Chapter 9
Nolan Gage thanked Nika's day nurse, Shirley, as she left the museum for the night. After watching how gently Shirley cared for his Nika at the hospital, Gage had hired her away at double her salary. He felt better knowing someone with such a kind spirit was keeping an eye on her. Gage closed the door to the basement room and was alone with his daughter.
He turned to face her as she drifted through her endless sleep. His heart caught in his throat. Every time he saw her, he had the same reaction. A thick throb in his chest, self-loathing gripping his every breath. His daughter, his once angelic cherub, now a husk of bones and sunken skin hooked up to prosthetic machines that stimulated her heart to beat, forced air into her lungs, monitored her brainwaves. Her lips, once full and apple red like her mother's, now two dried earthworms coated in petroleum jelly. Her eyes--warm, brown eyes that Nolan Gage could barely remember--shut from the waking world, sealed with medical adhesive against the desiccant air. His little Nika, her mind trapped in a dead body. Her mind remembering the carefree whimsy of her childhood. A time before Gage forced her away.
He had brought her to the museum basement a month ago. When she was still at the hospital, Maury had insisted that he was making progress, that he was constantly locating and transmuting increasingly complex dreams from her mind. It had grown more difficult to hide his work from the doctors and staff. They had started to question Gage about Maury and what exactly his specialty was. They didn't understand why a woman in her condition would need a psychiatrist. But Gage still had his faith. If he couldn't believe in Maury and his enticing promises to bring him happiness, what else was there to live for? Soon enough, he would transmute a full-scale dream-Nika.
He reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a small pink teddy bear. It was holding a smaller version of itself in its stubby stuffed-bear paws. He placed the bear in the bony crook of Nika's arm and pushed a wisp of lank, straw hair from her forehead. His poor Nika; today, her nineteenth birthday. She didn't look nineteen. She didn't even look human anymore. Nika had always had an adorable kewpie doll face, but now her skin looked like a wet napkin draped over a toy plastic skull.
Whenever he closed his eyes, imagining his daughter, she was the enchanting girl captured in Sophie's mural on the wall of the Serenity Wing. Eight years old. Pigtails and scabbed knees. Sun-dappled freckles and a grin showing off her missing front teeth. Not so long ago, really, but a lifetime ago in actuality. A short lifetime, a lifetime that Gage felt responsible for bringing to such an abrupt close.
He had met her mother at a black-tie fundraiser for urban renewal. He hated those things. Men with enough money to bring about guilt gathering to congratulate one another, and women without any shame for seeking such men circling like vultures. The banquet hall was set up with enormous circular tables spread out like an archipelago of millionaires. Michelle's golden hair fell to shoulder length, but her smile is what captured Gage's heart. She sat at a long oak table near the doors, seeming so small and fragile, a stranger set adrift in the upper crust menagerie of her surroundings. She didn't look up from the pile of papers spread before her when he inquired about making a bid on a tilting slab of red clay that they were trying to pass off as art. The clay was not kilned, and a name brand shoeprint was visible on the side of the solid slab. A shoe kicking over a structure somewhat building-like. How symbolic.
She hadn't lifted her head to look at him. Just her eyes. Gage, looking down the slope of her face--the gentle bridge of her nose, and the delicate curve of her lips--had quite suddenly fallen in love. Her smile and upturned gaze set him off balance. He stammered. She explained how to fill out the form for the silent auction. She smiled, and he made an outrageously high bid for the piece of junk art without realizing it. He stammered and asked for her name. She told him, Michelle.
He had never expected to meet someone at a stuffy fundraiser. He was only in attendance to maintain his profile in the city's highest social circles. But Michelle was different from the usual gold-digging women in attendance. She had received her degree in sociology the year before, and had been working at a women's shelter in the south side of Chicago since graduating. As they talked, his stammering lessened and the abrasive fundraising hobnobbing became increasingly distant.
