Floating Staircase

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The fever came, shuddering and without mercy, and I spent the next two days in a web of mind gauze. My dreams—what dreams I could remember—were erratic and paranoid, shot by a director on a bad acid trip.

In one, I was running down a dark, narrow corridor, the walls and floor and ceiling tightening up the farther I ran, until I had to drop to my hands and knees and crawl like an infant. I crawled until I came to a tiny door, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The door appeared to be comprised of many small wooden blocks of varying colors, woven together like bamboo stalks in a raft.

I pushed the door open and squeezed through the opening. As if the doorway were a living thing, I felt it constrict around my rib cage. Ahead of me, the darkness shifted. Shapes—or the idea of shapes—moved closer to me, then farther away, tauntingly alternating their distance. A light illuminated a little antechamber. Directly in front of me, nestled in a web of tree branches, dead leaves, and old sodden newspapers, were four hairless, sightless critters, grayish in color like a waterlogged corpse, moving only slightly.

I was trapped between walls, between realities, like the hidden bedroom in the basement. There is clarity here. I smelled something sickeningly sweet and thought of chamomile tea. Then, from behind me, I heard a great rushing, rumbling sound and felt the walls all around me beginning to quake. In that blind, frantic instant, the corridor in which I was trapped filled with cold water, so cold it burned my skin. And I drowned.

In another dream I was shivering and wet, a towel draped around my shoulders like a cape, with Detective Wren asking me what happened that night by the river. Behind him in the creeping dawn, uniformed police officers patrolled the wooded paths and blocked the area off with yellow tape. I heard the boats moaning in their moorings and smelled the diesel exhaust breathing in off the bay.

Suddenly, Detective Wren’s arms were burdened with paperback novels. He dumped them on a table that instantly materialized between us, and we were in an interrogation room, with greenish fluorescent lights fizzing and colorless cinder block walls.

—These your books? he asked. You write these books?

I nodded.

—How’d you come up with this stuff?

I said I didn’t know.

—Everything you wrote in these books happened last night at the river, said the detective. He was a big guy with oily skin and sharp, soul-searching eyes. Everything you wrote down in these books happened just like it did by the river, boy, Detective Wren went on, which makes me think this thing, see, maybe this thing was planned.

I sobbed and said I didn’t do it on purpose.

Detective Wren looked at me with disgust. Then his face slackened and purpled, and his eyes peeled away and readjusted themselves at either side of his rapidly narrowing head. His arms retreated up the sleeves of his rumpled suit, and his trousers loosened around his waist until they dropped straight to the floor. What lay exposed were not legs but the tapered, intestinal body of an eel. I watched in horror as Detective Wren slithered out of his suit, an enormous man-sized eel that snaked its way down the muddy embankment before splashing into the dark river. It raised a dorsal fin like a shark and zigzagged through the inky tide.

Then David Dentman was glaring at me, one hand palming the side of my head as he repeatedly slammed my skull down on the steps of the floating staircase.

I awoke, my throat rusty and my flesh sticky with sweat, with Jodie’s cool hand on my forehead smoothing back my sodden hair. There was a sunset burning on the horizon, and through the bedroom windows, the trees looked like they were on fire. I stared at the side of the street where Jodie stood talking with Beth in the snow. Something cramped up inside me. Before I could scream, the cool hand withdrew from my forehead.

Dreams. . .

Then something about a castle of cardboard boxes, of boating piers stacked one on top of the other until they formed a ladder straight into the heavens. At one point I dreamt I was married to a woman with a monster growing in her belly, and my name was Alan, and we lived by our own special lake in a different part of the country. Even in this dream, I could feel the heat of imaginary summer on my back and shoulders, pasting the shirt to my body and causing my skin to practically char and sizzle. Confused fever dreams.

There was one moment in my dream when I crept from my bed and floated down the hallway. Downstairs I could hear the faint phantom sound of someone talking in a low voice. I glided across the landing and gripped the banister with both hands. I peeked over the side. I could make out only a fleeing shadow against one wall. So I turned and floated down the stairs to the foyer. There, the voice became slightly more audible, and I knew with intuitive certainty that it was Jodie.

I floated into the living room. Even in the dream I had the detached feeling associated with feverish hallucinations. My feet hardly touched the carpet; my head was a helium balloon. A brutal wind whipped about the living room and bullied the curtains over the front windows, and I wondered only vaguely where it was coming from. From my vantage I could see the back of Jodie’s head as she sat on the sofa. I went to her, listening to her words . . . and realized she wasn’t actually talking; she was singing softly and tenderly and lovingly and handsomely. It was the way my mother used to sing to me when I was a child:

A, you’re adorable

B, you’re so beautiful

C, you’re a child so full of charms

D, you’re delightful

E, you’re exciting

F, you’re a feather in my arms . . .

I placed a hand on her shoulder. Her voice stopped cold. I looked down at her lap . . . where the undeniable image of a young boy cradled in my wife’s arms quickly blinked out of existence.

—Where’d he go? I asked.

—He’ll be back, Jodie said quietly . . . and began humming.

—Was he . . . ? I began.

—Yes, she said. It’s him.

—I thought it might be.

Her humming was soothing.

—You sound so beautiful, I told her.

This made her smile: I could feel it radiate from her and did not need to see it.

—Thank you, she said.

—Too bad I’m dreaming, I said.

—No, Jodie said. You’re not.