Mira Grant: Parasite

The pause, and the introspection, couldn’t last. Nathan turned to look at me. I bit back a sigh. I knew that look. It was the “I’m about to ask you how therapy went” look, and it never ended well, for either of us.

“Did you tell him about the dreams?”

Yup: this was going to suck. “What about them?” I asked lightly. “The red part, the red part, or the red part?”

“Sal…”

“Yes, I told him about the dreams. He thinks I’m dreaming about being in the womb. I think he’s wrong. He’s probably going to tell SymboGen I’m repressing, or regressing, or something, and I’m going to wind up with another year of therapy.” I stabbed a tortilla chip viciously into the salsa. “ He’s the one who needs therapy.”

“Unfortunately, he’s not the one getting it. You are.”

“Nathan, I’m fine .” Sure, I woke up screaming three or four times a week, but that was normal for me. It was what I had been doing for all six years of my remembered life.

Nathan frowned, starting to say something. He was interrupted by the return of the waitress with our drinks. Once she was gone, he said, “You didn’t know who I was yesterday morning.”

I stopped in the middle of reaching for my agua fresca. “Excuse me?” My mouth was dry. I grabbed my drink and took a gulp, trying to rinse the dryness away. It didn’t work.

“Yesterday morning, you screamed and sat up in bed. I asked you what was wrong. You looked at me like you’d never seen me before. Then you looked at your hands and screamed again. I was honestly waiting for my neighbors to call the police and report that I was beating you, you screamed so much.”

My head was spinning. It felt like all the blood had drained out of it, heading for safer climes elsewhere in my body. “What happened after that?” I didn’t remember any of this, I didn’t remember any of it. Was Nathan lying to me? Worse, was Nathan telling me the truth?

“You stopped.”

The words were so simple that they didn’t quite make sense. I blinked at him. “What?”

“You stopped screaming. You didn’t wake up, you didn’t react when I touched you, you just collapsed back onto your pillow like you’d never moved at all. When you sat up again, about ten minutes later, you didn’t remember any of it.”

I did remember Nathan being oddly concerned about how I’d slept, and asking three times whether I was going to keep my appointment with Dr. Morrison. I bit my lip before asking, “Why didn’t you say anything? You know I don’t like it when people keep things from me.”

“You also don’t like it when I upset you right before you have to see Dr. Morrison, and I’m saying something now,” Nathan countered. “If it weren’t for your medical history, I’d think you were having night terrors—they’re rare in people in their twenties, but they’re not unheard of. But with your amnesia…”

“There goes my medical history, complicating everything again,” I said bitterly.

“I love you, medical history and all, but it scared me. It should scare you, too. That’s why I wanted you to tell Dr. Morrison about the dreams. I know you don’t like him, but you don’t have another psychiatrist you can discuss this stuff with, and it’s better if this is psychological.”

I caught his meaning immediately. If this was psychological, it meant I was still recovering from that first big knock to the head. If it was physical, it could mean almost anything—and very little that was good. “I know. I’ll tell you what: we’ll keep a record of how I’m sleeping for the next few weeks, okay? If it happens again, I’ll tell SymboGen.”

“You promise?”

I solemnly drew a cross across my left breast with my right index finger. “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”

He actually laughed. “When did you learn that ?”

“Yesterday, from a little girl who came into the shelter to pick out her new kitten.” I grinned. “I am full of surprises.”

“Yes, you certainly are,” he said, and leaned across the table to kiss me.

I returned the gesture, although my mind was only half on the moment. I might not understand the gruesome details of my medical history the way he did, but I knew enough to understand that my problems didn’t end with any of the nasty physical side effects that I was being tested and monitored for on a regular basis. My implant had kept me alive. We still didn’t know what that meant, but it did involve waiting, every day, for the other shoe to drop.

Talking to SymboGen about the night terrors—if that was what they were—meant resigning myself to even more therapy, and possibly another sleep study at SymboGen. I could deal with that. If Nathan was worried, I’d be a fool not to be.

When I pulled away, Nathan smiled. “Love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. “And I’ll talk to SymboGen. I just won’t be happy about it.”

“If you were, I’d start worrying about your sanity.”

“I don’t trust Dr. Morrison.”

“You shouldn’t,” Nathan said, with a wry smile. “He works for SymboGen.”

I laughed, and then the food arrived, and we had better things to talk about.

Nathan didn’t ask me anything else important until the waitress came back to pick up the check. Then he asked, “You sleeping over tonight?”

There was only one good answer to that question. So I smiled back, and said, “I was just waiting for you to ask.”

Nathan’s apartment was in a gated complex near the Ferry Building. He had almost a quarter of the ninth floor, complete with a balcony on the wall that faced the Bay. He had it decorated in what he assured me was an utterly forgettable mishmash of Ikea and bachelor pad chic. It didn’t look like either the sleekly sterile halls of the hospital or like Sally Mitchell’s room, haunted by the ghost of a girl I didn’t remember being, and so I loved it.

But I loved him more. We were barely inside before I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the bedroom, where the big black bed was waiting for us. Nathan went willingly. I’d been the one to first take our relationship sexual; he was always trying to go slowly, trying to let me be sure of what I wanted. This was what I wanted. This room, this place, this time, and a man who’d never met Sally Mitchell, but who loved me for me.

By the time we fell asleep, tangled in the sheets and in each other, it felt like things would be better. And I dreamt…

When I listened to books about dream imagery—which I did more than I was willing to admit, because I wanted to understand my dreams as much as Nathan did, if only because I was worried about Sally rising from below and fracturing my fragile psyche with her own, older memories—they always seemed to focus on things happening to bodies. Bodies flying. Bodies getting older, or losing teeth, or being seen in public without their clothes on. Bodies everywhere, doing things .

I never dreamt about bodies.

Instead, I dreamt about the dark—the hot warm dark, which was always those three distinct things. It was hot the way a summer night was hot, when the air trapped moisture like a sponge, even in San Francisco, all humidity and untaken breaths. It was warm the way Nathan’s arms were warm, comfortable and close and safe, and the two states weren’t antithetical at all. They were two parts of the same whole. When I dreamt, it was absolutely natural that hotness and warmth would be different things, capable of existing simultaneously. It was only when I was awake that it seemed like a contradiction. And the dark…

The dark wasn’t like the dark in the apartment when the lights were off, or the dark in the street when the sun went down. It wasn’t even like the dark inside my eyelids, although that came closer than anything else did. The dark was . It was entire and eternal, without question, and it didn’t need to be anything else, because there was nothing else that the dark could possibly be. It was just the dark, the hot warm dark, and it was perfect. I didn’t need anything but the hot warm dark, and the feeling of the world’s arms closed around me.