Diane Gallant

         Somewhere, Eric is sitting cross-legged on a small circular rug under a window.  He is playing with tiny animals of colored glass, and in his hands tigers fly and dogs speak riddles and crocodiles bounce on their tails.  He is full of noise and color, bright and sharp around the edges.  Sid can hardly bear to look at him. 

         In this place, in this dream, Eric is the real creature, the child of flesh and blood, while Sid is the insubstantial one, the ghost.  Here, in this dream, it is Eric who lives and Sid who is dead. 

         Behind Eric, outside of the blue-curtained window, stars whirl and spin in a black sky.    

         "Eric," says Sid.  He does not expect to be heard. 

         Eric looks up, squints at the corners of the ceiling. 

         "Dad?"

         "Dad?"

         Karen's voice startled Sid from his dream.  He had wheeled his chair from his bed to the wide window that overlooked the parking lot of the Mother of Mercy Nursing Care Center.  Despite the cold outside, it was warm here, in the sunlight behind the glass.  Sid must have fallen asleep. 

         "Karen.  Dear.  You've come to see me again." 

          Despite her trip past the receptionist and down the long corridor and then up in the slow elevator, the cold January air still clung to Karen, and gently but quite suddenly, the cold permeated Sid's room.  Almost imperceptibly, he shivered.  Then, above the red wool scarf that was tucked up under Karen's chin, she smiled, and the room felt warm again. With her hands behind her back, Karen sauntered toward her father's wheelchair.  "I have something for you," she said.

         "Let me guess.  Is it... a kitten?  Or the keys to a shiny new convertible?"

         "Dad," she whined in her sing-song voice.

         "Tickets for two to Hawaii?"  Sid waved his arms like a hula dancer's. 

         "No," she said firmly.  "It's just this."  And out from behind her back she produced a toy spaceship.  "I saw it in a used toy shop on Delaware Road.  It reminded me of you."  She shrugged. 

         Sid took the toy from his daughter.  He held it reverentially, turned it in his hands.  "Karen..." he started to speak, but his words died before he spoke them.  

         Karen shrugged again.  "I hope you like it.  It's a replica of Swift Doe.  You remember the spaceship from that old movie?  You took us to see it when we were kids," she said, as she removed her coat and scarf and hung them in the closet in the corner of the room. 

         "It's perfect," said Sid.  "And indeed I do remember."

         Karen put the toy ship on the small table beside Sid's bed, and neither of them mentioned it again.  Karen sat in a chair across from her father, and she listened as he told her about his new doctor, his current medication, his sleepless nights, and the pain in his bones.  And in turn, he listened as she told him about her life, her job, her current project, her new boyfriend.  She stayed until supper hour, when a nurse hinted unkindly that she would have to leave.  She kissed her father's cheek, bundled up in her coat and red scarf, and promised to visit again soon. 

         When she was gone, Sid took the spaceship from the bedside table, and held it in his hands.

         Of course he remembered. 

         He knew by the scratch on the tiny pane of glass that was the spaceship's window, by the small dent in the plastic landing gear. 

         This same toy had belonged, once before, to Eric. 

         Sid had bought it himself, the summer when his own favorite childhood book, Swift Doe, was released as an action-adventure movie, the summer of his and Beverly's fifteenth wedding anniversary, the summer when they put in the pool.  The summer when Eric turned eight. 

         And every day, even during the worst days of his illness, Eric played with the toy spaceship.  He made it dance and turn somersaults in the air.  Sometimes, it exploded with a bang.  And sometimes, mostly after Sid told him there was no noise in space, it exploded silently.  Sometimes, it did not explode, and people rode in it to faraway worlds. 

         At night Eric slept with it, as another child might sleep with a doll, or a stuffed bear. 

         After he died, Beverly wanted to keep her son's room as it was, and so she did, for a while.  His toys remained in place, along with his books and pictures and the pillows on his bed.  But, oddly, not the spaceship.  It was not in its usual place of honor atop his bookshelf.  Beverly wondered about this, and she mentioned it to Sid, but Sid only shrugged.  It was, after all, just a toy.  Who knows what children did with toys? 

         Some time later, Melissa—Sid and Beverly's oldest—entered middle school and announced to her parents that she no longer wanted to share a room with Karen, who—she said—was such a baby.  She was right.  By then, Eric had been dead for nine months, and Sid decided that it was time.  Gently, he spoke to his wife, and gently, Sid and Melissa cleaned out Eric's room, and painted the walls pale pink, and made a room for Melissa. 

         And so time passed, and Melissa and Karen grew up, and left home, and the pale pink walls of Melissa's room were painted yellow, and Beverly put her sewing machine in there. 

         But though time passed, Eric stayed eight years old, and sometimes Sid would sit in the yellow room where Beverly's sewing machine gathered dust.

