saw another living thing. Or another dreamed thing, she would remind herself.
The dreams didn’t affect her sleep, or her work. She was not the type to struggle against such things. But by the second week of having the same dream over and over, she found herself beginning to get a little bored. By the third, she began to wonder if perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to see a psychologist. She told Darlene about the dreams, but her friend and fellow waitress had no suggestions to offer beyond recommending that Edda try a good, strong, over-the-counter sleeping pill. After hesitating, she did just that. It didn’t make any difference. At some indeterminate time after falling asleep, she inevitably found herself back in the white hotel, room 9432.
It was at the end of the third week that she encountered, quite unexpectedly and upsettingly, the source of the growling.
She was jogging around the corner past room 9647 when she came up short. The howling growling was louder than usual, though not disturbingly so. But for the first time in the dream, she was not alone. There was a figure, another person, at the far end of the hallway. She knew he was the source of the sound because he growled at her when their eyes met. He was immense: six eight or nine, and massive—maybe four hundred pounds. He had to bend slightly to clear the ceiling. His face was red, florid, clean-shaven, and he had blue eyes and short brown hair. He was wearing scuffed work jeans, hiking boots, and a red plaid flannel shirt. The outfit should have placed him somewhere in upstate Maine, not Manhattan. He looked surprised.
“What are you doing here?” he boomed. His voice was deep and threatening.
Here? What did he mean, “here”? This was a dream, the dream of the white hotel. Nothing more.
“Get out!” he roared. “You don’t belong here! Get out, now!” He started in her direction. With each step he took toward her, his weight made the floor shiver under her feet.
Dream or no dream, she turned and ran. She was faster than him, but that enormous stride kept him close. All the while, he kept bellowing accusingly at her. She didn’t pause to reply. Her only interest in life right now, or in dream, was to find the safety of room 9432.
She sensed him closing on her as she turned what she hoped was the last bend. Then she was fumbling for the door handle. A glance up the corridor showed him barreling around the corner, moving so fast that he slid slightly and slammed into the opposite wall, cracking the perfect pale plaster. His huge hands, calloused and big as meathooks, were outstretched toward her and his face was full of blind pain.
The door opened. Inside, she slammed it shut, flipped the lock, and retreated toward the bed. Something heavy hit the door hard. It shook, but held. On the other side, moaning fury had replaced words and growls. The pounding and the howling continued for a while longer. Then they went away, not abruptly as if the huge figure had suddenly gone silent, but fading into the distance.
Chest heaving, she approached the door cautiously. A glance through the peephole showed nothing on the other side. Still, she hesitated. It was still only a dream, she told herself firmly. And nothing in a dream can hurt you, right? She pushed down on the lever and opened the door.
The corridor was silent as after a new-fallen snow. There was no sign of the man who had pursued her. She closed the door. Retreating back into the room, she turned on the radio and drew herself the hottest bath she could stand.
The next day, she saw a registered psychologist. She saw him several times, despite the strain it put on her budget. Her other dream, the one that had the new TV in her apartment, receded a little further into the future. The psychologist was very nice, and very earnest, and utterly useless. And of course, nothing he said or suggested stopped the dreams.
For a while she dreaded going to bed and falling asleep. As for the dreams, sometimes the giant figure materialized to chase her, other times he was absent. On the night of the Wednesday of the fourth week, as he was chasing her with outstretched hands and screaming at her to get out, to go away, that she didn’t belong, a thought struck her that did not come from the well-meaning psychologist, or from Darlene, or even from Oprah.
Maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t her dream. It was a crazy idea, but no crazier than what was happening to her. Maybe that was why the figure was always telling her to get out, that she didn’t belong. Maybe it was somebody else’s dream. Maybe it was his dream. Perhaps that was why he was so angry, and so insistent that she leave, that she didn’t belong.
Could you be in someone else’s dream? Certainly you could appear in it. Friends and family had often appeared in her other, normal, ordinary dreams. If other people could appear in her dreams, then certainly she could appear in someone else’s dream. What was abnormal was her realization that that might be the case. But she didn’t know the big man. She had never met him, had never even seen him from a distance. She was positive of that. You wouldn’t forget someone of his dimensions. Of course, that didn’t mean that he had never seen her.