They had talked most of the night, and by the time the event was wrapping up, the subject matter of their conversation had continued to get deeper and more personal. They had already parted company when Gage realized he hadn't asked for her phone number. As politely as possible, he wedged back through the exiting black-tied old men with their Versace-draped younger companions. When she greeted him at the table, her papers gathered and her purse slung on her shoulder, she gave him that same perfect smile. She wrote her phone number on a cocktail napkin, and he knew his life was about to change dramatically.
Their age difference had never been an issue. So what if he was eighteen years her senior? Michelle didn't care, and as long as she was happy, so was he. She took him places he had never been and would have never imaged visiting. They walked the crumbling sidewalks of seedy public housing neighborhoods, walking two blocks away to where expensive high rises rose like some new life form set to dominate. She pointed out the gentrified layers of the city. Layers of money pushing away layers of decay, like grasping tree branches stealing the richest sunlight from the underlying ground brush. She pointed out the walls separating the classes and races. The expressways cutting off the projects and their populations of the poor, the disaffected, the drug-addled. Michelle opened Gage's eyes. He'd rarely felt compassion or empathy for others. She proved day after day just how wrong he was for his first impression of her. She was a fighter with a stubborn streak, yet somehow, she was able to care for people she had never met. Her personality was intoxicating.
Their marriage was a civil ceremony a year later. Nicole was born a year after that, a bundle of energy so similar to her mother that they could have been carbon copies.
Sixteen years on, sixteen years in which Gage thought he lived a happy life with his wife and daughter. Sharing moments, making memories. All fallen apart as quickly as he had fallen for Michelle all those years before. It was a trivial morning and Michelle was running trivial errands. Dry cleaning exchanged, a library book returned, tasks that Gage had always told Michelle were simply too trivial to waste her time doing. They had people to do those things for them. But his wife enjoyed her early morning walks, the fresh air, and the quiet streets. Maybe he should have gone with her. Maybe things would have turned out differently.
In line at the dry cleaners, a stranger had taken up a conversation with his wife. Later on, he learned this stranger was an artist. A poet, a pianist, a man who presumably neither shaved nor showered regularly. Gage wondered why such a man would be in line at a dry cleaner's. His clothes would be wrinkled, disorderly, mismatched, his uniform representative of his suffering for his craft. This weasel of a stranger had taken up a conversation with his wife, a trivial chit-chatty subject no doubt, and just that easily, so simply, the woman he had trusted and loved beyond words followed this angst-ridden would-be artist back to his loft. She had called later on, long after Gage had left worrying behind and was heading straight for full-blown hysteria, tears in her voice, scratchy jazz music thick in the background. Between her tears she told him it was over, she'd found someone else. She'd actually used the words soul mate when describing her new man. Just that quickly, fallen apart, a family ruined.
He wasn't able to tell Nika right away. The words wouldn't come to him, and if he could find the words, saying them would only make them true. Her mother was never coming home. He wished he could hire someone to explain to his daughter that for a reason as stupid as a chance meeting in line at a dry cleaner's, her mother was no longer a part of the family. The night of Michelle's phone call he eventually gathered his courage and went to Nika's bedroom--her boy band posters with their Colgate smiles leering at him, her stuffed animals appearing defensive of their place within his daughter's heart--and he had told her the news. At first, he thought Nika hadn't heard him, that his grief had possibly weakened his voice. But Nika had heard, and even more importantly, she had listened, distilling the knowledge down to its base elements. By the time he had finished speaking, his beard was wet with tears and a dull pain was shooting across his temples, mocking the beat of his heart. For some reason, Nika's lack of reaction hurt more than if she had broken down completely.
Michelle's betrayal had sent Gage into a tailspin of depression. Over the ensuing months, he rarely left his room, rarely left his bed, in fact. His pain was so blinding he couldn't see that even after such loss, life went on. She didn't react as he had expected, but Nicole was just as hurt by her mother's abandonment, maybe more so. During those most trying times, when she needed his support, she hadn't been able to count on him.
While he retreated to his darkened bedroom, his reddish beard getting longer and grayer, Nika took up with new friends. He didn't learn until later, not until after she had fallen into her coma, that she had started experimenting with drugs. Ecstasy and LSD and God knows what else, ingested with impunity. Dancing at rave parties and staying up for days at a time. Hurting herself, using the pain to fill the void where her mother once resided.