         And time, in passing, blunted the sharpness, but it did not heal. 

 

         Beverly is leaning back on soft cushions.  She is flipping through the pages of a colorful, glossy magazine.  Perfume rises from the pages of the magazine and fills the space between them, aggressively, with the scent of flowers. 

         As she reads, Beverly hums a song.  She hums idly, without thinking of the notes, but still, the song is sharper and clearer than any Sid has ever heard before.

         She does not know that he is present in the room. 

         "Beverly," he says.  

         It's futile, he knows, trying to speak to her.  There is no noise, no movement he could possibly make that could win his wife's attention.  He is too unreal here, and she is too solid. 

         Behind her, the wall is a wide window where stars move past in unknown constellations. 

         On the sixth floor of the Mother of Mercy Nursing Care Center, in the warm sunlight by the window overlooking the parking lot, Sid passes in and out of shallow dreams.  In his mind, he sets things aside, then picks them up again, and turns them over and over. 

         Swift Doe.

         It was the blockbuster hit of that long-ago summer.  Sid took the children to see it four times. 

         And long before that, it had been Sid's favorite book. 

         He still knew the story well.  One hundred refugees from the NiCay Intra-Confederacy War left earth to colonize the distant world known as Bliss.  The little group promptly lost communication with earth, and soon ran into all the myriad dangers of far space—monsters and demons, an alien virus, enemies armed with photon rays, time-rifts, and a black hole—before finally arriving, battered and decimated, in the Gwelnar star-system. 

         To the children, it was an adventure tale, fraught with danger and suspense at every turn.  To Sid, it was all that, and a story of faith and hope besides.

         Now Beverly is sitting with Eric at a low table.  They are playing a game on a large board painted with circles and triangles, but the pieces of this game are of so many different colors and sizes, and the moves are so random, that that Sid cannot determine who controls any piece, or even what the object of the game is.  Sid feels confused and troubled by this. 

         "I win," says Beverly.

         "No, mamma, look," says Eric.  "I win."

         Beverly looks, and laughs.  "I'll play you best out of three," she says.

         Now Eric laughs, and begins to reset the pieces. 

         Sid knows they cannot hear him, but he speaks anyway.  "Can I play too?"

         Sid is taken aback, momentarily appalled at the pitiful and beggarly sound of his voice.  He looks away from his wife and son, at the stars burning and spinning in the window over their heads. 

         Sid drifts gently from sleep.  Beverly, he thinks, It wasn't supposed to be like this. 

         After retirement, Sid vowed to spend more time with Beverly, who had been feeling run down and lonely.  The would get an RV, Sid told her, and they would go west.  They would camp in the Grand Canyon, he said.  They would go to Las Vegas, they would visit ghost towns. 

         It didn't happen. 

         Beverly was sick by now.  The doctors could not help; they could only deliver the truth and look away. 

         She was in the hospital for a long time, and Sid visited her every day, doing every day whatever he could to keep her comfortable and occupied.  He brought her magazines and movies, a deck of cards, and a set of mah jong tiles.  He also brought her the romance novels she loved to read. 

         And he brought something else, which he found quite by chance one day while walking from a bookstore near the hospital with a stack of paperbacks under his arm.  He passed by a consignment shop, and something in the window caught his eye.  

         It was a toy replica of Swift Doe.  Sid stood for long minutes on the sidewalk, peering into the store through the glass, shifting his weight and the weight of the books he carried.  He did not know what Beverly would make of such a strange gift.  He wondered if the gift would hurt her.  He feared that it would be in no way appropriate.  Then he made a decision, and entered the shop. 

         Sid took the toy from the clerk, and turned it over in his hands.  He saw the scratch and the dent, and at once he knew that this was not just another similar toy.  This was the one, the very one, that had belonged to Eric.  It had been lost somehow, and somehow it had come back. 

         Beverly did not express gladness or sorrow, or even slight surprise, to see the toy again.  She simply accepted its reappearance as a fact.  And as her sickness worsened, she took to sleeping with it in her bed, like a child.  And in those last days, Sid could do nothing but sit in a chair at her bedside, and fluff her pillow now and again, and hold cold water to her lips, and occasionally call for the nurse. 

         After the funeral, Melissa kissed Sid good-bye, and boarded a plane, and flew back to her own family, but Karen, who lived nearby, came to see her father every day.  She took over some of the household chores, and she helped Sid go through Beverly's possessions, separating what they would keep from what they would not.  

         Neither of them gave a thought to Swift Doe.  Neither of them would have noticed at the time if it was missing. 

 

         Beverly is sitting with an open book on her lap.  She looks young here, Sid thinks.  She is wearing red lipstick.  Her hair is longer than Sid remembers it, and falls in brown curls over her shoulders.  Sid wants to touch it, but he is too fearful to try.  His hands, he thinks, would pass right through it. 