What if it wasn’t an accurate representation? she told herself. Not everyone always appeared as themselves in dreams. It went a long way toward explaining the white hotel. She felt sure that if given the choice (as much choice as one had in dreams), that if it was her dream, she would have dreamed up a nice, colorful South Seas island beach resort. The white hotel was the big man’s dream, not hers.
Such thoughts occupied her all that next day at work, so much so that she actually forgot that Mr. Mackleroy always took whole wheat toast with his omelet and not white. A regular, he was more surprised than upset, and they shared a friendly chuckle over it. He tipped her the same as usual.
That night, she did all the usual things she did before retiring. Could a resolve made while awake hold true even in sleep? She hoped to find out.
For a while, she was afraid it would be one of those dreams that found her entirely alone in the white hotel. Then, outside room 9311, she heard the first howling. Advancing deliberately toward it, she waited until it grew loud enough for her to be sure. Then he was there, at the far end of the hallway as always. And as always, seeing her, he raised his huge hands and started toward her, shouting for her to leave, to go away.
Turning, she fled at a steady pace. There was no panic in her now, since she knew from experience exactly how fast he could run. She kept the distance between them constant as she turned corner after corner. Then the door to her room lay just ahead. She’d left it open. But this time, instead of entering, she whirled to face the oncoming hulk. Hands on hips, lips set firmly, she adopted the same attitude she used when unruly college students tried to confuse her with their orders or pick her up for a casual Saturday night date. The product of six years spent dealing with the breakfast shift in Manhattan, the pose always worked.
But as those glaring eyes and thick fingers came steadily nearer, she found herself trembling a little inside, and wondering if she might not be doing something really, really stupid.
“I’m not going anywhere!” she heard herself shouting. Her voice echoed off the snowflake wallpaper, the gold-trimmed wainscoting, and the gold-metal light fixtures. “This is your damn dream! You think I want to be here? I like to dream of waving coconut palms and well-tanned beach boys, not some damn deserted hotel, no matter how nice it is!”
The figure drew nearer, nearer—and slowed. The big man stopped, those massive grasping hands falling slowly to his sides. “You don’t belong,” he insisted. But this time he declaimed in a mumble, and not a shout.
“I know that.” She lowered her own voice. “Believe me, I couldn’t agree with you more. But here I am, until I wake up, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”
He gazed down at her out of eyes that were suddenly sad instead of angry. “Wake up?”
Her lips parted slightly. Not only was she in his dream, if his words were to be believed it appeared that he didn’t know this was a dream. Crazier and crazier, said Alice. She proceeded to explain things to him.
He sat down in the hall, his wide backside dimpling the carpet, leaning his massive bulk up against one wall. In all that whiteness and gold, their clothing provided the only other color. She told him everything: how she had begun to revisit this same dream every night, how she had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t her dream and that it therefore had to be his. She told him everything she had discovered about the white hotel, from the excellent bathroom accoutrements that were provided afresh every night to the dysfunctional telephone and the television that only played pay movies.
He listened to it all carefully, in silence. Without howling or growling or threatening. Then he rose and tentatively extended a hand. “Want—would you like to see my room?”
She hesitated, newly uneasy. It was an invitation to a kind of intimacy she wasn’t sure she wanted to share. But she wasn’t waking up yet, and it was something new and different, and despite his size he no longer seemed quite so threatening. So she accepted, warily, and walked with him, not taking his hand in case his attitude changed suddenly and she had to make a run for it.
After the usual twists and turns, they halted outside a room. On the door was the number 9665. It looked like any other hotel room door. It looked like her own. He pushed down on the handle, and entered.
The place was a mess. The television had been ripped off the wall and lay on the floor, smashed. The phone handset had been stomped to pieces. Linens lay scattered about, as if the bed hadn’t been made in weeks. The bathroom was filthy; the tub sporting a thick dark ring, the sink full of soap scum, the empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body lotion lying in a heap. The shower curtain hung limp, half the rings having been pulled out. An unpleasant smell hovered in the vicinity of the toilet.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “It always ends up like this. I can’t seem to help myself. I guess—I guess I get angry, and go a little crazy. And then …”
“And then you run screaming through the halls,” she finished for him. Dream or no, she knew she ought to have been afraid. But she wasn’t. There was about the room an aura of desperation, not homicidal madness.
