Richard Matheson - What Dreams May Come

The pain in my arm seemed slight now compared to the new despair I felt. Without thinking, I started toward her again, then jerked to a halt as Ginger made a lurching movement toward me, her growl now mixed with a frantic wheezing sound which told me how disturbed she was. I drew back hastily as Ann looked up, her face a mask of wretched anger.

“Will you go? ” she cried.

I backed off slowly, watching Ginger. As she settled down into a nervous crouch, I stopped. Looking behind me, I saw that I was standing near the piano bench and, backing up another few feet, I lowered myself onto it slowly, my gaze still fixed on Ginger.

“I want Chris,” Ann murmured, sobbing.

I stared at her, completely helpless.

“I want him back. I need him,” she said. “Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?”

I swallowed. My throat was dry; it hurt. My arm ached from the bites. I might as well be alive again. This level was so horribly close to life. And yet so horribly far, only racking sensations present, no compensations of any sort.

“Tell me about him,” I heard myself ask. I didn’t know why I said it. I was straining now. The effort grew more arduous with every passing moment.

She only wept.

“What did he look like?” I asked. Once again, I knew what I’d begun. What I didn’t know was if it would work. Why should it? Nothing else had.

Still, I went on. “Was he tall?” I asked.

She drew in shaking breath, fingering tears from her cheeks.

“Was he?”

She nodded jerkily.

“As tall as I am?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. A shuddering sob instead.

“I’m six foot two. Was he as tall as me?”

“Taller.” She pressed her lips together.

I ignored her reaction. “What color hair did he have?” I asked.

She rubbed her eyes.

“What color hair?”

“Go away,” she mumbled.

“I’m only trying to help.”

“I can’t be helped.” Through gritted teeth.

“Everybody can be helped,” I told her.

She looked at me, expressionless.

“If they asked,” I said.

She lowered her gaze. Had the significance of what I’d said reached her mind in any way at all?

I asked another question. “Was he blond?”

She nodded once.

“Like me?”

Her teeth clenched again. “No.”

I fought an overwhelming urge to give up, stand, walk out of the house, go back to Summerland and wait. It all seemed so utterly hopeless.

“What did he do?” I asked.

She had her eyes shut. Tears squeezed out from underneath the pressing lids and trickled down her pale cheeks.

“I heard he wrote for television.”

She mumbled something.

“Did he?”

“Yes.” Through gritted teeth again.

“I do too,” I said.

It seemed unbelievable to me that she could not see the connection. It was so incredibly obvious. Yet she didn’t. Never had the meaning of the phrase been so vivid to me: None so blind as those who will not see .

I wanted to leave. But I couldn’t desert her. “Were his eyes green?” I asked, plodding on.

She nodded weakly.

“Mine are too,” I said.

No response.

I shuddered fitfully. “Ann, can’t you see who I am?” I pleaded.

She opened her eyes and, for another of those moments, I had the feeling that she recognized me. I tightened, leaning toward her.

Then she averted her face and I shuddered again. Dear God, was there no way in heaven or hell of reaching her?

She turned back quickly. “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded.

“I’m trying to convince you who I am.”

I waited for her inevitable question: Who are you? It never came. Instead, she slumped back on the sofa, closing her eyes, shaking her head in slow, weary turns from side to side.

“I have nothing,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to herself or me. “My husband’s gone. My children are grown. I’m all alone. Deserted. If I had the courage I’d kill myself.”

Her words horrified me. To have committed suicide and ended up in a place so dreadful that it made her think of committing suicide. A twisted, unrelenting reflection within a reflection.

“I feel so heavy,” she said. “So tired and heavy. I can barely lift my feet. I sleep and sleep but always wake exhausted. I feel empty. Hollow .”

Albert’s words returned to torment me. “What happens to suicides,” he’d said, “is that they have a feeling of being hollowed out. Their physical bodies have been prematurely eliminated, their etheric bodies filling the void. But those etheric bodies feel like empty shells for as long a time as their physical bodies were meant to live.”

It came to me, at that moment, why it had been impossible to reach her mind.

By placing herself in this spot, she had removed her mind from all positive memories. Her punishment-albeit self-inflicted-was to recall only the inimical things in her life. To view the world she remembered through a lens of total negativism. To never see light but only shadow.

“What is it like to be here?” I asked impulsively. There was a cold sensation in my stomach. I was starting to feel afraid.

Ann looked at me but seemed to gaze into the darkness of her thoughts as she answered. Speaking at length for the first time.

“I see but not clearly,” she said. “I hear but not clearly. Things happen that I can’t quite grasp. Understanding always seems a few scant inches from me. I can never reach it though. Everything is just beyond me. I feel angry for not seeing or hearing distinctly, for not understanding. Because I know it isn’t me that’s missing things . But that everything around me is vague and held those few, scant inches from my understanding. That I’m being fooled somehow. Tricked .

“Things happen right in front of me and I see them happen but I’m not sure I’m getting them even though it seems I am. There’s always something more going on that I can’t figure out. Something I keep missing even though I don’t know how I’m missing it or why.

“I keep trying to understand what’s happening but I can’t. Even now, as I speak to you, I feel as though I’m missing something. I tell myself that I’m all right, that everything around me is distorted. But, even as I’m thinking it, I get a premonition that it is me. That I’m having another nervous breakdown but can’t identify it this time because it’s all too subtle and beyond my comprehension.

“Everything eludes me. I can’t describe it any better. Just as nothing works in the house, nothing works in my mind either. I’m always confused, off center. I feel like my husband must have, in dreams he used to have.”

I found myself leaning toward her, anxious to capture every word she spoke.

“He’d be in New York City, for instance, and be unable to get in touch with me no matter how he tried. He’d talk with people and they’d seem to understand him and he’d seem to understand them. But nothing they’d say would work out. He’d dial telephones and get wrong numbers. He’d be unable to keep track of his belongings. He couldn’t remember where he was staying. He’d know he was in New York for a reason but couldn’t remember what the reason was. He’d know he didn’t have enough money to get back to California and all his credit cards were missing. He’d never be able to figure out what was going on. That’s how I feel.”

“How do you know this isn’t a dream then?” I asked. A glimmer.

“Because I see and hear things,” she answered. “I feel things.”

“You see and hear . . . you- feel in dreams too,” I replied. My mind was laboring but I sensed that there was something there. A connection.