         The wonderful scent of popcorn with butter floats in from somewhere, from another room of this dream maybe.  

         Eric is lying on his back on the floor near Beverly's chair.  He is playing with a ball of green clay, and the shapes of animals emerge one by one from the clay in his hands, only to be pressed back into a ball and remade into something different.  His attention is divided between this and answering the questions his mother is asking him out of her book. 

         Sid listens, but the questions and answers are meaningless to him.  He feels anxious and sad because of this. 

         "Goomis?" says Beverly. 

         "Hoth," responds Eric. 

         Beverly smiles and nods.  "Chansee?"

         "Da alox." 

         Beverly smiles again.  "Roon?"

         "Stadath." 

         "Geseh?"  

         "Fraggor."

         "Very good," says Beverly finally.  "You know the capital cities.  Can you recite the names of the kings in order?"

         Eric sits up and  tucks his knees under his chin.  He wrinkles his face in concentration, and counts on his fingers.  "Stodye, Stodye-Two, Franyas, Vrige, Foobas, Great Ramosh, Ramosh-Two, Stodye-Three, Ghulyen and Bromyet the Big.  There!"

         "And what medicines will cure Morgson's Disease?" asks Beverly.

         "Willroot for men, Tobillit for land-animals, Fen-fen for things that breathe in water, Mincortu for angels and beasts of the air." 

         The unreality of this conversation is disconcerting to Sid.  The unreality of this conversation contrasts sharply with the real redness of Beverly's lips, with the real greenness of Eric's clay animals, with the real scent of popcorn that hovers everywhere. 

         This time, Sid does not speak.  This time, it is easy for him to keep silent. 

         Beverly smiles again at her son and closes the book.  "And the stars," she says. "Can you name them?"

         Sid looks at the stars framed in the window.  In this distant place, he does not know any of the constellations, and he cannot name any of the stars.  He feels that his heart will break. 

         Eric stands and moves to the window, and points at each star as he names it.  "Anyet, Freynet, Boom, Hottensot, Shake-up, Vrenden, Good-luck, Tilmil, Gwelnar, Potbelly."

         "Yes," says Beverly.  "And where are we going?"  

         Sid remembers that this is only a dream, and he is glad. He wakes now, so that he does not have to hear the answer.

 

         Awake again, Sid calls for the nurse.  She brings him a glass of water with his pain killer.  But the pill, alas, does nothing to kill pain.  Sid remembers anyway. 

         After Beverly's death, years passed, and Sid became an old man.  He became weak one day while walking in the park.  He fell, gasping for breath.  A jogger called an ambulance. 

         The doctors said they could help.  Treatment was available for this, they said. 

         Sid shook his head.  He underwent treatment, but he did not get better.  The doctors said they would begin a new treatment.  Sid shook his head again.  He was old, and he felt weak and tired all the time now. 

         Karen did what she could.  Home alone, Sid fell.  He needed more care than Karen could provide. 

         The dreams began at the Mother of Mercy Nursing Care Center. 

         Always, the dreams took place in a room that was more fragrant and colorful than his own room overlooking the parking lot.  Always, in these dreams, Eric and Beverly were very real—alive and bright and dense with matter—but their minds were utterly incomprehensible.  Always, in these dreams, Sid was a poor and shadowy interloper in their world. 

         And always, in his dreams, there were stars.

         This is why Sid was not really surprised to see Karen arrive with the spaceship behind her back. 

         All that day, Sid held the toy in his hands, as he sat in his wheelchair by the window, remembering and forgetting and remembering again, slipping from dream to memory to dream again.  And that night he held the toy in his arms, as a child would, and entered a deeper and better sleep.

         This time Sid feels as though he is walking through syrup.  He struggles through a thick, brown haze, and as he moves he feels that he is becoming thicker himself, and heavier.  Beyond the syrup is a light which is the beacon of a place he knows but does not know. 

         Sid emerges into another of the strange, bright rooms with its own window of stars, but something is different this time.  Sid has a dense body now; he is real here. 

         Beverly and Eric are sitting on blue-tasseled cushions on the floor.  Their attention is caught up entirely in a structure that they are building out of playing cards.  The spiral staircase they are making seems to hang in mid-air.  In that other world—the world Sid has left behind him for good—such a structure would be physically impossible. 

         Sid plucks up his courage.  "Yes, well," he says.  "Hello there."

         Beverly and Eric turn their heads toward him.  He is real now, and they see him.  They cry his name, and jump up to greet him.  And there, in the rooms that are his family's quarters aboard Swift Doe, Sid embraces his fellow travelers.

 

 

Copyright 2007, Diane Gallant

Diane Gallant is a new writer to DKA.  She calls Moscow home—the one in Pennsylvania, not Russia!

 

    

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For more information visit www.dkamagazine.com. This work appears as part of Issue 43, April 2007.

                                                     

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