He nodded. “For a long time, it was always by myself. Then I started to see you, and that made me angry, too. I’m not sure why, but it did. I guess because you didn’t belong. Because you hadn’t been invited.” He indicated the disarray. “Does your room look like this?”
She shook her head, and had to smile. “I guess I’m a little neater than you, even in dreams.”
He looked away. “Are you going to wake up now?”
“Not yet.” On impulse, she reached out and took his hand. “Let’s take a walk, first. I want to try something. I’ve wanted to try it for a while, but I kept running into you, and I never could finish.” She started for the door.
He resisted. “I—can’t.”
She looked back up at him. “Why not? What do you mean, you can’t? It’s your dream, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know what this is. I only know what you’ve told me.”
She pondered a moment. “All right then,” she said finally. “I’m telling you to come with me.” She tugged again, firmly. If he didn’t want to come with her, she knew, there was no way she could force him. It would have been like trying to drag a mountain.
He took a step. “If you say it’s okay …” He was still unsure.
“What have you got to lose?” She flashed him her best smile, the one that often resulted in double tips. “It’s only a dream.”
They left the door to his room open, the shambles showing clearly behind them. It wasn’t as if it was going to upset the maid, she knew. Purposefully, she led him down corridor after corridor, turning one corner after another. She’d never managed to get past 9876 in one direction or 9202 in the other because she’d always been confronted by her new companion, and had been forced to turn and retreat back to her room. Now, with him in tow, there was nothing to stop her from continuing onward.
She hoped.
They passed 9877. Then 9910. And 9925, 9951, 9978. And finally, 9998 and 9999, both of which boasted double doors and were obviously the entrances to exclusive suites. As always, no noise came from behind the tightly closed portals. But ahead lay something singular, something previously unencountered.
The end. The end of a corridor. It was demarcated by another door. The door was marked like all the others, but was also unlike them. It did not have a number.
On the door she read the words FIRE EXIT.
“Come on,” she told him. The great weight of him held back.
“No,” he murmured. There was dread in his voice. “I—I can’t.”
“Sure you can.” She looked back up at him. No fury in him now, no howling. Only fear. “It’s your dream, whether you believe it or not.” She let go of his hand. “I’m trying it even if you won’t.”
He didn’t move; just stared apprehensively down at her. Reaching out, she pushed against the door. It moved. Shoving it all the way open, she found herself looking at a wide, open, windowless stairwell. Like everything else in the white hotel, it was devoid of color. It looked a little dingy, a little less perfect than the hallways and her room, but that was only to be expected of an emergency exit. Ninth floor, she thought. They had a modest descent ahead of them.
“Come on,” she urged him again. When still he hesitated, she put her hands on her hips once more in that well-practiced no-nonsense waitress pose and cocked her head sideways at him. “You really in a hurry to go back to that filthy room?”
It required a visible effort for him to take a step forward—but he did. “No,” he told her firmly. “No, I’m not.”
The stairs led down. At the first landing, the presumed eighth floor, she tried the door. It was secured, as fire exit stairwell doors often are. That meant the door directly above them that led back to the ninth floor would now also be locked. What if all the access doors were secured like this? What if they couldn’t get back to their respective rooms, and found themselves trapped in this empty, cold, silent stairwell? It didn’t matter, she told herself. Eventually, they would wake up, exiting their respective hotel rooms or this stairwell. There was no danger. She kept telling herself that as they continued to descend.
Eventually the stairwell bottomed out, terminating on a slab of dirty, whitened concrete. If the white hotel held true to hotel form, this should be the escape door, the one leading to the street outside, or to an underground garage, or to the hotel lobby. If it was locked—if it was locked then all they had done was make a useless descent from the floors above.
“What now?” The voice from behind her sounded apprehensive.
She gave a little shrug. “We go out,” she told him. Putting her right hand on the heavy fire door, she pushed, leaning her weight into it.