The phone call from the hospital slapped some sense into him. They told him someone had dropped Nika off at the hospital's front steps. She was unconscious and near death. Her temperature had sky rocketed and her pulse had dipped to almost nothing. He didn't remember much about the conversation, but the words brain damage, and perpetual coma state stayed with him. His daughter, having been unable to find reassurance in her father, had overdosed on some rave drug that left her in a near vegetative state.
His future hopes hinged on those few words that crept through the ether of his depression: near vegetative state. The doctors told him that on the Harvard diagnostic scale, she was on the better side of the spectrum, if there was such a thing as a better side of being comatose. Yes, she was non-responsive to outside stimuli. He could stab a needle into her arm and pray that Nika would scream; he could pluck the fine hairs from her arm one by one, hoping she would flinch, but all to no avail. The outside world was dead to her. But her mind continued to function. She had thoughts, memories, dreams.
Now, as he sat next to her, wary of blinking in case she so much as twitched a toe, Gage looked at her nearly black hair, a color defying her heredity. Michelle was a golden apple beauty, while he had always shied attention away from his fierce red locks and smudged red freckles. When he first saw her in the bleached out hospital room with the guilt-laden aroma of giftshop flowers, her unconscious roommate's helium balloons swaying over a heating grate like clownish clouds, Nika's hair was streaks of purple and green. Black makeup coated her closed eyelids. Golden flecks of glitter shined along her neck and collarbone, mixing with the remnant bile and blood-tinged vomit the doctors had forcefully removed from her stomach. They'd uncovered a toxic stew of a dozen pills that would need a week to decipher. The doctors didn't think she would live until morning.
Now, almost a year later, her hair stripped of the purple and green dye, and her skin cleansed by Shirley's gentle hand, Gage still wondered if she would live until morning. That's why Maury Bennett's work was so important.
That is what started Lucidity. Nika's dreams. The first experiments had been simple. Gage had brought in doctors specializing in neurology and sleep science. They had shown Gage EEG printouts of Nika's sleep cycles--kinetic scratches of horsehair-thin waves on reams of printer paper. Gage first thought the reports looked like Richter printouts after an earthquake. The doctors assured him that the ideas were fairly similar; a Richter printout showed earth plate activity, while the EEG printouts indicated brain activity. Those first printouts led to a series of countless experiments involving countless scientists. A tenuous job security rewarded success and advancement in the project. Gage discarded anyone without the passion he demanded or the will to create something never before pondered.
In the end, only Maury Bennett remained. His reputation had been shaky at best, but he had a brilliant mind. Even before he was brought on, Gage had heard rumors of his strange abilities. Most respected doctors didn't think much of Maury, but none of that mattered now. Maury could do what no other person could do.
"You look lovely, Nika. Another birthday comes, but your beauty transcends time," Gage said softly, kissing her eyebrow.
He checked the readout screens showing her vital signs, and as usual, everything was stable. He wrapped the consoles, monitors and other equipment with padded blue tarps he normally kept stored under Nika's bed. He then pushed aside the deep recliner where he spent most of his time waiting for Nika to wake.
The floor needed to be clear.
Gage went to a small panel on the wall. When he flipped the switch, a door slid aside. A horde of animated stuffed animal creatures and frilly-dressed porcelain dolls and miniature horses with miniature girl riders tumbled out of the open space left in the wall.
Nika's transmuted dreams.
One stick-thin sock monkey puppet jumped into Gage's arms and wrapped around his neck. It stayed there, as he always did, cooing into his ear.
"Yes, yes children, hello. I missed all of you." Gage was on his knees, engulfed in stuffed animal fur and the rich voices that Nika had leant her dreams. Gage was laughing along with them and enjoying a companionship that he didn't share with anyone in the waking world.
"Now, Rupert, don't squeeze so hard, I'm not going anywhere," Gage said to the sock monkey hanging on him.
The dream squealed and pulled at Gage's face, smacking him a kiss with his sock fabric lips.
"I love you too, Rupert, but love shouldn't hurt," Gage said.
