Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“Hello… Yes. No, nothing’s wrong, he put it in his pillow and he’s already asleep. You must’ve made some kind of mistake. He’d never—Of course not, if you say that’s what happened I believe you, but it couldn’t have been him, you see, not really, maybe some evil spirit pretending —Of course I’ll make sure he keeps it there. I like the way it smells. So I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.”

He heard her go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, pull out a chair, and sit down. The worst of it was that she’d never do anything to hurt him unless she was convinced it was for his own greater good. Whereas he, with no transcendent goals, morality, or justifications, was perfectly aware that whenever he did anything to wound or hurt her, it was always merely for his own convenience and satisfaction, when it wasn’t just selfish indifference.

With the exception of one brief affair with a student at the second college at which he’d taught (and which had hurt Veronica deeply when she found out, though she’d never reproached him for it), he’d never done anything, had always known he’d never do anything. Until now, if he could just lull Mother Isobel’s suspicions while keeping the girls sharing his dreams from conscious guilt over their unconscious willingness to participate in his fantasies.

Veronica came in a little later, undressed in the dark, and fell asleep almost immediately. St. Jacques stayed awake, nervous and agitated, but afraid to wake her. When he finally did drift off he found himself falling through the back of his eyes again. He felt a surge of triumph: the sachet hadn’t been able to stop him after all!

Only this time what he was reexperiencing in reverse was not the previous day, but the time he’d spent lying in bed feigning sleep, and nothing he could think of seemed to make the process go any faster. So he took control of the dream, willed himself to get out of bed. Time reversed its backward flow, became normal again. The bedside clock said 4:00 A.M.

He imagined Terri and June opening the bedroom door and tiptoeing in, but nothing happened. He fantasized the phone ringing, with Liz calling from a phone booth to tell him she’d snuck away from school and would be there in five minutes, but the phone didn’t ring. He told himself a car had just entered the driveway and was coming to a halt outside his window, and still nothing happened.

He was suddenly terrified Mother Isobel had found a way to take control, that she’d burst in in her white satin baseball uniform and smash him over the head or try out some of the tortures he’d been reading about in the books on the Inquisition.

For an instant, he was sure he must have come awake again despite what the clock seemed to say. He glanced down at himself, told himself that if he really were dreaming, he could change his pajamas into anything else he wanted, like his swimming suit.

His pajamas were gone. He was wearing his swimming suit. So he was dreaming.

He left the dream-Veronica sleeping soundly and padded out into the hall. Dreams were symbolic; if he wanted to get in touch with somebody what better way than by telephone? He switched the dial so that each number became a different girl’s name, picked up the phone, and dialed Marcia. No answer, not even a busy signal. He tried the others. Nothing.

Closing his eyes, he imagined himself lying in the sun by the swimming pool, but when he opened his eyes again he was back lying on the bed, though he’d seemed to feel the sun on his chest and face for an instant. He imagined himself a three-piece tweed suit over his swimming trunks, then added the shirt, tie, socks, and shoes he’d forgotten, and went out into the hall to get his car keys out of the ashtray where he kept them. The phone was next to the ashtray; he saw that the dial had reverted to normal.

No one was waiting in romantic ambush outside. When he tried to drive off in his car, the whole night landscape around him faded out of existence and he found himself back in bed, wearing his pajamas. The clock said 4:20.

A few more experiments convinced him he couldn’t get more than a few hundred yards from his sleeping body, and couldn’t alter more than a few things at a time before finding himself back where he’d started from.

Further experiments convinced him he couldn’t bring anybody from the previous day into his dream. Except perhaps Veronica, who was still sleeping in the bed, part of the dream decor, but he didn’t want to bring her any further into the dream—there were too many chances that whatever happened would get back to Mother Isobel if he didn’t hit on the right way to suppress or distort her memories. Feeling silly, he went through the magazines in his living room until he found the latest issue of L’Evenement du Jeudi, leafed through it until he found the picture he remembered, an aspiring Italian starlet swimming nude at a hotel in Cannes.

With a little experimentation he found he could enlarge the picture, extract the girl and make her life-size and more or less three-dimensional, but he couldn’t make her look like a real human being, only a big, glossy inflatable doll. When he tried to make the doll move it twitched once or twice, and he found himself back in bed with his pajamas on.

So he needed other people to play the other roles in these dream-scenarios. Maybe that was how all dreams really worked, by telepathic contact between people’s sleeping minds. Immersion in a truly collective unconscious for purposes of wish fulfillment. In which case, being a telepath wasn’t what made him different, because everybody was a telepath; the difference was that he’d somehow learned to enter that collective state while maintaining his conscious will and lucidity.

If he was correct he could put his last doubts about morality to rest: he wasn’t doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing; the only difference was that he was able to take conscious control of his participation. So he wasn’t just inventing excuses for himself, no matter what Mother Isobel said.

But that still left unanswered the question of how to make contact with the girls’ sleeping minds. Perhaps he only had access to the dreams of people he’d already come across in his re-experienced waking time. Which meant that tonight there wouldn’t be anyone but Veronica.

He looked at her, sleeping, realized he could use her to find out if he could make the people he brought into his dream world forget what happened, so long as what he did was innocuous enough that it wouldn’t give her reason to suspect anything, even if she did remember. In any case, he’d probably be safer experimenting with her, for all her loyalty to her sister, than with someone with no reason to dream about him.

He climbed back into bed, closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep again, then made the phone ring. You can wake up now, Veronica, he thought. The phone’s ringing.

She took a long time to come awake. She seemed confused and recalcitrant, so he just kept the phone ringing until she got out of bed, stumbled into the hall, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he heard her say. “Hello?”

There’s nobody on the other end of the line, he thought. Put the phone back and come to bed.

He opened his eyes, watched her coming back into the room. There was a little light, not much, from the moon, and in it she looked younger, more graceful than usual. Almost the way he remembered from when he first met her at the University of Wisconsin and she’d looked like a slightly older Terri or June, before she’d taken on the solidity and practicality she now shared with her sister.

That’s how she sees herself in her dreams, who she really is inside, he realized. He felt an unexpected surge of desire for her, suppressed it: he couldn’t risk complicating his experiment too much, at least not this first time.