To the nurse’s credit, she managed to muffle her scream of surprise. Taking a stunned step backward, she bumped into the IV rack. Transparent bags full of costly liquids jangled but did not fall from their supportive hooks. Plastic tubing rattled but did not disconnect.
The boy in the bed was twelve. Opening his eyes, he blinked once at the ceiling before looking over at the shaken white-clad woman standing by the side of his bed. He peered down at the tubes that ran into him; into his arms and into his side. The needles that penetrated his skin itched. Then he looked up at the nurse again. For a grown-up, she was acting awfully weird.
“Can you call my mom? I don’t feel so good.” He licked his lips as best he could. “And could I have something to drink, please? I’m awful thirsty.”
It was three o’clock in the morning, but the floor supervisor at the 3A nursing station didn’t hesitate. She called the doctor at home and woke him.
Edda opened her eyes. Time to make the coffee, do her face, and get dressed. It was Monday, and Karoly’s was always busy on Monday. She stretched, preparatory to rising.
Pain shot through her.
What the hell? she thought. She started to get up. More pain, holding her down. What on Earth was going on? She’d been dreaming—she knew that much. The white hotel again, as usual. Last night’s dream had been different somehow, but in the haze of first light she couldn’t remember the details. The more awake she became, the farther they receded from memory. They didn’t matter anyhow. What did matter was the pain.
Maybe she’d gone to sleep in an awkward position. Struggling against the hurting, she made herself sit up. That’s when she saw that something—no, not something: everything—was wrong.
Her room was different. In its place was a smaller bed, with a six-sided metal bar running vertically above it. A handle hung from the bar. There were also horizontal metal bars on either side. Where her drawer and mirror combination should have been was a window and a single chair. The color scheme was all wrong as well, as was the lighting. Nothing was as it should be. The TV was there, but it was the wrong model, and in the wrong place.
A figure was sitting in a second chair, off to her left. She frowned momentarily before she recognized it. “Darlene? What are you doing here?”
The figure straightened, coming out of its own slumber. Then the eyes of her best friend widened and her mouth opened in an O of surprise.
“Edda? Oh my god, Edda!” Rising from the chair, Darlene rushed the bed. Reaching over the metal bars, she threw her arms around her friend. She was crying—no, she was bawling like a baby.
“Hey, take it easy.” More than a little bewildered, Edda let her own arms slip uncertainly around her friend’s back, patting gently. “It’s okay. What’s wrong?” She let her eyes roam again, let them identify and analyze her surroundings. She began to comprehend. At first none of it made any sense, and then gradually, it did. “I’m in a hospital, aren’t I?”
Still crying, Darlene stepped back. Wiping at her eyes, unable to stop from sobbing, she fumbled for a button attached to the side of her friend’s bed, finally managing to depress it. A nurse arrived. The nurse took one look at the woman in the bed and disappeared back the way she had come, reappearing moments later with another nurse and a doctor. They fussed over the patient until Edda couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I’m okay, people, I’m okay. Give me some room, for cryin’ out loud!”
Red-eyed, Darlene moved to stand next to the attending physician. “Is she—she’s going to be all right now, isn’t she?”
The doctor’s beard was mostly gray, his manner that of a man who had just dumped a dollar into the progressive slot at a local casino only to see five sevens line up.
“Yes, I—yes, she’s going to be all right. This is amazing, just amazing. Wonderful, but amazing.” He leaned forward slightly and smiled. “You don’t try to go anywhere, young lady. You just relax, until I can get back. I won’t be long.” Turning, he hurried out the door. It was the first time Darlene had ever seen a doctor in a hospital hurry from a patient’s room.
Pulling her chair close, she sat back down next to the bed and reached out to rest her hand on her friend’s arm. “A lot of people have been real worried about you, you know? Me, the staff at Karoly’s, your regulars. A lot of people love you, Edda.”
“What happened?” the woman in the bed wanted to know. “I remember getting home from work yesterday and going to bed. And dreaming. Like I’ve been dreaming for weeks now. About the white hotel. Only, last night was different, somehow.”