The sock monkey clung to Gage's neck, picking imaginary fleas from his skin and straggly beard. The other dreams were friendly and playful with Gage, but Rupert was the dominant dream of the bunch. Because of that, Gage figured that Rupert was the dream that was strongest in Nika's mind, so he was Gage's favorite as well. Most of the other dreams had gone off to play amongst themselves. Gage had a small audience of Rupert and twin elves that wore matching suede jumpsuits. Their voices were so high-pitched and the delivery of their speech so swift, Gage understood at most one word in ten. They were simple fellows, but they demonstrated a keen interest in Nika, so Gage felt a surge of emotion when he saw them.
Gage checked the monitoring equipment, and nothing had changed. His little family was unusual, sure, but he had developed a level of calm with Nika and her dream creatures.
Rupert left the comfort of Gage's neck and mimicked how he had checked the equipment.
"Why do you always copy me?" Gage asked the monkey.
In response, Rupert hopped in the air and beat his tiny fists into the bed next to Nika.
"Don't get an attitude with me, Rupert. I simply asked you a question. I didn't mean any harm by it. You're just like a little kid, always copying me. Just like Nika."
Rupert took this as an apology and regained his position around Gage's neck. He knotted his sock hands and began to coo submissively.
He tickled the little monkey until the dream jumped from Gage's arms to the floor. He taunted Gage until he went after him. Soon he was rolling on the floor with slobbering puppies and jittering baby possums, while bright red cardinals chirped and swooped overhead. Gage played with his daughter's dream animals for hours. He only stopped after he had completely worn himself out.
Nika's dreams eventually calmed down. Some rested in the folds of Nika's blankets. Others hid under the bed. Still others dozed in Gage's lap as he reclined next to his daughter. His eyelids were getting heavy, and he let them close.
Freakshow. Gaining consciousness, becoming cognizant of inhaling, aware of the taste of it, this corrupt and putrid air, fouled by the presence of humans. His eyes popped open, liquid fire irises glowing in the midnight backdrop of his eye sockets. For the first time, Freakshow felt discomfort--stiff muscles and aching joints--from remaining chest down in a fetal position. As he breathed the air of his enclosure, he felt his lungs burn, felt the oxygen trickle through the air sacs of his lungs.
He parsed at the miniscule particles bobbing through his newly corporeal form, and like an archeologist, he discovered tiny nuggets that represented all he could hope for. Particles of Kevin, his dreamer and former captor. The dust of his skin; sloughed-off dead cells. Condensed droplets from his lungs, a wetness floating in his used, respired breath. A wetness that made Freakshow's mouth salivate; a wetness that was nearly as dear to him as the rich blood pulsing though the boy's heart.
He unfurled, limbs quaking, nerves frayed. The room was dark. His fiery eyes glowed, embers in a dying campfire. He could step three strides in any direction before finding a wall. He coiled his fists and let loose a raging barrage of kicks, punches and scraping claws against the confining walls.
There was no give to the walls and the surface wasn't the least bit marred by his efforts. He only felt something new to him. Fatigue. Squatting on his haunches, his back against one corner of the room, he began to ponder his escape. He would need to use all of his faculties in order to succeed. The humans had control over their environment and he was a stranger to this new land. But the boy was close. He could feel it aching in the marrow of his bones, aching like some human disease. Kevin was near, and he was asleep.
Let the boy sleep. He would need to rest in order to fight for his life. And a fight would be a dear thing. A fight would increase the boy's fear, and would build Mr. Freakshow's strength in the process.
Freakshow took in a gulp of air, and held it shortly before letting loose a shrill scream that seemed to shake the teeth embedded in his jawbone. It wasn't a scream of pain or frustration. Only pure, unfettered anticipation. When his scream was sated and his lungs were empty, his chest still burned with the unfamiliarity of breathing.
Nika's dreams stirred at the sound of the scream. When Gage opened his eyes, he wondered if it was only a dream. Rupert, his spindly arms shaking as he clung to Gage's arm, whimpered in Gage's lap. Soon enough, the dreams settled again, and Gage let sleep take him away from this place.