Jeffry Lindsay - Darkly dreaming Dexter

I woke up. The pain in my head would split a cantaloupe. I felt like I had hardly closed my eyes, but the bedside clock said it was 5:14.

Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder I had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.

And now I couldn't get back to sleep, thinking of the infantile images. If I had to dream, why couldn't it be more like me, interesting and different?

I sat up and rubbed my throbbing temples. Terrible, tedious unconsciousness dripped away like a draining sinus and I sat on the edge of the bed in bleary befuddlement. What was happening to me? And why couldn't it happen to someone else?

This dream had felt different and I wasn't sure what that difference was or what it meant. The last time I had been absolutely certain that another murder was about to happen, and even knew where. But this time-

I sighed and padded into the kitchen for a drink of water. Barbie's head went thack thack as I opened the refrigerator. I stood and watched, sipping a large glass of cold water. The bright blue eyes stared back at me, unblinking.

Why had I had a dream? Was it just the strain of last evening's adventures playing back from my battered subconscious? I had never felt strain before; actually, it had always been a release of strain. Of course, I had never come so close to disaster before, either. But why dream about it? Some of the images were too painfully obvious: Jaworski and Harry and the unseen face of the man with the knife. Really now. Why bother me with stuff from freshman psychology?

Why bother me with a dream at all? I didn't need it. I needed rest-and instead, here I was in the kitchen playing with a Barbie doll. I flipped the head again: thack thack . For that matter, what was Barbie all about? And how was I going to figure this out in time to rescue Deborah's career? How could I get around LaGuerta when the poor thing was so taken with me? And by all that was holy, if anything actually was, why had Rita needed to do THAT to me?

It seemed suddenly like a twisted soap opera, and it was far too much. I found some aspirin and leaned against the kitchen counter as I ate three of them. I didn't much care for the taste. I had never liked medicine of any kind, except in a utilitarian way.

Especially since Harry had died.

HARRY DID NOT DIE QUICKLY AND HE DID NOT DIE easily. He took his own terrible long time, the first and last selfish thing he had ever done in his life. Harry died for a year and a half, in little stages, slipping for a few weeks, fighting back to almost full strength again, keeping us all dizzy with trying to guess. Would he go now, this time, or had he beaten it altogether? We never knew, but because it was Harry it seemed foolish for us to give up. Harry would do what was right, no matter how hard, but what did that mean in dying? Was it right to fight and hang on and make the rest of us suffer through an endless death, when death was coming no matter what Harry did? Or was it right to slip away gracefully and without fuss?

At nineteen, I certainly didn't know the answer, although I already knew more about death than most of the other pimple-ridden puddingheads in my sophomore class at the University of Miami.

And one fine autumn afternoon after a chemistry class, as I walked across the campus toward the student union, Deborah appeared beside me. “Deborah,” I called to her, sounding very collegiate, I thought, “come have a Coke.” Harry had told me to hang out at the union and have Cokes. He'd said it would help me pass for human, and learn how other humans behaved. And of course, he was right. In spite of the damage to my teeth, I was learning a great deal about the unpleasant species.

Deborah, at seventeen, already far too serious, shook her head. “It's Dad,” she said. And very shortly we were driving across town to the hospice where they had taken Harry. Hospice was not good news. That meant the doctors were saying that Harry was ready to die, and suggesting that he cooperate.

Harry did not look good when we got there. He looked so green and still against the sheets that I thought we were too late. He was spindly and gaunt from his long fight, looking for all the world as though something inside him was eating its way out. The respirator beside him hissed, a Darth Vader sound from a living grave. Harry was alive, strictly speaking. “Dad,” Deborah said, taking his hand. “I brought Dexter.”

Harry opened his eyes and his head rolled toward us, almost as if some invisible hand had pushed it from the far side of the pillow. But they were not Harry's eyes. They were murky blue pits, dull and empty, uninhabited. Harry's body might be alive, but he was not home.

“It isn't good,” the nurse told us. “We're just trying to make him comfortable now.” And she busied herself with a large hypodermic needle from a tray, filling it and holding it up to squirt out the air bubble.

“Wait…” It was so faint I thought at first it might be the respirator. I looked around the room and my eyes finally fell on what was left of Harry. Behind the dull emptiness of his eyes a small spark was shining. “Wait…,” he said again, nodding toward the nurse.

She either didn't hear him or had decided to ignore him. She stepped to his side and gently lifted his stick arm. She began to swab it with a cotton ball.

“No…,” Harry gasped gently, almost inaudibly.

I looked at Deborah. She seemed to be standing at attention in a perfect posture of formal uncertainty. I looked back at Harry. His eyes locked onto mine.

“No…,” he said, and there was something very close to horror in his eyes now. “No… shot…”

I stepped forward and put a restraining hand on the nurse, just before she plunged the needle into Harry's vein. “Wait,” I said. She looked up at me, and for the tiniest fraction of a second there was something in her eyes. I almost fell backward in surprise. It was a cold rage, an inhuman, lizard-brain sense of I-Want, a belief that the world was her very own game preserve. Just that one flash, but I was sure. She wanted to ram the needle into my eye for interrupting her. She wanted to shove it into my chest and twist until my ribs popped and my heart burst through into her hands and she could squeeze, twist, rip my life out of me. This was a monster, a hunter, a killer. This was a predator, a soulless and evil thing.

Just like me.

But her granola smile returned very quickly. “What is it, honey?” she said, ever so sweetly, so perfectly Last Nurse.

My tongue felt much too large for my mouth and it seemed like it took me several minutes to answer, but I finally managed to say, “He doesn't want the shot.”

She smiled again, a beautiful thing that sat on her face like the blessing of an all-wise god. “Your dad is very sick,” she said. “He's in a lot of pain.” She held the needle up and a melodramatic shaft of light from the window hit it. The needle sparkled like her very own Holy Grail. “He needs a shot,” she said.

“He doesn't want it,” I said.

“He's in pain,” she said.

Harry said something I could not hear. My eyes were locked on the nurse, and hers on mine, two monsters standing over the same meat. Without looking away from her I leaned down next to him.

“I-WANT… pain…,” Harry said.

It jerked my gaze down to him. Behind the emerging skeleton, nestled snugly under the crew cut that seemed suddenly too big for his head, Harry had returned and was fighting his way up through the fog. He nodded at me, reached very slowly for my hand and squeezed.