“Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”~William Faulkner
The front doors of the hospital were padlocked despite the parking lot being full of vehicles.
Closer examination revealed a shared feature among these forms of conveyance: The eastern exposure of each car or truck revealed a layer of thick dust, while western exposures showed none of this bombardment. Given opportunity, the wind might apply sediment to stationary objects, though one would be forgiven in thinking this a used car lot that did not thrive.
Howard’s Chevy truck was at the edge of the property, and incongruity was late to settle over this strange picture: How could a man with a crushed leg drive himself to the hospital?
The visitor entered through the rapid care clinic at the far end of the bleak, unwelcoming building. The receptionist greeted him, and told him he was ten minutes early for his follow-up appointment with the Korean doctor, which the patient had completely forgotten.
He sat in one of the folding chairs and thumbed disinterestedly through a magazine, considering (less disinterestedly) the side corridor and entry point to the hospital beyond the waiting room—something moved beyond the reach of light. It was no one two-legged or suited in a starched white lab coat. The small creature stuck close to the baseboard, where its blackish eyes glinted. A rodent, or other unsanitary quadruped, roamed the halls of the building nonchalantly, and drew into question the reputable purpose of the facility.
The patient sat on the examination table facing the French doors; their curtains were open and revealed the empty waiting room he seconds before occupied. No blood pressure measurement was taken this time, and the physician entered through the side door communicating with the aforementioned corridor.
The retinal scope was employed, though the monotone line of questioning was less concealed. “Has your sleep improved?”
“I am losing track of time,” ventured the patient.
The side door was not pulled to when the doctor entered the room. The creature seen from the waiting room was no better seen from this vantage, although it was closer. Its shadowy form was not guarded in the way of vermin, and suggested, casually, a degree of domestication.
Liam concluded, “I cannot refute, to this moment, that the hospital attached to this clinic is the fabrication of a dream.”
X-rays were pulled from a file and held against the overhead light, which provided little additional illumination. Regardless, the subject of these x-rays was able to determine that much (if not most) of his skeletal system was under discussion.
The doctor summarized. “You appear to have suffered grievous injury sometime in your past, going by these multiple fracture lines. They have healed over, but were not properly set.”
This was news to the patient. “What would cause these fractures? A fall? I have nothing like that in my past.”
“You describe the hospital as a possible hallucination… Which family relations most regularly appear in your dreams?”
“Well,” Liam searched this strange question. “Family dogs feature prominently.”
“In what way?”
“They appeared to me in need of assistance. I guess it is due to the responsibilities I used to have bearing on them when I lived at home.”
“Such as watering, feeding, or letting them outside?”
“Yes. The latter responsibility sometimes occurred at night. I suspected residual guardedness in my sleep owes to this wiring.”
“And you loved these pets?”
“Of course, but so much time has passed that these feelings are little more than distant abstractions to me now.”
The doctor consoled, “Grief passes, but love remains, even where that love is differently abled. For someone with autism, routines (such as those you listed in the care of your pets) stand in for overt displays of affection. Love is always compartmentalized for the autistic. Your sleep disorder can only make them more compartmentalized.”
The doctor searched one x-ray peculiarly. “There is a study centering on secure attachments in autistic children where a young boy, in the company of his mother, runs around a room humming to himself contentedly. He is oblivious to his mother’s presence until, on some pretense, she is called from the room. The child falls to the floor and, despite having little language ability, calls softly for his mother. An assistant enters the room and attempts to engage the boy with toys, but he will have nothing of it. Once his mother returns to the room, the distressed child rises from the floor, takes one look at her, and resumes his play as before.
Outwardly, you do not need much in the way of human interaction; but you may be doomed to walk in darkness in these matters, and never know your heart’s true objects until, in their being removed from you, they are unmasked. Perhaps it is through dreams of pets that you navigate your deepest feelings; and your dream life forms a forward boundaryland of your recovery. The way into the autistic heart may be narrow, where few may enter; and none may leave.”
“Have you placed me under a spell?” asked the patient plainly. “Am I hypnotized?”
Easing back in his seat, the hypnotist raised two fingers and snapped them. “If you labor under the premise that you persist in an unwaking nightmare, consider—from this moment forth—that you are awakened.”
This act may have been described as offhanded or unserious. Owing to this impression, no vigor came to Liam’s body. He again examined the windows in the French door, but the creature was spotted nowhere in the waiting room.
In his haste to leave the hospital, he failed to visit his ailing friend, but told himself that he would do it on the morrow.
The spurt of memorable dreams was ended, and against this development, the old landline telephone rang the next morning. The resident entered the little-visited sewing room, which was naturally dark until late afternoon, and cautiously brought the receiver to his ear. Howard was on the other end, and this intersection of a working phone and his one listable friend was to recall the last occasion of it, which was in a dream. The answerer accessed his lucid state, and then that of his coworker.
“I need you to fetch my truck and drive it to my house,” asked Howard.
“How did your truck come to be on the hospital lot?”
“Another factory worker drove me to the rapid-care clinic in it after the accident, and I procured the services of a medical chauffeur to drive me home. You will find the passenger door unlocked. An extra ignition key resides in a detachable magnetic box under the glove compartment. You can stow your bicycle in the rear.”
The Chevy truck was still parked where the cyclist last encountered it. He approached it timidly in seeing two wasps swarm over its door. A third wasp crawled under the hood covering the sideview mirror where, apparently, a nest was made. (Wasps are opportunistic squatters whenever a stationary object is presented to them.)
The thick coat of dust was wiped from the door handle—or so he was prepared to believe it dust. In point of fact it was fine ash, and smelled of charred bones. The two transmission towers triangulated with the likely culprit across the landscape: The mannequin factory was five miles away, but he had never once seen (or smelled) smoke issuing from its chimney.
The unseen papery wasp nest was sufficient in size to prevent readjustment of the mirror. A second difficulty was soon discovered. The rearview mirror was in the glovebox and not attached to the windshield. This essential item was wedged into the gap of the passenger sun visor and angled to capture a rear view of the road.
The unfastened tarpaulin covering Howard’s flatbed kept lurching into an already compromised view through the same rearview mirror. This constituted no true hazard to his driving, but Liam felt vulnerable in having his line of sight obstructed on two fronts. It was comparable to a convicted man who is inconvenienced by a blindfold at his execution.
The object of his errand was gained. A knock on Howard’s door brought no one to it. And yet, hobbling was heard within the small frame trailer home. This shifting about produced a soft clinking noise, consistent with the jostling of unstable bottles on a shelf. Whoever walked across the warbling floor within the dwelling proceeded cautiously in fear that any lurch might topple these items.
Liam tested the door; the lightweight trailer rocked easily on its cinder block foundation; this movement again caused the clinking sound. Were the resident at home, he was perhaps medicated for pain, and slept too heavily to be thoroughly roused by his visitor.
This was all the time that could be spared that afternoon for strange occurrences, and on a number of days usually rich with examples.
The cyclist returned home by means of his stowed bicycle.
After a half hour of dinner preparations, he was inspired (or troubled) to lift the telephone handset in the sewing room and press it to his ear; no dial tone hummed in it. Jiggling the chord, the tester was unable to produce evidence of static or a short. The phone was inoperable.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.