“White hotel? Getting home from work yesterday?” Darlene’s tone as well as her expression reflected utter bewilderment. “Hon, you’ve been in this bed for almost a month. In a coma.” She sat straighter in the chair. “You don’t remember any of it, do you? You were leaving Karoly’s. Must have had something on your mind. Guy was speeding, trying to pass the taxis, trying to beat the light. You stepped out and he hit you. Knocking you thirty feet, I’m told. They say you hit the street and bounced like a rag doll. You’ve been in here ever since.”
Edda gaped over at her friend, trying to make sense of insensible words. She still hurt, but the longer she sat up, the more the pain continued to recede. “C’mon, Darlene. I was at work yesterday. I’ve been going to work every day until today. I remember everything. Waiting on customers. Screwing up Mr. Mackleroy’s toast. The five-dollar tip I got last Friday. And the dreams. I remember dreaming every night, for weeks. About the white hotel. I remember talking to you about it, seeing a psychologist, trying sleeping pills. I remember shopping, going to the movies with you, cutting my leg while shaving one night.” Her voice fell slightly. “I remember everything.”
Her friend just stared at her. Stared for a long moment that stretched into several. Then she rose and walked over to the computer monitor that was mounted on the wall. Beneath the computer, on an attached shelf, was a folder. Though she really wasn’t supposed to, she picked up the folder and brought it back to the bed, handing it to Edda with a nod.
“Read it for yourself. Almost a month you’ve been here.”
Edda looked at her friend, glanced down at the folder, then back up at her friend. She opened the folder. She read.
“They were afraid you weren’t going to come out of it,” Darlene was saying. “You were banged up pretty bad. Your head—you hit your head real hard.” She summoned up a smile that was full of warmth and relief. “I was afraid I was never going to be able to talk to you again. And now …” The tears threatened to flow again. “You just—woke up.”
Edda continued to read. The words, the black print, the hand-written notations in typical barely legible doctor’s scrawl, could not be denied. “But—everything else. Everything I just told you. It was all—it was so real, Darlene.”
Her friend had to laugh. The sound seemed to lighten the room. “As many drugs as they had you on, I’m not surprised, girl! Don’t you get it? You were dreaming.…”
In spite of, or perhaps because of, their astonishment, they discharged her the next day. They made her promise to come back. For a follow-up, and to answer some questions. After all, she had made history of a sort, and they could hardly be blamed for wanting to document it.
As they wheeled her out (she could have walked, but—regulations) with a beaming Darlene at her side, she happened to note the number of her room: 9432. A sudden small, indefinable thrill ran through her.
“Stop!”
Startled, the nurse complied without thinking. “What is it, miss? Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. I’d just like to—I’d like to go another way, if we can?”
Darlene looked at her funny, but she was insistent. The nurse had no objection. She’d learned to deal with all kinds of last-minute requests. “Which way then, miss? Do you know the corridors? You were unconscious when they brought you up from surgery.”
“I want …” She hesitated. How could she say it without it sounding outlandish? So she just said it anyway. “I want to go by room 9665.”
The nurse exchanged a glance with Darlene, who looked blank. Turning the wheelchair, they retraced their steps, heading for a different bank of elevators.
Room 9665 was empty, the bed recently remade with fresh linens, the chairs unoccupied, awaiting a patient. Edda gazed into it until she could sense her companions growing uneasy.
“Okay. We can go.”
The nurse realigned the chair and resumed pushing. In the elevator on the way down, Edda thought to ask, “Do you know who the last person in that room was?”
The questions discharging patients ask, the nurse thought to herself. “Little boy. Robert Lukens. He was suffering from something serious, I know that. I don’t remember exactly what it was. His room wasn’t on my rounds. Some kind of serious cancer, I think. Somebody said something about it suddenly going into spontaneous remission. His parents came down yesterday from somewhere up north and took him home.” She smiled at the remembrance. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen too often in here, and it’s always nice to hear stories like that. Just like yours, Miss Lorelheim.”
Edda nodded but said nothing. The elevator doors opened and she was wheeled out into the lobby. People were everywhere. She saw Darlene’s little compact parked out front, in the pick-up zone. It was an intense white: the whitest white she was sure she’d ever seen.