Robin Wasserman - Shattered

Maybe this was what happened when you overloaded on dreamers—maybe at some point you didn’t need the dreamer anymore, and the brain made its own dreams. Maybe after the dreamer ate away everything else, the dream was all you had left.

But I didn’t let go. I held on. To the light and noise. To Riley, my face in his hands, my hands on his chest.

I woke up.

“How long?” I asked.

He let go of my face, eased me to the floor, one hand in my hand, the other at my waist. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. He didn’t let go of my hand.

“How long?” I said again.

“Since Jude was here?”

I nodded.

“Twenty-two days.” He winced like he was expecting me to freak out.

Three weeks. Plus the weeklong dreamer before that and the three days I’d dreamed away before that. One month below. In the dark. One month gone.

But if you were going to live forever, what was one month? Infinity minus one is still infinity.

“You know, I get it,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine.

“What?” But I knew what.

“Wanting it all to go away.” He brushed his hands along his thighs, then placed them flat on his knees. It was like he didn’t know what to do with them now that he was no longer holding on. “Forget.”

Normally there was nothing I hated more than someone pretending to understand what was going on in my head. But this time, it didn’t bother me.

“I keep thinking that someone should have screamed, you know?” Riley said. “It would have made it seem more like a vid. Unreal. But…”

“Yeah. No screaming,” I said, letting myself remember. For the first time not fighting back against the images. The dreamers had left an empty space behind them. And the memories rushed in to fill the vacuum.

“There was a girl,” I said. “A kid. I saw her before it all happened. She had this hot pink hair and—”

“Yeah.” He stretched his arms behind him, leaning his weight back on them. “I saw her.”

“She was probably eight or nine,” I said, picturing Zo at that age. She’d been experimenting with different hair colors, showing up with purple streaks one morning, rainbow the next. It was before she’d settled on the retro thing, and instead she was obsessed with av-wear—a phase that we all went through, when instead of modeling your avatar to look like you, you turned yourself into a live-action av, complete with neon hair, net-linked morphtattoos, and the occasional glitter wings.

But Zo had gotten a chance to grow out of it.

He leaned forward, his hands uncertain again, on his lap, then on the floor, then cradled, one in the other. “I stepped on someone. When we were running away. I wasn’t looking, and then—”

“We both did,” I said. I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted to go back to the dream. But it was like we were flying. Like we’d jumped out of the plane, and nothing was going to stop us now, except the ground. “We couldn’t help it.”

He shook his head. “I looked down,” he said. “When I felt it. Something—I don’t know. Soft and hard at the same time. You know?”

Soft and hard. The feel of a foot sinking into a chest.

“She was still alive,” he said. “Mouth wide open.”

“Like she was screaming.”

“It sounds stupid,” he said. “I know. She was just trying to breathe, but…”

“It looked like she was screaming.”

“I stepped on her,” he said. “And I didn’t stop.”

“We couldn’t have helped her.”

“You wanted to stop,” he said.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I reminded him. “I froze. You got us out of there.”

“And straight into hell,” he said.

I rested my hand on top of his hands. He stiffened.

“Thank you for waking me up,” I said.

He pulled his hands out from under mine. Stood up. “You would’ve woken up if I was here or not. Just good timing.”

“Probably.”

There was a loud scratching sound at the door. “Psycho Susskind,” he said. “You want me to let him in?”

“ What’d you call him?”

“Isn’t that his name?” he asked.

Yes, but it was my name for him, mine and Zo’s. Weird to hear it come out of Riley’s mouth.

“He doesn’t seem too crazy to me,” Riley said. “Maybe you weren’t feeding him enough.”

“Have you seen him?” I laughed. “The last thing that cat needs is more food.”

Riley grinned. “He never turned me down.”

“ You were feeding him?”

“Didn’t think you’d want him to starve,” Riley said.

“Sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to take care of my cat.”

So I had a cat again. I hadn’t even wanted one the first time around. Zo and I had begged for a puppy. But when our father showed up with psycho Sussie, we knew better than to do anything but smile and say thank you. And then pretend not to be disappointed when we tried to pet him and he hissed and ran away.

“Someone had to. But I think he misses you,” Riley said.

“Doubtful. But you can let him in.”

Riley obviously couldn’t wait to get away from me, and I couldn’t blame him. I reminded him of everything we both wanted to forget.

He opened the door and the cat slipped in. A moment later, nodding a silent good-bye, Riley slipped out.

Susskind was gray with thin black raccoon stripes streaking his fur and a long strip of black trickling down his spine and tail, a reverse skunk. If you looked closely, you could see the gray was speckled with white, like a permanent dusting of dandruff. His eyes were a pale, watery green, the color of wilted celery. All of which made for one extremely ugly cat.

He curled up against me, butting his head into my arm. Pet me, in catspeak. Love me. But every time I gave in and stroked his fur, Susskind would stiffen and creep away. It was only when I gave up that he would return, nuzzling my hand, digging his claws into my leg, giving me those cat eyes, which, unlike a pitiful puppy-dog gaze, bore no neediness or desperation, just a pale green watchfulness. We repeated the cycle a few times, head butt, purr, escape, return, until he judged me worthy and lowered his bulk onto my lap. Now he gave me a different look. I’m ready, it said. I deserve it.

What are you waiting for?

So I rested my hand on his soft coat, rubbing slow circles into his warm, ample belly. When I was a kid, Susskind’s fur had looked irresistibly soft. I’d longed to run my hands through it—but he always ran away before I got the chance. Now the fur barely made an impression. The synflesh wasn’t designed to appreciate that kind of subtle sensation.

He let out a guttural purr and clawed my arm. That felt good.

“Did you really miss me, you psycho?” I whispered.

He rested his paws on my knee, then lowered his head onto them. His eyes narrowed to slits. Naptime.

“I think I’ve slept enough,” I told him. But I sat there with him, my hand on his back, rising and falling with the even breaths.

I hadn’t been a cat person back when I was a person. But then, Susskind hadn’t been a person cat. Orgs were as repulsive to him as they were to Jude. Whatever I was now, he approved. No questions asked. Even in catspeak.

“I missed you too.”

Something to remember about cats: They’re not your friend. If you ever came across a giant dog, some kind of mutant puppy towering twenty feet off the ground, the dumb thing might knock over a few trees while it was doing its yippee-yay-a-new-friend happy dance, but the worst thing it would do is lap at you with its giant tongue and maybe drown you in dog slobber.

A giant cat would bat you around for a while between its giant paws.